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Notes -
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?
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).
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.
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