| Bezos is not a billionaire because he pays people less money than what he is able to capture from their work. He is a billionaire because he owns a lot of shares in Amazon, and Amazon is a trillion dollar company. There are examples where a group of people came together and decided to share in the profit or loss of a venture, and worked on it as employees (REI is a popular US outdoor equipment company that was started this way). Amazon seems to have chosen a path where instead of asking individual employees to take a loss or break even for 20 years, they paid their employees while the company absorbed those losses and scaled. The "billionaire" bit here seems arbitrary. Bezos is a billionaire because he owns a lot of shares because he didn't have a lot of cofounders. If he had started Amazon with 20 different cofounders then he (probably) wouldn't be a billionaire. Either way, the concept of exploiting labor for profit doesn't impact his billionaire status. I'd be open to having a separate discussion around what it means to "exploit" labor, but on this topic I think moving the conversation from the concept of billionaire founders to how the system oppresses those that fall below a certain income would be more productive. I don't know why Paul funds or doesn't fund certain founders, but if I were Paul I would be funding those founders that I believe can start companies that will eventually have stock collectively worth a lot of money. From the stories I've read - most of the founders that Paul funded DO plan on splitting their profits amongst all their employees - purely by virtue of when he invests in a company, the founders usually were the only employees. If I was Paul my dream would be that a company started by a small group of initial founders would be able to get big without having to "exploit" (or hire) any people at all. |