She's saying nobody can truly work a billion times more, a billion times harder, a billion times smarter, so nobody can actually earn a billion dollars.
Given that, how can some people be worth as much? There has to be some capture of wealth somewhere such that even though nobody can actually earn as much, they can be worth as much.
Not really. That's why I said no one can work a billion times smarter.
There is a "hack" to wealth, and PG has explained it here. You need a large addressable market with little competition where you can capture a small amount of value from a huge number of people at scale.
Individually, that value is often not worth much. A surgeon can save your life, and you'd give up most of your fortune for it. A starving person would do almost anything for food. Most startups don't create that kind of value for any one customer. They create a little bit of value for a lot of customers, and at scale that turns into enormous wealth.
That's what people are arguing when they say scale is a form of cheating. Maybe you got into the position to own it through harder work, smarter decisions, more risk taking, more grit, or more luck. But not a billion times more. Once you own it, you've locked yourself into a growth curve that scales with little additional work. In many cases, it gets easier as it grows.
Past a certain point, wealth is no longer tied to your work. It's tied to your ownership.
That's also why CEOs want equity. They don't want to be paid solely for their labor. They want ownership in large scale production so they can benefit from the growth of the system itself and eventually sell that ownership for far more than they could ever earn through wages alone.
This is why, as a software engineer, I favor equity compensation and have benefited from it myself. But I don't think I've worked harder than countless people in jobs that don't have this characteristic.
I wasn't paid more because I worked more. I was paid more because I owned something that scaled.
> If the company makes an unexpectedly large profit, the employer is not obligated to redistribute that to her employees in addition to the already agreed-upon and paid compensation.
What if they were ? That's the whole point of the conversation lol. It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse. Maybe the company should be obligated to redistribute it to her employees, or to the public, etc.
> It's like you're side stepping the entire discourse.
No, they addressed that with:
> The only thing that would be non-consensual would be obligating the employer to redistribute her profit over and above what had already been negotiated.
You make the law whatever you want and those become the terms. Either agree to them or you're not allowed to operate a business here. That's how taxation and other regulation work. You're free to operate a business in another country if you don't like it, just as an employee is free to look for work elsewhere.
The disagreement is whether a founder who owns 20% of a company that grows from $1M to $100B should personally receive $20B of the resulting value while thousands of employees and customers contributed to creating that value.
If I pay a plumber to fix a pipe in my house, and the value of my house is assessed now to be higher, I neither owe the plumber any more than the agreed rate for the pipe fix service nor equity in the house. If I owned 100% (or 20% per your company example) before, then I still own 100%. If the plumber was already a shareholder, then he will reap the additional reward.
Any asset value can grow or shrink thanks to effects from people, such as paid services, but I don't lose equity on property/companies I don't own if I vandalize them, just like I don't gain equity when I raise their value somehow.
Employees of a company are just contracted service providers with longer duration contracts, and of the company is public, they are free to buy some of that risk and gain or lose more when the company does so. 20% of $100B is $20B, so there is no need for a debate, math has our back.
Why do you think ownership should be uncapped and allowed to capture majority of wealth?
PG is absolutely right, if you want to be a billionaire, you need accelerated growth, you need to find something that a large number of people will pay for and you need to make sure you own equity into it as it grows, equity that grows with it.
And that's exactly the source of the debate, this trick to billionaire-level wealth, is that a good thing? Because it wasn't earned through labor, no one can earn a billion dollar through labor, you can only accumulate it through vast equity into market capture of a large market.
Would you want to take a pay cut if your employer was having financial problems? Why not? Because you have an agreement on what your salary should be. It is fair that it works both ways.
Would you prefer to stay and work without pay and not be allowed to change jobs? Millions of people have also had that experience in countries without a free labor market.
On what? You force the company to break up and liquidate so they can pay taxes?
You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.
On the business income, on the sale of shares, on their wealth, on loans, on estate and inheritance, etc.
Breaking up the company is another avenue, it could increase competitiveness and make the markets freer, open up more options for employees to shop around for employer, etc.
Raising minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, paid family leave, mandatory paid vacation and sick leave, non-compete restrictions, profit-sharing requirements, and other regulation that favors the employee is yet another avenue...
Are you proposing changing inheritance laws or are you proposing forcing companies to sell their stock in a firesale to be in accordance with the IRS? Be clear in your propositions please.
I agree these are partisan and bad developments. It is also unrelated to the question at hand about how to prevent people from gaining over 100m which people have been able to do under the heretofore non-partisan irs
Google likely won't rent compute from SpaceX, they have a substantial share of SpaceX (they own 5% of it) and need the IPO to be valued highly, so to prop up the IPO stock, they made this announcement, but if you read the fine print, both SpaceX and Google are allowed to cancel it at any time, as-in, after they cash out from the IPO.
I think there's likely many things even today, hidden papers, that discovered things, that no one has really decided to give it a shot and try, or figured out what can be done with it.
The thing is, what if there's an even better horse out there? Once you get on the cloning bandwagon, don't you also lock yourself out of looking/evolving an even better horse?
Wasn't there a study whose result was that people are not actually running faster but the better results are mostly attributed to changing/improving grounds and better shoes?
Edit: Can't find the study anymore. This one [1] at least partially attributes to material.
Training has also evolved drastically over time at the highest end of athletics. Periodization, nutrition, recovery and the size of the talent pool being scouted are all occurring alongside the advances in materials and equipment. It would be difficult to separate them effectively.
Yes, but developing a better horse has a low likelihood of success and a relatively long time horizon. There are some arms race dynamics here in that as long as no one else is trying to develop a better horse, you probably are better off just not trying to either.
Doesn't matter, such things threaten the horse investor lock in economics.
Many years past, an early bit of software from my student days was a side project making an easy to use database system for a horse stud farm, high status stallions being put to mares with the feed, vet visits, results, etc. all logged.
Horse racing is pretty much all about pedigree - without the lineage horses are considered valueless by the industry - super fast back country waler crosses might be acceptable for a four mile charge across open ground onto machine gun nests .. but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate that horse for racing.
I imagine Polo to be much the same, in the rich set. Probably more open and accepting out on the steppes knocking about the heads of the vanquished.
It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?
I know a peer of the realm who made pretty much his entire fortune on forged horses - he was breeding to make fast horses, but the pedigree was a load of, well, horseshit. All started because he’d bought a stallion who shot blanks.
Now it’s all about eight generations deep so he’s safe at this point, as they’re their own pedigree now.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on cows. There's a whole black market genomics industry going on in the uk right now, and probably elsewhere, too.
At some point moving up the luxury scale the price is less about product and more about buyer psychology.
I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata.
Yep. Some of my pants have rips and visibly bad stitching because I ripped them and am bad at stitching. Then I see people at the same parties buying brand new ripped pants. At least I fit in, I guess.
> I can sell a ripped t-shirt, but that same product coming from an upscale exclusive boutique owned by so-and-so’s wife is participation in a whole ecosystem with lots of signalling to other buyers in the same financial strata
This is only true for the lower financial strata though. It’s only the poorer people for whom shopping in so-and-so’s wife’s boutique is a meaningful experience.
> but w/out that pedigree <shrug> no Lord or up and coming billionaire is going to syndicate
sounds like an opportunity. as horse racing has a monetary reward associated with success one imagines a moneyball sort of play that you can compound by betting on your horse which the oddsmakers are going to handicap because it "doesn't have the pedigree" (at least the first few go arounds)
There is a wee bit of money to be made winning a race, sure.
Here's a question though (can vary by country and racing industry), how do the winnings from racing (as a distribution) compare to the earnings from pedigree breeding, stud fees, sperm straw sales, etc.?
I agree there's room for disruption, just as there is from (say) the iron grip of the US Home Owners Associations and other cartels, but expect a lot of regulatory push back from the insiders.
The, ah, American Quarter Horse Association won't let any old nag run if they can help it.
You'd expect so and it's bound to have been done, it's still one of those domains where the establishment (owners, trainers, breeders, jockeys, track associations, etc) is weighted against outsiders.
Money would count, but I dare say it'd need a bit of crafty social engineering running in parallel to crack in.
Caveat: I'm not a horse racing / polo insider - I did some contract work years back and rubbed shoulders with a bunch of millionaire horsey types.
There’s commodities and then R&D. Ignoring every other moral consideration, this horse cloning has turned a biological asset into a (relative)commodity, and if people were looking for better horses they’d stick to the randomized mutation of regular breeding which has that built in as a feature.
This isn’t even the only instance of this technique. You can look at the Argentinian president Milei who hired a company to provide him with consistent advisors in the form of cloned dogs he talks with through a mystic[1]
That is a slam campaign by Milei's political opposition; the company the article mentions (perPETuate) only collects DNA for when cloning becomes feasible. That Time magazine and NY Times repeated the silliness is more a reflection upon modern editorial standards than anything else.
The Wikipedia page has linked references. You’ll have to provide more evidence for me than your statement for me to disbelieve them after I read through to confirm that the Wikipedia article wasn’t misinterpreting or misquoting.
So in industrial agriculture, monocultures are a real problem. Every banana is essentially a genetically identical Cavendish. It used to be the Gros Michel until a fungus basically killed it. The same fate awaits the Cavendish. This is true of lots of produce. We, as consumers, like identical produce. But this makes the entire species vulnerable to an enterprising fungus (or virus or bacteria) and it's arguably only a matter of time.
Could this happen if every polo horse basically ends up genetically identical? Probably not in the same way but new diseases do appear. Parvo is only 50 years old.
Looks very much like the only chance of that ever happening now is if someone established a separate league that only allows naturally conceived horses.
They've already moved on to genetic engineering according to the article; no need to fuss with evolving a better horse when you can directly specify one.
At some point breeding programs will mostly be useful for identifying new mutations to splice into the main branch.
Funny that despite Neuromancer's prophesying the ubiquity of gene-splicing in future culture, William Gisbon specifically discounted it in this instance. As per the Finn: "Arabs still trying to code 'em up from the DNA, but they always croak".
The way to determine how you know if you have picked the best horse to clone would be the secretary problem[1] for optimal stopping. This is somewhat plausible among polo horses because of the artificially small population size of pedigreed and trained horses.
The simple version of the problem is you ride about 1/e of the total population and then the first one that is better than all previous ones is your best option. For a pro polo player who would also breed and train others in the off season, over a multi-decade career, it's not perfect, but in aggregate, they are positioned to be pretty good.
Will there be black swan horses? Absolutely. They aren't even black swans, they're inevitable, but if your goal in the sport is to compound your average performance over time without significant setbacks (loss of a prize horse), then cloning a top player's best horse is a good bet.
I find the ethical discussions around horse cloning and sports lack a lot of domain competence in both what riding is, and the stewardship and biology it entails. From a sensory and ontological perspective, a horse is basically an alien being with a peanut sized brain that it falls to our species to be responsible for its existence. Cloning a few to adapt them for survival in our world is profoundly more humane than selling the surplus from breeding programs for meat or leaving them for predators and disease. Even though the philosophers comments about objectification were paraphrased for publication, their perspective is dumb.
> the whole point of these ETFs is to make sure I don’t get a say in the matter, since I’m a terrible stock picker
When you IPO, the company basically can set its own price. Then investors can buy it or not at that price. If you set the price so high it makes your company one of the biggest, it means automatically index funds will buy you at the price you set for yourself, no questions asked.
To prevent abuse from this, index funds that track "biggest stocks" have a waiting period, it was often 1 year. That way, by the time the index buys the stock, the price should be reflective of what the market think it's worth, not what the company decided it was worth when they IPOed.
These ETFs have always done this, because you want to hold the biggest company the market chooses as biggest, and not that the company decided.
I don't think a democracy is necessarily a recipe for utmost economic success, it's more about having the ability to replace the leadership if they are failing the people. Without that, it's only a matter of time until you're stuck with a leader who's terrible, even if you currently have a good one.
I think many democracies have been struggling though, to find a good leader, lots of democracies been replacing their leaders over and over in recent times. That's definitely something to worry about, why aren't good leaders applying to be on the ballot or being voted in?
The thing about owning is that it messes up the incentives. If the government owns something, it will be tempting to intervene if it loses value. And when he government needs money, they often sell at stupid prices. I think taxing makes more sense.
What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.
Given that, how can some people be worth as much? There has to be some capture of wealth somewhere such that even though nobody can actually earn as much, they can be worth as much.
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