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There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Denn
by panny 4mo ago
There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs. Ritchie created C. Ritchie created Unix. They both died in the same month, but Jobs was the billionaire and everyone wrote a story about his passing. Ritchie was not a billionaire, he simply did the work that changed the course of human history. It's not an isolated event either. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, but none became billionaires.
The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. It's just that if you do it, you rarely get the billion dollars.
- coldtea 4mo ago>The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. What's "clearly possible" is to create a product. Or to create C. It's not at all clear than anything of the sort "deserves" a billion dollars. Except if we reduce it to the trivial "as a product it can be potentially worth billions of dollars in the market". But "is worth" doesn't equal "deserve". One is an economic claim (which nobody disagrees with). The other is a ethical/moral claim, which many disagree about.
- ForHackernews 4mo agoNorman Borlaug saved ~1 billion lives and did not become a billionaire. https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/05/07/dr-norman-borlaug-he-saved-billion-lives-14773 https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/05/07/dr-norman-borlaug-he-sa...
- coldtea 4mo agoBut some guys destroying health globally with sugar water did.
- pstuart 4mo agoA longtime friend of mine celebrated his 60th birthday, and the party was at a large venue that was packed with family, friends, neighbors, and (ex-)colleagues who all showed up to show their love and care for him -- he is undoubtedly the richest man I know.
- triceratops 4mo ago> William Shockley invented the transistor, but [didn't become a billionaire] In fairness that wasn't for lack of trying. Shockley founded a semi-conductor company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laborat...) and ran it so poorly that eight key people left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight), founded their own company (Fairchild Semiconductor) and became enormously wealthy. Two of the eight then went on to found Intel and became even wealthier.
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoYeah. The problem is that knowing how to invent something like the transistor, and knowing how to run a company, are two very different skill sets and backgrounds.