Every time this topic comes up and the comments are full of discussions about the little people I think of it. I do wonder if Murakami was inspired in any way by similar discussions.
Just because Uber made a billion dollars by outcompeting terrible companies doesn't mean that Uber isn't also a terrible company. A crime lord is still a crime lord even if he displaced other, smaller, crime lords in getting his place.
This is a great example of why you can't earn a billion dollars without doing something immoral.
First of all, you don't know how to build a house, you have some vague idea of it, maybe even some innovative one, and hire people who actually know how to implement that idea to do it for you, but you pocket some of the money because they don't know the exact worth, and because they need to live and no one else is paying them.
Then, what happens next is that some competitor springs up, and they want to poach your people by offering to pay them $475k and only keeping $25k in profits for themselves. You can't have that, so you start paying off government officials to deny or delay their building approvals, paying off mafia thugs to sabotage their construction or threaten workers who try to leave, you sue them for breaching worker non-competes or IP rights on the construction methods, etc.
All of these are part of how the construction industry actually operates, it is well known as one of the most corrupt industries around. Let's also not forget that the value of real estate is location location location - house and business prices are hugely determined by where the plot of land is, much more so than any differences in construction prowess, if we disregard the very top of the most complex projects ever made (of which there are way fewer than 20k).
None of the other workers know how to build a house. The electrician doesn't know how to build a house. The carpenter doesn't know how to build a house. The guy hanging drywall doesn't know how to build a house.
They know how to do one piece and finding and coordinating all those people (something else they don't know how to do) is work on its own that is valuable.
The exponential growth model that pg presents is an obvious lie - you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires, all it takes is 9 months of 93% growth after your first few billions; quadrillionaires will soon follow. The obvious reality is that exponential growth is just a small phase in any company's history, and it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in. A company can quickly capture a market, but not quickly grow forever.
Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues that are the supporting power of all such growth events. He claims this is all powered by "making your users happy", which makes them tell others about your business, as if every restaurant that people fawn over becomes a billion dollar business in 1-5 years. Even the examples he can think of of companies that did this are infamously bad companies that have become rightly hated and accused of spreading various forms of social ills - e.g. social media addiction induced by Meta, spy ads by Google, excessive tourism and house price increases by Airbnb, or the erosion of worker protections by Uber. There isn't a single billion dollar company that doesn't at least get accused of similar problems, which represent t the meat of the argument, and pg ignores this completely in favor of the "build something useful" model.
The chart on the site below shows JK Rowling's net worth growth was pretty much linear. $100M per two years until about 2006, then $100M a year after that.
She also pays full UK tax on her earnings, the 36th most of any individual.
Founders are often synonymous with their businesses. In the case of celebrities the relevant exploitation is carried out by others in the value chain, they are just the lure/source.
There's no such thing as a billionaire athlete. There are a handful of athletes who went on to become billionaires through their business dealings, like Michael Jordan, or Ion Țiriac or LeBron James. The arguments are exactly the same for them as for any other billionaire - that their businesses are either not really worth as much as the numbers suggest, or that their business engaged in various problematic practices.
For authors, the arguments are again quite simple - billionaire authors or directors don't become billionaires by selling books or movies, they become billionaires from much larger businesses that employ way more people who were collectively much more critical to the success of said businesses than the authors themselves. JK Rowling didn't become a billionaire until the movie franchise and the toy mega production began. If the movies hadn't happened, or the toys hadn't happened, she would have just been an extremely rich multimillionaire.
Even his examples (Meta, Google, Airbnb, Uber) are "hated and accused" mostly by pundits and activists. Their users and investors are overall rather happy with their services (all have healthy competition) and their employees can quit and work for somebody else at any moment.
It's almost like the people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives of a particular company/service come to different conclusions than the people who make money off the company or are directly marketed it.
> people who spend their time thinking and researching the positives and negatives
If only we could trust such big hearted people who selflessly donate their time and expertise for thinking and researching - without asking those pesky little questions like "what do they stand to gain? what hidden agenda do they have? what ideology dictates their value system? what axes to grind and biases do they harbor?"
I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.
>I'd rather trust the people directly involved, whose interests are mostly clear and known.
That seems like a wild statement to me. Just so I understand what you're saying. Are you saying you would trust Meta's statements on if their algorithms are harmful to youth/society over independent researchers because those researchers might have some hidden bias?
No, I am not saying I trust Meta's statements at all. I am just saying that I have ZERO trust in those "independent researchers".
I am old enough to remember when "researchers" and "experts" where warning us about the evils of violent FPS gaming, the whole panic over teens and kids playing Doom. The Columbine shooting. The end was nigh! Of course, it was all blown out of proportions...
You> you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires,
PG> I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative growth rate. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all.
You> it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in
PG> how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market.
You> Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues
Not addressing an issue, that doesn't undermine the points he does make, is not hand waving.
Hallmarks of clear instead of reactionary thinking: you don't lash out at people for things they said, that you agree with, or things they didn't say, that you would have disagreed with.
Make your own (good) points. No need for framing around disagreement or other misleading tie ins.
I feel just as disgusted and frustrated by some rich people. But lots of people quietly become billionaires now, from normal companies that produce sensible services or goods people want. Substitute "rich" for "billionaire" to account for inflation, and increased globalization, and this has been true for a long time.
He does put caveats around his initial, condescendingly worded points. The problem is that those caveats are either too small, or they completely contradict his initial point.
Again, if all it takes to become a billionaire is 15% growth rate for 5 years, which is easy, then if you start with two billion dollars and grow at 15% per month, you'll be a trillionaire in 5 years. And 5 years after that, a quadrillionaire. If the billionaires are literally generating billions of new value, what explains why trillions can't be generated in the same way?
If the market is limited, then it means that you can't grow your way to a billion dollars, you have to displace others - either competitors in the same market, or other markets as well. So now there's a much clearer chance that you're using underhanded means to actually get your billions - you're not growing a new pristine market that people just love, you might just be edging out competitors or snuffing out other markets that had existed before - and perhaps were limited by things like regulations or externalities that you simply choose to ignore.
And the question of externalities and unfair competition and corruption is not tangential, it is the whole point that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or others in this anti-billionaire movement are making. Not talking about it is simply ignoring their argument. The problem isn't "oh, I didn't realize that simply growing at 15% every month for 5 years will make a million dollar business into a billion dollar business". It's "the actions that you need to take in order to continue growing at 15% every month for 5 years are going to include things like un priced externalities, corruption, cartel behaviors, etc". Addressing how you can sustain this growth, and how the markets can have so much money in them, are exactly the most important things - not the trivial math of exponential growth that he discusses, condescendingly, at length.
You and Paul are both claiming it's extremely hard.
A restaurant won't scale - most ideas won't scale - because they're not useful enough.
These companies are not criminal enterprise and they don't steal money or threaten them with violence: they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it. Don't get me wrong: I hate them and I ban social media for my kids, but it doesn't make them evil.
The bad actors are thugs with guns stealing your purse and the government stealing your tax money or threatening you with jail.
To give another, less controversial example, I don't think companies selling products with sugar and seed oils are bad, even though they likely have the highest combined reduction of life expectancy across all people - but I hate them too.
One of the arguments against billionaires really deserving that much money is that while they own the shares, the scaling up is done by a labour force that doesn't capture this growth, "only" (so goes the argument, I do know about share options) "their wages".
How many burger flippers get compensation in the form of shares in the parent company? I genuinely don't know, but I do expect it to mostly be in the form of pension funds rather than stuff they can see in their working lives. Pension funds are a lot of money, they need to be so those with them can retire, same logic as FIRE because being a pensioner is the first three initials of FIRE.
This is probably for the best, owing to something not explicitly mentioned in the article: startups are risky. This is as much a lottery question as it is an effort question, because "cool idea" absolutely does not mean "make
it and they will come", no matter how hard working the founders (and first hires) are.
> they just offer them products and ecosystem and most people are dumb enough to ruin their life with it.
Also an argument for El Chapo and friends (if we didn't criminalize their products and add the violence around the trade, see Alcohol and Tobacco).
> - but I hate them too.
Why do you hate them if you don't think they are bad?
You seem to be saying, "it's not illegal; I will hate it, but it is not bad". What is "illegal" is an arbitrary classification that different countries choose. That's the point of what the unnamed politician (it's AoC I think?) is saying: those things should be illegal.
PG made the error thinking that this is just people misunderstanding math and exponential growth, which created a convoluted math section that could have simply been explained as - if you start with a million dollar and double every month, you'll be a Billionaire in less than a year. He also didn't really touch well on why many people hate large companies / billionaires.
You are making the mistake of using a moralization framework that equivocate being accused of something to being bad for society + not looking at the alternative (i.e. even if it's true that every Billion dollar company is "bad/exploitative/etc.", that doesn't mean that the (realistic) alternative is better for society or people.
The reality is that companies like Google, Amazon, NVidia, etc. have create an immense amount of wealth for their founders and investors, but also created an immense amount of value in society. There is a real problem of incentives when you prioritize growth endlessly, as it leads to perverse incentives such as that ones these companies are accused of - leading you to progressively take more and more less positive actions in order to achieve this growth. So I don't disagree with the general premise that growth leads to moral problems, but I do disagree with saying that building big companies is bad for society.
It's not even like unbounded exponential growth is a new or "startup" thing either. PGs story is just the grains of rice on the chessboard legend. (or depending on the culture telling the story, perhaps wheat on a chessboard, according to google)
Like poet/warrior/advisor that convinces the King to give them one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains of rice on the second square, four grains of on the third square, eight on the fourth - and so on, doubling the number of grains each square until the 64th square. The King can no more deliver 2^64 grains of rice that PG's founder keep her 93% growth rate consistent for 64 months (or even the calculated 9.5 months to make her a billionaire).
Yes, it's true that a very few tech startup founders create billion dollar wealth by "making what the people want" - but anybody trying to tell you the naive compound interest math makes it inevitable, is trying to sell you something (like perhaps their companies startup accelerator program or venture capital investment opportunities).
"Corn" is the general word for the most common cereal crop of a region, and the word for an individual grain of such a plant, in case you wish to use the corn-on-a-chessboard story without the qualification.
That seems to be true only in British English.
In other dialects (USA, Canada, Australia), corn refers only to maize.
(I'd never heard corn used as a general term, though Miriam-Webster does affirm this British usage.)
> There is a real problem of incentives when you prioritize growth endlessly, as it leads to perverse incentives such as that ones these companies are accused of - leading you to progressively take more and more less positive actions in order to achieve this growth.
What negative actions has Google Amazon and Nvidia done due to them prioritizing growth endlessly?
For Google, they didn't prioritize growth or they would have moved on AI a decade ago, but they were afraid of having tech journalists who hate them already write mean articles about how their AI is harmful.
Amazon just .. I don't know, keeps squeezing out operational efficiencies that get me next day delivery? Or developing AWS to enable other people to build apps?
Nvidia sells GPUs. Maybe you're a gamer and the push into AI means higher GPU prices?
I'm at a loss here. I don't think anyone is mad at these companies outside of a tiny vocal terminally online minority.
All of the companies you mention are at minimum engaged in monopolization and anti-competitive mergers as well as exploiting tax loopholes.
More specific criticisms:
Amazon
- They exploit factory workers that have to piss in bottles to keep up with productivity quotas and have high workplace injury rates. When they take time off to recover they are fired.
- They commit intellectual property theft, by copying top selling products and putting their hands on the scales to divert traffic to their clones.
NVidia
- Used software lock-in of CUDA to gain advantage in hardware sales.
Google
- Steals your information. Uses its browser to compete unfairly in other markets (mobile phone OS, etc).
Elon Musk / Tesla / SpaceX
- Bought Twitter and used it to influence elections and voters, promote racism / nazi sympathizers.
>but also created an immense amount of value in society
I would say value is subjective. For example, some people might consider a successful game as having created value. Others might view it as too addictive and see the negative value on society as a whole.
It could be very true that in the long arc of history, most of the "value" these companies have created is seen as a net negative. Take smartphones for example. They have created "value" but it's very possible that in 100 years when we better can evaluate what they have done to kids who grew up with them, we well conclude that they were a net negative until their usage was rained in.
The only opposing force is government regulation and that's exactly what is wrong with these types of companies (and billionaires in general). They are the ones that stop reasonable legislation from happening because they have too much power because they are so large/rich.
> The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids when I'm an adult!"... but that's what would have to happen.
And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met. So it's not just not impossible, it's by far the likeliest scenario.
> Our population isn't exploding, it's just big. And it will shrink rapidly.
The whole population of the world slowly rose from some 10-50 million before 1 CE to some 100 million by 1000 CE, to maybe some 2-300 million by 1700 CE. And then it suddenly reached 1B in 1800, 2B in 1920, 4B in 1974, 8B in 2022. This is a massive population explosion, with the doubling rate increasing rapidly, especially before the 2000s.
> People are only generally capable of reproduction from the ages of 16 to 36... just 20 years.
This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history, a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again. And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s (note that the record is currently 74), while men can and often do reproduce well into their 60s+.
Now, is it better if people who want to have children have them when they're younger, probably in their late 20s? Absolutely - mostly to keep generational gaps manageable, to benefit from grandparents' help, etc. But it's not in any way a strict biological necessity, and as fertility science advances, we have every reason to believe this will continue to improve.
> Well at least when our species dies out, the last few people will have masters degrees. That's the important part, right?
This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
>And yet this exact thing happened, in reverse, everywhere in the world as certain social conditions were met.
No. It's never happened in the history of the human species. It's unprecedented. When human population dropped, it recovered... but only because the fertility rate was still high. Fertility rate isn't population... a sub-replacement fertility rate is literally and exactly "this population no longer grows at all".
You're gibbering nonsense right now, and somehow it sounds intelligent to you.
>This is wildly wrong. Children of 16 years should NEVER reproduce, it's an awful thing that this happened for so long of human history
It's non-ideal. Awful? Dunno. But they can, it's documented fact, and a mere 20 years after that it becomes functionally impossible at scale. That's the window of reproduction, but I guess it's easy to try to change the subject because if people start thinking about icky teenage pregnancies then they can stop thinking about their looming extinction.
>a shameful reality that will hopefully never happen again
I can promise that it will soon never happen again, because your entire species will become extinct in just a couple centuries. Your perfect utopia is coming, and more quickly than you might have hoped.
>And as health has increased, women have become able to reproduce (with some medical aid) well into their 40s
No. They've become able to in exceptional circumstances. This isn't the same thing as "able to reproduce". For it to matter, it would have to be every woman capable of this, every time. This problem won't go away because 1 in 60 affluent women will have a geriatric pregnancy.
>This is absurd hyperbole for the exact reasons above.
It's not hyperbolic. Not even a little. One of us is, but it's not me. And it's bizarre that you think it is... I live among lunatics. Go back and read your horseshit... you're talking about how there's nothing wrong and everything's just fine because some women can carry babies to term at age 74.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
Hmm, what about JK Rowling and LeBron James where the vast majority of their value is explicitly going to their publisher and they keep only a small percentage. Their tiny portion is a billion after everyone else takes most of it!
Harry Potter became a billion dollar business after the movies and toys and so on were created - again, it takes waayyy more people than one to actually produce this amount of money. The initial idea that Rowling herself came up with is of course a significant part of that - but still only a small part of it, in the grand scheme of things.
It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.
JK Rowling, the proofreaders, the reviewers, the printers, the marketing, the librarians... Everyone in that list is in effect getting stolen from by the publishers, yes.
in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?
Right, and even if we assume Lebron accomplished his entire basketball career by himself and that his salary is 100% “earned”, his salary didn’t net him a billion dollars.
you’re only strengthening the argument that people deserve asymmetric compensation. LeBron and the NBA have a symbiotic relationship where both of them make more money because they exist. And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
Are we not discussing this in the context of this parent message?
> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
--
> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.
Once again, the publisher gave her something like 5-10% of sales and kept 90% to cover those costs and she is still a billionaire!!! So is your real beef with the publisher?
I don't think that was the point, you can add those to the physical goods list as well, as well as many other human services (education, cutting hair, open air games, etc).
The point was that the real money comes from finance games, like the stock market, forex trading, etc - things of much more dubious value when you actually look at them objectively.
So nice of pg to mention AirBnB as one of his examples of what a successful startup who "doesn't cheat" means. They just were great people with a great idea who found a market for something people wanted that no one had thought about before, and poof, exponential math billionaires who earned it!
Of course, we'll ignore the huge issues that Airbnb created for cities, customers, and providers. We'll ignore the way they knowingly helped ignore any regulations on tourism as much as they could. We'll ignore the business model of simply being the biggest middlemen around. We'll ignore the fact that their business is slowly being outlawed in major cities, at least in Europe, because of all of the above.
And, surprisingly, if we ignore all of the things these founders do to ignore the law and cheat the market or their competition, we can say that they earned their billions without cheating!
We'll also ignore the fact that the brilliant magic math that us lay people and politicians just don't understand also predicts that the founder whose business is growing 93% per month will not only be a billionaire in 9 months, but a trillionaire 9 more months after that, and surely the world's first quadrillionaire within 5 years. You might think this is implausible, but that's just because you don't understand how exponential growth works!
No, that problem was not generated by Airbnb. There’s growing demand and, because of regulation, not enough is built every year. For example, according to INE, 250k new families are formed in Spain (more than 500k people) and only 100k new houses/flats are built and the yearly deficit has been accumulating for 12 years. That is the real issue and blaming corporations is just the politicians’ easy path to deflect blame, which unfortunately too many citizens eagerly buy into.
Even if it were true that the problem of housing affordability was not affected by Airbnb (it's not, at best it only exacerbated an existing problem), that would not mean it didn't create other problems for cities. Having tourists concentrated in places that are not designed for it, where a hotel license would never have been issued; the problem of too many tourist accommodations, causing an overflow of tourism; problems for neighbors with parties and similar nuissances; problems with untaxed income from the smaller owners; and probably others I'm forgetting.
I know the Spanish case. The hotel lobby does not only push for airbnb restrictions but also for banning new hotels (so that they can push prices up). For example famously there are no new airbnb or hotel licenses since more than 10 years and obviously the problem has only worsened. Regardless, the problem is in general still a demand that grows roughly at 2.5x the supply growth rate.
Are the boulevards, museums, parks etc growing as well? If not, why should the number of hotels grow? A city generally has a limited capacity for tourism (one which is not primarily related to the number of hotel rooms) and once that is reached, it becomes detrimental to increase tourist accommodations. I don't know if this is the specific case in one specific city that you have in mind, but the principle is there - expanding tourist accommodations is not a good in and of itself. Supply is naturally constrained, regardless of demand, for many real goods, and this is one of them.
Additionally, you keep ignoring the fact that even if new housing supply would be very important, Airbnb is still a drain. If demand was outpacing supply 2.5x before Airbnb, and it's outpacing it 3x now, that is still Airbnb making a bad problem worse.
Externalize all the problems, but its "not cheating!" - its just making us all pay for your growth while you take advantage of the current structure of society and generally making things worse.
It's incredible to think that there are still people who think Elon Musk is really involved in any positive way in the technology his companies' employees produce.
A nice tidbit from the article, for people who think that Tesla Cybertrucks are actually selling decently well:
> SpaceX spent $131 million on Cybertrucks in 2025, according to SpaceX's IPO filing.
Per their numbers (20k cars sold in 2025) and the list price (70-100k), this means that almost 10% of all Cybertrucks sold by Tesla in 2025 were bought by another Elon Musk company.
Where I live (Orange County, California) they are selling decently well. There’s one parked in every street. I guess when you have a high Asian immigrant population, they ignore the politics and just buy what makes sense for them.
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