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You're not really engaging with PG's argument so much as nitpicking around the edges. Are people becoming billionaires primarily by cheating and stealing, or by making something people want? That's the core argument. Were GitLab, Dropbox and Stripe primarily cheating or offering a service people liked? Rather than cherry-picking one or two examples of what you deem the worst offenses, show that "you can't earn a billion dollars" without cheating or abusing others. PG isn't arguing that startups never do anything bad. He's just arguing that they can sometimes earn a billion dollars without cheating.

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My argument was that he wasn't engaging with the topic. I didn't make a particularly heavy case (as you note) for billionaires as cheaters—part of the reason for that is that there are a few low hanging arguments and examples for it and I'd think a counterargument should address them.

I think you're reframing his argument as something softer. Not whether they cheat or exploit, but whether they're primarily doing it. Is the cheating low enough or outweighed by the tremendous love for the product? I'm not sure he would agree that's what he's trying to say, but I would count that as cheating. At best, there is cheating, but it's worth it (for them and, I don't know, maybe/hopefully even for society).

You're also nudging it towards whether some billionaires are sometimes able to do it without cheating. It's hard to make a strong assertion whether the senator or PG's claims are meant strictly all or nothing. Both have language of this type. I couldn't say which one means it, though I think it's fair to judge hyperbole. I alluded to this in the prior comment, but I think it's fairly easy for CEOs to benefit from cheating happening downstream. Did Dropbox spam users' contact lists to grow? Did their PM or PMMs abuse push notifications for marketing? Again, I can see versions where this doesn't count as cheating for some. Or it does, just low enough level or normalized such that people redefine cheating. I think there's a lot of (often low level) cheating just built into business and it's mostly a matter of whether anyone will take you to task for it.

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> I feel like you're also doing something weird—sorta strawmanning and sorta being conveniently inconsistent. You're reframing his argument as something much softer.

I'm going to firmly push back on this. A reasonable, straightforward interpretation of AOC's quote is that "you can't earn a billion dollars" without cheating or abusing others. I'm can believe she may have meant that as hyperbole, but even if she did, PG believes "What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without cheating in some way." He's not doing mental gymnastics to get there; it's a straightforward reading of "you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that."

That makes PG very much not strawmanning. He's arguing directly against her stated position. He doesn't steelman her argument (create a stronger or more generous version of her argument and argue against that), which could have made his argument stronger.

That also means I'm not strawmanning. PG's position is exactly what I said: that it's not impossible to become a billionaire without doing something bad. He is quite clear on that. Nowhere does PG use language implying all billionaires don't cheat. Only AOC does that, if you take her words literally.

I think you're basically doing what you accused me of doing here: greatly softening AOC's position. Did Dropbox spam users' contact lists to grow? (They didn't, AFAIK, though they did have a referral program to invite friends.) This is a huge downgrade in accusation of wrongdoing compared to breaking rules and abusing labor laws.

If you soften your definition of cheating to this level, it's no longer a billionaire thing. It's an everyone thing. Does my gardener report all his cash income? Has a friend ever streamed a TV show less than legitimately? AOC isn't trying to nitpick the smallest infractions. She's trying to paint becoming a billionaire as substantially corrupt.

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What he does for hyperbole is say that all one needs to become a billionaire is make something people want. It’s that simple. There are of course many non-billionaires who make food or write code that people love. There is more than one path to a billion, but many of them involve employing the people making loved products and services and putting one or many layers in between. The billion is largely not possible from just making it. The layers attract cheating. Some might also argue it's wrong to say the billionaire's path involved the making of the thing people love anyway.

This is not unlike a sibling commenter who hypothesizes earning a $50k margin building a home and all you need to do is do it 20k times. There’s a lot in between doing it once and 20k times. The path has many places where cheating will make things easier and possibly required. If the leader avoids the temptation, their employees may not, society may not. If their competitors cheat and they don't, we should applaud them, but they might not be a billionaire then and we can't count them. I'd guess this is a common way potential billionaires do not become billionaires. It probably catches lots of people getting to a million and then more at ten million and then more.

There's a certain amount of "in theory you could make a billion", that's different than whether we have billionaires that didn't cheat. I think it’s worth noting that you are engaging with the issue in a way that he didn’t. This was the primary argument I was making.

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  If you soften your definition of cheating to this level, it's no longer a billionaire thing. It's an everyone thing.

FWIW It may well be an everyone thing. As an argument though, if everyone cheats, billionaires cheat. It's not absolving the billionaires. That lots of people do it is the normalization and redefining bit. And everyone wasn't necessarily doing it at the point anyway. People don’t have to count dark patterns as exploiting, but there's a difference between considering it light cheating and moving it to not cheating.