The only point that this guy has is that working for a big corporation is a safer average payout than starting your own firm. Paraphrasing the logic: the 10,00

The only point that this guy has is that working for a big corporation is a safer average payout than starting your own firm. Paraphrasing the logic: the 10,000th engineer at Google adds more value, which is why he is paid more than the average startup person. It's a meaningless statement. Google has a magical core business, which the 10,000th employee had nothing to do with. the core business throws off a lot of profit, which allows them to pay for all kinds of stuff. There's just no way to say whether the marginal Google engineer creates more value than the average startup, and using salaries as the sole benchmark drives us to lazy conclusions. Most likely, the google engineer is working on something that will go nowhere - perhaps it is Google Wave! - but the company can afford to overpay him for his trial-and-error, because search has a >25% operating margin. If anything, the average startup, even the failures, contribute more value in the sense of social outcomes because we have a massive decision tree of trial-and-error of all the possible permutations of business. Some of them work, some of them don't. (...important that we try...) > Corporate can be fun. I am chuckling that this is a Bloomberg guy who is way into the culture. Depending on who you talk to - others describe it as the most political, micro-managing environment they've ever experienced. I don't think it's a particularly innovative company at this point, but like Google, they have a magical core business, basically a monopoly on a segment of financial terminals, which allows them to do all kinds of ridiculous stuff. Does the 10,000th employee of Bloomberg add more value than the average startup? No, chances are he's trying to figure out how to copy a competitor - with a 5% chance he's doing something legitimately new - but the company makes so much money on other stuff, they can afford his efforts. The reality of major corporations is that the strength of their legacy businesses allow them to throw off a lot of cash and their employees don't need to do that much to improve the situation - they just jockey to make sure they are the one who gets to sit in a big chair. M&A is a huge factor in the long term positioning of major corporations for this reason - swallow the competition. Procter & Gamble uses MBAs to figure out how to shrink a toilet paper roll while raising the price by $0.05. Is that innovation, or "value", that's objectively better than even a failing startup? Probably not, but they can afford to pay.