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> They made their money through exploiting other people’s labour, that’s the only way you accumulate such capital. Is that true? Maybe, but I guess it hinges o

• stuaxo 7y ago
  By taking a bigger % of the work put in than the person doing the work == exploiting.
  • diffeomorphism 7y ago
    So any management position is exploitation? Being the boss of any manufacturing business is exploitation? Hint: Even if you take only 1% of the work but employ 1000 people you are going to get rich. Your benchmark for what is exploiting seems to not work particularly well in practice.
    • samcday 7y ago
      > So any management position is exploitation? Being the boss of any manufacturing business is exploitation? In many peoples opinion (including mine), yes. This can all be considered wage slavery. Of course the magnitude and severity varies. A worker in the Gigafactory (probably) has a higher standard of living than the one in the Foxconn factory, who in turn probably has a better standard of living than the worker in the Nike sweatshop. But it’s all the same thing.
      • virgilp 7y ago
        > wage slavery Also called a "job". You're telling me I'm a wage slave? (in the last 10 years nobody reported to me, I was never self-employed). Through this sort of wage slavery in the last 10years, I have achieved an incredibly high standard of living, compared to the regular citizens of any age in human history. I think this narrative is just devaluing the meaning of words and the suffering of those who really are exploited.
        • nicoburns 7y ago
          A lot of people (even in first-world countries) have zero chance of becoming a multi-millionaire, and even struggle to make ends meet, pay their rent, etc. That is the problem, not highly compensated workers. And it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources.
          • virgilp 7y ago
            Yes, that is true (though at the same time things have been massively improving in average). What I find amazing is that we live in a time where a person living in a (relatively) poor country, working a non-management job, paying all taxes, _can_ actually get fairly rich. Employment really isn't "slavery". Would it be great if more people could achieve prosperity - ideally, _all_ people? Yes it would. However, just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this (we can argue about details of taxation, and I don't think in particular USA has a good system, but that's more of "fine-grain detail" in the end) > it is an economic system which awards a vastly disproportionate share of resources to people like Musk and Gates that deprives others of those same resources. I've lived in communism. It really is equal sharing of misery, _not_ equal sharing of reward. The reality is that Musk really puts in way more effort & takes a lot more risk than your average factory worker. But at the end of the day - not even that is what matters. What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia. Not sure what it would take to convince people it's an inherently bad idea - but I feel that at least by now the burden of proof should be on the shoulder of those who advocate it.
            • nicoburns 7y ago
              > just "take the money of the rich" is not a solution for this I'm not suggesting taking money from the rich. I'm suggesting not giving it to them in the first place. > What matters is that by attempting this "equal sharing of resources", each and every time it was tried, it resulted in a horrible dystopia. I'm also not suggesting "equal sharing of resources". The idea that the only possible distributions of wealth are "everyone gets the same" and "unbounded in response to supply/demand" is silly. If all the billionaires in the world had $10million instead of $1 billion, and everyone with >$1million's wealth was scaled down in proportion, I'd be happy. There'd still be plenty to work for. For me, the key issue with communism was too much concentrated power. That lead to inefficient resource distribution, because the people responsible for distributing had perverse incentives which lead to corruption, and even where the leadership was benevolent, they simply didn't have the mental resources to work out how best to distribute things. Now, markets solve this problem, by allowing everyone to have input into what the economy produces, simply by spending their own share of our economic output. However, this mechanism relies on economic demand being somewhat evenly spread out amongst the population. Otherwise you end up with the same problem: those in control of demand have incentives to pursue their own self-interest, and even where they are benevolent, they don't have the means to determine efficient distribution. Bill Gate's philanthropy is a good example of this: very well meaning, but hopelessly ineffective given the huge sums of money involved. Notably, this wealth is being distributed just like wealth in communist countries: in a planned way, by a central authority. Extreme wealth concentration circumvents the market mechanism, and should be avoided for just the same reasons as communism.
      • diffeomorphism 7y ago
        > But it’s all the same thing. "If everything is important, nothing is."
  • collyw 7y ago
    Some work is more valuable than other work.
    • newsgremlin 7y ago
      But by margins of billions? Figures like this are thrown around a lot but it's hard to grasp how much just one billion, even 1/1000 of that can make an individuals life unrecognizable before having that wealth.
• econcon 7y ago
  >Is that true? Maybe, but I guess it hinges on your definition of "exploit". I think you can make money (in theory, of any amount) without exploiting people There would be no excess for the founder if you distribute all the money that a company operation makes evenly to all employees and owners. That's what they mean when they summon the world "exploit". Roman slaves weren't exploited in the ways some layman might imagine.
  • vzcx 7y ago
    Founders are typically the first and primary owners, at least initially... Is the objection that founders and investors get a larger slice? People have a strange reaction to the word 'exploit.' It smells bad, and it gives the sense that those using the term want something to smell bad. 'Exploit' just means 'to make productive use of' to me. Musk 'exploited' his workers? Good. Theyre making cool stuff. That's what he should be doing. A company 'exploited' a uranium deposit? Good. We need those hot rocks for fuel rods.
    • econcon 7y ago
      I also own a company but many times who work for us often have similar ideas like "owners are taking too much, they are stealing from us".
• modo_mario 7y ago
  >Haven't they both pledged to donate 99% in their lifetimes? Didn't gates massively increase his wealth in the period in which he said he'd give away half of it? >Plus you could argue the companies themselves (where at least Musk's wealth is mostly locked up) are helpful. At least Tesla. But would they exist without him? He's certainly been good at marketing himself and by extension his companies. On the other hand he also just bought the rights to the title founder at tesla so the actual original founders can't call themselves that which many people don't seem to realize. Meanwhile they kept hostage battery tech advantage via Panasonic. And then there's spacex and Solar city which happily survived on tax payer funds whilst the later maybe didn't help green energy adoption as much as a competitor might have in it's stead as they basically did Chinese solar panel resale which were going at dumping prices and the EU was blocking for that rezason....And i think they also had/have some fun gov bribery accusations against em which reflects badly on the billions in taxpayer subsidies they managed to waste. Meanwhile whilst an increase in NASA's budget wasn't politically feasible it's been a notoriously monetarily efficient institution.