Startups would not have existed if not for free and open source software. You know, Stallman and the like, which people like Graham pretend don’t exist or don’t matter. But than again, a person that retweets trump is not someone I’m particularly interested in hearing what they have to say in general.
While I really like the open debate directly between influential people without journalists gatekeeping, I don't think Twitter is a good medium for this.
There's only so much nuance you can convey in a few short sentences.
Really wish politicians wrote essays to persuade their case instead of just tweets or news interviews.
Ridiculous. PG says that startups cause billionaires as though this is a law of the universe. Why should it be? It would surely be possible to structure society in such a way that startup founders of unicorns don't obtain more wealth than they can possibly spend in a lifetime.
Further, not all startups become decacorns or megacorps. Small business exists, even though PG and the broader VC community would rather focus on the startups that make it huge. A sustainable business that employs 30 people, even under existing social structures, won't make the owner stunningly wealthy. And yet these businesses provide jobs just as well as the next uber or airbnb.
Doesn't seem as a good working schema, in my opinion. Surely its possible to know how to spend quite large amounts, like quadrillions of dollars, in a lifetime.
Maybe we should not enable what happens after you get more than, say, $50 million. After you've bought a few really nice houses and given your kids the best education money can buy, all you're really doing with that money is imposing your will on others without that kind of money, and often without their say. Lobbying politicians, setting up foundations, etc., is usually a rich person telling others what they should do, rather than enabling individuals to do what they think is best. Maybe this is ok if rich people were really just always super intelligent, but I think it's clear that that's not necessarily true (luck (and sometimes even a bit of ruthlessness and lack of compassion) is big in getting rich). And people who are experts in one field can be clueless in other fields without realizing it. Just give the excess money to individuals, on the basis of need, and we'll probably see it used more efficiently.
Startups aren’t made by billionaires, the workers at those startup aren’t billionaires, the people who make the most money out of a startup are the billionaires who invest in the first place.
The people who design an iPhone are seldom millionaires, ditto for the people who write the software, the people who actually build them, and the people who buy them.
Startups may make billionaires, but that doesn’t mean those startups haven’t benefited primarily from no -billionaires.
More over the bulk of the money those billionaires have are either cash (so not contributing anything to anyone), or investment funds (eg not adding capital to new businesses, and not injecting money into the economy).
So the bulk of assets held by billionaires are only benefiting those billionaires, and then they aren’t actually doing anything with it except hoarding.
Billionaires don’t add value to the economy. Because one billionaire is never going to be spending more than 20 thousand times more than an average American. So they aren’t contributing proportional to the amount they benefit from the economy.
