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Software has almost zero overhead beyond base line business expenses. Anything that requires making real stuff depends on many more people to produce the produc

Software has almost zero overhead beyond base line business expenses. Anything that requires making real stuff depends on many more people to produce the product. They all need to be paid which means engineers and management need to take a smaller slice of the pie.

godelski 3y ago
Sure but I always have a hard time comprehending these arguments tbh. Because I honestly can't tell the difference between someone who has a billion dollars and someone who has 200 billion dollars. There's essentially no difference other than a number. But while writing this I decided to check instead of making what I thought was a reasonable assumption. Apparently the net worth of the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon are under $100m? That's a bit surprising if the numbers I googled are accurate. That would make the net worth of the two primary shareholders of BMW 1000x their counterparts. Each! I scrolled through Forbes billionaires and I didn't find aerospace anywhere but I did find pig breeding, shipping, and Chick-fil-A, candy, soy sauce, videogames, legos, in-n-out, dental implants, "Star Wars", "Billboards", and even "drones". Especially considering that there's a lot of shipping on there and a drone billionaire. Really makes me think some of the other things are over priced tbh. Especially with how many crypto-bros are on that list. Edit: Wait! "762 Charles Edelstenne" is listed as "aviation" but he cofounded Dassault... Edit 2: "868 Neal Blue & family" is listed as "Defense" for General Atomics and "871 Eren Ozmen" as "Aerospace" for Sierra Nevada. "916 Fatih Ozmen" also for Sierra Nevada. So okay, maybe some are on this list but my intuition suggested defense and aerospace would have at least someone in the top 100. Surprised not even the top 500. All of them under $4bn btw
- sgu999 3y ago
  We can find countless examples of high paying jobs that are absolutely useless to our industrial civilisation. The answer is likely a mixture of both: salaries are not that much correlated to skill and value overall, and some industries have much lower margins than others. Having to compete with the likes of Airbus and ULA for workers, SpaceX doesn't need to inflate the salaries that much to get top talents.

godelski 3y ago

Sure but I always have a hard time comprehending these arguments tbh. Because I honestly can't tell the difference between someone who has a billion dollars and someone who has 200 billion dollars. There's essentially no difference other than a number. But while writing this I decided to check instead of making what I thought was a reasonable assumption. Apparently the net worth of the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon are under $100m? That's a bit surprising if the numbers I googled are accurate. That would make the net worth of the two primary shareholders of BMW 1000x their counterparts. Each! I scrolled through Forbes billionaires and I didn't find aerospace anywhere but I did find pig breeding, shipping, and Chick-fil-A, candy, soy sauce, videogames, legos, in-n-out, dental implants, "Star Wars", "Billboards", and even "drones". Especially considering that there's a lot of shipping on there and a drone billionaire. Really makes me think some of the other things are over priced tbh. Especially with how many crypto-bros are on that list. Edit: Wait! "762 Charles Edelstenne" is listed as "aviation" but he cofounded Dassault... Edit 2: "868 Neal Blue & family" is listed as "Defense" for General Atomics and "871 Eren Ozmen" as "Aerospace" for Sierra Nevada. "916 Fatih Ozmen" also for Sierra Nevada. So okay, maybe some are on this list but my intuition suggested defense and aerospace would have at least someone in the top 100. Surprised not even the top 500. All of them under $4bn btw

sgu999 3y ago
We can find countless examples of high paying jobs that are absolutely useless to our industrial civilisation. The answer is likely a mixture of both: salaries are not that much correlated to skill and value overall, and some industries have much lower margins than others. Having to compete with the likes of Airbus and ULA for workers, SpaceX doesn't need to inflate the salaries that much to get top talents.