[Twixes]

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.

[xyzelement]

(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?

[Twixes]

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.

[sudhirj]

> 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?

[Konnstann]

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.

[La1n]

>He didn't take the money from anyone

So he summoned it out of thin air

[heavenlyblue]

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.

[james_s_tayler]

>After all, without them no actual work would be done.

Leadership is the other side of that coin.

[Twixes]

It is. It's not that leadership should get nothing. They just shouldn't get everything.

[james_s_tayler]

They don't really get everything. They often give a lot up to get what they do too.