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The problem with income inequality is that the people at the top are actively stealing money from everyone else. Elon isn't out there building rockets. He just

The problem with income inequality is that the people at the top are actively stealing money from everyone else. Elon isn't out there building rockets. He just gets the rockets that other people made automatically and for free. This is the case with literally every billionaire. So, yeah, I'm envious. I'd like my stuff back.

epgui 4y ago
I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense). I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.
- d0liver 4y ago
  No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
  - junofan 4y ago
    > Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
    - d0liver 4y ago
      What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist. Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
        d0liver 4y ago
        This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on. It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
- deltathreetwo 4y ago
  It is always the case. Another fallacy that can only be the result of your flawed intuition. All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case." Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case. The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.
  - epgui 4y ago
    Even if everything you just said was true, it completely misses the point and is irrelevant to my comment.
    - deltathreetwo 4y ago
      Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
      - epgui 4y ago
        PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
        formulatwothree 4y ago
cercatrova 4y ago
That's only the case if you are a believer of socialism/communism, ie the labor theory of value. If not, then if one were a capitalist, they would say that systematically derisking the idea of reusable rockets is where Musk gets his billions from. If his workers are content with their compensation then that is what they agreed to.
- d0liver 4y ago
  If you gave his workers a choice between splitting the company equally with Elon and letting him have all or most of it, they would all choose to have the benefits of ownership. You can't say that someone "agreed" to something if they took the only available path.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    That's post facto. What about when someone is first starting a company that could fail at any time, would workers have equally put money in and taken the risk of ownership too? People only want the rewards once they see how rich someone's company was but not when they might have to potentially lose their money if they had to invest their time and money in the beginning.
    - d0liver 4y ago
      Pretty much every billionaire in existence has, at some point, taken millions of investment dollars from someone else. This is ultimately where the vast majority of their business value comes from. Compare to value generated by individuals (like book authors) which can sometimes generate millions of dollars. That kind of individual value is more inline with the value that an individual with good judgment might be bringing on their own as an owner of an early startup who is willing to take some risks. Basically, the risk itself isn't worth anything; paired with good judgment, the risk and the good judgment are both worth something. Really, that worth has to do with how common that good judgment is. But, most billionaires are idiots (at least at being billionaires) and their judgment tends to benefit them and nobody else. So, from a role perspective they bring negative value to a company in addition to stealing everyone's productive efforts. You can look at how companies perform when a billionaire owner hands it off to a non-billionaire CEO. There's no sudden 20,000x value multiplier that's lost. Their role in that situation is essentially to just be privileged idiots and it's a process that's fully automatic after a certain point.

epgui 4y ago

I don’t agree that this is always the case, and I don’t even agree that Elon’s accumulation of wealth was particularly exploitative (in the pejorative sense). I do agree that it often is the case with very wealthy people, and probably with most executives, who add little value relative to the wealth they are able to accumulate.

d0liver 4y ago
No billionaire is contributing anything close to what they're receiving in return. They should be compensated with an amount that's commensurate to the role they fill within an organization. Elon, for example, is a glorified manager and should be paid a manager's salary and nothing more. Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire.
- junofan 4y ago
  > Can you give an example of a billionaire bringing tens of thousands times as much value as an average employee at a company? Imagine that they are not already a billionaire. Yeah, Jeff Bezos took his idea for an online bookstore from working as an employee at DE Shaw and delivered way more value by systematically derisking the business over decades. There was a market worth many trillions: online retail. When Bezos created Amazon, owning part of that company was very risky and therefore Amazon was nearly worthless. Now anybody can buy a share of Amazon. Bezos was compensated for the value he created by derisking.
  - d0liver 4y ago
    What you're talking about is using other people to leverage the value of your judgement, right? This is similar to what a manager does when they manage a team - they make sure that things flow well in the team or the whole project fails. In that case, at the end of the project, is it fair for the manager to get up and say, "I personally created all of this value because without me it wouldn't exist"? No, of course not. Because without literally everyone on the team who made a contribution it wouldn't exist. Imagine Jeff Bezos trying to create Amazon literally _on his own_. It just doesn't math; it can't. The good judgement required to grow a company is definitely worth something, but it isn't worth like twenty thousand times more than everyone else involved.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      Why can’t ‘good judgement’ at the right time be worth 20000x more than a mediocre judgement at the right time? (Or good judgement at a mediocore time?) In the most extreme case, say some military general’s correct judgement to avoid launching a nuclear missile during a false alert, may be worth more than everyone else’s combined. i.e their ‘good judgement’ during a critical few seconds would be worth 8 billion times more than the average.
      - d0liver 4y ago
        This only works if you're leveraging your judgement through other people. The people who put you in a position to make the meaningful judgement are just as important. For example, if the person who made the monitoring system that you're using to inform your decision didn't mess it up, then they're just as responsible for the good outcome. Same with the people who made the parts that they used to build the system and on and on. It's still the same thing: Taking credit for other people's work and claiming it as your own. It's also probably a good reason to democratize decision making when there's a lot on the line. Because, ultimately, everyone suffers from the bad decisions that people in power make.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
deltathreetwo 4y ago
It is always the case. Another fallacy that can only be the result of your flawed intuition. All human capability has limits. You have limited strength and limited intelligence. There is no amount of intelligence or physical strength in a single human that can allow one man to build a feat of technology such as a Boeing 747. It can't even be done by one human in 10 lifetimes. This fundamental impossibility in your words is "always the case." Yet there are individuals that exist in the world with enough wealth to buy several 747s. You will see that anyone with this amount of wealth could not have achieved this wealth through the sheer power of their individual IQ or physical strength. They had to have worked with many others in order to achieve such wealth. The existence of said individuals completely verifies the existence of how wealth is distributed unfairly. There is no fair barter that can allow one man to gain a 747 unless that man extracted work off the backs of others. It is logically impossible if this was not the case. The only thing you can argue here is that wealth inequality is required for society to progress; but there is no argument on whether or not the resources are distributed fairly.
- epgui 4y ago
  Even if everything you just said was true, it completely misses the point and is irrelevant to my comment.
  - deltathreetwo 4y ago
    Doesn't matter. It's true and what you said how it's "always the case" is categorically false. The falsehood of your comment is the only thing that is relevant here.
    - epgui 4y ago
      PS.: I don’t know what I said to trigger you, but you don’t need to continue posting arguments to other comments I make across various threads. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
      - formulatwothree 4y ago

cercatrova 4y ago

That's only the case if you are a believer of socialism/communism, ie the labor theory of value. If not, then if one were a capitalist, they would say that systematically derisking the idea of reusable rockets is where Musk gets his billions from. If his workers are content with their compensation then that is what they agreed to.

d0liver 4y ago
If you gave his workers a choice between splitting the company equally with Elon and letting him have all or most of it, they would all choose to have the benefits of ownership. You can't say that someone "agreed" to something if they took the only available path.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  That's post facto. What about when someone is first starting a company that could fail at any time, would workers have equally put money in and taken the risk of ownership too? People only want the rewards once they see how rich someone's company was but not when they might have to potentially lose their money if they had to invest their time and money in the beginning.
  - d0liver 4y ago
    Pretty much every billionaire in existence has, at some point, taken millions of investment dollars from someone else. This is ultimately where the vast majority of their business value comes from. Compare to value generated by individuals (like book authors) which can sometimes generate millions of dollars. That kind of individual value is more inline with the value that an individual with good judgment might be bringing on their own as an owner of an early startup who is willing to take some risks. Basically, the risk itself isn't worth anything; paired with good judgment, the risk and the good judgment are both worth something. Really, that worth has to do with how common that good judgment is. But, most billionaires are idiots (at least at being billionaires) and their judgment tends to benefit them and nobody else. So, from a role perspective they bring negative value to a company in addition to stealing everyone's productive efforts. You can look at how companies perform when a billionaire owner hands it off to a non-billionaire CEO. There's no sudden 20,000x value multiplier that's lost. Their role in that situation is essentially to just be privileged idiots and it's a process that's fully automatic after a certain point.