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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?
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 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.
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 buddiestop guys get a huge payout and the rest of the company gets a middle finger.More options
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