[AlexMuir]

An alternative is that this money goes into buying 10 apartments, pushing their value up, and making even more money for the buyer. Buying this $13m car will transfer money to dozens of employees, subcontractors and shareholders in Bugatti. "Blow this amount" and "Waste the money" = the money is put into circulation. If the buyer doesn't "Blow the money" then they either keep it, or invest it and gain even more money from someone else.

[perfmode]

This is wasted labor. These people could instead spend their time more productively.

[imbusy111]

On what exactly? I feel like we don't have a shortage of people able to execute, but rather a shortage of good ideas or ideas we are willing to invest money in.

[TeMPOraL]

> but rather a shortage of good ideas or ideas we are willing to invest money in.

We have no shortage of good ideas or socially useful things to do. What we have is a problem with getting funding for these useful pursuits.

[perfmode]

See: parable of the broken window

[Fins]

The same could be said about 95% of SV hackers. At least Bugatti employees do honest work for living and do not make the world a worse place.

[cycrutchfield]

Not according to the market

[zepearl]

This is maybe a little bit (in a contorted way) similar to "Parable of the broken window"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

In this case there are probably some highly skilled people involved who were able to increase their know-how (doing research to make the car somehow be xxM$ worth) thanks to being funded by whoever bought the car, but the whole exercise generates probably very little intellectual value outside of this context.

[cycrutchfield]

>the whole exercise generates probably very little intellectual value outside of this context

Why do you assume that the R&D required to produce this vehicle is somehow wasted effort?

[zepearl]

I did not assume that it was "wasted" ("little" is more than 0).

[perfmode]

Precisely the parable of the broken window.