I seem to remember similar stories of Steve Jobs (not in the specifics but getting in the faces of employees and causing more harm than good).
They don’t make money like us (well, obviously).
To become a billiionaire, you need some of the following ingredients.
- Starting wealth. I’m sure a few billionaires started poor, but Bill Gates started with a nest egg. (This meant he could immediately open up a business, a risky proposition.) If his business hadn’t worked out, he would have simply gotten a “good” job earned through a combination of education, smarts, and connections.
According to
They said Bill Gates came from an upper middle class family. I presume his private school was a good one.
- Luck. Get into a business (or real estate, or investing) at the right time. The most extreme example are crypto whales, some of whom got in early and multiplied their “money”. (Those who haven’t left are at risk if the problems with Tether ever explode.) Gates got into computers when personal computing was still in it’s “infancy”.
Some “lower-ranking” billionaires, such as Kim Kardashian, had a lot of luck. I don’t know if her tape (which apparently launched her career) was leaked deliberately or not, but either way she rode the wave and became very well known. She is currently worth $1.2 billion.
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Brains. This isn’t a requirement if you inherited your wealth. You don’t need to be a genius, but it’s easier to avoid making repeated mistakes with a certain amount of brains.
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Drive. Gates was willing to stab Apple in the back to get ahead. Many billionaires work hard, although some do so in unethical ways. (I seriously doubt Al Capone or John Gotti were lazy. Sure, they wouldn’t work a normal job for a living, but they did work a lot.) Bezos underpays his workers, or overworks them, because he wants revenue to greatly exceed expenses.
Speaking of drive, when I was much younger, I kept hearing on the news how Amazon wasn’t going to turn a profit (along with, frankly, many other tech companies). It took Bezos years of carefully taking risks (or luckily taking risks) until Amazon took off fast enough to turn a profit. And keep that profit flowing. Bezos may not be so valuable to Amazon now, but he certainly played a big role in building it into a profitable company. It’s a bit like an actor still getting residual payments for a twenty year old TV role because it’s still popular.
This drive may indicate abnormal behavior. Being extremely focuses on wealth building may not be mentally healthy. It certainly enables many billionaires to make sacrifices (long hours, or relationship problems, or having to be followed by security, or celebrities getting stalked by criminals and paparazzi, etc).
- Growth. Some companies (such as Amazon and Microsoft) grow very quickly in value. Your shares blow up from small time to big time. (Stocks often have to split to make it possible for ordinary people to even buy shares. At present a share of Microsoft is over $300.) Gates can sell shares when he wants money.
Microsoft, revenue of 41.7 billion USD (FY21 Q3) - and it wasn’t clear to me if that was for a whole year or just a quarter - has a virtual monopoly on personal computers (it could be seen as holding the lion’s share of an oligopoly). Yes, you can buy an iMac, Linux, Chromebook, etc, but those are much rarer. I bought a new Windows desktop last year, and I paid a little extra for the “professional” Windows OS, but I know that part of the computer’s cost went toward Microsoft.
Microsoft had its IPO on Mar. 13, 1986.
Microsoft stock split on nine occasions, each time 3/2 or 2/1.
Many billionaires own multiple companies, and sometimes many of these are profitable. Bezos is mainly known for owning Amazon, but he recently bought a newspaper (which he presumably hopes will be profitable or at least give him value in the form of good press). Amazon isn’t a monopoly, but it’s so big and so well-known that it’s hard for competitors to stand up to it. If I want to buy something quickly, I tend to find myself looking at Amazon, Walmart, or maybe Ebay or a cheap foreign company.
Comparing Gates to Donald Trump, the latter owned several businesses, most of which weren’t successful. In addition, those businesses weren’t original. The world already has many casinos, football teams, steaks, universities, hotels, etc. If Trump’s businesses had been high quality and successful, he almost certainly would not have reached Gates’ level of wealth.
Mark Zuckerberg made $25.3 million in 2020 (on top of his official salary of $1 million). Allegedly most of that money was spent on security, but I’m sure he padded the figures. Either way, $25 million a year won’t make someone a billionaire unless that money is invested very wisely. I suspect most of Zuckerberg’s wealth is in the form of stock, and equity in income-generating companies and real estate.
Jobs was unpleasant to say the least but at least understood that he needed to hire skilled people and delegate things that he didn’t understand. to them. Unfortunately, because of that example being an “asshole entrepreneur” is now firmly embedded in the fabric of Silicon Valley tech culture (as if it weren’t bad enough in being dominated by almost all white “brahs”) and is actually seen as a sign of being an effective CEO even if it is actually counterproductive.
Stranger
Will be interesting to see if bill gates & Warren buffet speak up on this.
Once you get a certain amount of wealth, it is incredibly easy to get richer and richer with little active work of any sort. This is not a stealth brag, but an illustration: I’m lucky enough to have one retirement account with a little over $1M (we have several accounts, but this is my main one). Since 9/30/21 (30 days ago), it has gone up $60K, not counting my contributions. I did no work during this period that contributed to this increase. Scale that up to a billion dollars and you can see how easy it can be. Of course it can momentarily go down, but over my 20+ years of contributing, I’ve been happy for those downturns because I am buying on the cheap. But, it takes money to make money and once you get to a certain scale, it becomes easy.
They just get richer. And yes, I think it becomes a competition for your ranking on that list.
But that’s the thing: people who grow companies to $100 billion+ valuations psychologically don’t have a “cruise mode”. If they had one, they would have slacked off long before. They have enough money to do anything at all in the world they want to. It turns out that what they want to do is to grind long days making their companies bigger and richer and more powerful.
“Billionaires- they’re not like us”
Well, yeah, that’s an easy to reach conclusion.
I dunno, someone whose work life looks like that, is NOT in the path to billionairehood anyway IMO. So, yeah, they’re not like us, and I ain’t going to be one of them.
Isn’t that what the Big Boss does, always?
Not just SV – playing up to the general culture’s acceptance of the “asshole boss” trope as a sign of the guy who gets things done and takes no shit from anyone, got A Certain Someone into a position of great political power…
Yeah, it turns out that they have found their vocation in creating this and there is an exhilaration in keeping up the drive.
Heck, it’s not rare to hear people saying to themselves, “what would I DO if I hit the lottery or retired? I can’t just sit around chilling 24/7.” So is it for the billionaire class. This is what they do and if they didn’t they’d get bored to tears.
Then there’s people like me who with a billion at hand would be sorely tempted to hookers-and-blow it to an early end leaving most of the billion still there for my heirs. Which atitude will prevent me from making a billion in this lifetime 
There’s no doubt there are some as you describe.
I would submit most people do not do that.
I am an avid PC gamer. Have been for decades (since PC gaming became a thing).
There are loads of examples of gaming house working their asses off for several years, making a stellar game, and then selling out. Indeed, it is the norm. So much so I cannot even think of that one example someone will undoubtedly find to prove me wrong.
Not just PC games…all sorts of tech enterprises bloomed than then sold out. Indeed, consolidation is the name of the game these days. There is probably an example of someone who stuck it out after making it big and kept running their company and refusing to sell it.
Hell, even Netflix tried to sell out but Blockbuster refused.
Most people cash out and go kick it at the beach. The notion that the only successful people are the ones who will keep working forever is just not true. Far from it. Most will sell out given the chance and go relax somewhere.
The thing is, is that even for an experienced engineer at SpaceX, I’d imagine it’s hard to doubt Musk as he has had so much success in pushing limits and taking risks. There is not another private space company in existence that has accomplished anything close to what SpaceX has done, and I believe these other companies have brilliant engineers as well. So maybe it takes something like a CEO willing to sleep on a cot in the production floor to get the sense of urgency implanted into the engineers. Consider if he just went on a super yacht cruise instead… the cynicism in the engineering ranks would overtake any genuine excitement that solving an issue would bring. Or if he spent 99% of his time in a walled office dealing with “strategic business issues”… there is a reason he is so successful in many areas and I think a lot of it is due to his extemely flat management structure at his businesses.
There’s a big difference between “billionaires” and “successful people”. The vast majority of successful people will in fact work hard, get their payday, and enjoy their life. Those people (largely) do not become billionaires. There are exceptions. But this specific strand of discussion started with a question about how Zuckerberg spends his day. The answer is: he spends it like a workaholic obsessed with Facebook.
I think understanding billionaires becomes easier when you realize they’re just hoarders. I’m sure we’ve all watched at least one or two episodes of Hoarders and tried like fuck to get into the headspace where living like that makes sense. Normal people CAN’T get into that mindset, because it’s fucking weird and crazy. Being a billionaire is exactly the same thing, but with less feces and mess. The drive to endlessly get more more more money, to deprive others of as much as you can get away with and to live knowing your hoard could assuage multiple social ills but being indifferent to the suffering around you (and that you probably caused a big percentage of it yourself) takes a world view that normal, empathetic people are not able to comprehend. Just because they have a lot of money and don’t live in squalor doesn’t mean that their minds are any less diseased than some poor fucker who got crushed to death by piles of crap when the floor of his house finally gave way. And that type of mental illness is incredibly hard to treat, especially when society persists in giving admiration to these sick fucks for their hoarding habits.
I think this comparison is totally wrong.
Although it is probably true that there is a lot of pathological behavior among billionaires, categorizing them all as “just hoarders” is overly reductionist if not entirely wrong. In fact, there is no particular reason to expect people to behave with some economic notion of altruistic ethics in a “free market” system because there is literally no reward for doing so; the goal of anyone correctly utilizing the ideals of so-called laissez-faire capitalism is to obtain maximum yield even it it means manipulating the market to their personal gain and against public benefit as a whole. Users are supposed to ignore externalities that don’t have any impact upon profitability in the near term because that is a future cost that the market will correct for later. That is, of course, a fine philosophy when it comes to things like adjusting for maximal yields or exhausting new sources of some commodity, but when it comes to driving people into inescapable poverty or doing vast, irreversible ecological damage most reasonable people would agree that there should be some checks and balances beyond “the market”.
Stranger
I think that is somewhat flawed to say most billionaires are hoarders -that implies they took money directly from someone else and just stuffed it into a huge money vault like Scrooge Duck.
When the truth is most became wealthy by starting a company that started small and increased in value until the company and the owners were worth billions. Owning a company is NOT hoarding and the government should NOT be trying to force people to sell all or parts of their companies because they think they are valued to high.
Is that really ever the rationale for breaking up a company?
Breaking up the ownership of the company not the company itself.
That’s what the cumulative effect of a wealth tax would do. Every year Bezos or Musk would slowly have to sell shares of their stock in their companies in order to pay it until their own shares are diluted to the point they no longer have a controlling interest.
I wonder what effect Congress passing a wealth tax will have on the valuation of the stock market. Will it cause a crash or a mass devaluation?
shakes head So, no understanding of basic microeconomics, eh?
A tax on so-called unrealized gains would have to be set basically at or below the mean inflation level such that it doesn’t become a stimulus for higher inflation, thus defeating the point. The net effect on the actual capital (aside from fluctuations due to speculation) would be neutral before any kind of growth due to actual value creation (or positive speculation, or acquisition of more capital resources). For instance, the wealth tax promoted by Elizabeth Warren was a 2% annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and a 4% annual surtax on billionaires (6% tax overall) on household net worth above $1 billion. Even at 6%, a relatively conservatively invested bundle of capital should be able to sustain itself during normal economic growth, and practically effects a readjustment of the high concentration of wealth among a very small kleptocracy of billionaires. This might be onerous if it were being applied on top of a high tax bracket of income, except as has already been shown most extremely wealthy people are able to pay an effective income tax of a tiny fraction of one percent. And if their “wealth” is in the form of grossly overvalued companies that might actually act as a check on such ridiculous valuations and the political power that such artificially high value offers.
Cry me a fucking river for billionaires being forced to pay a small fraction of their wealth to maintain the infrastructure and services that everybody else has to support, especially when their billions come from low labor costs subsidized by welfare and charity of others.
Stranger
OK that kind makes sense. I appreciate the education.
Another thought occurred to me involves Bill Gates-he transferred billions of dollars of his asset into the private Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation(now worth $50 billion). Everyone always credits him from donating billions of dollars to charity. Is this a legitimate thing ? Or does he get to enjoy the benefits of those assets while not actually owning them? Otherwise we are going have billionaires they donated all their assets to “charity” in order to avoid a wealth tax.
I think CFSG got his charity shut down because he couldn’t keep his fucking fingers out of it.