[api]

You don't even need such extreme cases. Companies that are insanely successful are generally not the ones that innovate the most and rarely are they founded by inventors. Not only is Tim Berners-Lee not rich but Netscape failed too. Meanwhile the largest success story of the web is Facebook, a company that uses it to strip mine personal data and manipulate our attention.

Our system rewards value extraction (rent, financial hacks) far more than value creation.

[mailxplorer]

TBL is worth over $50 million.

[InitialLastName]

What's the economic value of the World Wide Web? How tiny a portion of that should we really allocate to the innovators who create the concepts our economy is built on?

[lajhsdfkl]

So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?

Your rhetorical question provides no value. I want to know how we should decide who should be rewarded, how we can obtain the money to reward them and what benefit does rewarding them in this fashion provide to society.

[salawat]

That's a bit disingenuous.

Not all rewards need be monetary or zero-sum.

Also, one does not reward someone to provide a benefit to oneself. THAT is thinking that creates the greatest inequality in our system if you ask me.

Oh, let me pay this employee... but wait! That money goes right into a retirement account, that invests in an index fund, that supports me and my business partners...

A reward is something given at a COST to another in recognition of their accomplishment. You give it without thought of a return, because what they have done is made your life better.

The fact no one in economics wants to think through the money trail thoroughly doesn't change that the corporation is no longer a provider of services as it's primary goal... It is an enricher of the few who jump on the equity train.

[coldtea]

>So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?

Sure.

An innovation tax, and a group of cross industry and academic people (e.g. a mix of successful founders, engineers, great researchers, Nobel winners, plus a jury of common folk etc) that decides, every e.g. 5-10 years, who gets to share the money among a shortlist of potential benefactors.

"Hmm, looks like this Turing person did good work in retrospect that hugely helped our society. Let him have $100 million of the $1 billion innovation fund".

[WJW]

That seems like an amazingly gameable system. In particular, it would reward the ones who are best at taking credit, which are not necessarily the same ones that did the actual innovating. Further, it requires the deciding group to be reasonably free of prejudice. As little as a few decades back it would have completely ignored any contributions by women, for example. Finally, I would not be surprised if an outsized amount of the 'prize money' went to friends/family/acquintances of the people in the decider group.

[lajhsdfkl]

And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded? What about the millions without healthcare? Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?

[coldtea]

>And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded?

Who said that? For one, we can tax people more. For another, we could do a better job on spending the tax money (e.g. stop trillions going to tax cuts or military spending or BS projects).

>Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?

I mentioned a panel of non-government successful people, on academy and the market, who votes, not an "institution", much less a "bureaucratic" one.

[api]

Good, and thanks for correcting, but he poor compared to Zuckerberg. All the latter did was riff successfully on the already established social media concept and then sell out his user base more brazenly than competitors.