> Sure, if you start off with $2 million and double it 9 times, you end up with $1 billion. Exponential growth is a powerful thing, so it comes as no surprise that maintaining a large growth rate over time very quickly grows a starting sum into a much larger pool of money.

Reminds me of this post I’ve seen making the rounds recently about a welder at SpaceX who was making $28/hr becoming a millionaire.

They keep emphasizing he’s a welder, the system works, and at the verrrry end mention he was issued 10k in stock a decade ago at SpaceX and held until it IPO’d the other day. The only “lesson” here is “if you own stock and stock go up you get lots of dollar bucks.”

They keep emphasizing “he’s a hardworking welder.” My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”

But that’s obviously not their point.

▲

joefourier 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> My response is “great! Let businesses take a lesson here: give all your employees a chunk of the company. Let’s all share in the success!”

Don't >95% of tech companies offer stock options or equity, from startups to FAANG?

	▲	Forgeties79 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A cursory search says 74-90% (in the US), but also that’s just tech companies and usually you need to be early. It’s also often in the form of options that take years to exercise and companies have gotten very creative lately in how they screw people out of them. Looooots of caveats here.

▲

haaz 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think they hid the point that he was issued stock? I thought it was pretty obvious? Which is why they're talking about it now, because the value of those stocks shot up because they went public

▲

Forgeties79 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Yet they keep talking about an emphasizing how he was a hardworking welder first when, frankly, it’s borderline irrelevant to his being a millionaire.

The thumbnails often just tell the welder story, for instance. It’s very clever (misleading).

	▲	smallmancontrov 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes! What's wild is that the story is a microcosm of what's wrong with the economy as a whole, where his work was worthless in comparison to his winning lottery ticket, which itself was (charitably) 10% due to SpaceX achieving its original mission and 90% due to investor optimism about AI datacenters in space.