[pandoro]

> What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way.

> But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy.

There is no doubt that Graham is right in saying there is a formula to becoming a billionaire and that formula involves creating products that help your users in some way.

However this is very narrow, reductionist interpretation of AOC's comment. You need to put it into perspective of the massively increasing global wealth inequality.

In 2011, billionaires owned 4.5 trillion USD of wealth. Today, fifteen years later, it's 20.1 trillion USD. This amounts to about 20% of the entire planet's GDP. That means 0.000003% of humans capture 20% of the value globally created. The top 12 billionaires own more than 50% of the bottom half of humanity.

How can you sensibly argue that this is not exploitation?

[agrajag]

GDP is a measure of the amount of commerce per year, while global wealth is a net accumulation of all the work that has happened in human history.

Billionaires obviously get a disproportionate amount of income per year, but it’s far from 20% of all the world’s GDP. To make your math work that would assume they got all the wealth in a single year.

[pandoro]

You are right that I should have said "That means 0.000003% of humans own 20% of the value globally created" instead of capture.

However, getting relatively accurate and meaningful numbers for billionaires income is probably virtually impossible. Hence the comparison to their wealth which is known. I think it's still a valuable and common comparison. See https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_rich_26_trend_percentx... or this New York Time article: https://archive.is/KvbQH or this Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2026/may/15/wealth-br...

[chad_c]

You can't.

For some subset of the population, they are okay with exploitation as long as they are able to exploit someone else that is lower on the capitalist hierarchy.