[newbYhrly]

Musk posted screens of his Elden Ring progress a couple weeks after launch. Given other players had to sink 60-80 hours in to get to the same point Musk was broadcasting, he was working 48 hours a day at his companies and on Elden Ring.

Bezos has given interviews about his habits. He works maybe 10-20 hours a week.

Billing 40 hours every week to run scripts that generate a Github repo structure in minutes has been profitable for me though. Not going to knock Musk and Bezos optimizing for themselves by gaming others agency.

[ITB]

Picasso offered a drawing in a napkin for $1M dollars, even though it took him 1 min to draw it. You know the gist. Bezos might do 20 hours a week of “work” because he scaffolded a giant organization around his brain, so he only needs to provide certain input. Besides, much of the non-work time, such as public speaking and so forth, is actually work.

Also the ultimate test is whether after confessing to your real contribution, people are ok. I don’t think any amazon employee was annoyed after hearing this so called interview, whereas is your company knew what you were charging them for, they would fire you.

[newbYhrly]

He had 50 people invest tens of thousands each to build that scaffold.

He’s not a genius just well networked.

Idle idolatry of normal human beings with no effort to verify their real outputs creates an unfalsifiable truth Bezos is a lynchpin to reality.

Ooo oo I heard it through the grapevine, Bezos is not what you might call “divine”…

The rich did not invent science, engineering, and economic activity. Human behavior gives rise to those things organically. The rich are merely playing information awareness constraint games; a man named Farmer is a farmer, an engineer is an engineer, and there’s no reason to allow them agency to learn other things.

His value is rooted in traditions of political correctness to buy into that narrative, not immutable laws of nature.

Every worker faces the risk of their livelihood vanishing tomorrow. One slip of the tongue costing their job. Why are these guys insulated from the same?

[somenameforme]

Bezos parents were teenagers of no significant means. After they divorced, his mother married an "uneducated" (in the sense he had not attended college) Cuban immigrant, Miguel Bezos, again of no significant means. After Miguel graduated from the elite University of New Mexico, they moved to Houston so he could work for Exxon. During high school Jeff took on an elite internship working the morning shift at McDonalds.

It's not entirely rags to rich because gramps indeed did well for himself and had a nice big ranch out in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. But it's pretty close to it, and overall a pretty cool story.

[newbYhrly]

You stopped short of detailing the well documented part of 50 people chipping in 25k.

That alone is a testament to how the country has changed. How many McDonalds burger flippers have that social network now?

His childhood and his family greatly benefited from pre-Reagan social programs.

How sad if the mega-mega-billionaires were mega-mega-millionaires. The rich of their childhood got through high taxes ok.

If such taxation is immoral, let’s discuss then the advantages immoral taxation in the past provided them and accept them as less uniquely gifted and successful on their own then.

[somenameforme]

He didn't found Amazon in high school. Instead, alongside working at McDonalds, he also graduated valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and so on. He then graduated from Princeton (almost certainly on a full ride scholarship), and again graduated near the top of his class (a member of both Phi Kappa Beta and Tau Beta Pi) with degrees in both electrical engineering and computer science. From there he worked for 8 more years until he set upon founding Amazon.

[OkayPhysicist]

That's a power balance issue far more than a fairness argument.

If my boss is happy to pay this amount for my level of work output, why should it matter whether I'm spending 40 hours or 4 doing it? In fact, to suggest otherwise is downright Marxist, asserting that the value of my labor is the time I spent doing it, rather than the value someone else is willing to pay.

Do you subscribe to the labor theory of value for goods, or just people?