A genuine selfmade billionaire

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, obviously

Bill Gates – privatised (enclosed, even) the public commons of decades of state-funded computer science and established a vicious monopoly with Microsoft

Various hedge fund and crypto bros

Musk – goes without saying

Both Theo and Karl Albrecht are now dead but before that they’ve a reasonable claim. They started with their mother’s shop and built Aldi out of it.

Sure, starting with a shop etc. But that was also little more than a few walls in a bombed flat Germany post WWII.

Without disputing the usefulness of this exercise for persuasive purposes imho wealth at that obscene level of concentration represents power over other people’s efforts deriving from illegitimate control of resources that is morally proximate to slave-owning. Arguing about their individual merits is like arguing about how many almshouse’s Edward Colston opened or how early he got up in the morning.

I’m inclined to think Harry Frankfurt’s other famous work may be more relevant to the idea that the rarity of billionaires makes hostility towards them unreasonable.

Andrew Carnegie.

I was able to do my PhD because I got a Carnegie scholarship to fund it, so I’m a little biased; but the fact that AC gave away 90% of his fortune ($350 million nineteenth-century dollars; $6.5 billion or so’s worth today) provides one way of reconciling oneself to the existence of billionaires.

It seems to me odd that one could “deserve” a place in a random structure that determines how much money they have.

There are many excellent artists and writers, for example. In the current system, some writers and artists have become billionaires. But the demand for fantasy novels outlining the hero’s journey, or edgy, arty rock ‘n’ roll is a contingent, historically conditioned feature of the current system. There may be somebody out there writing blank verse that’s better than Milton’s, thinking more deeply than Hegel, carving marble better than Michelangelo, and who is nice to children and puppies. That’s not what gets paid, so within the current system, they don’t deserve anything.

On the other hand, everybody–I mean every human being, simply by being human–deserves “enough,” which I take to mean food, shelter, freedom from arbitrary violence, and, in general social, circumstances conducive to health.

If the presence of billionaires makes providing people with a sufficiency more difficult, by all means, let’s get rid of them. (I think curbing their power is unquestionably necessary.) If not, let’s talk about creating conditions to get billions of people what they need and deserve. I don’t think we need to make moral judgments about individuals as individuals to do that.

It’s structures not people.

Bill Gates wasn’t self-made. He got his start from his mother who was chief legal counsel for IBM, and recommended Bill’s purchased MS-DOS to the executives.
In the IT business I’ve spent my life in, the self-made billionaires that I can think of tend to be fairly nasty people. There are rich people who became incidentally rich like Steve Wozniak, the truly rich ones are more like Steve Jobs, ruthless exploiters.

In entertainment of some kind, sports or music, there seems to me some possibility of innocence in the gathering of large sums of money. The musician Jack Johnson is my personal idea of a rich man who was able to do it without hurting anyone.

I like the Carnegie suggestion. There were probably some others in the heyday of the USA, when the class system had not yet taken root and there was some kind of egalitarianism for white men of the right ethnicities. I wondered if any of those Victorian engineers in England could have qualified, but wikipedia says for example of Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
“an obituary in The Morning Chronicle noted:
Brunel was the right man for the nation, but unfortunately, he was not the right man for the shareholders. They must stoop who must gather gold, and Brunel could never stoop. ”

Really I’d have to work my way down the Forbes list, offhand I can’t think of any interestingly self-made billionaires..
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

For example
https://www.forbes.com/profile/zhong-shanshan/?list=billionaires&sh=35a6b72949ae

who appears to have dropped out of elementary school, now a bottled-water tycoon. ??

And,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/segunolakoyenikan/2024/04/02/new-billionaires-2024-taylor-swift-magic-johnson-and-263-others-join-the-ranks-this-year/?sh=7d6f2243af37
“The youngest of the self-made newcomers is Japan’s Shunsaku Sagami, founder of Tokyo-based advisory firm M&A Research Institute, which employs AI to find buyers for companies. “

It’s very hard to find a billionaire who has made it to that level sheerly through economic and social usefulness as determined by open, competitive markets. Almost invariably you will find at least one of the following conditions in their upward trajectory: inherited wealth and social capital (and this doesn’t require the death of an elder, there are lots of bigger wealth transfers between parents/grandparents and their offspring before we get to a will and probate), leveraging crony capitalism and government subsidy, leveraging monopoly and/or market power and/or regulatory arbitrage, leveraging the over-financialization of the modern economy.

The incredible leverage of the now global entertainment and internet/software industries is about the only place you’ll find people who didn’t start out at least affluent and/or in the family business and meeting at least one of the other conditions.

As an exercise a few years ago, I looked at billionaires in the Nordic countries and they were nearly all part of family dynasties or took over their dad’s business after getting a fancy business education and launching into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the top America billionaires were more selfmadeish.

I think “Every billionaire is a policy failure.” is a more strategic framing than ‘deservingness’ or zero-sum arguments. It immediately links to the conditions I’ve listed and then the policies that might break up such concentrations of wealth and (more importantly )power.

I prefer the framing that billionaires are an unavoidable consequence of the system that we have. If you set 500 rats on the edge of starvation through a complicated maze. Some of them will solve the maze first. If you give extra food to the first 50 that come out, they are much more likely to get through first on the next trial. Do that 10 times and you have a group of sleek smart rats that are clearly superior to the rest of the group. We even call the modern world a rat race. The problem (as the OP is suggestion) is that we have bought into the idea that capitalism is a meritocracy … And of course, the people most invested in defending this idea will be the sleek rats at the top.

Nobody’s mentioned Warren Buffet, but if you asked most folks on the street, that would be the name that comes up most often.

If you accept the idea of a self-made billionaire at all, then yeah, I think J.K. Rowling is close to the pure case – it’s really not obvious what help she had, she worked really hard in pretty unfavourable circumstances, etc. But of course she is a hate figure for other reasons.

JK Rowling herself thinks she had an enormous amount of help in the form of the welfare state — specifically welfare when she was a single mum and trying to learn how to write. I did mention Warren Buffet, who, himself, emphasizes the myriad ways in which circumstances, context, and other people enabled him to become rich.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-afghanistan-ovarian-lottery-luck-inequality-higher-taxes-rich-2021-8

My family loves the “How I Built This” podcast, so occasionally subject me to it on car trips. Its very striking how much the presenter and the entrepreneurs emphasize that they are from ordinary middle class homes, and how often some family member managed to come up with an emergency loan of half a million or so dollars overnight which was needed to avoid the company going under at a nascent stage. I picked out 20 of the subjects once, and found that 17 of them went to private high schools which currently have tuition rates over $30k/year. Almost everyone who ends up in the top 0.1% started in the top 5%.

the only ‘person’ I know who doesn’t deserves the degrading and defaming insult to be called
‘just some billionaire’
is Taylor Swift –
as she made
IT
after FIRST being hailed by RED America as ‘the Aryan Godess’ and then –
for ‘betraying country’ defamed and degraded to such a degree – that hardly any other women on the internet received the amount of HATE – which drove her into hiding.

And to get out of this… hole – she thought she never would get out of – took a lot of ‘selfmadeness’ – and when we just last week were defending her against some truly evil men who had the nerve to call her ‘Satan’ and her fans the members of a ‘satanic cult’ –
there was this question on the NY Mag:
Why are you defending a Billionaire? –
the only ‘sink’ we could answer was:
BE-cause the HATERS made her become the Idol for every bullied and degraded Teenager
on this planet – and if she
NEXT –
will tell all US Swifties that we should NOT vote for the German FF Von Clownstick – she truly 2will have earning every single Dollar of this Billion!

Capisce?

Its the same in politics, if you are looking for someone without any “unearned advantages” at all, then you will rarely find them in top political leadership. But there are many with considerably fewer such advantages than others.

I would like to refer the “actually billionaires are nice because they give their money away and I even got some of it” people to the recent threads on Effective Altruism.

Billionaires are near 34 millionths of a percent of population and control around 3 % of total wealth. The more our debt to them (their wealth) is paid with pain and perversity, the less we should have owed them. Is there some wealth at which investments become repressive? I suspect this is a much lower net worth than one billion.

On the other hand, the “surplus value” billionaires have accumulated allows for concentration of repressive strategies. I salute you if you can demonstrate if even the best of them really don’t deserve this credit.

At what wealth do you suppose half of them aren’t deserving?

LFC — I’ll cite Anarchy State and Utopia when I get to my office (where my copy is lurking). But, after reading your comment, I googled, and was staggered to see how many sources misattribute to him the view that desert should be the basis of entitlement; clearly lots of people get taught this! The text is not really very ambiguous though!

Just a normal West Country gal whose great-grandfather founded the Hawaiian national health service:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugald_Campbell

So she may be from good social democratic stock. Excellent.
I suppose if you’re from Arran, Kauai might feel familiar!

Re the “slippery slope”

Global private wealth is around $500 trillion and the global adult population is about 6 billion, so if you shared everything equally between them everyone would have about $80 000. If that sounds like the bottom of a terrifying “slippery slope” to you, you just might not be representative of the 8 billion people on this planet, or even of a lot of people in your own rich country. (All land should be nationalised btw.)

Radiohead may be a “A genuine selfmade NOT billionaire” as a counter example. “Radiohead released In Rainbows online and allowed fans to set their own price, saying this liberated them from conventional promotional formats and removed barriers to audiences.”.
See below.

Searched:
“ethical” “self made” billionaire
DDGo found NO matches
The googl found;
– reddit “How is there “no ethical way” to become a billionaire?”
– quora – “Is-it-possible-for-someone-to-become-a-billionaire-completely-ethically-No-exploitation-no-child-labor-no-blood-money-no-wage-theft”

Even students and Teen Vogue agrees…
“Billionaires Should Not Exist — Here’s Why “This op-ed argues that every billionaire really is a policy failure.
BY REBEKKA AYRES
DECEMBER 29, 2021

The Publishing Haüs
Student Voices and Student Stories from The Northwest School
“There are No Ethical Billionaires”
Josie F. ’23May 25, 2023

Talylor Swift, JK Rollings, Theo and Karl Albrecht. Creators though don’t themselves enshitify for wealth, whereas Theo and Karl Albrecht, Waltons etc to some extent do, to get to billions. Maybe these are as close as you’ll get.

Yet it takes 2 to tango.
What about us money throwers and tithe ten percenters required to ‘self make’ a billion?
Swift and Rollings rely on gobsmacking out of distribution sales aka us money throwers. So what drives people to bestow a billion on a creator? See Popes below. Does Taylor, now she has a pile, or The Beatles or the Rolling Stones release everything for ‘pay what you are able to afford’? Hmmm… Paul McCartney Net Worth – $1.2 Billion, whereas Thom Yorke of Radiohead has a mere $45m. “In Rainbows is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Radiohead. It was self-released on 10 October 2007 as a pay-what-you-want download, followed by a physical release internationally…”
Wikipedia “In Rainbows”.

And to bestow a billion in a creator how do you account for the market, banks, law, crappy policy etc??? Is a genuine selfmade billionaire ‘better’ in liberal democracies?

What about self made “ethical’ Jim Simons? He stopped making billions at some point. Probably one of the best examples of tax policy failure; “September 2021, it was announced that Simons and his colleagues would pay billions of dollars in back taxes, interest and penalties to resolve the dispute, one of the biggest in IRS history.”. (Soros has a similar tale.)
“Simons was described as the “greatest investor on Wall Street,” and more specifically “the most successful hedge fund manager of all time”.[4][5][6]”.
(Simon had a lever and used it code breakung and math. His megayatch is named Archimedes.)
Wikipedia James_Harris_Simons

Popes???
Limitarianisn at Wikipedia says: “… what is always common is an examination of when it is proper, moral or ethical to interfere and intervene in the lives and freedoms of individuals, in order to benefit society as a whole.” 

Self made??? Ethical??? …”interfere and intervene in the lives and freedoms of individuals, in order to benefit society as a whole.”. Hmmm.

How about tithe wealth accumulation counter examples for context. Top tithe billionaires;
Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc.
Owner: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Roger Clarke (CEO)
Gérald Caussé (Presiding Bishop)
AUMUS$124 billion 

See “List of wealthiest religious organizations”
Organization Worth
(billion USD)
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – 236.0
Sree Venkateswara Swamy Temple – 35.0
Catholic Church in Germany – 26
…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_religious_organizations

Seperate Catholic entries -Read: ‘Policy Failure writ large due to dogmatic capture’ – the Catholic Church is listed as seperate countries. The [seperate] Vatican you ask?… “Not available due to widespread properties globally.[17][18][19]”

Popes all the way down.
If you find examples among the rocking horse teeth, will the Jevons Paradox or Dutch Disease kick in!!!
Looking forward to results of the hunt for “A genuine selfmade billionaire”.

Do you believe the Delware Nation should own its ancestral lands on the East Coast? If so, you may not approve of individual billionaires. But you do believe that 2,081 people should control trillions of dollars of wealth.

@engels I followed the link – it’s a nice photo, but it’s a 3 bedroom house, which is now worth around £400k. That’s more than the average house price in the UK (which is £300k), but below the average house price in that town (£438k), and not much above the average for the county (£374k). I’m not sure it proves much one way or another. I don’t believe in self-made billionaires – which is why I started with that ‘If…” – but if the idea is that she came from wealth, we need more evidence I think.

@37. Tutshill is Glos, yes, but not the posh part. Over the Severn but before the Wye, Chepstow – could unkindly call it “South Forest of Dean”. Mid 1970s? Rectories in far corners weren’t quite the thing back then.

You didn’t build it” seems to apply equally well to everyone regardless of how much wealth they have.</I

Hmm. Maybe this would be an argument for distributing resources according to need.

An interesting discussion. A few observations.

-If you are going to exclude JK Rowling because she took some welfare money and then also exclude say, Bill Gates or Sam Walton because they didn’t you aren’t leaving a lot of green space to find a potential ‘deserving’ billionaire.

-Personally, I think athletes and artists should be excluded from the discussion entirely. I enjoy Taylor Swift, JK Rowling, Michael Jordan et al immensely but can’t honestly say their contributions to society or culture amount to anything remotely game changing. There are a huge number of artists with more cultural impact that didn’t accumulate wealth for various reasons. If Michaelangelo had been a billionaire would we have called it deserved? The fact he was not tells more about how culture values art than anything else.

-The definitional person you seek will inherently be someone not well known that perhaps developed a key invention or process and derived great wealth from it, but either donated it or (perhaps worse) just kept it to themselves. Andrew Carnegie, the Albrecht brothers or maybe someone like Hansjoerg Wyss (pledged several billion to green initiatives) would be good people to consider.

Fergus @49
Thanks. Been a long time since I looked at Anarchy, State and Utopia, but what you say sounds right.

Having not read her books or followed her Twitter account the only opinion I really have about JK Rowling as a person is that if they ever make a biopic about her they should use the theme tune “Rolling rolling rolling”.

I would probably be in favour of nationalising her intellectual property and using it to convert Oxford or Eton into a Hogwarts theme park in order to milk wealthy Chinese tourists for foreign currency, which we as a nation could then use to procure basic services such as sewage treatment or dentists.

El Chapo.

mw,

“We” have SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla because of gigantic public subsidies and preferential contracts from government and because of the engineers who do the actual work while praying that Musk doesn’t interfere in it like he did with Twitter and the Cybertruck. “We” have Amazon because of the poor sods Bezos forces to pee into a bottle instead of giving them breaks. “We” have Apple because of workers and engineers who built the actual products, including those in China who commit suicide because of the working conditions. None of these leaders have even had ideas that a hundred others wouldn’t have had in the same decade. The role of founder or CEO is exactly as fungible as that of public relations officer or contract manager, and in fact it requires considerably fewer qualifications and training. If you replaced any of them with a randomly chosen person, chances are high the companies would (or in the case of Jobs, would have) perform(ed) better, except perhaps in the case of Bezos, where it might just become less abusive towards workers and customers.

And that all assumes that having these arrangements is even good. With Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook we are talking about digital services that are natural monopolies because the best user experience is to be locked into one system where (a) data can move freely between all devices and/or (b) everybody you know is in the same data ecosystem or social network, again making communications seamless, and (c) you have grown familiar with the user interface and even trivialities like the charge cables and mouse keys. In other words, the incentives are to lock oneself into one provider, making it much harder to switch to another than with e.g. electricity providers, newspapers, restaurants, or supermarkets, which gives that digital service provider monopoly power. This means that by definition, there is no functioning free market in this area, instead there is massive, well-documented abuse of power to the detriment of customers, workers, and/or suppliers in all of these companies, and all of them would in a sane world be nationalised and run as public utilities.

That last comment on the useless heirs is also very funny. These families are the echoes of the last time something like we have today was allowed to happen, before 70-90% top marginal tax rates and anti-trust enforcement gave us a few decades of shared, widespread prosperity and growth and CEOs living in just another, albeit slightly nicer, house down the same road as their employees. The people you admire so much for (checks notes) creating an online store that leeches money off actual creators for providing humanity with the revolutionary concept of (checks notes again) an online store or an operating system have heirs who will be the calcified useless dynasties of the next hundred years.

How about an award called
The “Not Enclosing aiding Billions” Award.
Maximum human benefit for invention.
Free of enclosure or rights.

How many billions would Tim Berners-Lee amassed for the World Wide Web?
“In a list of 80 cultural moments that shaped the world, chosen by a panel of 25 eminent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders, the invention of the World Wide Web was ranked number one, with the entry stating, “The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the Internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world.”[39]” Wikipedia.

Many others.

Template or outing those in my missive above.

How about a CT post on dark money law in the vein of “an examination of when it is proper, moral or ethical to interfere and intervene in the lives and freedoms of individuals, in order to benefit society as a whole.”. Limitarianism Wikipedia

Henry Farrell has provided a Template:
“Law and Economics”
by HENRY FARRELL 
on OCTOBER 18, 2018
“I’ve been waiting for this paper to drop, ever since Suresh told me about it last year. It’s groundbreaking. What it does is to take Steve Teles’ qualitative work on the conservative legal movement, and then ask a simple question: if we start with the qualitative evidence about the program’s intentions, then FOIA the hell out of George Mason University to find out which judges attended the Manne seminars, and then apply cutting edge econometrics and natural language processing to their decisions, what are we going to find out?”
Thanks.
I’ll donate.

There is a more radical position, that nothing can be deserved. Let me try to write another post about that, since teasing out those differences deserves its own space.

I would be very interested in your take on this.

My off the cuff view tends to be that nothing is deserved, because I tend to have a somewhat deterministic view of human behaviour, i.e. there are so many genetic, developmental and societal factors beyond anyone’s control in determining the fate of any individual, that applying a moral judgement to it seems wrong.

Also, doesn’t saying that someone deserves their good fortune imply the opposite, namely that the those not favoured by genetics, fate or circumstances also deserve their lot, which would seem equally wrong?

Coming very late to this party to suggest that “self-made billionaire” is not all that useful a category, as is illustrated by the debate here about how much help you can have before you’re not self-made. Suggesting that JKR does not count as “self-made” because she was able to receive welfare… I think that right there illustrates the silliness of the quest.

I think the billionaires who are the interesting edge cases are the ones who became billionaires by building something that grew to be worth billions. This basically means tech fortunes today… Gates and Larry Ellison are maybe the type specimens of the genus. What kind of tax policies could help put a crimp in the emergence of these kinds of fortunes?

IDK if you are going to be able to make an analysis that will convince Joe the Plumber that “self-made” billionaires are not to be admired. Gates and MS would be a good example of the kinds of sharp practice edging into outright lawbreaking that’s involved in turning your startup into a 100 billions of $$ behemoth though. The first 15 years of MS’s history involved a lot of really-sketchy-to-downright-illegal business practices. Not until about 1995 did MS really let non-MS programmers have all the keys to the OS platforms.

#79 “After a family friend gave the Jacksons a Super 8 cine-camera with Peter in mind, he began making short films with his friends… around the age of nine…”

????

Gar Lipow @71
The OP did not ask for names of “good” billionaires. It asked for names of “self-made” billionaires. There were comments about how Carnegie used his wealth or what his foundations have done, but speaking for myself I didn’t make those comments. I mentioned Carnegie as someone who might fit the self-made category, not necessarily the “good” category.

Not a billionaire but Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin founder) is probably one of the best examples of entrepreneurial ability there is.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful, it’s the leadership, drive, and ability to convince investors and recruit and motivate key employees that’s rare

Yes: brilliant scientists, artists and philosophers are two a penny. David Geffen was vastly more talented than Mozart or Bir… shots

It seems to me that every politically conservative person will regard every legal privilege essential to the fortune as part of nature, unless somehow it is specifically devised to favor that person. All sports and entertainment fortunes rely on exclusive broadcasting rights plus whatever privileged access to radio/TV frequencies and subsidized venues are regardless deemed more or less part of nature, theoretically accessible to all. Therefore every degree of fortune is earned.

Similarly, every tech (which includes pharmaceuticals, strictly speaking) billionaire relies on patents being unregulated monopolies. The principle that all monopolies should be regulated is most certainly not widely accepted (even articulated?) The same goes for writers and other copyright holders. Being wildly successful is not perceived to be partly a function of a huge and elaborate publicity/sales/marketing scheme.

And the increase in wealth due to the rise of the estimated price of real estate due to development not even undertaken by the owner is also taken to be part of nature

There may be some greater tendency among political conservatives to see financial gains as somehow illegitimate. But so far as I can see, even in those cases, there seems to be a powerful tendency to regard finance as an honest game and the big winners as deserving because they are so good at the game. The highly favorable views of Buffet seem to me to reflect that.

Even with inherited wealth, the political conservative seems to think of themselves as afflicted with “death taxes,” who of course share a principled interest in the sacredness of inherited money. Anyone who succeeds in growing a small stake of a few million into a billion is also a winner, who deserves.

Last of all, there is the general God-given/natural (according to personal preference) necessity for inequality to keep society functioning. I believe this is ideological but political conservatives I’m pretty sure think objecting to the dictates of God/Nature is what’s ideological, which is to say criminal, crazy and demonic (all things that seamlessly blend together in the politically conservative worldview.) I mean, good luck with the project, but I can’t see it convincing anyone who doesn’t already believe things about the wrongness of, say, unregulated monopolies and such.

I’d argue there is no such thing as a “self-made” billionaire. None of them are self -made because each and every one built their wealth on the efforts of someone who came before them. And each and every one benefitted from advances made by those who came before. The efforts of millions of others aided them in their acquisitions, so without the contributions of the societies they inhabit they would have accomplished nothing.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Isaac Newton

mw,

What gets me is that people always want to have it both ways. The free market is so powerful because it is adaptable, but if we introduce a minimum wage or some regulations to keep people safe, the economy will collapse, so seemingly there is no adaptability at all. In this case, your “places that are fertile ground for billionaires” make it so that these supposedly good things (i.e., exploitative and abusive corporations) happen, but at the same time, it can’t be those places who are the key factor, instead it has to be the unique brilliance of this exact one billionaire here, because otherwise you still can’t justify his specific billions as deserved by him, specifically.

And you can’t anyway – the idea that by 2024 still nobody except Jobs would have come up with a UI that has little symbols is ludicrous, as is the idea that anything he has ever done deserves billions in reward instead of a nice salary bonus at the end of the year, as is the idea that these people do more “hard work” than the person who puts the parts of an iPhone together. Jobs’ job was to sit in meetings where he cried and shouted abuse at others until he got his way, and to stand in front of cameras claiming credit for his employees’ work. (As I write this, I realise that the exact same description would match another billionaire who has been much in the media these past few years, but part of this may be that many tech bros model themselves after Jobs.)

At the core of your argument is the illusion that a reward of billions is required to drive innovation. Three observations comprehensively prove that to be incorrect. First, the 1940s to 1970s were not a technologically stagnant dystopia. Second, thousands of companies not run by an abusive, egocentric billionaire are innovating and delivering user value every single day. Third, the first two are possible because the world is full of engineers, lab technicians, scientists, and small business owners who innovate and create value on a secure, regular, middle class income.

Antibiotics, the structure of DNA, PCR, DNA sequencing, CRISPR, organ transplants, computers, the internet, wifi, these were all discovered or invented by people, often academics or public servants, who were excited to understand nature and find useful solutions while expecting no more than a salary commensurate to the cost of their education and the respect of their peers. The claim that to have progress we need to allow individuals to become billionaires by exploiting these innovations has no more grounding in reality than the related one that we need a king and a class of feudal lords to defend our nation, but it is surely useful for the sociopaths and neo-feudalists who benefit from it becoming common wisdom.

Gautam Adani comes close to the conventional self-made billionaire narrative.

Satoshi Nakamoto? Hardly gets more self-made than that.

mw writes a bunch of stuff including:

“Approximately nobody has started a successful new auto company in 100 years before Tesla.”

Except for all the Japanese auto companies. And Chinese. And there’s the minor problem that Tesla isn’t much of an auto company. It doesn’t make very many cars, and they don’t work very well. And the “don’t work very well” bits are all due to Musk’s bad decisions (e.g. insisting on no Lidar, the CyberTruck). And Musk didn’t start Tesla, he bought it. Ditto on SpaceX.

But the returns on the actual hard work of folks who did start their companies all accrued early on, when they were mere millionairs. The 100 million and up amounts are due to various rent seeking, monopolistic, and other sleazy practices that hurt people.

So your world wouldn’t change in the slightest if all income (including capital gains) over 10 million was taxed at, say 70%, and over 100 million at 90%. Which were (very roughly) the tax rates in the 1950s, and the rich did just fine in those days.

Engels @91 “Genuine question MW: what would it take for you to revise your opinion that billionaires are so astronomically more gifted than the rest of humanity?”

What would it take to revise your opinion that NBA players are so astronomically more gifted than the rest of humanity? I don’t make the ‘astronomically more gifted’ claim, actually. In both cases, we’re talking about ‘lottery professions’, where the almost equally talented also-rans, though still rare in the population, are far more numerous than the notable successes. But we also benefit greatly from the efforts of those who work mightily to succeed but fail (or achieve good, but more obscure levels of success). This applies to entertainment too (or rather especially)). I don’t think Taylor Swift is ‘astronomically more gifted’. Butt if you make a policy of confiscating the wealth of the most successful, far fewer will strive, and the vast consumer surplus they create will be greatly diminished. If you confiscated the winnings of Powerball ‘instant billionaires’, nobody would play (though in the case of actual lotteries, that would probably be a good thing–those contests produce nothing of value).

Alex SL @94. “the idea that by 2024 still nobody except Jobs would have come up with a UI that has little symbols is ludicrous”

Oh, the market was full of smart phones based on UIs with little symbols before the iPhone. Microsoft, Nokia, and Blackberry dominated the market. These earlier smart phones had physical keyboards and a stylus had to be used on the screen. These phones were mostly for business and professional use, not the mass market. What was revolutionary about the iPhone was that the UI was reorganized for use by fingers with a different, touch-sensitive (albeit less accurate) kind of touch screen (capacitive rather than resistive). And, of course, the UI was ‘dumbed down’ to be easy to use for the masses.

“The free market is so powerful because it is adaptable, but if we introduce a minimum wage or some regulations to keep people safe, the economy will collapse”

Markets always adapt, but the new equilibrium is likely to be worse. For example, California imposes a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers, so Pizza Hut adapts by laying off all of its delivery drivers and contracts out the delivery (so that the drivers are no longer fast food workers). California passes a law mandating that most independent contractors are to be considered employees. So national publications stop hiring freelance writers based in California. And various industries with connections get ‘carve outs’ from the new rules, so companies adapt by spending a lot more money currying favor with politicians (see the example of Gavin Newsome & Panera Bread with the fast food min wage in CA — CA is a seemingly never ending source of illustrative bad examples).

David in Tokyo @100, “Except for all the Japanese auto companies. And Chinese.”

With the Japanese companies, yes, they were founded within the last 100 years — the newest is more like 75, I guess. And China? China is another country that’s conducive to billionaires. Though they do have to tread carefully — if Elon Musk were in China, he’d have received the Jack Ma treatment long ago.

if the sports person doesn’t deserve the money, who does

I’m going to go with “any of the 700 million people who are suffering from hunger right now”.

the almost equally talented also-rans, though still rare in the population, are far more numerous than the notable successes. But we also benefit greatly from the efforts of those who work mightily to succeed but fail

Ok let me see if I understand: Mozart and Charlie Parker would never have picked up an instrument if they hadn’t thought they’d had a shot at becoming David Geffen…

Plarry @93

I think that in Rawls’s view no one has a “legitimate expectation” to end up at any particular place in the distribution of income and wealth.

Limitarianism is featured in Esquire’s The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 (So Far). Congratulations!

Dirtbag climber to self-made billionaire, then gave it away – Yvon Chouinard

Gabe Newell, founder of Valve

And we were thinking that one way to make our (abstract, theoretical) arguments accessible to “Joe the plummer”, is to take an individual case of a selfmade billionaire, and delve into the details of their life story….

I think social critique must also include, whatever else it includes, starting from where the people are and showing that the notions they use make no sense, or, put differently, that the category of “selfmade billionaire’ is empty. To show that, methodologically the strongest way to do that, is to take the most convincing/best case of someone who is perceived to be a selfmade billionaire, and show that they are not. That’s what we will do.

I would have guessed that there’s already some sort of literature somewhere on what “self-made” means and how to measure it, but maybe there isn’t.

If one is already certain that the “self-made billionaire” category is empty, then to me that would simply mean that one thinks the “self-made person” category is empty, there’s no such thing.

I can understand the argument (as I think others have suggested) that “self-made” is somewhat meaningless – is anyone truly self-made? Even if you think (as I do) that people make choices, and those choices influence outcomes, maybe other factors have far more influence in our outcomes.

But the argument here seems to be that “self-made person” is not an empty category, just “self-made wealthy person.”

It would seem like you could take a large sample of people, then somewhat like the Forbes thing mentioned in comment 69, develop a “self-made” score, weighting this or that attribute according to whatever definition or idea of “self-made” you wanted.

And then you could apply it to various billionaires, and see how they compare to non-billionaires – that would be interesting.

If it was on a scale of 0 to 100 (i.e. percentiles), where would the billionaires tend to fall? My guess is most would be well above 50. But would any be above, say, 98 or 99? I guess the conceit of IR’s certainty in this matter reflects the idea that if you’re a billionaire, that’s sufficient evidence to prove that you must have gotten quite a few breaks.

From 69 again, Oprah Winfrey seems like an interesting one – is she an amazing case of over-coming an impoverished background, or at key moments did she get a lot of help from family members and others? There are so many events or influences in any one person’s life that are hard to understand or measure fully from the outside (let alone inside), it seems difficult to assign them that 0 – 100 score with much certainty.

I’d start with the question of “deserve” as in why should we accept that a person is deserving of the wealth they accrue?
I would say it is intuitively right to assert that a person deserves the reward of the fruit of their personal labor: e.g., if you plant a vineyard, tend it, press the grapes and ferment the wine by yourself, most people would accept the idea that this person deserves the resulting wealth.

But even the most industrious person has only a very limited number of hours in a day. So to increase wealth the person needs to hire a helper, and then more and more. And along b the way the wealth is derived less from labor than finance.

The more distant the reward gets from labor, the less intuitively easy it is to accept the deserving party.

What exactly does the retired winter do to receive the reward accrued from company stock? It is his property in only the most legal sense, no less absurd than to assert that Charles owns the British Isles.
The wealth being generated is now the result of the labor of thousands of individuals, all of whom have a stronger claim on the wealth than the founder.

You are side-stepping the OP’s question of whether anybody deserves obscene amounts of wealth by shifting the conversation to the claim that society is overall better off with that arrangement

Yes, I was explicit about that. I think that when it comes to billionaires, ‘deservedness’ is the wrong question. But I did play along and suggest, wrt to ‘deservedness’ that Taylor Swift might be a good candidate to analyze.

then you ignore the fact that society was overall more prosperous when this level of inequality didn’t exist. You also ignore that the people getting these obscene amounts of wealth didn’t actually do anything much.

These are claims, not facts. I believe (and have argued) that both of those claims are false.

Your places conducive to billionaires are, indeed, places that produce billionaires

It’s not just that they produce billionaires, it’s that they’ve generated the successful revolutionary innovations of my lifetime that have made my own life vastly richer, more convenient, and more interesting. I’d sooner give up indoor plumbing than the Internet, smart devices, delivery services, streaming services, GPS, digital photography, etc, etc. And that’s not hyperbole–I have experience doing so. That is, we have worked remotely from an RV for extended periods and have found it delightful (despite having to collect water in a jerry can and periodically empty the portable toilet).

It occurs to me that the argument of economic growth overall being stronger if (a) there is no minimum wage and/or (b) there is enormous inequality and/or (c) there is less ‘red tape’, which, among other things, leads to more workplace incidents, consumer poisonings, etc. is exactly what Le Guin invented her analogy of Omelas for. Luckily, all these claims are nonsense anyway, as there is little economic growth if the working class cannot afford to buy anything, and it is always cheaper to avoid an incident than to deal with its consequences. They only make sense from the perspective of an individual entrepreneur who can get away with pushing the externalities onto the rest of society.

mw,

Going in circles, no sense in repeating myself. But in this last comment I just have to stress how genuinely perplexed, if not befuddled, I am that you believe billionaires are necessary to have things like the internet (“started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information”, quoted from the results of a five-second Google excursion), GPS (“owned by the US government”, ditto), and the concept of delivery services, which require no more than a shop in 1950 having a telephone and some means of transportation. Where does such a worldview come from and how does it survive contact with history books and encyclopedias?

Then again, many people were convinced for a long time that society would fall sink into anarchy without monarchs even despite hearing in school about ancient Athens and the Roman republic, so maybe this shouldn’t surprise me.

I was just invited to an online survey (self-selection etc.) with one of the questions asked specifically whether people agreed or not that “nobody deserves to own billions no matter how hard they work”. It occurs to me that such surveys probably have been done before and there should be some literature about the results.

I recall reading about studies showing how badly average people (probably including Joe the plumber) underestimate the extent of inequality.

that you cannot see the essential role of billionaire-founded companies even as you (and everybody else) uses their products daily

I can see, at least, that you would have believed that the pharaoh was required for the spring floods to happen.

They can have their silly superyachts — I really don’t care.

Good for you. And don’t worry about climate change either: you can always park your RV somewhere cooler.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/twelve-billionaires-climate-emissions-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-elon-musk-carbon-divide

mw,

This is not necessarily about the destructiveness of the products, although this may very much become an issue with GenAI. But yes, the inequality is intolerable, and that isn’t Luddism. It is safeguarding democracy and equal opportunity. Liberal democracy is incompatible with one person being able to buy fifty members of parliament and personally owning half the newspapers in a medium-sized country, and meritocracy is incompatible with one person getting 30% of the reward for making 0.01% of the contribution to a company’s success and then their children inheriting that advantage for the next few decades.

In addition to that, I would argue that the existence of billionaires is evidence of market failure. This circles back to the OP separating different kinds of them. Putting aside inheritance and famous artists who sell gazillions of books, merch, or concert tickets, perhaps best understood as a psychological phenomenon, the entrepreneur billionaires who get rich through tech or resource companies can only do so because of some kind of market failure: monopoly, monopsy, vendor lock-in, etc. If a functioning market existed in their area, price competition would by definition and unavoidably render their profit margins too small to make that amount of money. In other words, their wealth has been extracted from suppliers, workers, and customers who in a more efficiently operating economy could have allocated it to more productive pursuits to increase overall prosperity. This kind of billionaire is evidence of a problem in the economy that should be corrected.

Regarding your view that the billionaires are required, yes, billionaire entrepreneurs are as replaceable as this engineer here or as that public relations manager there or as yonder IP lawyer. If you swap out, say, Jobs for another CEO, Apple still happens, minus an early disaster he was responsible for that nearly broke the company and perhaps plus another disaster that he avoided. If Apple didn’t happen, another computer manufacturer and another operating system would have happened instead. There is a massive amount of survivorship bias in this. Smartphones would also have happened. The idea that something that useful to consumers never gets developed and marketed if we simply removed a single person from history is patently absurd (and stands in a bizarre tension with pro-free-market sentiment). We are social beings, and the economy is a social activity.

Second, these guys don’t even do that much to contribute to the success of their businesses. These supposed geniuses do not generally personally design the rockets or the motherboards, and anecdotes like what happened when Jobs tried to do so (the device didn’t work due to, IIRC, overheating) and the 1980s computer game vector graphic that is the Cybertruck show why not. Again, Bezos seems competent, but Jobs, Zuckerberg, Altman, and Musk are not very smart. Just read a bit about them, their worldviews, their claims, and the very expensive, predictable, and widely predicted mistakes they made that would have crippled normal people’s careers but that they could afford because they were already rich and well-connected.

Good for you. And don’t worry about climate change either: you can always park your RV somewhere cooler.

In point of fact, we park our RV (a rather small and inexpensive travel trailer) where it’s warmer (in the desert). This is a net benefit for the climate as our northern house is set with thermostat just to prevent pipes from freezing (this year, the gas company thought the meter must have been malfunctioning) while the trailer in the desert requires a couple of BBQ grill sized tanks of propane for heating and cooking for a month while the electric comes from solar.

Billionaire private jets? The emissions are individually outsized, of course, but trivial in the overall of scheme of things. How do they compare to the emissions of government officials flying to Davos and other junkets and ‘fact finding missions’? And then let’s do international academic conferences that also somehow can’t be done virtually.

You know, a more sophisticated, less unbelievable argument might be, “Yes, yes, we get all this supposedly amazing stuff from billionaire-founded companies, but on balance, it’s just not worth it.

This is probably a bit eccentric but I do feel this way (apart from the “amazing” part) about (at the very least) Uber, Deliveroo, AirBNB, Spotify, Netflix, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, all of which I try never to use and a few of which still cause me considerable inconvenience (not least because my high street became a row of boarded up shops patrolled by maniacal pavement cyclists).

Jim Simons, who recently died, made a fortune of approx $30 billion through the development of quantitative algorithmic trading. Was Chair of the mathematics dept at Stony Brook,quit at age 40 and started out in a strip mall office before renaissance technologies became one of the biggest investment funds extant