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I don't know, the bravery and courage it took for the "guests" to join this ride inspired me to donate to St. Jude. If it had just been billionaires (and a tok

I don't know, the bravery and courage it took for the "guests" to join this ride inspired me to donate to St. Jude. If it had just been billionaires (and a token scientist or aspirational astronaut), I may have agreed with your jaded opinion.

simonh 5y ago
I don’t see why anyone involved in this being a billionaire is relevant at all. Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. I don’t understand why being done by a very successful person detracts from the achievement. Isaacman has built a business that provides valuable services and employs a thousand people paying them a decent wage to do useful work. There’s nothing bad about that, but he’s talked about as if he was a criminal or had done something shameful.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. There are plenty that believe the very existence of billionaires suggests an obscene imbalance in our system of capital. (I happen to agree.)
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    Some degree of concentration of capital is good. It helps fund long-term projects.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I don't disagree, would emphasize "some" degree.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Sure, it's a fairly commonly expressed sentiment. My question to that is, where are the big, successful, innovative products, services and companies going to come from? Who is going to create them, and who is going to own and control them? Let's take Isaacman as a fairly randomly selected example. At age 16 he identified poor practices in the payments processing market and started a business. Instead of having to wait a month for card processing to be set up for a business, he would have them up and running in 1 day. How much money has that saved the US economy? Apart from the company itself, how many jobs at other companies has that cumulatively supported? Aside from that, through his control of the company, Isaacman has steered it to greater and greater success, supporting every more jobs and customer businesses. Clearly he knows what he's doing and is the right person to run the company. So what's the sense in confiscating his share of the company? Who should it be given to, and therefore who instead of Isaacman should run it? Marxism says Isaacman shouldn't have had the opportunity to start the company in the first place. All capital allocation should be controlled by the state, putting bureaucrats in charge of everything. Collectivists say the employees should own it, but employees don't want to assume the risks that owners and investors do. They generally don't want to have to assume the responsibilities either. There's nothing to stop employee owned companies thriving in most developed countries, that doesn't happen because the dynamics of such enterprises just don't work in practice. Yes of course there are exceptions, great, but why are they so desperately few? I'm not against employees having a say in company affairs, they're legitimate stakeholders and should rightly have a voice, but control and ownership must be earned and it must come with responsibility and acceptance of risk.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      I guess millionaires, not billionaires?

simonh 5y ago

I don’t see why anyone involved in this being a billionaire is relevant at all. Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. I don’t understand why being done by a very successful person detracts from the achievement. Isaacman has built a business that provides valuable services and employs a thousand people paying them a decent wage to do useful work. There’s nothing bad about that, but he’s talked about as if he was a criminal or had done something shameful.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
> Billionaire is thrown about as an insult these days. There are plenty that believe the very existence of billionaires suggests an obscene imbalance in our system of capital. (I happen to agree.)
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Some degree of concentration of capital is good. It helps fund long-term projects.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I don't disagree, would emphasize "some" degree.
- simonh 5y ago
  Sure, it's a fairly commonly expressed sentiment. My question to that is, where are the big, successful, innovative products, services and companies going to come from? Who is going to create them, and who is going to own and control them? Let's take Isaacman as a fairly randomly selected example. At age 16 he identified poor practices in the payments processing market and started a business. Instead of having to wait a month for card processing to be set up for a business, he would have them up and running in 1 day. How much money has that saved the US economy? Apart from the company itself, how many jobs at other companies has that cumulatively supported? Aside from that, through his control of the company, Isaacman has steered it to greater and greater success, supporting every more jobs and customer businesses. Clearly he knows what he's doing and is the right person to run the company. So what's the sense in confiscating his share of the company? Who should it be given to, and therefore who instead of Isaacman should run it? Marxism says Isaacman shouldn't have had the opportunity to start the company in the first place. All capital allocation should be controlled by the state, putting bureaucrats in charge of everything. Collectivists say the employees should own it, but employees don't want to assume the risks that owners and investors do. They generally don't want to have to assume the responsibilities either. There's nothing to stop employee owned companies thriving in most developed countries, that doesn't happen because the dynamics of such enterprises just don't work in practice. Yes of course there are exceptions, great, but why are they so desperately few? I'm not against employees having a say in company affairs, they're legitimate stakeholders and should rightly have a voice, but control and ownership must be earned and it must come with responsibility and acceptance of risk.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I guess millionaires, not billionaires?