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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   363 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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I was talking to a Progressive friend on Friday and the left's favorite topic came up: Billionaires. Or more specifically how it is impossible to be an ethical billionaire. Obviously there are loads of moral axioms loaded into that statement and several different framings that can be used to identify that. I'm curious if you take the idea outside the obvious marxist definitional stance, and look at how the billionaires got their money. Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money? If we grant things like selling merch made in third world sweatshops a la TSwift or not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical. Anyone have some ideas. I said Gabe Newell, owner of Steam and did not get a convincing counter-argument for that, even in a marxist theory frame. I wonder if there are others?

Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money?

Inheritance.

not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor

You misunderstand. The fact that they are billionaires and their employees are not is proof, in these peoples' views, that the employees are not paid fairly. It's a tautology, or close to it.

I think that’s not quite right. The intuition is that if the billionaire couldn’t be a billionaire without (broadly) your labour, then you should be recognised as a small but vital part of the whole operation and you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

It’s the transition from absolute value (the value of your work to the enterprise) to marginal value (the value of your work relative to the next best candidate) that people find confusing and upsetting.

Striking is a power play but it’s also a way of saying, “see? Your company literally can’t function without the work I do, so it’s bullshit that you make billions from it and I make $5 an hour”.

you deserve more than the bare minimum it would take to replace you with the next available economic unit.

Sure, but how much more? To simplify, it's enough more that the billionaire is no longer a billionaire. Alternatively, the argument might be that the billionaire should have been taxed until he's no longer a billionaire (I've seen this put as "every billionaire is a policy failure").

I suspect in practice most people in private would agree to a hierarchy in which, say, in a software company the janitors are important but less important than the eggheads, who are important but less important than the CEO. In the privacy of their own heads, I think a lot of low-level workers envisage a hierarchy where the janitors earn X, the eggheads earn 2X, and the CEO earns 3X.

Didn't Ben and Jerries have to get rid of their 10x rule for CEO after they were unable to find anyone qualified for the role who was also willing to take that salary?

Didn’t know that but wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest.

We're basically talking about the same thing. A company in which the CEO earns 3x more than the janitor means that the CEO isn't a billionaire or the janitor is at least a centimillionaire (simplifying a little bit) which is plainly impossible.

In practice, yes, but I’m saying I think that you’ve got the causation wrong. People think that if they’re working a small but necessary job in a company where the CEO gets 1e9 then they should be getting at least 1e8. They don’t object to the leader of a big company being rich, they object to someone being paid 10000x the menial staff who actually make the place run.

Especially since, let’s be honest, terrible CEOs are common and cost basically as much as the regular kind. My founder is a very business oriented guy who made his money as a director in a world famous startup, and even he vents about some of the CEOs he’s dealt with who couldn’t find their arse with both hands.

I know JK Rowling has taken steps to force Warner's to source ethical products for their Harry Potter theme parks so she at least made an effort, and I'm inclined to think an artist selling books is likely pretty low on the totem pole of evil moneymakers in the first place.

I have a hunch that the "people claiming there are no ethical billionaires" and "people who think Rowling is unethical (being a TERF)" is a venn diagram that's pretty close to a circle.

I remember when she actually used to be the token good one, until she gave it away and became even better.

Then she had to open her mouth.

Cthulhu only swims left. You either die a left-coded feminist hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a right-coded TERF villain.

She is Exhibit A in how no one is safe in a purity spiral.

not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical.

You can pay fair market wages to everyone your company employs and set agreeable terms with all your contractors. That doesn't mean the wages are "fair value" under whatever framework they're using, or that the circle of concern stops there.

I think all of the examples are going to be in software of some kind. Notch made a billion dollars from Minecraft with only minor contributions from others, and I heard of a billion-dollar aqui-hire in AI. There are probably a bunch of $10M+ projects run by a single person, and scaling that up 100x doesn't seem impossible.

The other possibility would be sports or celebrity. If your personal labor is creating a billion dollars of value, then it seems fine to get a billion dollars.

I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset. Superficially Gaben looks like a good answer, but then you find out how many people in the development and publishing space hate him for steam being "freeloaders." Consumer hate is rarer but still comes up with respect to some decisions they make.

So if we reframe the question as "who are the most ethical" billionaires I'm sure you can find some, it's just usually not people the man on the street knows about.

Consider the Duff brothers from Mississippi - they made their money running a tire company.

Or Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic gets a lot of flack but most of that is actually regulatory burden or angry competitors.

Plenty of people make a billion in generally unethical spaces (real estate, investing) while being no more unethical than everyone else in that space, sometimes even more ethical (just very good or lucky).

Upsetting people doesn't make something unethical, though.

I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the most ethical billionaires would have to be those who did the most good* without trampling any particular rights. Given how hard business can incentivize one or another form of such trampling, then, it would be really hard to find a billionaire with clean hands. At some point they'd have signed off on a sketchy deal, or exploited labor laws, or just hired people who did. How much of that responsibility should transfer?

You could probably get a pretty good proxy of political affiliation by asking a series of comparison questions. Ask whether a person is culpable for X, Y, Z, with decreasing levels of personal involvement. Someone who believes in holding a CEO responsible for his bottom-level managers' hiring decisions is much, much more likely to subscribe to various left-wing policy planks. Collectivism is not limited to redistribution.

Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.

*Yes, yes, we also probably disagree on some key points of the "good". Not going there right now.

Right. I bring up Judy because she did a lot of good (made medical records electronic) uses her power and influence the success of people and patients over the success of her company (as she sees these things) and generally does not engage in evil billionaire behavior.

It's so debatable though - lots of people who work for the company hate, lots of the people who work for the company love it, she does lobbying (evil) but it's almost always for the good of the company and the medical record industry (which has some bad parts but is usually good for people).

She's done a wild amount of good for the world but you could easily find people willing to shoot them.

Likewise with the brothers I'm sure you have some underbelly to the tire world and they didn't entirely make their money with right place right time, I Just don't know what it is.

A motivated socialist is going to find both of those and GabeN evil but that's not going to really capture things (or encourage people to not be evil which is a thing society has lost).

I think your comment abuts something which bugs me about the progressive crowd - nobody is ethically if they do something the slightest bit wrong, but if a system results in great evil it can still be good as long as no individual is making an evil move. It's weird.

I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset

This is precisely why the focus is on billionaires. The left-wing claim that "there is no just consumption under capitalism" does too much: it breeds either neuroticism or Hasan Piker-style hypocrisy where you justify buying $10,000 watch as if it's the same thing as needing to buy a house or consuming unethically sourced products from some company with monopoly power.

I take it more as scapegoating than anything.

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