[rybosworld]

Tim Dillon said summarized it pretty well - can't remember or find the exact quote. Something to the effect of:

"Look around at all these things I have - how could I be wrong when I have so much?"

And that's how you get the Andreessen's and Musk's of the world stating these nonsensical things as truth. In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick. The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.

You don't need to look very hard to see this is what they really believe. Elon has done extremely silly things like claiming he was the best Path of Exile player in the world because he paid several people grind his account to a high-level. Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.

[lordnacho]

What I took from the video game thing is that he thought he could fool people.

It's very obvious to gamers when someone hasn't played, it actually doesn't matter whether you have high level gear.

There's things you can't buy with money, and respect is one of them. He fundamentally doesn't understand how status works. He could, for free, just put out a video where he says "look at me, I'm a busy CEO, but I play this game even though I'm bad at it".

People would think positively about that.

[irishcoffee]

This is made even more interesting by the fact that musk was caught misrepresenting himself playing the computer game Diablo in the not-so-distant past. IIRC he was either buying accounts or paying someone else to stream on his behalf. [0]

[0]https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/elon-musk-video-games-scandal...

[steveklabnik]

Also in sort of stark contrast to the "here's my elden ring build", which was pretty incoherent, and so was believed to be actually his.

[irishcoffee]

As a complete aside, I beat that game along with the DLC, lvl 170 (scadu 19), all by myself, and it was by far the biggest gaming accomplishment of my life.

People who lie about things like that make me sad. It's actually a hard thing to do. Waste of time? Absolutely.

[visarga]

> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.

In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.

Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.

[mayneack]

That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?

[brandensilva]

They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.

I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.

Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.

[hackyhacky]

> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.

Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.

[AndrewKemendo]

They’re just the most ruthless

If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:

The most ruthless always wins

That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.

That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation

That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates

There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption

[Zigurd]

That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.

[svachalek]

Tribal chiefs are not authoritarians? Because basically every Stone Age village has one.

[tolciho]

A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.

[Zigurd]

Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.

[mayneack]

I promise there are thousands to millions of people just as ruthless. Most of them just end up as petty criminals.

[AndrewKemendo]

No doubt

Placement almost perfectly dictates whether high level psychopaths wind up in jail or the boardroom

[skdhfkdjfhsjk]

"A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a nation."

- Chuang Zhu (late 4th century B.C.)

[rybosworld]

> In a loopy recursive way, it is.

The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.

It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.

Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.

Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.

[horsawlarway]

Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.

To go back to your biology point:

Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!

Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.

But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.

Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.

They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.

---

So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.

[Teever]

No. it certainly isn't.

I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.

It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.

Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.

I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.

Slow and steady wins the race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E

[Zigurd]

I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.

[asdff]

The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.

They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.

[asdff]

>Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway

You don't even need an amazing job to do that though

[a123b456c]

Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?

I don't think many people would agree with such positions.

I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.

[etchalon]

OK, but ... imagine Andreessen said, "I don't eat food."

No one would think that was a reasonable position.

No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"

We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.

We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.

No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.

[hackyhacky]

I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.

Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.

All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

[asdff]

Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.

[push-pull-fork]

If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?

How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?

How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?

Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?

[coldtea]

Also doesn't help that wealth means they can own newspapers or social media to promote their shitty takes as gospel, and have armies of regular Joe fanbois, that kiss their ass and tell us how wise they are...

[overfeed]

> Having enough money to pay someone to play the game for you, is the same as being good at the game, in his mind.

It's worse than that: he thinks the point of playing games is to be number 1 in the world.

[jorblumesea]

I really don't think he thought it was equivalent, he was just larping and thought he could trick people.

[bko]

You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything. "How could I be wrong, look how handsome I am"

To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit. It can be a better rocket design, some insight into human psychology that can help you raise money, or something else.

Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare, and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given. At any extreme, you have to have both luck and skill. The best athletes are both incredibly gifted and incredibly hard working

They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.

I think the flip side would be "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" I prefer why aren't you happy myself, but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world, why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?

[datsci_est_2015]

> Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare

You and I have vastly different mental models of the world. Or, at least, very different definitions of “luck”. For example, I would probably say that anyone who is rich through a “family business” has quite a bit of “luck” to thank (by my definition), except for the founder. And even then, the founder is usually “lucky” by connections (e.g. generous government contracts).

> and people with great wealth don't have that luxury because they would squander it away and won't be able to grow what they have been given

If I had to guess, it probably takes about an IQ of 90 to not lose generational wealth, unless there’s an addiction at play. Maybe even less.

[bko]

So your contention is that it's easy to run a family business and manage immense wealth?

I'm going to take a wild guess, but I would bet you never ran a business. I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business. Sure they give you the whole "I am very fortunate and lucky in my life" but never "yes, it's trivial to run a business"

And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual

[datsci_est_2015]

> So your contention is that it's easy to run a family business and manage immense wealth?

No, I said except for the founders. Real easy to be the brother or son or aunt to the family business founder and become rich.

> I've never heard this from anyone that ran a business.

I never said “not time consuming” or “stressful”, which I feel like you’re putting those words in my mouth. The first thing I usually hear from (especially braggarts) small business owners is about the biggest contract that they have, which is usually some government contract or bid that they won from Walmart or Amazon. When ZIRP dried up I heard less bragging about such contracts.

> And my other bet would be you had never had any extended interaction with a 90 IQ individual

All four years of my American public high school education. I’m saying the bottom 25% of my high school class might lose generational wealth through poor decisions (90 IQ is roughly 75% of population). I think that’s fair. We are talking about generational wealth, after all. I can think of a few 90 IQ people from my graduating class that are trust fund kids who haven’t managed to lose it all yet.

[rhines]

The greatest philosophers are rarely the wealthiest people. Wealth generally comes from being presented with opportunities, putting in the work to make the most of those opportunities, and being lucky enough that they end up being good. Intelligence can be an asset here, but bigger assets are knowing people already in positions of power, already having resources you can leverage, and being willing sacrifice years of your life in pursuit of wealth. Those factors don't require you to be well reasoned, logical, or intelligent.

[rybosworld]

> You say financial success as though it is completely independent of pretty much everything.

I never made a suggestion that financial success is completely independent of anything.

> They could be wrong on some things but to pretend they don't have a somewhat functional world model that is different enough from the consensus that it allows them to exploit it for great wealth is just naive.

It's naive to think that financial success sometimes blinds people into thinking they are generally an expert in all areas?

> but sure, random person commenting on the internet about how the wealthiest people in the world don't know anything about the world

Also, never said anything to this effect.

> why haven't you exploited your superior knowledge relative to said billionaire to amass great wealth for yourself?

How could you possibly know if I have, or have not?

Your entire reply is effectively an unrelated tangent to what I said.

[ghywertelling]

I think Marc might be referring to "navel gazing". If introspection is so important, we wouldn't need to do experiments to figure out what is reality. He could be advocating for Empiricism. You will find quotes like "If unsure, take a decision and make it right later. Don't get trapped in analysis paralysis". Basically two camps are fighting here : those who think reality can be figured out by thinking alone. and those who think we need to get out there and collect data and analyse it. I am personally biased toward Radical Conversatism.

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) was a British theoretical physicist and mathematician whose work on the Dirac equation (1928), which merged quantum mechanics with special relativity, predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the positron. His approach to this discovery was deeply rooted in a mathematical philosophy that valued elegance, consistency, and a belief that nature is fundamentally mathematical, often placing him ahead of experimental validation.

Radical conservatism in physics, often associated with John Archibald Wheeler, is a philosophical approach that adheres strictly to established, successful principles—like quantum mechanics or general relativity—while pushing them to extreme, unexpected logical conclusions. It involves modifying as few laws as possible (conservative) while daringly following the math to radical insights.

[user20010]

Hmm, I think this statement needs some support "To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit."

Money simply invested in a market fund generally creates wealth, and that doesn't require a model of the world that's much more sophisticated than the average person's.

"Some people fall ass backwards into money through luck, but that's rare," This feels unsupported as well. How could you even attempt to quantify what percent of success is due to luck, much less establish confidence that this percent is going down?

[vintermann]

> To create great wealth in a vibrant capitalist society you have to have some model about the world you can exploit.

As an individual? No. There's an interesting paradox here.

The paradox is that almost no matter what game you're playing, you want to play safe when you're winning and take chances when you're losing. That's what most rich people actually do, and naturally they take as few chances as they can.

But the richest of the rich, aren't going to be those. The very richest are going to be those who are comfortably winning, but still feel the need to take high-risk bets. Usually because of a pathological need to prove themselves.

A few of them, that is. For every Jobs, Musk etc. there's going to be twenty rich failsons who failed in their big bets. You just don't hear about them - why would you, they're now a much lower tier of rich.

So I don't think it's necessary to assume the super-rich has a better model of the world than average. Because of this effect, I think they're more likely to have deeply flawed models of the world, and in particular, deeply self-destructive personal values.

There are a number of recent antics from Musk and Trump in particular which I think can illustrate that well. You'd think they'd both be happier people if they were more content with what they had and weren't so eager to fuck up the world for the rest of us - but their messed up personal values get in the way of that.

[gentoo]

I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."

[b00ty4breakfast]

that's pretty rich coming from Tim "They're paying me enough to ignore slavery" Dillon.

[longislandguido]

> The fact that they have so much wealth is a testament that their way of thinking is always right.

At least wealth is a quantifiable measure of success in our society.

In contrast, many posters on HN think they're always right (it's notorious for it) with no qualifications whatsoever.

This discussion is a sea of jealously and a perfect example.

[b00ty4breakfast]

>This discussion is a sea of jealously and a perfect example.

Yes, the only reason anyone could have for criticizing the ultra-wealthy is jealousy. It's just the haders, b.

[longislandguido]

You eat booty for breakfast?

[b00ty4breakfast]

are you a guido from Long Island?

[codechicago277]

HN posters are famously overconfident, sure, but wealth is a bad measure of success. Putin is one of the richest people on earth, but responsible for extreme political repression and global instability. Pablo Escobar did very well financially. Financial success says how well you’ve extracted wealth from others, and approximately zero about your contributions to society.

Einstein, Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Orwell had tremendous public impact and “success”, with relatively little wealth to show for it.

Wealth gives those with shallow sense of values an easy scoreboard to look down on others, which is how you get disasters like Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed attempt at “effective altruism”, or almost-trillionaires like Musk gutting the federal government, while extracting billions in public funding and subsidies.

[longislandguido]

There's always going to be outliers, but there is this general premise that guys like Marc, Elon, and Bezos are failures in spite of their wealth. There is no way they Forrest Gump'd their way into that money.

In fact, there is a bizarre visceral hatred for all the old Netscape guys here—Marc, Brendan, and Jamie—who in particular probably hates this place back even more, even though they are directly responsible for 95% of HN posters having jobs today.

[scubbo]

> wealth is a bad measure of[...]your contributions to society

To be _abundantly_ clear, I agree with you and your assumptions here - but, please note that you are making some assumptions here about what "success" is defined as, which might explain why other people disagree.

[codechicago277]

Sure, but with that definition parent’s comment becomes “wealth is a good indicator of wealth”, which while true certainly isn’t useful.

I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact, which is a bad measure for the reasons I stated. They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”, whatever that is, which is even more of a problem but for different reasons.

[scubbo]

> I’m assuming they meant to imply wealth is a measure of positive social impact

I don't see any basis for assuming that (again, I say this respectfully - I hold similar values to what I'm assuming you do)

> They also might mean it as a proxy for “rightness”

This feels closer, but still not right IMO. I see it more as a claim that "success" is "ability to achieve one's _own_ aims" - personally, internally-established objectives - whereas you (and I) are trying to tie "success" to external, pro-social measures. Basically, selfishness vs. community.

[gentoo]

Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.

[nkrisc]

There is obviously some minimum level of competence and intelligence required to be wealthy (not losing all of it), but for many becoming fabulously wealthy is as much a matter of circumstance than anything else. I would guess most people here would also be billionaires if they had the same opportunities and circumstances as Musk.

[array_key_first]

I don't think there's a minimum level of competence even. You can get very wealthy by sheer luck and timing.

Also, a lot of wealthly people aren't stupid like we think. They're evil, which is different. And being evil is actually pretty good for being wealthy. Most people are encumbered by their morality. Evil people are not, so they can do much more.

[raddan]

This reminds of me the following wonderful Numberphile video [1] where they compare the success of billionares to gas molecules: "everybody is just bumping around randomly but the one person that, you know, that became a billionare or something--they wrote their autobiography 'how I got here, all the great decisions I made to beat everybody'... It was just random." I've always wondered whether it would be possible to compute the expected number of billionaires with a model like this. If the number is higher than the expectation, well ok, some fraction of them are consciously steering themselves into billionaire-hood. Otherwise, it's probably dumb luck. It's a fun null hypothesis.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvwgdrC8vlE&t=57s

[andy_ppp]

Everyone thinks they are right, but it’s having the grace to be able learn, be wrong and develop is the point here! Also your average HN commenter does not get listened to or promoted anywhere to the same degree!