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Sergey Brin’s $100B Private Fiefdom (2022)
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago[flagged]
- imgabe 4y agoThe Us government budget is over 4 trillion dollars. Why not use $100 billion of that to house the poor?
- bobkazamakis 4y agoThese aren't mutally exclusive. Plenty of government programs are still underfunded, and plenty of the rich aren't paying their fair debts to society.
- imgabe 4y agoThat's not the point. The comment implies all it would take to "house the poor" is to spend $100 billion. The government spends that amount many times over. Spending $100 billion is not a big deal. If that were sufficient to end homelessness, it would be done already. Also, since when is confiscating 100% of someone's wealth, "paying their fair debt"? Do you happen to have any personal wealth? If so, why haven't you donated it to the government yet, as fairness dictates?
- nerbert 4y agoYou nicely came to the conclusion that homelessness is indeed a political choice.
- imgabe 4y agoPlease detail exactly how the $100 billion should be spent to end homelessness.
- kazinator 4y agoIf we assume, say, 600K homeless, that gives us a $166K budget per person. (If we somehow spend that, per person, our main challenge would be keeping it secret so as not to disincentivize people who have to work for $166K; we need them to pay taxes.)
- knewter 4y agoDo you think homeless people are mostly homeless because of the lack of a house?
- astrange 4y agoRepeal all local zoning codes and spend the rest on lawyers defending the SCOTUS case. And/or repeal the Faircloth Amendment and give it to HUD.
- _just7_ 4y agoIts a political choice in so far that we have artificially inflated home prices by not allowing enough homes to be build
- Craighead 4y ago[dead]
- woodruffw 4y agoIt occurs to this humble Internet peasant that we might do both.
- rizky05 4y ago[dead]
- kortilla 4y agoAnd give $1 million a year in perpetuity to every person on earth, right?
- rizky05 4y ago[dead]
- searealist 4y agoWhat would that look like?
- mistrial9 4y agothis is not the right approach, on multiple levels.. anyway, check out the Panama Papers and others, and realize that plenty of people are pushing around lots of money secretly, while others suffer
- mlindner 4y agoThis type of opinion getting any kind of popularity in society is a scary thought to me. I really hope this continues to stay a fringe opinion. It would lead to tremendous abuses to the general public and a destruction of stability. There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion.
- woodruffw 4y ago> There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion. I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring. And this makes intuitive sense to most people: a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.) This doesn't justify massive wealth confiscation as much as it explains why it's an extremely reasonable reaction to the wealth amassing behavior we're expected to explain away as "normal."
- davidguetta 4y agoReasonable or not the reaction is just a conséquence of poor being too poor in america, and having NO POLITICAL PARTY at all defendign them. They dont realize it most ofbthem, but they really have 0 prospect, 0 hope. Some go on reddit thinikg other people will sympathize on rant subreddits like r antiwork.. but at the end of the day they have 0 power and 0 prospect of having some in the future if thet stay in ze country. Just move. For your own sake
- cloutchaser 4y agoSo one persons intuition works better at working out exactly what too much wealth or a healthy society means, than a feedback system of about 7bn independent entities kind of trading freely and making decisions, and for example awarding Jeff bezos 100bn for making almost all products available within 24 hours at the lowest possible margins, almost never making a profit, and employing 400k people extra during Covid. Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much. Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoBroken government policies are part of why we have a housing crisis. Given that reality, stealing one person's money to throw money at the problem won't fix it.
- _just7_ 4y agoThe federal government spent 6.8 trillion about 30% of GDP in 2021. If we confiscated all wealth of every single billionaire in the US without any loss what so ever, we would have 4 trillion dollars, or enough to fund the budget for about seven months. In this case we are ignoring that you would probably only destroy that vast amount of wealth without having anything to show for it, because most of it is tied to things like stock prices, which you would probably have a hard time finding a buyer for if you just confiscated everyones stocks...
- graycat 4y agoMoreover, could only do that $4 T confuscation once while the $6.8 T expenditures would continue on year by year. Moreover, if just dumped the $4 T into ordinary consumer expenditures, i.e., houses, cars, Walmart, Amazon, etc., then would get some inflation which would mean that the $4 T would do less good than a simple view would have anticipated.
- lo_zamoyski 4y agoI presume you're opposed to theft, unless, of course, the target is a rich guy. It's a fashionable double standard to live by. Often, if not usually, envy is somewhere lurking in the background, and certainly some kind of utilitarianism. The only licit way to confiscate that money is to show that it has been acquired illicitly, at which point it should go to those from whom it was taken, if possible. Even then, doing so may cause more harm than good, depending on the circumstances. And mind you, living is an ongoing cost. Poverty is not a thing to be solved, but something we must continuously respond to, in healthy ways. The proverbial selling of the Mona Lisa to buy rice/housing/etc isn't the way to go. And human beings do not live on bread alone.
- hbrn 4y ago> I presume you're opposed to theft, unless, of course, the target is a rich guy. It's a fashionable double standard to live by. And their definition of a rich guy is usually someone richer than me.
- m348e912 4y agoIt's not lack of available homes that causes homelessness, it's lack of available treatment (addiction & mental) that is the underlying issue. I'm not an "All-In" podcast fanboy, but they touch on this on the latest episode and I think they actually have it right.
- astrange 4y agoNo, it's the homes. This is pretty obvious because homelessness happens in places with expensive home values, not in Appalachia where they're poor and addicted to meth. But they aren't in New Jersey because it has constitutional affordable housing requirements. Most homeless people aren't literally on the street either, they're in precarious situations like cars or people's couches.
- chazeon 4y agohttps://archive.ph/RlbHs https://archive.ph/RlbHs
- julianeon 4y agoI'd be willing to bet that Bayshore, for all its clever investment strategems and financial experts and so forth, will underperform a simple stock market index fund in the long run.
- _8j50 4y agoI doubt all that much is even in stocks. And if it is, plenty of private stocks to buy up before IPO or fund new companies. Of course nothing beats real-estate. With that kind of money, futures are very appetizing too.
- GalenErso 4y agoThe job of a family office is not to act as a private hedge fund. Well, not necessarily. View it more as a "family management" office.
- bidirectional 4y agoWhy? Loads of private investment funds beat indices.
- cardosof 4y agoIt's not enough to beat them if you have all those complex strategies, you have to do it with good risk control and in a cost effective way, and that's why low cost broad market ETFs have their place.
- bitL 4y agoYes, but not on average. Very few funds beat index consistently; in a 10 year period most of them look like a random walk.
- cobertos 4y agoThe article mentions that a problem of investing _that_ much money is the scale. Is assume you'd have non-negligeable effects on what you invested in/effects in the intermediate levels (like putting too much money through the order book)? S&P 500 market cap is 32 trillion. 100 billion is 0.3% of that.
- GalenErso 4y agoOn one hand > There are now around 10,000 family offices On the other hand > And yet with so much extraordinary client discretion, it can almost feel like this $6 trillion industry doesn’t exist at all. 10,000 family offices x 10 staff on average (made up number, the article mentions 100 people in one of them) = 100,000 people, which is not a small number of people. How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Connections, you might say, but I find it hard to believe that 100,000 people could all have personal connections. Surely some of these people must be cold hires, people with no previous connections to the owners.
- voisin 4y ago> How does an industry that is at once so discreet and employs so many people find staff? How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? Honest question, where do I find these jobs? Like any other hedge fund or private equity fund. There are recruiters and job boards. Many of the aforementioned fund types actually source the majority of their funds from individuals or families, and would actually be considered family offices.
- Galanwe 4y agoI work in finance since ~15 years, essentially in quant hedge funds. I have some friends that work or worked in family offices, and I was proposed to work at some. The term is very vague and encompass very different entities. At its core, a family office is a kind of "prop shop" (a company trading with its own money, not client's money) where the original funds are from a single very high net worth person, or family. There's a lot of them in Asia, as VHNW families/individuals are common (especially in mainland China). It's a little bit less common in US/EU, where people usually employ "wealth managers". > How could I work for a family office if I had experience in business/management/finance/real estate/etc.? It really depends on the kind of office. I would say most of the time it would go through connections and networking, but some people will be recruited directly on the job market for rank & file positions. In the case of the proposition I had, it was a guy whose family is VHNW. The guy was a professor of econometrics at a top US university, so he convinced his family to let him start a shop to manage their money. I was presented to him through connections. I ended up declining, and he ended up hiring 3/4 people through a mix of friend connections & recommendations, and a student he supervised the PhD of. > Honest question, where do I find these jobs? In all honesty, family offices are rarely the most interesting jobs. It can pay really well, but you often end up in some small microcosm of politics subject to the desires of the King owner. Would not recommend 90% of them.
- tiffanyh 4y agoFamily Office I don’t think the author knows about “family offices”. The secrecy and nondescript nature is exactly inline with what family offices are, because family’s don’t want other people knowing about their investments. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office
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- cobertos 4y agoThey do mention part way through the article how much of a stretch the term has become > Admittedly, the variance between these entities shows how the term “family office” has lost some meaning.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI laughed at the "family office business" being a "6 trillion dollar industry." The term "family office" is about as descriptive of a company's line of business as "trust" or "llc."
- pottertheotter 4y agoNot really. There are definitely a few categories you can roughly group family offices into but they’re still generally the same thing. If you say “family office” to someone in finance, everyone knows exactly what you mean.
- sloreti 4y agoThe last sentence of the second paragraph literally reads, "The organization at the center of one of the industry’s most epic feuds and divorces is cloaked in secrecy ... which is, by design, the central value proposition of the entire family-office industry."
- anm89 4y agoYeah, the private fiefdom of funding Parkinson's research. Just like the dark ages. Clearly a real piece of shit.
- metadat 4y agoBrin is unloading resources into ailments most likely to affect him. It's an understandable strategy, though also self serving. They could instead aspire to have the largest possible positive impact across all of humanity. This is the basis for the argument that it's not right for any single human to be entrusted with such a disproportionately high amount of discretionary resources.
- anm89 4y agoWhat a terrible person, selfishly trying to spend their own money to address problems important to them. Again, real piece of shit.
- metadat 4y agoDid you really delete your downvoted comment from another post in this thread and affix it here? Gee, thanks, I'm flattered. Edit: My mistake, you posted a nearly identical comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376436 So sorry for the confusion! Thank you for ensuring the mark of anm89 is uniformly applied.
- anm89 4y agoThis doesn't even make sense. This comment is clearly a response to your parent comment. How could my response to your comment have been in another thread if your parent comment wasn't in the other thread? I'm honestly curious as to what other thread you think I deleted something off.
- mistermann 4y agoHyperbole can be both helpful and detrimental to the quality of one's thinking.
- astrange 4y ago> For starters, Bayshore is huge. Some family offices—like Musk’s Excession, which is managed by his fixer, Jared Birchall—are actually surprisingly small. One thing I learned from this article is that Musk's habit of naming things after Culture novels is… excessive. (Also, that book was okay but I prefer A Fire Upon The Deep, the other book about AIs and snotty Usenet posts in space.)
- etrautmann 4y agoInteresting- I got something entirely different from that book. My takesway was more about alien contact, the focused, persistent surveillance, the value of parks, and general spacefaring civilization.
- astrange 4y agoIn Excession I appreciated everything about the world aside from the title excession, but thought it didn't end up doing much. Also, IIRC he tried to portray it as something that was not explained and never could be explained, but then in later books he ended up explaining how post-singularity/sublimated civilizations work anyway.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y agoSuch a good book.
- entropicgravity 4y agoTwo surprising passages. '...the family office business has become a huge industry, valued at around $6 trillion, now bigger than the $4 trillion hedge fund business.'. and 'Investing in venture capital funds doesn’t put enough money to work, this person said, which encourages some family offices to just dump wads of cash into real estate, index funds, and anything else that can actually move enough dough.' It's hard to imagine this much money in your bank account.