I don't personally subscribe to this belief but the people saying it's impossible to earn a billion dollars without doing something bad would say that your founders are doing something bad by exploiting the employees by not returning to the value creators a fair share of the value generated and instead hoarding it for themselves. pg is arguing a strawman to the actual argument when there are far better arguments around rewarding risk though I feel like most people shouting that don't value risk either so maybe that's not a better argument?

Andrew Wilkinson has a whole part in his book about what it's like to be on the billionaire side of this speaking to former employees who feel that you took more of the value than you deserved it was an interesting read.

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csallen 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Who decides what's "fair"? Shouldn't the market decide? Otherwise, of course people will always be incentivized to argue that their subjective opinion is what's fair, and that's almost always going to be, "I should have been given more."

	▲	sanswork 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't have an answer for that, again I don't subscribe to that belief and I think risk should be highly rewarded. That said the market is a terrible judge of fairness since it's a feedback loop so luck early on can definitely allow you to extract an unfair amount of value later(this is what Wilkinsons employee was saying basically, Andrew pointed out that they offered them share packages instead of salaries and the employee replied that his employees couldn't afford to live without a salary like he could so it was never a real option so they didn't actually have a chance to capture a fair amount of the value from their work). (It's been a while since I read the book I could be getting some of the details slightly wrong)