This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]

[0]https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/elon-musk-video-games-scandal...

> In a loopy recursive way, it is.

The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.

It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.

Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.

Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.

That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?

Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.

To go back to your biology point:

Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!

Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.

But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.

Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.

They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.

---

So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.

>Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway

You don't even need an amazing job to do that though

Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?

I don't think many people would agree with such positions.

I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.

If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?

How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?

How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?

Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?

No. it certainly isn't.

I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.

It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.

Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.

I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.

Slow and steady wins the race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E

OK, but ... imagine Andreessen said, "I don't eat food."

No one would think that was a reasonable position.

No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"

We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.

We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.

No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.

> You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything.

I never made a suggestion that financial success is completely independent of anything.

> They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.

It's naive to think that financial success sometimes blinds people into thinking they are generally an expert in all areas?

> but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world

Also, never said anything to this effect.

> why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?

How could you possibly know if I have, or have not?

Your entire reply is effectively an unrelated tangent to what I said.

> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare

You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).

> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given

If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.

The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.

I think Marc might be referring to "navel gazing". If introspection is so important, we wouldn't need to do experiments to figure out what is reality. He could be advocating for Empiricism. You will find quotes like "If unsure, take a decision and make it right later. Don't get trapped in analysis paralysis". Basically two camps are fighting here : those who think reality can be figured out by thinking alone. and those who think we need to get out there and collect data and analyse it. I am personally biased toward Radical Conversatism.

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was a British theoretical physicist and mathematician whose work on the Dirac equation (1928), which merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the positron. His approach to this discovery was deeply rooted in a mathematical philosophy that valued elegance, consistency, and a belief that nature is fundamentally mathematical, often placing him ahead of experimental validation.

Radical conservatism in physics, often associated with John Archibald Wheeler, is a philosophical approach that adheres strictly to established, successful principles—like quantum mechanics or general relativity—while pushing them to extreme, unexpected logical conclusions. It involves modifying as few laws as possible (conservative) while daringly following the math to radical insights.

Hmm, I think this statement needs some support "To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit."

Money simply invested in a market fund generally creates wealth, and that doesn't require a model of the world that's much more sophisticated than the average person's.

"Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare," This feels unsupported as well. How could you even attempt to quantify what percent of success is due to luck, much less establish confidence that this percent is going down?

> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.

As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.

The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.

But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.

A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.

So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.

There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.

I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."

>This discussion is a sea of jealously and a perfect example.

Yes, the only reason anyone could have for criticizing the ultra-wealthy is jealousy. It's just the haders, b.

HN posters are famously overconfident, sure, but wealth is a bad measure of success. Putin is one of the richest people on earth, but responsible for extreme political repression and global instability. Pablo Escobar did very well financially. Financial success says how well you’ve extracted wealth from others, and approximately zero about your contributions to society.

Einstein, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Orwell had tremendous public impact and “success”, with relatively little wealth to show for it.

Wealth gives those with shallow sense of values an easy scoreboard to look down on others, which is how you get disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed attempt at “effective altruism”, or almost-trillionaires like Musk gutting the federal government, while extracting billions in public funding and subsidies.

Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.

There is obviously some minimum level of competence and intelligence required to be wealthy (not losing all of it), but for many becoming fabulously wealthy is as much a matter of circumstance than anything else. I would guess most people here would also be billionaires if they had the same opportunities and circumstances as Musk.

Everyone thinks they are right, but it’s having the grace to be able learn, be wrong and develop is the point here! Also your average HN commenter does not get listened to or promoted anywhere to the same degree!