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Comment by TomGullen | Hacker News Reader

> very much deserved

Does anyone actually deserve $1,000,000,000? (I know it's shared between investors but assuming he got a chunk of that)

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Good question. Ask the billionaires. Then ask the rest of the world.

Some country in Scandinavia (Denmark?) at some point had a 100%+ tax rate, which meant that if you earned more than some ridiculous amount of money you lost more than you made.

I think any amount of money over and beyond what you need to live in whatever is considered luxury in the place where you live is probably wasted on you. But I guess for people at that level it's a way to keep score.

As far as Justin and Co having deserved this, they worked harder than most people ever will (especially in the early days), they have been diluted substantially and they'll be paying a fair amount of their take in taxes.

For the longest time it looked like the whole thing could still fold up and this deal is a gigantic pay-out compared to many other acquisitions. Even so, I think they really did build something of actual value, as opposed to some other recent acquisitions (far higher ones than this one) that I fail to see any value at all in. So as far as I'm concerned they deserve some kind of pay-out, and since we're living in a capitalist society that is defined as 'what the market will bear'. In this case that appears to be $1B. So good for them. Wished I had not banned those gamers ;).

In the 1970s, Sweden briefly had a glitch in the tax system where the self-employed paid 20% plus income taxes of up to 87%, for a net of 107% if you were self-employed, filthy rich and stupid enough to declare it in Sweden -- not a common combo (rest assured the IKEA or Tetra-Pak guys weren't paying 107%!). But this was not the intention, and it was long since fixed.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304500

> As far as Justin and Co having deserved this, they worked harder than most people ever will

When you say this, you mean harder than other people in western based office work?

Sorry not trying to pick on you, you seem reasonable and decent! I just think it's a shame that bestowing incomprehensible amounts of wealth on individuals should be celebrated as a deserved reward. Hard work = lots of rewards is not the reality for the majority of the world.

I agree they deserve a payout of course, that level of wealth just feels wrong to me, like everything feels a bit out of whack. And I know myself I would of course probably keep the majority of it as well.

I tend to compare this to my mom, which keeps me on the humble side of things. She worked really hard her whole life long and does not have much to show for it. She supported me and my siblings whenever we needed it. When I was 21 and sold my first company I realized I had just made more money in a year than my mom made in 10. That was a really weird feeling.

So I'm well aware of the fact that 'deserved' is a pretty elastic concept. But if you want to start that discussion then you should pick up the Forbes list of billionaires and start petitioning them to abandon the capitalist way, they are most likely as much or more 'not deserving' of their wealth as the people that put together twitch.

I've got a very healthy respect for people that do regular work, farmers, masoners, lathe operators, millwrights, mailmen and so on, if only because I tried my hand at all those professions at some point in my checkered past and have found that each and every one of those takes tremendous dedication and skill to perform with any amount of success. And yet, barring lucky accidents very few people in those professions will ever be wealthy.

It's an unfair world we live in, but that does not stop me from congratulating those that achieve a certain level of success if they played this particular game by the rules that they themselves did not set. That it is possible to envision a better world in which the wealth could be spread better does not detract from their achievement.

I agree they deserve a payout of course, that level of wealth just feels wrong to me, like everything feels a bit out of whack.

http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

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It doesn't seem like market efficiency was the central thesis of the essay. He was saying that countries which don't allow their citizens to get rich are worse countries to live in. That's empirically true. Based on that observation, he argues that income variation is actually a sign of health. None of that relies on efficient markets.

Most "highly valued" startups usually disappear in thin air once founders get their payouts as if they had never existed (ahm... Viaweb?).

Viaweb was designed to be sold. Pg didn't want to work on online stores the rest of his life. But it went on to become a profitable part of Yahoo. That seems like a win-win for both Yahoo and the Viaweb team.

now you can argue founders are 100X better in skills to exploit market and make believe everyone that their goods are far more worth than it actually is. Should they be paid 100X for these skills? If you think of benefit to the human kind as a whole, perhaps not.

If someone paid the founders a certain amount of money for those skills, then those skills were worth that amount of money.

What does it mean to "benefit humankind as a whole"? That presupposes humankind has a purpose. Who gets to decide how much benefit something has to humankind? It seems like the answer is "the market."

Not too long ago I read a thing I ruminate on every now and then:

    I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not 
    let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be 
    lying and you will believe it.

But that's just wankery over "deserving". I can still say good on them for getting theirs in an f-you-I-got-mine world.

If your business has improved the lives of tens of millions of people, which Twitch has, I think you do deserve to become a billionaire or multi millionaire. I figure the rewards for a business are relative to the number of people it impacts.

Assuming founders were working on this for past 10 years straight, 16 hours every single day without taking any vacations or weekend days off whatsoever, their pay rate would have been $1,700 every hour assuming they receive only 10% of this pie each. Well deserved for all the "risks" they took to avoid regular jobs, eat ramen everyday or innovations they contributed to the advancement of mankind? Multi-Billionaires typically make equivalent of $100,000 every single hour. I often joke that Paul Allen charged Microsoft shareholders $10,000 per character for the code he wrote. Next time when you type if in your program, take a breath and think what if someone paid 20 grands just for doing that. That's how it feels like to get billion dollar payout.

> Assuming founders were working on this for past 10 years straight, 16 hours every single day without taking any vacations or weekend days off whatsoever, their pay rate would have been $1,700 every hour assuming they receive only 10% of this pie each

That's just made up.

> Well deserved for all the "risks" they took to avoid regular jobs, eat ramen everyday

The "risk" of avoiding a regular job is lost wages (I'm stripping away the experience that could get you into a better paying job after a failure here as well). If they could be earning $50k a year, and worked for 10 years on their startup, their risk is $500k. I'm also sure that most people wouldn't go more than a few years without any traction, so you're probably looking at about $150k risk. Deduct any earnings from that risk in that time frame as well ( they need to live) so the personal risk is actually perhaps nearer to ~$100k. I think you are overstating the risk factor here.

Eating ramen every day is something you've made up as well.

> innovations they contributed to the advancement of mankind?

Hyperbole, it's a website that lets you watch people playing computer games. You're vastly overstating it's contribution to the advancement of mankind.

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