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PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck

PG makes little effort to identify what it means to earn something. Some people consider effort the measure of whether something is earned. Some believe luck should be subtracted from result to get what is earned. Some say you cannot earn the benefits you receive from your genetics. No idea of what it means to earn something is given except for making users happy while "not cheating" (who decides what counts as cheating he doesn't say). No consideration for ideas such as economic rent, inherited advantages, or negotiating leverage are discussed. There is no way anyone responding to him has a lazier argument than he does.

johnea 4mo ago
I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...
- YZF 4mo ago
  So if I'm a brick layer and I decide to innovate and build a machine that can lay bricks faster and cheaper, and I hire people to help me do that, suddenly I've not actually earned anything? If I'm a farmer and I use a horse and a plow to plow my field instead of with my bare hands then I've not earned anything? Putting your capital towards these things is absolutely "earning" and the modern economy is just a generalization of that which enables capital and need to find each other more readily. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?
  - collingreen 4mo ago
    You gave examples of creating and inventing things and employing and leading people. Those are value creation. I don't think I fully agree with it, but OPs point wasn't about any of that and instead said capital gains (and clarified further - fungible, uninvolved capital without any other contribution). That's really different. If you want to attack that maybe use an example of passive index investors or pension funds allocating capital to a vc.
    - YZF 4mo ago
      Clearly my example didn't resonate but in my mind there is no difference between me using my capital in my business and me using my capital in other people's business. A passive index investment is me using my capital in the broader economy. So I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I give it someone to design a brick laying machine. Or I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I invest in the S&P 500. When I have the brick laying design I go to someone with more money and negotiate them funding my brick laying machine company. Those are all capital gains. Where is that imaginary line? pg specifically talked about startup founders. Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we have. We need to educate people better about how it works and we need to regulate it so it's not abused. But capital gains, or interest, are "earned". They are also taxed, and when those taxes are used for the right goals by the government, result in improving things for everyone.
      - smallmancontrov 4mo ago
        > capital gains, or interest, are "earned" According to the IRS, "unearned income" is money received from sources other than employment, such as interest, dividends, rental income, and pensions. We tax it at a vastly lower rate than ordinary income, and we tax it not at all for the purposes of exponential compounding, which is the application in which it is most problematic. What fraction of Elon's capital gains do you think have ever been realized?
        YZF 4mo ago
        I am almost certain (not sure how we can check) that Elon is paying a lot more taxes than the average person. He doesn't get more services for that money. The top 1% income earners pay something like 50% of the total individual's taxes + their companies pay a lot of taxes. He's basically subsidizing any service you're getting from the government. We tax capital gains less because we want people to invest their money in companies. As I said, we can debate the tax rates, some might argue we should lower the tax on capital gains (double taxation?) some might argue we should raise it. We should absolutely have an evidence based rational discussion on these topics.
- protocolture 4mo ago
  >Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. How does this follow? Is the management effort in organising a brick laying company not count as work? Does the RND effort of a bricklaying company not count as work? I would have used housing speculation as my example tbh.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
    also, the bricks ARE capital.
    - ewfs 4mo ago
      Wrong. The house is the capital. Bricks are an intermediate good.
      - tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
        Yes, in a house, they form only part of the house. But before that, someone has to own the land and equipment that gets those bricks out of the ground, and the kiln that fires them, etc. And the materials for the kiln have to be sourced and built. The point is, the bricks do not materialize out of thin air. The act of laying the bricks is not the only labor or capital involved in laying bricks.
  - bandofthehawk 4mo ago
    The parent post is not talking about managers, they receive a salary and are taxed at regular income rates. It's taking about shareholders. Someone who makes money by owning a stock should be taxed more aggressively that someone earning a salary, IMO.
    - protocolture 4mo ago
      But a company director is usually both? And often forgoes salary for ownership. The parent post is not saying that some forms of shareholding do not earn, but they are excluding any form of owning a bricklaying firm is definitively not earning. So any arrangement that involves owning a bricklaying firm is within scope. Sole Trader or Partnership for instance.
- pdonis 4mo ago
  > I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from running the business. The money startup founders make, from building something as PG describes, is also capital gains. So again, no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned.
  - bandofthehawk 4mo ago
    > no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned. Yes, we can say this. The IRS classifies capital gains as unearned income.
    - pdonis 4mo ago
      The way the IRS uses technical terms has nothing to do with the ordinary lay person's concept of what is earned and what is not. (The main function of the IRS definition of "unearned income" is to define what kinds of income don't have to have payroll tax withheld.)
  - crote 4mo ago
    That's simply not true. No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase - especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded. In fact, in some countries not paying yourself a fair-market-value salary is illegal!
    - pdonis 4mo ago
      > No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase Maybe not zero, but PG's "ramen profitable" basically means the only "salary" the founders take is enough to cover their living expenses, which are kept minimal. So the vast majority of the money they make (remember we're talking about a billion dollars here) is capital gains, not salary. Of course CEOs of large established companies (not startups) take large salaries--and then usually get stock options and own a considerable amount of company stock, so they get compensated three different ways. Which arguably gets into "unearned" territory--but at that point the company is way past being a startup. > especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded Privately owned companies can still be sold, and the profits from the sale are capital gains. But I agree that in this case that's not the primary way the owners of, say, a mom and pop restaurant get compensation. I should have been more specific that I was talking about startups.
- johnea 4mo ago
  Typical ownership heavy replies, which want to equate other people's effort to their own...
  - neumann 4mo ago
    100% A lot of comments seem to not assume that ownership is equivalent to 'earning'. Why does capital need to pretend their wealth growth is equivalent to the effort of labour.
    - tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
      Effort is irrelevant. If it takes me ten years to grow one apple, should I get paid the same as someone who can produce 1M apples? Productivity is what matters, not effort. People are more productive when they have tractors and seed and fertilizer and all the other requisite capital inputs for growing apples. In fact, one can hardly think of anything productive one can do with zero capital inputs. You do not live on an island. There is trillions of dollars worth of both capital and labor at work underneath your every waking moment that supports your life. Your level of effort means nothing to anybody.
      - neumann 4mo ago
        That's half my point. Because what you said might be true, and yet, the argument by Capital is often that they are working HARDER THAN EVERYONE else to get their wealth and everyone else is lazy. Which is a) both irrelevant as you state, and b) a sign they need the validation that they are putting in effort / more effort to justify what they are extracting from everyone else.
- yowlingcat 4mo ago
  What happens to the person who earns their income laying bricks when an automatic bricklaying machine is built? Is it unethical for them to earn that income because they are operating the machine? What about the person who finds them people who need bricks laid because the person who lays bricks finds it hard to get good clients who aren't a pain? I really wish people weren't so easily seduced by the labor theory of value.
  - bandofthehawk 4mo ago
    I think you are arguing against a strawman. I've never heard someone suggest that the machine operator shouldn't be paid. Same for the other example who would clearly be doing labor.
- hluska 4mo ago
  No, we can’t clearly say that. If we could, they wouldn’t be taxable.
  - bandofthehawk 4mo ago
    Yes, we can clearly say that capital gains is unearned. Unearned income can also be taxable.
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
  All production requires labor AND capital. Your labor alone without materials, without tools, or a farm, or a factory, is just you flailing your arms in the air and producing nothing. Capital is as valuable an input to production as labor. You cannot have one without the other. It's so funny to see people on HN who have clearly overdosed on Marx but have never read Das Kapital, where even the man himself acknowledges the critical role capital plays in production.
smallmancontrov 4mo ago
The responses to PG were remarkably substantive and specific, in the direction you point out and others! The high-horse complaint about "negativity" was easily the laziest and least specific thing in this thread.
- hluska 4mo ago
  I don’t agree. You may agree with them but your agreement is not the same as substantive.
  - smallmancontrov 4mo ago
    The allegations of PG ducking AOC's definition of "earn," the allegations of missing externalities, all the specific controversies -- you have made no post over 20 words, no explanation of why you find any of this criticism substance free. If you have something to say, say it.
cm11 4mo ago
The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. He's said the "make something people want" thing before, his argument for billionaires doesn't seem to go much beyond it. It seems rather clear it's not all you need nor is it all it took for these people to get there. You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. You market it and you distribute it and you do all the things normally associated with business. Your ability to do those things "well" has lots of room to cheat. Hasn't Uber and Lyft skirted a bunch of laws? Aren't there still a ton of drivers who feel cheated? Aren't there a bunch of share bikes and scooters lying around cities and landfills? Isn't it fairly standard to throw tons of investor money at your CAC to buy "love" and sabotage competitors? He mentioned Facebook, isn't its origin story connoted with theft? I can see angles where these don't count as cheating for some. I can see slivers where there's only so many degrees of separation you hold the billionaire responsible for what happens downstream. Even if not done intentionally, the accumulated wealth still resulted from some cheating though, no? And there's the stock market. If he means the stock price when he's talking about things people want, then I might agree. You need to manage the thing people love, and by "the thing people love" I mean your product, and by your "product" I mean your stock price. Most of the billionaires became so because of their equity. We're well down normalizing that your product doesn't need to be profitable (where people love it enough to pay more than it costs to make) for the stock price to soar. It doesn't count as engaging with the argument if he doesn't engage with it. I'm almost surprised he bothered to respond. Edit: Interesting downvote situation going on throughout the comments.
- wdxs 4mo ago
  Yeah this analysis (Not yours - PG's) is pretty poor tbh either he is intentionally glossing over the tactics and strategy necessary for one to acquire such wealth - or - he really lacks the fundamentals that is value (of equity) is a function of free cash flows to equity, growth and risk. And guess what, immense cash flow potential doesn't fall out the sky. It requires doing certain things. Such things can be considered dirty by many people. Anywho, I was really unimpressed with the post.
- pazimzadeh 4mo ago
  also his argument relies on consumers being in a stable situation. desperate people 'want' a lot of things which makes them easier to exploit
hluska 4mo ago
This is quite a lazy argument.
sethev 4mo ago
Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works. I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.
- Retric 4mo ago
  Depends on what you mean by wages. Floyd Mayweather Jr.‘s career earnings are over 1 billion. Celebrities can get extremely high compensation packages especially when you adjust for inflation without an ownership stake in anything. Finance can be similarly well compensated at the very top. Often very high compensation packages happen to include shares, but that’s just the form of compensation not an inherent requirement. Of course all paths to a billion dollars are so unlikely it’s really not a reasonable target unless you have already passed most significant hurdles.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  > I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor. Non-founders CEOs have done this, like Tim Cook. Also, Taylor Swift.
InterviewFrog 4mo ago
You saved $500k to buy a beautiful home. You don't know how to build a home. I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k. Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it. I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. Market forces decide how much you "earn". There are plenty of blue collar workers who work 3 jobs and live paycheck to paycheck. There are SWEs who work 20 hours a week and make the bank.
- beloch 4mo ago
  >I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full. Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.
  - ericd 4mo ago
    It's the execution, not the idea.
  - rayiner 4mo ago
    > You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.” Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client? That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.

johnea 4mo ago

I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. In this sense, it is indeed impossible to "earn" a billion dollars...

YZF 4mo ago
So if I'm a brick layer and I decide to innovate and build a machine that can lay bricks faster and cheaper, and I hire people to help me do that, suddenly I've not actually earned anything? If I'm a farmer and I use a horse and a plow to plow my field instead of with my bare hands then I've not earned anything? Putting your capital towards these things is absolutely "earning" and the modern economy is just a generalization of that which enables capital and need to find each other more readily. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?
- collingreen 4mo ago
  You gave examples of creating and inventing things and employing and leading people. Those are value creation. I don't think I fully agree with it, but OPs point wasn't about any of that and instead said capital gains (and clarified further - fungible, uninvolved capital without any other contribution). That's really different. If you want to attack that maybe use an example of passive index investors or pension funds allocating capital to a vc.
  - YZF 4mo ago
    Clearly my example didn't resonate but in my mind there is no difference between me using my capital in my business and me using my capital in other people's business. A passive index investment is me using my capital in the broader economy. So I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I give it someone to design a brick laying machine. Or I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I invest in the S&P 500. When I have the brick laying design I go to someone with more money and negotiate them funding my brick laying machine company. Those are all capital gains. Where is that imaginary line? pg specifically talked about startup founders. Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we have. We need to educate people better about how it works and we need to regulate it so it's not abused. But capital gains, or interest, are "earned". They are also taxed, and when those taxes are used for the right goals by the government, result in improving things for everyone.
    - smallmancontrov 4mo ago
      > capital gains, or interest, are "earned" According to the IRS, "unearned income" is money received from sources other than employment, such as interest, dividends, rental income, and pensions. We tax it at a vastly lower rate than ordinary income, and we tax it not at all for the purposes of exponential compounding, which is the application in which it is most problematic. What fraction of Elon's capital gains do you think have ever been realized?
      - YZF 4mo ago
        I am almost certain (not sure how we can check) that Elon is paying a lot more taxes than the average person. He doesn't get more services for that money. The top 1% income earners pay something like 50% of the total individual's taxes + their companies pay a lot of taxes. He's basically subsidizing any service you're getting from the government. We tax capital gains less because we want people to invest their money in companies. As I said, we can debate the tax rates, some might argue we should lower the tax on capital gains (double taxation?) some might argue we should raise it. We should absolutely have an evidence based rational discussion on these topics.
protocolture 4mo ago
>Someone who lays bricks, "earns" their income; someone who's wealth increases as a bricklaying company's value increases, does not. How does this follow? Is the management effort in organising a brick laying company not count as work? Does the RND effort of a bricklaying company not count as work? I would have used housing speculation as my example tbh.
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
  also, the bricks ARE capital.
  - ewfs 4mo ago
    Wrong. The house is the capital. Bricks are an intermediate good.
    - tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
      Yes, in a house, they form only part of the house. But before that, someone has to own the land and equipment that gets those bricks out of the ground, and the kiln that fires them, etc. And the materials for the kiln have to be sourced and built. The point is, the bricks do not materialize out of thin air. The act of laying the bricks is not the only labor or capital involved in laying bricks.
- bandofthehawk 4mo ago
  The parent post is not talking about managers, they receive a salary and are taxed at regular income rates. It's taking about shareholders. Someone who makes money by owning a stock should be taxed more aggressively that someone earning a salary, IMO.
  - protocolture 4mo ago
    But a company director is usually both? And often forgoes salary for ownership. The parent post is not saying that some forms of shareholding do not earn, but they are excluding any form of owning a bricklaying firm is definitively not earning. So any arrangement that involves owning a bricklaying firm is within scope. Sole Trader or Partnership for instance.
pdonis 4mo ago
> I think we can clearly say that capital gains are not earned. No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from running the business. The money startup founders make, from building something as PG describes, is also capital gains. So again, no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned.
- bandofthehawk 4mo ago
  > no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned. Yes, we can say this. The IRS classifies capital gains as unearned income.
  - pdonis 4mo ago
    The way the IRS uses technical terms has nothing to do with the ordinary lay person's concept of what is earned and what is not. (The main function of the IRS definition of "unearned income" is to define what kinds of income don't have to have payroll tax withheld.)
- crote 4mo ago
  That's simply not true. No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase - especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded. In fact, in some countries not paying yourself a fair-market-value salary is illegal!
  - pdonis 4mo ago
    > No CEO is going to accept zero salary, just because the value of his stocks will increase Maybe not zero, but PG's "ramen profitable" basically means the only "salary" the founders take is enough to cover their living expenses, which are kept minimal. So the vast majority of the money they make (remember we're talking about a billion dollars here) is capital gains, not salary. Of course CEOs of large established companies (not startups) take large salaries--and then usually get stock options and own a considerable amount of company stock, so they get compensated three different ways. Which arguably gets into "unearned" territory--but at that point the company is way past being a startup. > especially not with small companies which aren't publicly traded Privately owned companies can still be sold, and the profits from the sale are capital gains. But I agree that in this case that's not the primary way the owners of, say, a mom and pop restaurant get compensation. I should have been more specific that I was talking about startups.
johnea 4mo ago
Typical ownership heavy replies, which want to equate other people's effort to their own...
- neumann 4mo ago
  100% A lot of comments seem to not assume that ownership is equivalent to 'earning'. Why does capital need to pretend their wealth growth is equivalent to the effort of labour.
  - tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
    Effort is irrelevant. If it takes me ten years to grow one apple, should I get paid the same as someone who can produce 1M apples? Productivity is what matters, not effort. People are more productive when they have tractors and seed and fertilizer and all the other requisite capital inputs for growing apples. In fact, one can hardly think of anything productive one can do with zero capital inputs. You do not live on an island. There is trillions of dollars worth of both capital and labor at work underneath your every waking moment that supports your life. Your level of effort means nothing to anybody.
    - neumann 4mo ago
      That's half my point. Because what you said might be true, and yet, the argument by Capital is often that they are working HARDER THAN EVERYONE else to get their wealth and everyone else is lazy. Which is a) both irrelevant as you state, and b) a sign they need the validation that they are putting in effort / more effort to justify what they are extracting from everyone else.
yowlingcat 4mo ago
What happens to the person who earns their income laying bricks when an automatic bricklaying machine is built? Is it unethical for them to earn that income because they are operating the machine? What about the person who finds them people who need bricks laid because the person who lays bricks finds it hard to get good clients who aren't a pain? I really wish people weren't so easily seduced by the labor theory of value.
- bandofthehawk 4mo ago
  I think you are arguing against a strawman. I've never heard someone suggest that the machine operator shouldn't be paid. Same for the other example who would clearly be doing labor.
hluska 4mo ago
No, we can’t clearly say that. If we could, they wouldn’t be taxable.
- bandofthehawk 4mo ago
  Yes, we can clearly say that capital gains is unearned. Unearned income can also be taxable.
tjwebbnorfolk 4mo ago
All production requires labor AND capital. Your labor alone without materials, without tools, or a farm, or a factory, is just you flailing your arms in the air and producing nothing. Capital is as valuable an input to production as labor. You cannot have one without the other. It's so funny to see people on HN who have clearly overdosed on Marx but have never read Das Kapital, where even the man himself acknowledges the critical role capital plays in production.

smallmancontrov 4mo ago

The responses to PG were remarkably substantive and specific, in the direction you point out and others! The high-horse complaint about "negativity" was easily the laziest and least specific thing in this thread.

hluska 4mo ago
I don’t agree. You may agree with them but your agreement is not the same as substantive.
- smallmancontrov 4mo ago
  The allegations of PG ducking AOC's definition of "earn," the allegations of missing externalities, all the specific controversies -- you have made no post over 20 words, no explanation of why you find any of this criticism substance free. If you have something to say, say it.

cm11 4mo ago

The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. He's said the "make something people want" thing before, his argument for billionaires doesn't seem to go much beyond it. It seems rather clear it's not all you need nor is it all it took for these people to get there. You don't just make the thing. The founder didn't become a billionaire simply because users loved her product. You market it and you distribute it and you do all the things normally associated with business. Your ability to do those things "well" has lots of room to cheat. Hasn't Uber and Lyft skirted a bunch of laws? Aren't there still a ton of drivers who feel cheated? Aren't there a bunch of share bikes and scooters lying around cities and landfills? Isn't it fairly standard to throw tons of investor money at your CAC to buy "love" and sabotage competitors? He mentioned Facebook, isn't its origin story connoted with theft? I can see angles where these don't count as cheating for some. I can see slivers where there's only so many degrees of separation you hold the billionaire responsible for what happens downstream. Even if not done intentionally, the accumulated wealth still resulted from some cheating though, no? And there's the stock market. If he means the stock price when he's talking about things people want, then I might agree. You need to manage the thing people love, and by "the thing people love" I mean your product, and by your "product" I mean your stock price. Most of the billionaires became so because of their equity. We're well down normalizing that your product doesn't need to be profitable (where people love it enough to pay more than it costs to make) for the stock price to soar. It doesn't count as engaging with the argument if he doesn't engage with it. I'm almost surprised he bothered to respond. Edit: Interesting downvote situation going on throughout the comments.

wdxs 4mo ago
Yeah this analysis (Not yours - PG's) is pretty poor tbh either he is intentionally glossing over the tactics and strategy necessary for one to acquire such wealth - or - he really lacks the fundamentals that is value (of equity) is a function of free cash flows to equity, growth and risk. And guess what, immense cash flow potential doesn't fall out the sky. It requires doing certain things. Such things can be considered dirty by many people. Anywho, I was really unimpressed with the post.
pazimzadeh 4mo ago
also his argument relies on consumers being in a stable situation. desperate people 'want' a lot of things which makes them easier to exploit

hluska 4mo ago

This is quite a lazy argument.

sethev 4mo ago

Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works. I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

Retric 4mo ago
Depends on what you mean by wages. Floyd Mayweather Jr.‘s career earnings are over 1 billion. Celebrities can get extremely high compensation packages especially when you adjust for inflation without an ownership stake in anything. Finance can be similarly well compensated at the very top. Often very high compensation packages happen to include shares, but that’s just the form of compensation not an inherent requirement. Of course all paths to a billion dollars are so unlikely it’s really not a reasonable target unless you have already passed most significant hurdles.
rayiner 4mo ago
> I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor. Non-founders CEOs have done this, like Tim Cook. Also, Taylor Swift.

InterviewFrog 4mo ago

You saved $500k to buy a beautiful home. You don't know how to build a home. I do. I take the $500k from you and then pay $450k to a bunch of employees who put in 40 hours a week. I take home $50k. I earn $50k. Now, you like the home so much you tell all your friends about it. I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. Market forces decide how much you "earn". There are plenty of blue collar workers who work 3 jobs and live paycheck to paycheck. There are SWEs who work 20 hours a week and make the bank.

beloch 4mo ago
>I hire more employees and I take $50k profit per house but I build 20k houses and make $1B. I earn $1B. This is the "rock star" fantasy. You do something that becomes wildly popular and can then walk away while still making epic amounts of cash. You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort. It was all made by your initial idea. It just takes time for the cash to be delivered in full. Do you deserve to profit off a good idea? Yes, and few would contest that. Do you deserve to profit so much that you never have to work another day in your life? Should the system let people retire after having one good idea? That's going to seem like a sub-optimal system to many. However, its important to note that ideas take capital to implement, and it's much more typical for rock star rewards to go to those with the capital than those with the ideas. That's a system that many more will find to be flawed.
- ericd 4mo ago
  It's the execution, not the idea.
- rayiner 4mo ago
  > You didn't earn that $1B through continuous effort Why does it have to be earned through continuous effort? It seems like you’re defending a sweeping assertion (that you can’t “earn” $1 billion), but retreating to a narrower position based on a very specific definition of “earn.” Yes, you can’t become a billionaire performing fungible labor compensated on a periodic (hourly or annual) basis. But I don’t see why that’s the dividing line between “earned” and “unearned.” A lawyer charging hourly will never become a billionaire. But there’s been a couple of lawyers (Joe Jamail, Mark Lanier) who became billionaires by securing enormous verdicts for their clients. Are you saying lawyers “earn” their money only if they charge hourly, but not if they get a share of the money they recover for their client? That seems to be a weird definition of “earned” versus “unearned.” Maybe you can say that money is unearned when it’s inherited. Or that it’s unearned when it’s just accrued interest. Or that it’s unearned if it’s through socially questionable activities like high frequency trading. But most billionaires didn’t get their money in those ways.