Comment by achenet
4 hours ago
> Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
False in the general case - with inherited wealth, someone who starts with a lot but grows more slowly will beat a fast grower who started with nothing, at least on short time scales.
In other words, you can build a better OS than Windows today, and have better business sense than Bill Gates, but it'll still take you years to catch up to him wealth wise if you're starting at zero.
> I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
I agree with that - with any art/practice (business, programming, music, sports, etc), it's always inspiring to see the best play.
However, I'd argue that in our current business culture, many players will
1) do things I'm not comfortable doing morally - the sports equivalent of Maradonna's Mano de Dios [0] - so I'm not really comfortable using them as role models (I just tell myself I can do better by playing fair). Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir), Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates ripping off their friends and co-founders, products that are intentionally addictive (cigarette companies), etc.
2) not actually be that good but just be in a good position - many rich people are honestly just lucky. Yes, you have the serial entrepreneurs that make _several_ billion dollar fortunes like Jim Clark, you have the wise investors like Warren Buffet, but you also have people like Adam Neumann [1]or any New York real estate tycoon who got started with a small million-dollar loan from their millionaire parents/Saudi oil princes who just got lucky.
In particular, I firmly believe I've got more money-making talent than a random Saudi oil prince, even if my bank account doesn't reflect that.
Or to use the sports metaphor, I believe I'm a better player than a lot of people currently in the big leagues, even if it's taking a while for the rest of the world to realize that :)
> Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir)
Not true regarding SpaceX, they were just cheaper and better than the competitors. They had to sue the government to even be able to compete against Boeing/Lockheed for military contracts. Who had more friends in the government in the 2010s, SpaceX or Boeing/Lockheed? In 2014, NASA awarded two contracts to develop spacecrafts for transporting astronauts to the ISS (at the time, American astronauts flew to the ISS only on Russian Soyuz). SpaceX received $2.6B (for Dragon), Boeing received $4.2B (for Starliner). Since that time, SpaceX has made 11 operational flights with astronauts to the ISS, while Boeing has made 0 (they're still working on it). It's not friends in the government, it's delivering services faster and for a lower price.