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| ▲ | savanaly 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale. | | |
| ▲ | yoyohello13 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the MOST money. | |
| ▲ | cootsnuck 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations. | |
| ▲ | ambicapter 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this sentence, no? | |
| ▲ | tsimionescu 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible. | |
| ▲ | troosevelt 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian. | | |
| ▲ | trinsic2 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian. I'm calling this out. That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world this way. Some of us believe that some things are objective and deontological. IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created the corrupt conditions we are living in |
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| ▲ | PunchyHamster 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire. It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you. | |
| ▲ | keybored 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it. > I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale. Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important. The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558 | |
| ▲ | mystraline 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work. It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires. Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism. Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly. | | |
| ▲ | sillyfluke 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | >It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this.
I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA. But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads). Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies. |
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| ▲ | troosevelt 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality? I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire. I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense? If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels? | | |
| ▲ | mikkupikku 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > slave morality I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse." That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich." | | |
| ▲ | trinsic2 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah but I don't think this is being said here. Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses. | | |
| ▲ | mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I am not sure about that. Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > on an island where underage girls party on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape them. | | |
| ▲ | trinsic2 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thank you for making that clarification. It seems like the parent was trying to normalize the "underage" and "party" part. |
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| ▲ | Sohcahtoa82 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > an island where underage girls party. What an absolutely gross mischaracterization of what happens there. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them. | | | |
| ▲ | bityard 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If making increasingly immoral decisions is all it takes to be a billionaire... then man, I have truly been wasting my life's potential | | | |
| ▲ | BlueTemplar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Oh yeah, plenty of that, even scientists and thinkers were tempted, we had plenty of details even before the 'files', thanks to Maxwell's phone book : https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo... | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think Taylor is close to lead any villain-list of superrich. Teter Phiel using money to buy influence and influence legislation or Melon usk, the guy fidgeting about with his right arm constantly pointing skywards - these guys definitely would be way before Taylor. But the main issue is why a few hold so much money. There needs to be a mandate to re-invest and improve the conditions on the planet past a certain threshold. Using their money to undermine democracy - now that should be a perma-jail offence. | | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. I propose choosing $1m as the threshold unrealized and realized summed. A 100% wealth tax on anything over that should help reduce inequality. | | |
| ▲ | hn_acc1 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This can't be said in any kind of good faith. You'd put a lot of people in bigger cities out on the streets, including people who never worked above "bookeeper" or "factory worker" whose houses happen to be in a desirable location 40 years after they bought them. | | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | So just because they were bookkeepers we should let them hoard wealth when most Americans could not afford an unexpected expense? To a person with $100 in their checking account both a millionaire and a billionaire are impossibly far away. I think what’s happening here is that a bunch of millionaires are complaining that there are people richer than them so they want the limit higher than them. But they don’t realize they’re the problem. They’re the top 3% while people are suffering. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We're all capable of seeing the difference between Taylor Swift and Epstein and his crowd. Well, almost all, apparently. | | |
| ▲ | renewiltord 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You don't become a billionaire by being moral If you’re ESL, that statement actually doesn’t specifically reference Epstein et al. If you’re not ESL, I suggest a remedial course and then the statement doesn’t specifically reference Epstein et al. | | |
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| ▲ | jordanb 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Of course the grappling to find one good billionaire begins. While Taylor Swift is not nearly as obviously evil as the tech bros, she grifts the shit out of her fans. I do think it's kinda evil to create a parasocial relationship situation with millions of young girls and then mine every last penny of disposable income out of them. She could have just as easily superstar multi-millionare with far less grifting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWE1fH0pDo | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > she grifts the shit out of her fans People are free to use their money. I am not sure why that should be the fault of Taylor? | | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Aren't many of Swift's fans children? That being said I think comparing Swift to the likes of Thiel and Musk is comedic at best. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Where do you guys come up with these ideas? By thinking. | | |
| ▲ | shimman 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thinking, experiencing the world, knowing that throughout our entire history of a species that tales of "excess greed" were also cautionary tales on how greed ruins society throughout the entire world. |
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| ▲ | triceratops 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > the philanthropy they've done is pretty crazy If philanthropy and normal living expenses (even assuming billionaire living standards) were the only things super-rich people spent money on that's fine. Unfortunately they use it to directly influence politics and society. Wealth, like celestial bodies, has a gravitational field. | |
| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My working class family members always gave 10% to charity (kind of the standard social contract in the US for giving) when that 10% made up a huge percentage of the money it takes for them to live a very basic life. Compare that to billionaires who have more money than they could ever spend and the percentage they have given: Zuckerberg 2.1%.
Ballmer 3.7%
Bezos 1.6%
Sergey Brin 2.5%
Michael Dell 2.6%
Ken Griffin 5% https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame... | |
| ▲ | cratermoon 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you gave away as much money proportionately, you'd have about 75 fewer dollars in your pocket. Tell me again how generous billionaires are. | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because it's about power, control, and influence. The wealth is just the tool. Melinda French and MacKenzie Scott are true philanthropists, Gates and Bezos are just status chasers. "Look at me!" "Please clap." and so on. There are only ~3000 billionaires in the world, so I am not too concerned about broad support for them in a world with 8-10 billion people. "Fuck you" money is fine, we all strive for freedom during our lifetime as humans. "Fuck everyone" money is not a welcome target, imho. That's unelected power. Its easy to not be a billionaire of course: philanthropy. But do most billionaires? They do not. They hold tightly to their power. "Why does it even matter?" Because many of us do not want to be ruled or governed by these people, who by all indications, are not fond of other humans and see them as a resource to exploit and control. I assure you, I have no envy for these people and their wealth, I am allergic to what it would take to accumulate and maintain it (as a high empathy, high justice sensitivity human). I know what enough is. This is self preservation from a class of predator. > Where do you guys come up with these ideas? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind https://medium.com/roaring-rivers/are-all-billionaires-socio... | https://archive.today/nX2Fh https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/bil... | https://archive.today/Gb2RF https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellamalmgren/2025/09/09/america... | https://archive.today/nLx78 https://www.google.com/search?q=billionaires+sociopaths |
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