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Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work. Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but t
by anjc 10y ago
Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work.
Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but the fact is that he has attained disproportionately less value than he's created. By rights he should be one of the wealthiest people in tech. He might have 150m but that's peanuts given what he's done. The wealth of the guy who made Instagram dwarfs that. The guy who made Whatsapp has a net worth of 8b.
Creation might be 90% perspiration as he says, but perspiration doesn't equal success, and success doesn't equal a career. Obviously everything isn't about money, and Torvald's legacy will be timeless. But if you want to ensure earnings, at some point it's a good idea to sell.
- gue5t 10y agoIf you think money is important you aren't a hacker.
- akappa 10y agoAn ironic thing to say in a seed accelerator-owned website.
- Gracana 10y agoI think there's a sizable camp of HN members who just come here to read the various interesting tech articles, with no plans to join the cult of SV.
- laser 10y agoMoney is a tool in a hacker's kit like any other. If you don't recognize the importance of useful tools you aren't a hacker ;)
- pyrale 10y agoA tool is not important. A tool is just a tool.
- calebm 10y agoI'm assuming this is sarcasm, but in case anybody thinks this, just remember: money = freedom.
- grabcocque 10y agoLinus Torvalds has an estimated net worth of $150m, I doubt he's worrying about where his next meal is coming from.
- bostand 10y agoWhere did you get that number from?
- VeejayRampay 10y agoYou somehow make it unclear whether or not Linus not being a multi-billionaire is a good or a bad thing. Are you saying that because he didn't try to monetize his code as much as he could have, it somehow makes his opinion less valuable? The man created Linux AND git, it doesn't matter whether or not he's got billions. He's got something more important than that, a legacy.
- wingerlang 10y ago> He's got something more important than that, a legacy. Why is that important?
- circlefavshape 10y agoLinus Torvalds' work has been useful to me, and to you, and to many other people. That's surely more important than whether or not he is rich
- anjc 10y ago?! Surely that completely depends on whether or not he'd like compensation for your convenience.
- circlefavshape 10y agoWell, if you're considering only what's important for him then yes. Otherwise no
- VeejayRampay 10y agoIn my opinion, a legacy like that of Linus means that he's produced a piece of software that has positively impacted the lives of people. It's important because he's actually delivered on the famous SV con-artist promise of "making the world a better place". Not directly, as in curing diseases or revolutionizing energy production or consumption, but in ways that help people in developing countries access information due to falling costs of computers (Linux) and phones (Linux through Android) and people in business can thrive because of the diversity it brings to the table (versus the Microsoft quasi-monopoly we had before). That's what I put under the umbrella term "legacy", something that has, in a way and ever so slightly, changed the world for the better. Then again, we might say "it's just software", but in a software-centric world, I reckon it does matter.
- bbcbasic 10y agoFunny because if he did a Bill Gates his creation would be so much less special.
- jacquesm 10y ago> but the fact is that he has attained far less value than he's created. This goes for an extremely large portion of humanity, probably > 99.99%. Very few people manage to extract all of the value they created (and sometimes more), and most of those people are not the nicest ones.
- anjc 10y agoOh well absolutely, but Linus' value creation/wealth disparity is mindblowing. Again, I'm not suggesting that money is everything, and I'm sure that he'd say he doesn't care about money. But he's advocating an ethos which wouldn't work for most people, and which barely worked for him in terms of earnings.
- jacquesm 10y ago> which barely worked for him in terms of earnings. 100M$+ or so? Barely? Where do I sign? You could not spend > 10M$ on yourself and your direct dependents meaningfully in a lifetime.
- pyrale 10y agoNow think about the man who invented writing. The truth about most SV billionnaires is that they captured far more latent value than they created. This ethos of building a fortune of absurd proportions can not work for most either.
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoReally? I would say that a large portion of people who live in a society extract more value from it than they put in. If you are just merely doing your job you are not making any extra value. I could work hard as a hunter-gatherer, or work hard programming, but either way I'm just doing my job. In the second case I'm just using the infrastructure that other people have set up to be able to live a much happier life by working just as hard (or even less hard).
- jacquesm 10y ago
- vacri 10y agoTorvalds didn't say that marketing and sales wasn't work. He said that crapping on about innovation isn't work, and that work is in the details. And the same is true in sales as well - who would you rather work for you in sales, the one who spends their time crapping on about how huge everything is going to be, or the one who spends their time pounding the pavement, making calls? The work is in the details in sales as well.
- anjc 10y agoThat's all very true, but the people you typically hear 'crapping on about innovation' are doing their job, and have more than likely put enormous effort into perfecting their documentation, presentations, delivery, pitching, market analysis etc etc.
- Svenskunganka 10y agoAs a Scandinavian I'd like to think that the culture Linus was brought up in influences what he personally sees as "success". Considering he grew up under the belt of the Nordic model, he might consider success completely different from someone brought up in the US for example, where the American Dream™ has long been the status-quo where amount of money equals amount of success. I'm sure Linus is living a very comfy, happy life - even though his Net Worth isn't greater than the guy who made Instagram.
- anjc 10y agoI've always assumed this about him. Again, I admire him greatly and I don't think that money trumps everything. I used the Instagram and Whatsapp examples just to demonstrate Linus' almost ridiculous lack of work->earnings. I mean if a world-renowned workaholic genius can't automatically generate a fair amount of wealth from decades of creating some of the most used and influential software in the world, what does that imply for the rest of us?
- Svenskunganka 10y agoI don't think it is because he couldn't generate a fair amount of wealth from his work, but rather that he chose not to, and I believe that is what lead to the success of the project. I also don't see him as a world-renowned genius (as you put it), because he isn't one and from what I've understood from watching his talks & reading the mailing list he himself does not want to be refered to as one either. I think that people should keep that in mind when they read articles about Linus, because most articles tries to portray him as some kind of higher form of being among the likes of Steve Jobs & Gabe Newell, which I believe is not the way he'd like to be perceived when you read a sentence he spoke.
- anjc 10y agoOh I see your point now, in that he chose not to. Yeah you're probably right. Tech-world renowned I should've said. And he may not be a self-proclaimed genius but he has a level of talent which is surely rare, at least.
- dualogy 10y agoYou and "the instagram and whatsapp guys" simply use a different denominator for wealth than perhaps Linus, theregister readers, or many of us here. You're talking first of all there about valuations (aka pie-in-the-sky) not cash-in-the-bank-or-matress anyway or other encumbered "assets" not money. These usually only get "converted" when in a mad rush to beat the avalanche of other "assets" seeking rapid conversion on a massive scale due to black swans, and then good luck converting those "billions" into (purchasing-power-equivalent, in-the-bank) billions. > Obviously everything isn't about money, and Torvald's legacy will be timeless. So why the heck bring it even up? =)
- supremesaboteur 10y agoHe is worth $150 million and has an annual salary of $10 million : http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/tech-millionaire/linus-torvalds-net-worth/ http://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/t... I say he marketed himself well
- js8 10y agoI doubt both claims are true, especially the one about his annual salary. I would like to see a better source; I googled it, but the only other answer I found was that in 1999, he got some shares from Redhat worth of about $20 million.
- ryandrake 10y agoYour good point is getting very unfairly down-voted by disagreers. Sure, he's set for life, but compared to his massive contribution to the industry, Linus seems to have left a lot of money on the table. I know--it's stupid to believe in the just-world, but it grinds my gears that in our world talkers tend to be rewarded orders of magnitude more than doers.
- megous 10y agoHad he heavily monetized, Linux might not have happened at all in the current shape.
- waynecolvin 10y agoI believe Linus claims to be an engineer, or maybe a manager nowadays. shrug Glad he has done well anyways.