rail enthusiast wife DariaJan 18, 2023

Keep seeing people comment that if they were billionaires, they’d be the good kind, who used their money to help society.

And I have to keep pointing out, you don’t get to be a billionaire if you’re a person who’d help society. You don’t accumulate the billion dollars: you used it helping society.

Show threadCharles J Gervasi ⚡🛡️🥥Apr 11, 2023
@dariaphoebe That means as soon as you build something valuable, you give it away, meaning you lose control of building if further. Even if doing so works and allows the business to keep growing, which is plausible because people certainly can run businesses without having much equity in them, at what point would good people start divesting? Why not $100M or even $10M or $1M?
Show threadbignoseApr 12, 2023

@dariaphoebe was referring to billionaires. I don't know who you're talking about @cgervasi, but there isn't a single billionaire who can be said to have got their billions because they "built something valuable".

The challenge is to find *any* hyper wealthy person who has got there by doing anything that could remotely be called "valuable to society". It's always exploited unjustly, from the resources and labour of others.

Show threadCharles J Gervasi ⚡🛡️🥥

@bignose
Why not? If you build something that generates $100k/yr consistently it's worth $1M. The same ratio holds true if you can create something t that generates $100M, making it worth $1B.

@dariaphoebe

Apr 13, 2023 at 2:28amWeb