The sad part about it, and one that has become a bit of a theme with his postings, is that pg stopped being intellectually honest in his online writings at some point over the last two decades.

His post here in particular violates the fundamental principles of HN in that he does not engage with the argument at all.

The argument isn't that it's impossible to become a billionaire legally, the argument is that it's impossible to become a billionaire in a moral way, though that's more of a problem of the system than it is necessarily one at the individual level. A just and moral system would assign the value being created in such a way that becoming a billionaire would be essentially impossible.

Yet pg never even acknowledged the possibility that that might have been the argument.

pg’s argument is essentially 1. Build something people want to buy 2. If you do, you can get exponential growth of people buying it 3. This isn’t inherently immoral.

There are many assumptions around this you could argue about, but he’s directly addressing the original statement (which was also simple, and did not explicitly include the assumptions either).

I agree they are talking past each other - a lot of this is more related to marginal cost differences than anything else imho (basically how leveraged the value of my labor could practically be).

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