> So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars.

> She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire.... What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.

> But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to cheat to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the growth rate and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without cheating, which of those two numbers is impossible?

AoC quote:

> There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.

Come now @pg.

$2 million * 9.45 months * 93% growth rate = earning a billion dollars, ok. Does that really address what AoC was saying? She wasn't saying that the math doesn't math.

He's saying that the math as he defines it means that YC founders who make less than even millions can anticipate making billions without anticipating doing something unsavory along the way. That's a fine, and possibly true premise.

But, in the real world, as the 'exponential earnings' stack up, the incentives to do unsavory things to keep the rate of growth scales right along with the earnings; and the odds of anyone actually 'earning' a billion dollars while sharing the proceeds and absorbing the risks and societal costs of that growth fairly, ethically, legally and honestly has a growing potential to become vanishingly small.

AOC was speaking to this reality, the author was speaking about the math functions of how some steady rate of growth crosses from a small number to a very big number due to the law of compounding growth, and speaking to the actions and motives of a cohort who had not yet done what it took to realize that rate and duration of growth.

They actually are both right.

AOC was not addressing the math at all, nor did she claim that it was mathematically difficult to become a billionaire; just that it was unrealistic to expect that the process of doing so did not select for people with an intrinsic ability to externalize risk and maximize profit in a manner which many other people find distasteful, bordering on criminal if known to the full extent.

And the original post posits that his representative cohort was free from these types of behaviors and thus would remain so.

I find one of those arguments more realistic and actionable than the other even though they both may be true. I'll leave which for another day.

Of course he's not addressing what AoC said. That wasn't the purpose of his propaganda. Just as so many billionaires are panicking about potential wealth taxes etc, so too is PG.

This is no different than any of the Thiel/Musk/Bezos propaganda that's been swirling around as they realize that the natives are getting a bit restless and mentions of guillotines become more common on social media. And they look at the UHC CEO's murder and wonder just how safe they really are.

I doubt he listened to what she said - just a soundbite on Fox News or worse Facebook.

Did you read his post at all? He knew what she was saying and addressed it clearly:

> What [AOC] meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way... The reason [my founder's] startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong [AOC] was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her startup was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been working their asses off to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you exponential growth.

In other words, this founder being on a trajectory toward billionaire status, through doing little but working to provide something of value to those willing to pay for it, belies the claim that you must be doing something unethical and cannot earn one's way to a billion dollars.