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Why do you think no one is contradicting him? The exponential growth model that pg presents is an obvious lie - you could use his exact explanation to claim th

• saidnooneever 4mo ago
  it is simple fact economy is based on maths that require a percentage growth or death from everyone. denying that is denying maths. There will not be next quadrillionaire soon because there are economic crashes that kick economy down each time so it has space to climb again. That is how its been historically and how it will continue unless the math underpinning it will change.
• chistev 4mo ago
  I agree with you, but what would be the argument against Athletes and someone like J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter author)?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • svnt 4mo ago
    Founders are often synonymous with their businesses. In the case of celebrities the relevant exploitation is carried out by others in the value chain, they are just the lure/source.
  • Symbiote 4mo ago
    The chart on the site below shows JK Rowling's net worth growth was pretty much linear. $100M per two years until about 2006, then $100M a year after that. She also pays full UK tax on her earnings, the 36th most of any individual. https://moneynation.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/ https://moneynation.com/jk-rowling-net-worth/
    • chistev 4mo ago
      But that's not a response to my question.
      • Timwi 4mo ago
        It is in the context of this thread, because the article is about exponential growth.
  • tsimionescu 4mo ago
    There's no such thing as a billionaire athlete. There are a handful of athletes who went on to become billionaires through their business dealings, like Michael Jordan, or Ion Țiriac or LeBron James. The arguments are exactly the same for them as for any other billionaire - that their businesses are either not really worth as much as the numbers suggest, or that their business engaged in various problematic practices. For authors, the arguments are again quite simple - billionaire authors or directors don't become billionaires by selling books or movies, they become billionaires from much larger businesses that employ way more people who were collectively much more critical to the success of said businesses than the authors themselves. JK Rowling didn't become a billionaire until the movie franchise and the toy mega production began. If the movies hadn't happened, or the toys hadn't happened, she would have just been an extremely rich multimillionaire.
• shenberg 4mo ago
  Some example >1B companies off the top of my head: DataDog, Sentry, Snowflake, Okta, MongoDB
  • bigiain 4mo ago
    Isn't Dropbox the canonical HN example of a "stupid and obvious idea" that anybody could build for themselves and would never pay for? Now with a 6bil market cap is seems. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 (Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...)
    • sam_lowry_ 4mo ago
      > DataDog, It's just grepping logs on steroids > Sentry Hooks on error handlers in JavaScript > Snowflake Anyone can just use parquet or DuckDB >Okta No digital sovereignty for those who can't manage users' passwords > MongoDB JSONB fields in Postgres, anyone? /s
    • latexr 4mo ago
      > (Apologies to BrandonM for reminding everybody...) BrandonM doesn’t mind: > I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070138 But dang does: > my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281 It’s thoughtful context that I think everyone mentioning BrandonM and Dropbox should be familiar with.
      • deleted 4mo ago
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  • nickpp 4mo ago
    Even his examples (Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber) are "hated and accused" mostly by pundits and activists. Their users and investors are overall rather happy with their services (all have healthy competition) and their employees can quit and work for somebody else at any moment.
• jokethrowaway 4mo ago
  You didn't prove him wrong. You and Paul are both claiming it's extremely hard. A restaurant won't scale - most ideas won't scale - because they're not useful enough. These companies are not criminal enterprise and they don't steal money or threaten them with violence: they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it. Don't get me wrong: I hate them and I ban social media for my kids, but it doesn't make them evil. The bad actors are thugs with guns stealing your purse and the government stealing your tax money or threatening you with jail. To give another, less controversial example, I don't think companies selling products with sugar and seed oils are bad, even though they likely have the highest combined reduction of life expectancy across all people - but I hate them too.
  • abenga 4mo ago
    > they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it. Also an argument for El Chapo and friends (if we didn't criminalize their products and add the violence around the trade, see Alcohol and Tobacco). > - but I hate them too. Why do you hate them if you don't think they are bad? You seem to be saying, "it's not illegal; I will hate it, but it is not bad". What is "illegal" is an arbitrary classification that different countries choose. That's the point of what the unnamed politician (it's AoC I think?) is saying: those things should be illegal.
  • ben_w 4mo ago
    > A restaurant won't scale - most ideas won't scale - because they're not useful enough Counterexample, a restaurant worth $202 billion: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/mcd/market-cap/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/mcd/market-cap/ One of the arguments against billionaires really deserving that much money is that while they own the shares, the scaling up is done by a labour force that doesn't capture this growth, "only" (so goes the argument, I do know about share options) "their wages". How many burger flippers get compensation in the form of shares in the parent company? I genuinely don't know, but I do expect it to mostly be in the form of pension funds rather than stuff they can see in their working lives. Pension funds are a lot of money, they need to be so those with them can retire, same logic as FIRE because being a pensioner is the first three initials of FIRE. This is probably for the best, owing to something not explicitly mentioned in the article: startups are risky. This is as much a lottery question as it is an effort question, because "cool idea" absolutely does not mean "make it and they will come", no matter how hard working the founders (and first hires) are.
• deleted 4mo ago
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• gpt5 4mo ago
  Both you and PG are missing the mark here. PG made the error thinking that this is just people misunderstanding math and exponential growth, which created a convoluted math section that could have simply been explained as - if you start with a million dollar and double every month, you'll be a Billionaire in less than a year. He also didn't really touch well on why many people hate large companies / billionaires. You are making the mistake of using a moralization framework that equivocate being accused of something to being bad for society + not looking at the alternative (i.e. even if it's true that every Billion dollar company is "bad/exploitative/etc.", that doesn't mean that the (realistic) alternative is better for society or people. The reality is that companies like Google, Amazon, NVidia, etc. have create an immense amount of wealth for their founders and investors, but also created an immense amount of value in society. There is a real problem of incentives when you prioritize growth endlessly, as it leads to perverse incentives such as that ones these companies are accused of - leading you to progressively take more and more less positive actions in order to achieve this growth. So I don't disagree with the general premise that growth leads to moral problems, but I do disagree with saying that building big companies is bad for society.
  • bigiain 4mo ago
    It's not even like unbounded exponential growth is a new or "startup" thing either. PGs story is just the grains of rice on the chessboard legend. (or depending on the culture telling the story, perhaps wheat on a chessboard, according to google) Like poet/warrior/advisor that convinces the King to give them one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of on the third square, eight on the fourth - and so on, doubling the number of grains each square until the 64th square. The King can no more deliver 2^64 grains of rice that PG's founder keep her 93% growth rate consistent for 64 months (or even the calculated 9.5 months to make her a billionaire). Yes, it's true that a very few tech startup founders create billion dollar wealth by "making what the people want" - but anybody trying to tell you the naive compound interest math makes it inevitable, is trying to sell you something (like perhaps their companies startup accelerator program or venture capital investment opportunities).
    • 4mo ago
• Nevermark 4mo ago
  You> you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires, PG> I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative growth rate. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all. You> it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in PG> how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market. You> Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues Not addressing an issue, that doesn't undermine the points he does make, is not hand waving. Hallmarks of clear instead of reactionary thinking: you don't lash out at people for things they said, that you agree with, or things they didn't say, that you would have disagreed with. Make your own (good) points. No need for framing around disagreement or other misleading tie ins. I feel just as disgusted and frustrated by some rich people. But lots of people quietly become billionaires now, from normal companies that produce sensible services or goods people want. Substitute "rich" for "billionaire" to account for inflation, and increased globalization, and this has been true for a long time.
  • ejpir 4mo ago
    millionaire is not a billionaire :)
    • deleted 4mo ago
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    • Nevermark 4mo ago
      Wait, your chart is confusing me! Is that vertical unit dollars or thousands? :)
  • tsimionescu 4mo ago
    He does put caveats around his initial, condescendingly worded points. The problem is that those caveats are either too small, or they completely contradict his initial point. Again, if all it takes to become a billionaire is 15% growth rate for 5 years, which is easy, then if you start with two billion dollars and grow at 15% per month, you'll be a trillionaire in 5 years. And 5 years after that, a quadrillionaire. If the billionaires are literally generating billions of new value, what explains why trillions can't be generated in the same way? If the market is limited, then it means that you can't grow your way to a billion dollars, you have to displace others - either competitors in the same market, or other markets as well. So now there's a much clearer chance that you're using underhanded means to actually get your billions - you're not growing a new pristine market that people just love, you might just be edging out competitors or snuffing out other markets that had existed before - and perhaps were limited by things like regulations or externalities that you simply choose to ignore. And the question of externalities and unfair competition and corruption is not tangential, it is the whole point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or others in this anti-billionaire movement are making. Not talking about it is simply ignoring their argument. The problem isn't "oh, I didn't realize that simply growing at 15% every month for 5 years will make a million dollar business into a billion dollar business". It's "the actions that you need to take in order to continue growing at 15% every month for 5 years are going to include things like un priced externalities, corruption, cartel behaviors, etc". Addressing how you can sustain this growth, and how the markets can have so much money in them, are exactly the most important things - not the trivial math of exponential growth that he discusses, condescendingly, at length.