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they don’t work, they are the real bums doing nothing all day, living with the profits of OUR (the working class) hard work.
They don’t work and are the reason why the workers don’t have a good life.
What are you basing that on? Here’s a list - most are workaholics.
Hard disagree. Proud of you for posting a list of richest people though. Here I have a link too https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
What are you disagreeing with?
And I in no way was saying that the wealth inequity wasn’t absurd.
That most are workaholics. I do not agree with that. Like the general premise of the comment you posted is what I disagree with I guess?
Oh, well, that’s pretty well documented. Most of those guys started companies and worked giant amounts of time.
I mean, literally the first person listed is Elon Musk. If you think he’s a hard worker who only got there through grinding then I have a bridge to sell you.
You’re going to take a single counter example and throw out everything else? I also mentioned there are different types, and some are like Christy Walton, who haven’t worked at all. But neither of those examples means that there aren’t a bunch of workaholics on the list.
Look, at least most of us agree that the wealth inequality is grotesque, but I’m not sure why you have a hard time with the concept that a lot of people get rich by focusing on making money and working very hard at it. I have a hard time with the concept of a CEO making orders of magnitude more than the average worker’s salary, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work a lot.
At some point they venture off to hobbies and try to pat themselves on the back with a bit of philanthropy.
I don’t think so…
Found Al from Home Improvement.
“I don’t think so, Tim.”
Richard Karn is a pretty kickass dude…
They don’t really have to work at all.
I don’t know any billionaires but I knew some extremely wealthy people and they def worked for it. One only slept from 1-5am, we knew because of their email and document edit times. Also had to supply them with satellite internet while they hiked up to my Everest base camp so they could keep working. Dude was intense but literally built an empire in his industry by himself.
People that were already multi-millionaires at birth? No idea.
Dude was intense but literally built an empire in his industry by himself.
ROFLMAO!
This is also my impression of some billionaires. I found this article about the work ethic of some famous people: https://www.inc.com/business-insider/work-ethic-of-super-successful-people.html
I’m not buying 180 hour work weeks, that only leaves 38 hours or so for meals, bathing, etc. I’m not buying 100 hour work weeks for 24 years, either. I am curious what industries need graveyard shift receptionists that aren’t illegal industries.
It was interesting about the sports people, and may or not be believable.
I think they were including things like travel and executive meals/networking as work time in the hours worked per week. I also assume these people really like their work (more like a hobby), which I can see making it easier to put in the hours. And at some point they can probably afford to pay for things that most of us do in our off hours (cook, clean, sit in traffic). So the numbers are definitely greater than butt in chair time.
Ok but 38 hours a week for sleep, hygiene? For years? Sleep deprivation alone causes serious mental and physical health issues and don’t just impact the sole individual. That’s deific, and I can see why the gods have issues, and they rest, according to the mythos.
That like 5 hours per night with 20 min to shower/get ready. Not great, but it can be done by taking meetings during your commute into work, having food delivered and eating/working at the same time. I assume that lady didn’t have kids during her time at Google (when she was working those hours).
Edit: Marissa Mayer did not have kids during her time at Google. She had her first after she’d moved to Yahoo. There are no mentions of her hours there, so I assume they were less (not as fun to put into the article)
Their hobby is working. Thats the difference.
I just don’t see how it’s humanly possible without artificial means and/or serious health consequences (mental and physical). Sleep deprivation is a torture tactic and causes serious issues. Even the gods rest in various mythologies.
My theory is that psychosis due to self-imposed sleep deprivation causes some of the crazier things Elon Musk does.
You’ve got me, there.
I hear shoe polish is toxic… you should rinse out your mouth every now and then.
Are you recommending I put poison in my mouth?
They were making a reference to boot licking
Oh, thanks for the clarification.
I’m one of those weirdos that likes to work (like I would still work 12 hour days if I won the lottery), even if I wouldn’t expect others to do the same. So this type of article is relatable. Didn’t mean to imply that others needed to work this way.
Whoosh.
Dude was intense but literally built an empire in his industry by himself.
With zero employees? Impressive!
Yes.
It’s not work it’s more like a hobby. Work is what people do to survive. See working class vs owner class.
Wealth hoarders can either obsess or not obsess about hoarding more wealth, like any person with a hobby.
So, how much time they spend on their hobby and what hours they spend on their hobby really depends on their temperament.
True
What kind of dragon are they?
Are they a chromatic dragon like Bezos or Musk?
Are they a metallic dragon like Swift?
Either way they still smash smallfolk, it’s a question of if it’s purposeful or not.
Nobody becomes billionaire by working. You become a billionaire by exploiting others work.
Exactly…
Edit: I’m not saying they didn’t work but there is a limit of money someone can make working by themself, so at some point they start to delegate stuff to make more money, so yeah at the end start exploiting someone else to make more money.
Notch is a billionaire. He made Minecraft as a solo project, it became what it was, then he sold it to Microsoft.
Not saying that most billionaires didn’t get there via exploitation, but I don’t think it’s a strict prerequisite.
Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It’s more neutral to state the same thing as, “Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people’s labor.”
And that’s true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn’t exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.
Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it’s true. (That’s why the negative connotations of exploitation don’t apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.
We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we’re imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he’d live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he’s a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others’ labor.
Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.
I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.
But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.
Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.
Notch initially developed Minecraft by himself when he started the project in May 2009. However, as the game gained popularity, he founded the company Mojang in 2010 and brought on additional developers to help improve and expand the game. By the time he sold Mojang and Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014, it was a collaborative effort with a team of developers.
A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.
That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.
And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.
It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.
I don’t believe it, it’s just too many things to do, not just the development but everything around it. And once you lose momentum, people go and find some other game to play. Timing and luck are very important.
The argument is usually there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. As in every part of the system is exploitative. The computer he used to program exploited workers and natural resources. The clothing he wore made in sweatshops. All the food made by exploiting animals, etc.
Therefore those with the most money must’ve cumulatively exploited more than others regardless of how they made the money because the exploitation is unavoidable.
Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.
Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.
I think the argument makes more sense when applied to villainize billionaires. Like there’s makes more money and then there’s makes many orders of magnitude more money. You’re much closer to a millionaire than a billionaire.
Then “anyone with money then me” becomes “anyone with 10,000x more money than me” and you can see where the arguments starts to make sense again. Did this person work 10,000x more than me? Obviously that’s impossible and therefore someone must’ve been exploited.
The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.
If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.
And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.
Ok but how much more money have made Microsoft with Minecraft exploiting other people?, I’m not saying they isn’t a billionaire I’m just saying at some point people start delegating work or like in this case selling it to someone who can delegate the work to make even more money.
You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?
Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)
Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.
What about the billions Microsoft paid which are made off exploiting other people? Dirty money…
Sure, but if that’s the argument, then everyone who has ever bought a laptop that shipped with Windows on it is equally guilty.
Perhaps even moreso. Those people are giving money to Microsoft. He took a billion dollars away from them.
But like, this is classic motte and baily. Your initial position was “all billionaires exploit labor for profit,” but when under scrutiny you just retreat to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so he’s guilty by virtue of simply participating in the system.”
Oh I would classify everyone who gives M$ money as guilty.
Typically there’s an entourage that includes the people who actually run things and/or communicate the decisions made by the oligarch. They will own the company but rarely make direct decisions for the company. They may make business decisions in the beginning of the company history but by a certain size they are detached from most operations and hand down proactive choices about what the company should be doing with its resources.
The primary vehicle for their money is the control of the company they own, the actual stocks that they borrow against for spending money.
Since they have access to any amount of money they want, there is no need to do any actual work. Any interaction with the company is just personal preference and the owner is more useful as a mouthpiece and investment magnet for the company. With few obligations each week, days start to not matter and sleep schedules are fucked. Sobriety becomes a burden since there is nothing to live for - it has all been accomplished. The only thing left to do is get drunk/high and spend money.
Owning a successful company, even a successful local business, is usually enough to detach a person from the average experience of daily work and set schedules. Millionaire business owners are just as warped as a billionaire so it becomes a question of where the shit happened. Billionaires go overseas to do fucked shit.
Anecdotally, most millionaires don’t work. Some have hobbies that make a few thousand here and there but they don’t worry about schedules. They are on rich time.
Edit: the ones who are in business leadership and making millions each pay period are literally sociopaths. They run shit to exercise power. They don’t actually need to be there either except for some decision making meetings and coordinating with other organizations.
Some will, some won’t. Not a hivemind.
There isn’t one type. There are the ones like Bezos and Dell, who got rich by growing one or more businesses, and are still at it. They likely don’t work normal hours, but they likely work more than 40. Some of those, like Gates, get older and move on to other things like foundation work, but not an actual job. Hard to say what kind of hours they work. Then there are the ones like Christy Walton, who inherited their wealth and don’t really ever work.
Best/most honest answer here.
It’s ridiculous to assume they don’t work. They don’t have to but I bet most if not all of the billionaires that didn’t just inherit their fortune are total workaholics.
Yeah, that’s mostly the case. There’s a lot of people here just making a lot of assumptions, but there’s quite a bit of information on billionaires as individuals. For instance, there’s this Forbes list, where you can click each one to get a summary of how they got rich.
Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.
Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.
Just to add, they pay someone to make the board report or PowerPoint presentation for them.
No they do not. But they do emit about 1 million times more CO2 than the average person
Lol
You become a billionaire with stocks. Which requires others to work 9 to 5s.
Nope. A lot of them pretend to work, though.
I would suspect never.
Either they are obsessed with their “work” and do it far more than that, or they do nothing.
