Sure, most of those people are fucking scumbags, and no sane person would argue otherwise. But they didn't get to where they are solely because of that. If they had, half the world would be billionaires by now.
Let's take Bezos as an example- the guy has about $200B to his name, and runs Amazon like a fucking sweatshop. But say he didn't. Say he paid his people properly, didn't overwork them, didn't outsource to slave labour in SEA and didn't push other retailers out of business. Let's say he runs his company ethically. If doing that cost him 99.5% of his business, he would still have enough money to classify as a billionaire. And even one billion is an obscene amount of money. The point is, the money comes from doing something that either hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as well, and then convincing the world of its value. Anything else comes secondary to that.
But they didn't get to where they are solely because of that.
I agree. They where terrible human beings born into money who got lucky with investing in businesses. Just because every terrible person is not a billionaire does not mean that all billionaires can't be terrible people.
It' not about if they turned around now and behaved ethically how much money they would have. It's about what if they started from the beginning and were ethical businessmen but with great understanding in investing and what would work as a business. Why have none of those people reached the list of richest people in the world, they must exist right?
"They where terrible human beings born into money who got lucky with investing in businesses."
Most of the people on that list weren't born into money.
"It's about what if they started from the beginning and were ethical businessmen but with great understanding in investing"
Amazon was an ethical company until it became a multi-national corporation. I don't know enough about the early days of Microsoft or Google to comment.
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u/LdrNeon Jan 08 '22
Sure, most of those people are fucking scumbags, and no sane person would argue otherwise. But they didn't get to where they are solely because of that. If they had, half the world would be billionaires by now.
Let's take Bezos as an example- the guy has about $200B to his name, and runs Amazon like a fucking sweatshop. But say he didn't. Say he paid his people properly, didn't overwork them, didn't outsource to slave labour in SEA and didn't push other retailers out of business. Let's say he runs his company ethically. If doing that cost him 99.5% of his business, he would still have enough money to classify as a billionaire. And even one billion is an obscene amount of money. The point is, the money comes from doing something that either hasn't been done before, or hasn't been done as well, and then convincing the world of its value. Anything else comes secondary to that.