Seems like an odd thing to say in response to such a clear example. Deserves maybe isn’t the right word but they earn it and people are willing to pay for the value so why not?
Even if you had been earning your current salary since the day Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have today even a quarter of a billion dollars. That's the outrageous part. That kind of wealth should not be attainable for any single person. If the company is doing that well, the wealth should go to everyone who's part of it. After all, without them no actual work would be done.
(a) depends on the salary and (b) have you heard of compounding? :) But seriously, that's a weird way to think about it. Nobody pays you to be a billionaire - it happens that you create something that grows in value and takes you up with it. I used to work for Bloomberg - Mike is rich because the thing he created is just that valuable. He didn't take the money from anyone, didn't make anyone pay him a crazy salary. He just made something amazing that's been generating value for 30+ years, and has made lots of people rich in the process. Why begrudge him that?
You know, I respect Mike for what he created and I believe he should be doing very well. Still, he didn't do all the work himself. And billions of dollars is a ridiculous amount of wealth for someone to own. Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.
> Employees should have gotten their fair share of that too.
You mean the employees should have asked for higher salaries and refused to work for his company if the company refused to pay? I don't think a single person has claimed that Bloomberg has paid them a single cent less than the salary specified in their contract.
That's the rub, isn't it? This is a protest against market forces, not against people. If I write a book and everybody in the world pays a dollar to read it (JK Rowling), how on earth could anyone say that I shouldn't have a billion dollars? Shouldn't they be ranting at the all the people who gave me the money of their own accord?
In Bloomberg's case, every employee made a conscious decision to work for the company to increase its value, and every employee was paid what they signed up for. What's unfair about it?
If you somehow published, distributed, translated, and marketed the book yourself then sure, you deserve a billion dollars. However, because you probably didn't do any of those things, just wrote the book (probably had a separate editor as well), you don't.
The second assumption is that people join companies to "increase their value". That may be true for some people on this forum, but most people join companies for a paycheck, because they can't live without income. If no one had to work to live comfortably, I doubt anyone would care about billionaires.
Because there is a limit in how much money a person can spend, and the rest of the money is working in the rent-seeking domain simply reducing the efficiency of everyone else.
> No, nobody deserves a billion dollars, I don't care what they do.
If somebody single-handedly invented a cure for all cancer and made it free to the world... you'd have a hard time convincing me that person didn't deserve a billion dollars.
Just translate "deserves a billion dollars" to "gets to decide how most of a billion dollars gets allocated".
Nobody can actually spend/consume more than ~10% of 1Bn. But if someone is smart enough to make 1Bn, it's probably a good bet for society to "promote that person to being in charge of how most of that 1Bn gets allocated". In most of the civilized world 1Bn doesn't automagically translate into "you're a god now, you can buy off the police and the judges and the government and do whatever". (Now sure, in a corrupt country one could fully spend 1Bn by "buying out" lots of people and institution and making himself a god, but in "the civilized world" it doesn't work, or would require significantly more than 1Bn.)
The alternatives are bureaucracies / central-planning committees. For some things they work well, for some they are catastrophic, but for most thing they are simply very very very suboptimal / wasteful and non-innovative!
Hence we "bet on capitalism" and let the guy "keep" his billion.
(There are issues ofc, one could spend a significant part of the money outside of the "legal market of civilized society" or use them to subtly "bend the system"... hence it's probably a good idea to cap personal wealth at 1Bn or smth like that and force other forms of power be shared or politically mediated. Or to just monitor that the use of the money is on goods and services that are actually legally buyable and are "bought to be used or sold at a profit" instead of "bought to profit the buyer and buy his servitude" or other schemes, or not on fake donations that buy influence.)
...yeah, but there's still a "market mechanism" - you're not going to be able hire and keep a good CEO if you don't pay at least "market rate". Also, probably most people worth >1Bn have not made that by being CEOs, that's more like what you get through successful investment (the "rich daddy" + "some brains" combo), or through being really really incredibly lucky as a founder.