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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2586 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?

Steam is only successful because of the availability of servers on which to run it and the proliferation of personal computers allowing everyday people to play video games on them, which they pay Steam for the license of. I'm sure somewhere in the chain of events leading to the production of servers and consumer PCs, one can find some sort of unethical or exploitative behavior by some supplier or vendor somewhere, and so Gabe Newell is clearly an unethical billionaire.

More to the point, you can play this 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconunethical-production with anything, and so the entire concept is just a fully general argument that's meant to be pulled out of the quiver and deployed as needed when convenient.

There is a much easier one that another friend pointed out: CS-GO skins are essentially child gambling. Loot crates are absolutely designed to be addictive gambling.

You could point to any country that has run into hyperinflation so that all of its citizens become billionaires+. Talk to them about Zimbabweans in 2008: they were all billionaires! You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around as a kind of "ethical immunity totem" as you discuss the issue.

They love saying that slogan because they have trained themselves online into rhetorically browbeating anyone who even slightly disagrees. Purity testing is a part of progressive (communist) culture.

It is a last-gasp of marxist zero-sum class warfare. If they they let go of Marxism, they really might have little else to add to the conversation.

You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around

This is actually amusing. not as a "immunity totem" but as a effigy. Give it to another friend so we can "publically" condemn them. Real abducto ad absurdium.

I feel like this comes down to whether you consider ethics a legal code of bare minimums, or ethical behavior is a maximal standard we all strive for and ultimately fail. I think it's reasonable to say no billionaire was also a saint.

It depends on what one considers to be ethical or unethical. Which is a substantial problem - I'm not sure even your "obvious" examples are really that unethical.

Third world "sweatshops" are a bit of a mixed bag. Sure, they're a harder day's work than being a Starbucks barista. But is anyone actually forced to work on one? As far as I know, that's never been a thing. That means they can't get workers unless they're a better deal than their local competition, usually subsistence farming, as far as time and difficulty of work versus payment. In addition to that, they bring foreign currency and industrial infrastructure into the nation, get some local laborers and probably managers used to how to operate an industrial business. That's a big part of how you actually lift a third-world country into the first world. And the companies are getting cheaper labor, yeah, but they're not going to bother bringing industry into that country without getting something for it. Yeah, it's sad not everyone in the world is a first-world latte-sipping poet or something, but you don't get there from subsistence farming by wishes and magic, you get there by gradual economic progress, some of which might look like "sweatshops".

Even if we granted that they were "unethical" somehow, would that make Taylor Swift "unethical" automatically? As far as I know, her money comes mostly from ticket sales, album sales, other royalties, and such things. Making merch is probably a tiny part of her budget however it's done. If that's enough to make her "unethical", is anyone with any actual power "ethical"?

Not paying employees what some uninvolved party thinks is the fair value of their labor seems a bit iffy too. Usually neglected is the stability value they get too. Owners risk losing some or all of their money if the business does poorly, but the workers either continue to get paid, or get fired at worst. They don't stand to lose much. That's worth something too.

Focusing exclusively on billionaires seems a bit iffy to me too. It seems to me, what we're really concerned with here is power. Yes, billionaires have a moderate amount of power, but they're not the only ones. Why shouldn't we focus on Government too, both elected and un-elected officials too? They're the ones with the power to tax us, fine us, imprison us, start wars, etc. Why isn't any government official who doesn't magically make the world operate like some activist wants also "unethical"? Billionaires can only create great products and services we all like to make money, and they lose it again if their businesses fail. Governments can impose terrible economic systems like marxism on a nation, causing millions to starve to death.

Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money?

Inheritance.

Yeap, pretty much, I was thinking about this recently and at my current rate of accumulation and throwing money into the stock market, assuming things about passive investing holds true AND my child and grandchild also accumulates the same way I do then maybe my great grandchild will be a billionaire (plus and minus a generation). We would all have gotten our wealth ethically, though I suppose because the immoral capitalist ways of seeking profit (whatever they maybe) has been laundered through broad passive investment in the market. Oh right, that would be a billion not counting inflation so the value is totally different.

No he won't, the fortune will be divided along the way.

I started from 0, and no matter how many kids I have, they definitely won't have to start from 0. But yeah, lots of massive assumptions about how my progeny spend their 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").

The people who coined the expression "every billionaire is a policy failure" were claiming that a business which generates enough profit (above a normal return on the actual tangible capital put into it by investors) to make the founder a billionaire is presumptively exploiting market power in an anticompetitive way. For example, in this model Zuckerberg is a billionaire because he has gained enough market power that he can force you to look at adverts in order to communicate with your own friends.

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.

which is plainly impossible

I don't think it's that clear cut. If Amazon would have been set up e.g. like the Mondragon Corporation (a worker coop), a janitor with the company from the very start would have been a worker-owner from the beginning, accumulating dividends in his individual capital account within Amazon. His salary would have been lower than Bezo's by orders of magnitude, but the share of the company both of them held and the size of their dividend accounts would have been the same.

Now, Mondragon isn't nearly as large or successful as Amazon - but they are relatively large and successful.

This is a perfect example. Amazon's market cap is 2.7T. It employs 1.6M people (the true number is even larger due to employee turnover, contractors, etc). That would make Bezos' and the janitor's share worth $1.6M. Even Amazon can't make the janitor a centimillionaire.

This is the wrong set of numbers. Amazon's net book value is about $400 billion. The extra $2.3 trillion is the market's estimate of the PV of future profits - it is value that can only be realised by selling parts of the company to outside investors, and would be invisible if Amazon was a co-op. Total profit to date is a better metric of what could plausibly have been exploited out of workers, and is somewhat less than $2 trillion. And most of that comes from AWS, so it doesn't come from exploiting the warehouse workers.

If Amazon had been a Mondragon-style co-op, the money available for distribution to workers (including Bezos) would not have included that $2.3 trillion - it would be latent value that would ultimately accrue to future workers when the promised profits were realised. If corporate Amazon has never paid a dividend (it hasn't) or bought back more shares than it issued to fund acquisitions and employee share options (they haven't - shares out increases over time), then it hasn't put cash directly into Bezos' pocket (Bezos' billionaire lifestyle is funded by selling rights to the $2.3 trillion of future profits) and the hypothetical Mondazon could not have distributed more money to workers than it in fact did while still investing in growth like Amazon did.

One of the problems maintaining co-ops which don't have an explicit social mission (such as professional partnerships) or which have de facto lost their social mission and become ordinary commercial businesses (like the UK's building societies) is that turning a co-op into a stockmarket-listed company, or selling it to an existing listed company, allows the current generation of members to monetize that value.

In the Mondragon system, the share itself actually has no value, since it is not tradeable by design.

The thing that has value is the capital account, and those typically only vary by how long a worker has been with the company - and it only gets filled with actual profits. So Bezos and janitor #1 have pretty large capital accounts, but the rest of the 1.6M employees have less, since they haven't been with the coop for as long.

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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 would broadly agree that they would view it as a circle, but it actually makes for an interesting follow on. Are billionaires unethical because of how they got their money or because what they do with it? If it's the former, JK Rowling would probably be a good example of an ethical one. If it's the latter than being a billionaire isn't really the core component because there are plenty of people who behave poorly that aren't billionaires. (in this case by being a TERF) The billionaire part is irrelevant.

Presumably, a billionaire only has to fail one, not both, of those to be "unethical." Either they became a billionaire via unethical means, or, having become one, they then proceed to behave unethically.

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.

The athlete's wealth is still built on the foundation of a fundamentally exploitative industry that devours black and brown bodies in the name of profit. Both the leagues themselves, and the sportswear companies making their sponsored products.

As the saying goes, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. We're all complicit, and we must all seek absolution at the feet of the party.

I agree that I think we are pretty much restricted to software which is interesting considering how much hate I've been hearing about SWEs on the left. It's probably impossible to be considered an ethical billionaire under the framework if you manufacture something or have a company that employs lots of people because the rejoinder is "if you got rich why didn't your employees". Software bypasses that. Sports or celebrity is interesting because there's a part on how they got rich, if it was from merch sales then you pretty much got rich by exploiting third world sweat shops. Not very "ethical" I think they said TSwift was unethical but didn't enquire about the reasoning because I am not a swiftie.

Software bypasses that.

A little bit, but not much. Sergey Brin's net worth is 300B. The average FAANG engineer is probably somewhere on the order of millions, maybe ten or twenty if they really got in early and grinded. There's a vocal portion of FAANG SWEs who are not satisfied with a measly few million NW when the boss is at 300B.

Then you've got situations like the Windsurf acquihire where the boss and his college buddies top guys get a huge payout and the rest of the company gets a middle finger.

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).

Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic

Epic low balls SWEs, back in the golden years of the SWE field, when entry levels were commanding 6-figs, EPIC would try to pressure hire you on a 60k starting. Many ex-EPIC folks are like ex-amazon folks. People did not stay there long. Idk if they stack ranked but it wouldn't surprise me.

Pretty much any large company with employees is going to run into the framing of: "If you got rich owning the company did your employees who were doing the major work get rich too? Did you fire anyone who was there too long so they didn't get equity? Did you give any equity?"

Not here to litigate the company from what I understand it has some bad parts as an employee and also some incredibly good parts.

Doesn't change that she actually attempts to accomplish ethics in business, took on the minimum of outside investment, doesn't overcharge customers and all kinds of other good things.

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.

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

Probably going to be hard, because I think I really oppose their idea on this, but its interesting from a devil's advocate perspective, if its just impossible to be an ethical billionaire, in that they have created an unprovable tautology, or if even within this framework, one could find an "ethical" billionaire, and essentially prove their statement wrong.

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.

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.

The latter is the whole point. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a way of saying "Don't sweat the ethical implications of your day job in HR at Evilcorp, latte habit, and collection of Apple products - the thing that matters is the work you do to overthrow the system."

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