6 ms·

But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like wor

by hugh3 15y ago

But Gates's own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience. Maybe. But it doesn't particularly make me want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I'd rather let someone else make those $100 billion dollars and give 'em away. I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn't have to. Thanks Bill!

ehsanu1 15y ago
The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ramblerman 15y ago
  > I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Steve jobs?
  - Technophilis 15y ago
    or Yuri Milner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-russian_n_843182.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-r...
- femto 15y ago
  An interesting point. Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work? I'd come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority). The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are: 1) Get an interesting job. 2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells. 3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot. 4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together. 5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load. Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?
  - chad_oliver 15y ago
    Start a business that generates a passive income source, in the same vein as patio's BCC. This would obviously require a large amount of work up-front, but within 10 years you should be sorted. I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  >I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.
  - learc83 15y ago
    Wow I can't find anything at all supporting anywhere near that. The total net worth of all the worlds billionaires is only $4.5 trillion according to forbes.
    - forensic 15y ago
      Forbes only knows about public wealth. The Rothschilds in the mid 19th century owned half the wealth of the world, and the contemporary argument is that they have not lost money since then, rather it has grown steadily, and is hidden off the books in countless family controlled foundations as well as secret reserves stashed away before there was the type of public accounting we have today. Heads of state and CEOs have public wealth. The Rothschilds didn't.
      - khafra 15y ago
        How does the total value of privately traded companies compare to publically traded companies, and how many privately traded companies can the Rothschilds plausibly own without it being public knowledge?
        tmh88j 15y ago
        Is it possible to find the total market cap of all privately traded companies? Considering that a private company's wealth isn't public knowledge the only thing we can do is estimate using a tool like bizstats.com.
        speleding 15y ago
        Macro economics can give you a pretty accurate estimate of the "market cap" of privately traded companies: just work your way down from the Gross National Product by segmenting it into public and privately earned. (You could also look at total tax revenue and calculate from there)
- vladd 15y ago
  > The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent I doubt people that are great at creating value would appreciate making these kind of decisions once they get to know what's involved. Just to give an example: an 8 year-old requested $50'000 from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to help him survive by contributing to his leukemia treatment, but Gates turned the request down because they don't contribute to individual cases (their policy is to fund programs designed to target large groups of people, i.e. population control in Asia). I don't imagine great founders or great engineers getting up in the morning because they dream in having a "point" to say in this kind of decisions. They love to do what they do best: creating something people want.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - hvs 15y ago
    The Gates Foundation isn't your traditional "take money, give money" charity, though. It is actually just the kind of charity that you would expect a successful entrepreneur to create. They require results from the research that they fund and they require regular status from the research they fund. It is a very hands-on style that entrepreneurs are good at and other charities, traditionally, have not.
PakG1 15y ago
Well, counterpoint to that is whether the billionaire is giving to things with which you agree. If you're the billionaire, you get to choose where the money goes. :)
bfe 15y ago
Imagine though if we had a thousand Bill Gateses who each had a hundred billion dollars, and the brains and determination that got them that money, to throw at one or more of the projects mentioned above. Can there be such thing as too much resources being deployed for the advancement of the human race?
- heelhook 15y ago
  If that were the case, thousands of people with bill gates's wealth, either you would have an accumulation of capital at the top that would be unsustainable, or more likely such a devaluation of the currency that having a hundred billion dollars wouldn't make you rich, think Zimbabwe.
  - bfe 15y ago
    That just assumes that accumulation of wealth is necessarily due to extracting it from the general economy rather than by generating wealth for the economy at large. Without debating the relative merits of Microsoft's contributions in particular, and assuming you accept the capitalist premise that someone can deserve to become wealthy by generating more wealth for society than they take home for their own benefit, why should there some intrinsic limit to how many people that can be true of or of how much value they can collectively create?
    - heelhook 15y ago
      The problem is simply that we can't all be rich. We can all be billionaires, but we can't all be rich. The intrinsic limit comes from the fact that wealth itself is relative. Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost). When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.

by hugh3 15y ago

ehsanu1 15y ago

The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in "giving it all away" indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Anyways, the whole problem with trying to become a billionaire is that it's really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can't just will yourself to earn billions.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ramblerman 15y ago
> I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. Steve jobs?
- Technophilis 15y ago
  or Yuri Milner http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-russian_n_843182.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/31/yuri-milner-house-r...
femto 15y ago
An interesting point. Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work? I'd come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority). The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs. The options I can think of are: 1) Get an interesting job. 2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells. 3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot. 4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together. 5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load. Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?
- chad_oliver 15y ago
  Start a business that generates a passive income source, in the same vein as patio's BCC. This would obviously require a large amount of work up-front, but within 10 years you should be sorted. I was really surprised to realise that my living costs are only about $130 per week, or $20 per day. If I could earn $20 every day, I could do whatever I want in the other 23 hours.
bluedanieru 15y ago
>I'm sure there are some billionaires exactly like that. The Rothschild family is thought to have a net worth of a few trillion or thereabouts, so yeah. Of course, they do things with it.
- learc83 15y ago
  Wow I can't find anything at all supporting anywhere near that. The total net worth of all the worlds billionaires is only $4.5 trillion according to forbes.
  - forensic 15y ago
    Forbes only knows about public wealth. The Rothschilds in the mid 19th century owned half the wealth of the world, and the contemporary argument is that they have not lost money since then, rather it has grown steadily, and is hidden off the books in countless family controlled foundations as well as secret reserves stashed away before there was the type of public accounting we have today. Heads of state and CEOs have public wealth. The Rothschilds didn't.
    - khafra 15y ago
      How does the total value of privately traded companies compare to publically traded companies, and how many privately traded companies can the Rothschilds plausibly own without it being public knowledge?
      - tmh88j 15y ago
        Is it possible to find the total market cap of all privately traded companies? Considering that a private company's wealth isn't public knowledge the only thing we can do is estimate using a tool like bizstats.com.
        speleding 15y ago
        Macro economics can give you a pretty accurate estimate of the "market cap" of privately traded companies: just work your way down from the Gross National Product by segmenting it into public and privately earned. (You could also look at total tax revenue and calculate from there)
vladd 15y ago
> The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent I doubt people that are great at creating value would appreciate making these kind of decisions once they get to know what's involved. Just to give an example: an 8 year-old requested $50'000 from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to help him survive by contributing to his leukemia treatment, but Gates turned the request down because they don't contribute to individual cases (their policy is to fund programs designed to target large groups of people, i.e. population control in Asia). I don't imagine great founders or great engineers getting up in the morning because they dream in having a "point" to say in this kind of decisions. They love to do what they do best: creating something people want.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- hvs 15y ago
  The Gates Foundation isn't your traditional "take money, give money" charity, though. It is actually just the kind of charity that you would expect a successful entrepreneur to create. They require results from the research that they fund and they require regular status from the research they fund. It is a very hands-on style that entrepreneurs are good at and other charities, traditionally, have not.

PakG1 15y ago

Well, counterpoint to that is whether the billionaire is giving to things with which you agree. If you're the billionaire, you get to choose where the money goes. :)

bfe 15y ago

Imagine though if we had a thousand Bill Gateses who each had a hundred billion dollars, and the brains and determination that got them that money, to throw at one or more of the projects mentioned above. Can there be such thing as too much resources being deployed for the advancement of the human race?

heelhook 15y ago
If that were the case, thousands of people with bill gates's wealth, either you would have an accumulation of capital at the top that would be unsustainable, or more likely such a devaluation of the currency that having a hundred billion dollars wouldn't make you rich, think Zimbabwe.
- bfe 15y ago
  That just assumes that accumulation of wealth is necessarily due to extracting it from the general economy rather than by generating wealth for the economy at large. Without debating the relative merits of Microsoft's contributions in particular, and assuming you accept the capitalist premise that someone can deserve to become wealthy by generating more wealth for society than they take home for their own benefit, why should there some intrinsic limit to how many people that can be true of or of how much value they can collectively create?
  - heelhook 15y ago
    The problem is simply that we can't all be rich. We can all be billionaires, but we can't all be rich. The intrinsic limit comes from the fact that wealth itself is relative. Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost). When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.