1 billionaire or 10,000 people with $10,000 working as a team.
Or would this all boil down to 1 CEO against one billionaire?
The 10,000 people would be randomly selected from folks who have saved over $25,000
My math was off, should have been 10,000 people with $100,000
Randomly selected from people who have saved $250,000
Powerful at what? If they are residents of the same small city of less than 20,000 people, the 10,000 people can vote as a block on lots of issues and win every time. In some jurisdictions, they could enact zoning laws alone that would really screw with the billionaire’s lifestyle.
If they all live in Manhattan, I think a billionaire has more power than 10,000 random people with a mere $100,000 each.
The billionaire will be more powerful. Even if the 10,000 are working as a team, with a shared goal, they are going to have disagreements about how that goal should be achieved, and at what pace, and which steps should be taken in which order. A single individual who can wield power without consulting anyone else is always going to be more powerful than a group of people who have to manage group dynamics before they can accomplish anything.
The exception would be for situations in which physical size and strength would make a difference, but even then, the billionaire could presumably hire 10,000 people to do his bidding, while the 10,000 individuals would still have to agree.
So yeah, the billionaire.
Power would be defined as each teams ability to create more wealth. This would be a 10 year venture each team starting with cash but no assets.
The billionaire no question unless you have some really unusual people in that 10,000 like the Google founders. He or she already has the proven ability to make tremendous amounts of money and manage it well. All the billionaire has to do is invest well in any money producing assets and will beat the 10,000. Even a simple index fund should do it but a billionaire has ways to do a lot better than that.
A conglomeration of 10,000 people can generate more ideas and manpower than any single person but that is as much a liability as it is a strength. It requires strong organization to make any decisions at all. You also have to sustain the 10,000 people for a few years. They only have $100,000 a piece. That is barely enough to start a small convenience store and you can’t have 10,000 convenience stores in one place. They would have to collectively agree to give up most of their money to build some very large business that can turn a profit in just a few years while still being able to sustain themselves. That isn’t really possible without some truly unique ideas, perfect execution and lots of outside cash. It is still extremely unlikely even then but stranger things have happened.
The one thing you didn’t specify was where you got these 10,000 people. If they are just randomly selected people, there is no chance. If you can pick people that are extremely good individually at a wide variety of skills and share a common goal, then maybe but not likely.
You are basically asking if a group of 10,000 people could form a very successful small city or a company with revenues in the $1 billion+ range starting from scratch in just a few years. That is almost impossible due to the technical and organizational complications alone.
That’s tough. One really smart investor would be more powerful. Look at someone like Warren Buffet. OTOH, a huge mass of people would be more like buying an ETF. Some people might not do well, but other people would do better and it might all balance out and their combined wealth might not rocket up, but should work it’s way up slowly. The big group will have some conservative investors and some risk takers. The one single person could go either way. He could put all the money in a penny stock and see where it ends up in a week or invest in a solid stock with a good dividend and stay in for the long haul.
He could even give his billion to the other people (or match what they’re doing) and it would stay the same…and ETF of sorts.
Basically, if you get a random billionaire and a random group of people, I’d probably put my money on the random people, but you never know, the billionaire could be a great investor like Buffet (or a risk taker like Musk).
Also, we, how did the billionaire become a billionaire? If it had anything to do with investing (again, Buffet), that’s where I’d put my money. If he’s more like Musk or even Richard Branson who basically got lucky with some great products, then I’d go with the 10,000 people.
I just read Shagnasty’s response and realize I slightly misread the OP. I was under the assumption that this was about investing in the stock market.
I think based on it just being about making more money, I’d go with the billionaire. He/she saved up FOUR THOUSAND TIMES as much money as a randomly selected group of 10,000 people. Think about that. Here’s 10,001 investment bankers (all on the level) showing you that they all made returns to their customers of about 3% over 10 years. The last one (again, on the level for this hypothetical) that shows you that his customers made 12,000 percent.
Or 10,001 business owners or 10,001 blue collar workers or 10,001 randomly selected people, when you realize that 1,000,000,000 is 4,000 times as much as 250,000, I’d give my money to the billionaire to invest.
If I had to blindly hand out a billion dollars to, I can imagine giving 100,000 to each of a random 10,000 people. Sure, some of them are probably millionaires, investors, very good business owners that can invest in themselves and get you some nice returns, but some of them are also about to default on their house, behind on their credit card bills and most of them are in the middle and wouldn’t know what to do with 100,000 if you handed it to them. My guess is that you’d probably end up getting back close to what you started with.
The billionaire would be randomly selected from self made billionaires. All self made billionaires names would go into a hat and one name drawn.
The group of 10,000 could pool their money if they chose and elect a ceo. Having needed assets of at least $250,000 to be selected would pick them from decent stock.
Not necessarily, a quarter million dollars is nothing for a trust fund baby. A friend of mine has 2 million in hers and she didn’t do squat for it other than have a rich grandpa*.
Plus, there’s entire generations of “Old Money.” People who are only wealthy because someone several generations before them did very well and they’ve passed the money (and the business) down and all the current generation has had to do was something between not go broke and keep the business afloat until their kid could take over.
In my family, one of my relatives has Chiclets (yup, the gum) money. He didn’t start the business, he has nothing to do with it now, but the money has made it’s way down to his generation.
About a year ago I found out one of my friends in grade school has very wealthy parents. I never knew it (they didn’t act like it, live in a huge house, etc). Turns out her grandpa owns some huge business. Again, they surely have a quarter of a million dollars and it wasn’t self made.
Any of these people, if they’re good at turning money into more money would just be from having money which has given them the ability to practice with it, but it’s not that they built up their fortune on their own. Some of them (such as my friend) have never touched their money. She lets her broker/financial planner deal with it.
TLDR, it’s a bit of a fallacy to assume that just because someone has money that they’d be good at turning making money.
As I type this, I keep picturing Bobby Newport from Parks and Rec. He’s actually a really good example.
*on the off chance that you’re reading this, I love you, I’m just making a point.
The billionaire, he has already proven he knows how to get major tasks done.
The billionaire, because ten thousand people, random or otherwise, are not going to work as a team. Even if a miracle happens and they somehow manage to get their shit together, there will still be substantial inefficiencies because of the scale.
A small team maybe beats out one person.
I believe the billionaire could hit the ground running where the group of 10,000 might take several years. Long term I would put my bets on the group of 10,000. Only a minute percentage of the 10,000 would likley have much input beyond their investment. The trick would be finding a way to identify the best potential earners in this large group to select from.
Statistically we would expect the ten thousand people to earn a market rate if they invested individually. We would not expect this of the billionaire, whether he earned more or less than the market rate would likely be random. If the ten thousand people created a corporation their outcome would likely be just as random as the billionaire.
However, since the billionaire would likely be overconfident from their previous success they would be more likely to invest in something risky and thus would have a higher likelihood of failure but a larger reward if they were successful. This would not happen with the ten thousand people and so the billionaire would be more likely to fail.
What is “fail”? Simply not earning as much as the pool of people?
I’ve figured out how to make this true. 10k people can likely overwhelm any single billionaire’s estate defenses, so they storm the estate and capture the billionaire.
Then we can find out for sure if torture is reliable or not, for stuff like PIN numbers and passwords.
Batman, if he’s prepared.
10,000 is not a viable size for a team. It will divide into factions or a hierarchy will emerge, or something.