[rocgf]

Look, to be honest, I just think we have vastly different opinions and views on the world and how it works. There is absolutely nothing in your message that gave me any pause, and I think we start from irreconcilable positions.

> I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.

I do think that there is probably too much inequality for it to be healthy for society, but I am not of the opinion that "billionaires should not exist" or that anyone rich is some version of evil.

I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output. Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.

> I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here

In previous replies you associated hard work with physically strenuous work. I think they are orthogonal concerns. Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities. By your definition, someone shovelling bricks for 8 hours is working harder than someone working 8h in an office. By mine, that is not necessarily true.

Also, even if your definition was true, paying someone purely on how 'hard' they work would still not be a good idea.

> Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.

This sentence does not sound as good as you think it does.

Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".

> I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds

Me neither, but have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX, in a field entirely dominated by national agencies. No matter which way you cut it, SpaceX has ushered in a new era in space exploration. I won't even bother arguing more about this, this is honestly ridiculous.

[lapcat]

> I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output.

Half the population has better than average work ethic.

Does Musk have a better work ethic than his lesser paid employees? That's dubious. After all, he infamously demanded that Twitter employees be "extremely hardcore" and work "long hours at high intensity". But these employees are not compensated nearly as much as Musk. They're not even rewarded at all in many cases. He still fired a bunch of them afterward, even the women who tweeted a photo of herself sleeping in the office.

What about the work ethic of the poor people who work multiple jobs because one job doesn't pay enough? How is there any relation whatsoever between work ethic and income? Note that Jeff Bezos, one of the other five richest men whose income doubled, actually quit his job! You don't make massive money from working for wages, you make massive money from owning assets and waiting for them to appreciate. This is how Musk got his PayPal payoff despite having been removed from power by other investors.

There are countless people in the world who are extremely smart and have a great work ethic. But that doesn't automatically bring great wealth. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time. Do you need to be smart and have a good work ethic to take advantage of the opportunity? Yes, probably. But most people aren't lucky enough to get those opportunities in the first place.

It also helps to ruthlesslessly pursue wealth with no regard for ethics...

> Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.

He makes more money than virtually all of us. That's beyond dispute, and indeed the subject of the submitted article. It's basically a tautology though and not an explanation.

> Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities.

Well, as I mentioned, loading shampoo bottles into crates for 8 hours was definitely on the edge of my abilities.

> Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".

You're missing the point. Musk was kicked out of his own company not just once but twice for incompetence. Yet he still got a $175 million payoff. That's failing upwards.

He ought to be kicked out of Twitter for incompetence too, but unfortunately he can't be.

> have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX

I did, and I already said I don't like it: "I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit."

[rocgf]

You seem hell bent on pretending to not understand what I am saying. I'm sorry, but I will not be replying anymore.

[lapcat]

Why would I pretend? That makes no sense. I have nothing to gain from pretending.

At this point, more than 24 hours after the article submission, which is apparently now flagged, and 14 hours after my previous comment, nobody is reading this thread except for you and me.

You can call me stupid if you want, though you would be sorely mistaken, but don't call me a liar.

[rocgf]

I don't think you're stupid or a liar, but there are two strong trends I'm noticing recently - playing the contrarian and a hate for the rich.

To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth. What you've done in previous replies is a typical reductionist approach, which is to pretend that a multivariate problem, with those variables on various continuums, can be presented as "Elon Musk doesn't work harder than someone stocking shelves with shampoos". I honestly do not understand how someone frequenting HN could genuinely think that this is a valuable argument.

In simpler terms, if you exclude all the obvious counter-examples like inheritance, crypto pump and dumps, lottery winners and so on, it is empirically true that richer people work harder than poor people. Before you give some example of how some billionaire simply got lucky, I did say about that this is a multivariate equation. There are many, many things that go into it, and luck is one, hard work another.

The simple logic is: you work harder -> your productivity is higher -> you make more money. You may find some exaggerated counter-example, but this is the truth.

If Elon had just been involved in the PayPal business, yeah, he would be some forgotten rich dude living his life on some island. It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.

There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.

[lapcat]

> playing the contrarian

I don't "play" contrarian. If my views happen to be contrary to yours, or to the majority's, that's just how it is, how I am, and how I've always been from a very young age. Nonetheless, there are plenty of subjects on which I'm in agreement with the majority.

> hate for the rich

Well, my view is that our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless, so if there's any hate, I would argue that it's a rational hate rather than an irrational hate. In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.

> To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth.

To me, it's not an axiom. I don't consider it to be self-evident or even true. If you don't want to argue over your axiom and defend it from criticism, you're free to walk away, but you shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't accept your beliefs as evidently true.

> It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.

The word "impressive" means "evoking admiration through size, quality, or skill". The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike? If a person that I vehemently oppose gets elected POTUS, am I supposed to "admire the accomplishment"? Only 45 people have ever been President, so in that sense it's an accomplishment, yet "admiration" is not really the appropriate attitude in these case; more like "horror". I understand that if you admire Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, then you might admire Musk too, but I personally don't give a crap about any of them and even consider aspects of them to be a negative for society.

Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler? He did have a major impact, changing the world forever, doing some unprecedented things, and greatly affecting tens of millions of people. (I'm reminded of the sarcastic conversation that Paul had with Stilgar and Korba in Dune Messiah.)

Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.

> There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.

I was happy to ignore Musk as much as possible until recently, and to me his followers seemed very much like a cult. Unfortunately, Musk acquired Twitter, which was my social network of choice, and then proceeded to wreck it in many ways, which is mainly why I hate him in particular. Again, it's not some weird "irrational" hate but rather a direct reaction to his actions.

[rocgf]

> In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.

Finally, we agree on something. This is exactly it. The problem is the system, which I am happy to change. The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.

Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.

> To me, it's not an axiom.

I struggle to understand why anyone would think this. So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money? That would be an incredible statement to defend.

> The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike?

If you have subjectively decided that Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI are not impressive, then I'm afraid we simply view the world differently. I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress.

The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures. I can.

> Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler?

Anther clue that we simply think very differently. Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example. Imagine if this same amount of work, ingenuity, scrappiness was applied from 'good'. Then we might have had two rich entrepreneurs that you'd find just as despicable simply for being rich.

> Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.

Back to what the real problem is - the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.