[sznio]

I thought about the same recently, in the context of the Epstein files.

You don't become a billionaire by being moral. Each time you don't do something because it's wrong, you lost opportunity to make more money. You start with smaller things, then your standards slide more and more, until you are a billionaire, and you're so corrupt there isn't anything for you to do except make more money.

Which makes me wonder, how many people went to Epstein's island not because they like diddling kids, but because they needed to network with Epstein to make more money. How many actively participated just to be in his in-group? Not because they enjoyed, they just were so corrupt that they would do anything for business.

[savanaly]

Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

[yoyohello13]

You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the MOST money.

[cootsnuck]

"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.

[ambicapter]

"relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this sentence, no?

[tsimionescu]

Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.

[troosevelt]

Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.

[trinsic2]

> There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.

I'm calling this out.

That's a personal belief, not everyone sees the world this way. Some of us believe that some things are objective and deontological.

IMHO our move toward too much utilitarianism has created the corrupt conditions we are living in

[keybored]

Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.

> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.

The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558

[PunchyHamster]

You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.

It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.

[mystraline]

Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.

It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.

Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.

[sillyfluke]

>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers

Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this. I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.

But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).

Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.

[troosevelt]

Isn't this kind of Nietzsche's slave morality?

I don't, for example, think Phil Knight is an immoral person who intentionally did wrong things, though his company certainly has. You don't just become a billionaire and become corrupt, you have a mindset that justifies what you're doing and you conveniently excuse yourself or are unaware because you're dealing with things outside of your scope because a single person can't handle that much authority without delegating to people who will inevitably do corrupt things. PK didn't start out wanting to be a billionaire, he just wanted to sell shoes and maybe become a millionaire.

I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates. I'm more likely to call someone immoral who interacted with him post-conviction than a billionaire, but generally labeling people moral/immoral instead of their actions misses why people do what they do. Very few people want to be considered immoral, but many people don't have an issue excusing immoral actions. Does that make sense?

If you want to get people top stop doing things like this, you have to attack the actions, not the person, because when you say all billionaires are immoral, it gives them nowhere to retreat, it gives them more reason to dig in, because who are you but some seemingly envious person who's made just as many compromises, just at lower levels?

[mikkupikku]

> slave morality

I think if you're saying: "These billionaires are bad because they do bad things, and being so rich makes their capacity for harm much worse."

That's not slave morality, at least not necessarily, because the "doing bad things" can probably be expressed using normal classic values. It becomes slave morality when you abbreviate the above to: "These billionaires are bad because it's bad for anybody to be so rich."

[trinsic2]

Yeah but I don't think this is being said here.

Are you just trying make a point outside of what is being said? I'm hearing people saying the first part in many of these responses.

[mikkupikku]

I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.

[shevy-java]

> I suspect the vast majority of people who interacted with Epstein did it just to make connections and they made excuses, eg, Gates.

I am not sure about that.

Sex may have played a factor in this. I use the word "may", as I don't know for certain, but I don't buy into the "just to make connections". The superrich don't really need to "make connections" on an island where underage girls party.

[jacquesm]

> on an island where underage girls party

on an island where they traffic underage girls and rape them.

[trinsic2]

Thank you for making that clarification. It seems like the parent was trying to normalize the "underage" and "party" part.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> an island where underage girls party.

What an absolutely gross mischaracterization of what happens there.

[jacquesm]

This the mindblowing thing about the whole Epstein saga: so many people knew about this. And yet, the mutually assured destruction of having been associated with Epstein was enough to effectively impose a code of silence on all of them.

[frm88]

Have you ever heard of the Bohemian Grove? The birthplace of the Heritage Foundation? There you have them all, in one club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove

[jacquesm]

No, I never heard of them, so thank you for the pointer.

[defrost]

Secret Men's Business is global: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weld_Club

They have such clubs in your part of the world no doubt? (Netherlands, IIRC?)

The fostering of circles of trust, backed up with Kompromat, to strengthen elite solidarity, ease insider trading, treat handshakes as binding, and cover up the odd "unfortunate incident" is seemingly as old as time.

#PigGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggate is loosely related.

[BlueTemplar]

Oh yeah, plenty of that, even scientists and thinkers were tempted, we had plenty of details even before the 'files', thanks to Maxwell's phone book :

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/10/i-called-everyo...

[bityard]

If making increasingly immoral decisions is all it takes to be a billionaire... then man, I have truly been wasting my life's potential

[toomuchtodo]

You also have to be lucky. Have you tried being more lucky?

[overfeed]

Necessary - but not adequate.