I’m not sure this has any bearing on the actual moral facts of economic fairness, but within the context of the neoliberal game, I think you can square the circle of billionaires with a more granular understanding of how wealth of billionaire proportions is built.
An important caveat - at almost no point are the billionaires popularly thought of anywhere near as wealthy in cash as they are on paper. Their wealth is best understood as function of their control over highly valuable companies. While they can liquidate some of their positions, doing so in truly large amounts would depress the price of their ownership and their ultimate take from the sale would be much less than the paper wealth. TLDR, Bezos Billions is best thought of as x% of Amazon’s total value + some other stuff he’s liquidated.
The underlying business value is not an annuity. Which is to say the process is not *invent amazon* > *collect $200mm for 35 years* - there is a whole life of a company that comes after a successful founding. America is filled with entrepreneurs who found a company, grow it to $20mm in revenue and sell out to private equity and semi retire by 50. The difference between that and bezos is two decades of winning competitive tournaments for online spending every day for years. It’s also about reaching scale faster. An Amazon idea may be saturated by 2000 but if it takes until 2040 to fully implement with the second best entrepreneur, that is also lost value.
Can this be construed for as apologetics for capitalism? Yeah. But it’s also a real look at the ridiculous amount of human compute thrown at optimizing the world’s markets. Love em or hate em, they’re a remarkable invention.
I’m not sure this has any bearing on the actual moral facts of economic fairness, but within the context of the neoliberal game, I think you can square the circle of billionaires with a more granular understanding of how wealth of billionaire proportions is built.
An important caveat - at almost no point are the billionaires popularly thought of anywhere near as wealthy in cash as they are on paper. Their wealth is best understood as function of their control over highly valuable companies. While they can liquidate some of their positions, doing so in truly large amounts would depress the price of their ownership and their ultimate take from the sale would be much less than the paper wealth. TLDR, Bezos Billions is best thought of as x% of Amazon’s total value + some other stuff he’s liquidated.
The underlying business value is not an annuity. Which is to say the process is not *invent amazon* > *collect $200mm for 35 years* - there is a whole life of a company that comes after a successful founding. America is filled with entrepreneurs who found a company, grow it to $20mm in revenue and sell out to private equity and semi retire by 50. The difference between that and bezos is two decades of winning competitive tournaments for online spending every day for years. It’s also about reaching scale faster. An Amazon idea may be saturated by 2000 but if it takes until 2040 to fully implement with the second best entrepreneur, that is also lost value.
Can this be construed for as apologetics for capitalism? Yeah. But it’s also a real look at the ridiculous amount of human compute thrown at optimizing the world’s markets. Love em or hate em, they’re a remarkable invention.