But his N=1 anecdote doesn’t prove anything. He shares a feel-good story about an early stage company with very high growth on a small base. This person is not a billionaire yet.

The actual comparison would be to look at all the startups with billionaire founders (so likely $10B companies) and then analyze the market dynamics that enable them to keep growing so fast.

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edouard-harris 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What AOC actually said was (linked in the essay): "You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that." That is a strong claim - a claim of universal impossibility - but it's the claim she chose to make. Because she made a universal claim, an N=1 anecdote is enough to disprove it by counterexample.

	▲	theptip 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Fwiw I agree that the universal impossibility statement is too strong. But his example doesn’t demonstrate anyone earning $1b. It just demonstrates a very high growth rate at $1-2m.

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nfw2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can disprove an absolute statement with n=1

	▲	theptip 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And yet the N=1 he chose doesn’t disprove the statement.

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csallen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's an argument for AOC to make. This post is about PG responding to the argument she actually did make.

She has made vague, handwavy, and (depressingly) oft-repeated statements that "there are no ethical billionaires" and that "it's impossible to earn a billion dollars," but she has rarely supported with these statements with any facts or evidence whatsoever.

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stouset 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The statement that there are no ethical billionaires who’ve gotten there by creating something approximating a billion dollars of value can be trivially disproven through a single counterexample.

The fact that her detractors have spilt gallons of ink arguing against her point without providing such a counterexample speaks volumes.

	▲	csallen 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Plenty of counterexamples have been provided, people just don't accept them because the definition of ethical is subjective. And when you have circular reasoning that defines making money itself as unethical, then you become impossible to please. But here's a quick list from the top of my head: Judy Faulkner of Epic Systems, Hamdi Ulukaya from Cobani, the founders of Canva, the founders of Stripe, Tobi Lutke from Shopify, Paul Graham himself, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, George Lucas, Roger Federer, J.K. Rowling. Probably dozens/hundreds of others. If you do something that somebody likes and they give you $1000, that's ethical. But if you do something a million people like, and they give you $1000, then you're a billionaire, somehow you must be unethical?

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inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

She said there are no ethical billionaires.

He said nonsense! If you start as a two millionaire and grow 95% every month you can be there in 9 months!

I say if I start with one cent and grow 10000000000000% every millisecond I can be there in a millisecond.

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chasd00 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Isn’t Oprah Winfrey the left’s beloved billionaire and the one who actually “earned it”? I wonder if AOC would say Oprah is unethical and immoral.

Edit: I’d like AOC to publicly say Taylor Swift is unethical and immoral too. Heh the swifties would have her head over that.