[blackjack_]

Actually crazy that Linus just takes home 1.5M per year for one of the largest contributions to tech of anyone in the world. Obviously nobody needs more than that per year, but this pay is 1/100 or 1/1000th of many tech executives that have contributed very little comparatively.

[wmf]

That's the difference between giving your work away for free or not. 100x.

[jancsika]

1st place: $1 million with my work running on billions of devices

A Very Distant 2nd place: $100 million and a beautifully framed picture of my masterpiece, The Conjoined Triangles of Success

[balamatom]

Or maybe the difference between doing work, and controlling humans by convincing them that what they're doing is "work".

[tome]

> Obviously nobody needs more than that per year

What's the smallest amount per year you'd say it is obvious that no one needs?

[potamic]

A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.

There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.

[xienze]

> A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers

Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.

0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.

[logicchains]

>There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people.

Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.

[thomascountz]

   Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true.

This sounds like an oversimplification and assumes "big" is on par with net good.

[krior]

That implies that the goal is to create big companiea.

[lyu07282]

It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.

[com]

Really? Your rhetoric seems to miss a LOT of new global businesses, as well as older ones that are much bigger than ever before.

Spotify, Wise, Adyen, DeepMind just off the top of my head, but there are loads more.

The fact that you don’t know about them is because many tech bros in the USA are pretty parochial and haven’t been exposed to international businesses or indeed tech.

[rmunn]

> Obviously nobody needs more than that per year ...

You are, of course, in a position to know what everybody on Earth needs.

What if someone wants to give $10 million away per year to worthy charities? Will you tell them they can't?

Or... what if someone wants to own something you consider wastefully expensive? Is it your job to tell them they shouldn't? Or is it wiser to adopt the position of humility and say "Well, it's their business, not mine, what they spend their money on"?

It's easy to be motivated by envy, even when we think we aren't. It's much better for your soul, and your peace of mind, to adopt the "let them" mentality, and not decide what other people, whose lives you know nothing about, need.

[apexalpha]

There is a big difference between 'needs' and 'wants'.

I'll defend the argument no one 'needs' more than 1.5 mill per year.

I agree with you greed is endless and lots of people want more and will rationalize their hoarding while others, often in their own communities, suffer.

[zeroCalories]

No one really "needs" anything. You can live perfectly well on minimum wage. But really, you could survive perfectly well as a slave. Infact, the world is content for you to die and get nothing. All "need" is "want". All you deserve is what you have leverage for.

[benj111]

This is a global audience. Define 'minimum wage'

[array_key_first]

This comment feels like playing stupid to such an absurd degree that the argument loses any semblance of thought and you sound like you're yelling at clouds.

Obviously being a slave is not the same as being a millionaire. If you make your argument this reductionist then you don't even sound human anymore, let alone well reasoned.

[queenkjuul]

You absolutely cannot live perfectly well on minimum wage lmao

[zeroCalories]

What you mean is that you can't have everything you want on minimum wage

[queenkjuul]

No, i mean precisely "you can't live perfectly well on minimum wage" -- housing is not a want

[jdub]

Opponents of obscene wealth/income inequality are typically not motivated by envy – that is your own projection.

[queenkjuul]

For going on so much about needs, it's very funny that your one example is about wants

[rmunn]

Interesting vote-to-downvote ratio my comment got. Seems there are a lot more people with anti-libertarian beliefs hanging out at HN at the moment than there are people who lean libertarian.

Since it was not my intention to engage in ideological battle (you'll notice I framed it as "good for your soul and peace of mind" rather than make any kind of political argument for it), I'll leave it there and not reply to any of the answers I got. But it was quite enlightening to see how people reacted to that comment.

[blackjack_]

I guess to reply to the OG, I’m very conservatively putting a bound on a cozy upper middle class lifestyle locally. Linus lives in Portland, Oregon. There you can comfortably live an upper middle class lifestyle on 200k or 300k. Again, conservatively take the upper bound. 1.5M >> 300k, so it’s more than anyone needs to live a cozy life. Technical needs are much lower, but this is a lazy mathematical proof where I prove the Linus number is bigger than a thing much higher than practical physical and emotional money needs and so don’t need to strictly define them.

In your argument case, those are all “nice to haves” (like much of the stuff in an upper middle class lifestyle), but it would be very difficult to argue they are necessary to live life, even at a relatively wealthy capacity.