Nobody becomes billionaire by working. You become a billionaire by exploiting others work.
Exactly..
Edit: I'm not saying they didn't work but there is a limit of money someone can make working by themself, so at some point they start to delegate stuff to make more money, so yeah at the end start exploiting someone else to make more money.
Notch is a billionaire. He made Minecraft as a solo project, it became what it was, then he sold it to Microsoft.
Not saying that most billionaires didn't get there via exploitation, but I don't think it's a strict prerequisite.
Notch initially developed Minecraft by himself when he started the project in May 2009. However, as the game gained popularity, he founded the company Mojang in 2010 and brought on additional developers to help improve and expand the game. By the time he sold Mojang and Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014, it was a collaborative effort with a team of developers.
The argument is usually there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. As in every part of the system is exploitative. The computer he used to program exploited workers and natural resources. The clothing he wore made in sweatshops. All the food made by exploiting animals, etc.
Therefore those with the most money must’ve cumulatively exploited more than others regardless of how they made the money because the exploitation is unavoidable.
Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.
Your position could be equally stated as, "anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me." It's a misuse of the "no ethical consumption" idea on its face.
Exploitation is a loaded term, with many negative connotations. It's more neutral to state the same thing as, "Nobody gets to be a billionaire without accruing the surplus value of other people's labor."
And that's true of Notch, too. Minecraft wouldn't exist without countless people who built the computers, the OS, the Java language, built out the Internet, operate the electrical grid, operate the payment networks, litigated and legislated copyright law, et cetera.
Now, you might say that all of those people got compensated for their labor, and it's true. (That's why the negative connotations of exploitation don't apply.) However, the result of their labor unlocks immense value, which they do not share in because of the way the Internet developed. We could easily imagine a different scenario in which the online services won, an alternate reality in which Notch worked as a programmer for PepsiCo-Prodigy-AOL, and got paid a very good salary to create Minecraft for it. Then, it would be fair for the company to reap all of the subscription fees generated by putting the game on their network service.
We can say that in both scenarios, as long as we're imagining, Notch would have put in the same amount of work. In one, though, he'd live a decent, middle-class life, with a corporation reaping the surplus value of his labor. In our world, he's a billionaire, benefiting from the surplus value of others' labor.
Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.
Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.
Just to add, they pay someone to make the board report or PowerPoint presentation for them.
No they do not. But they do emit about 1 million times more CO2 than the average person
Lol
I feel people still don't understand how much a billion is. One Million dollars would still be life changing for most people here, but consider that 1 million seconds ago was 11 days ago, 1 Billion seconds ago was 31 years ago.
To put it in another perspective, a very bad investment would yield you 0.1% monthly. This means that if a billionaire was to invest money the worst way possible, he would have to spend over 1 Million dollars per month to ever decrease his fortune.
If you had an infinite money machine, that as long as you don't spend more than a million per month it just keeps on growing, would you ever work? Yeah, thought so, billionaires are the same, they might have hobbies, and those hobbies might be something others consider work, but they're not working.
I personally believe that if a person ever gets 1 Billion dollars he should receive a letter congratulating them for winning capitalism, and informing them that any cent above 1 Billion will be taxed at 99.9999% (including investments).
I've always liked the saying "The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars" to really drive it home.
Welcome to a day in the life of a billionaire. You'll need to get up nice and early for a personalised yoga routine devised by your trainer, and then it's straight out of the house to work. You've got breakfast scheduled with a CEO, and you're going to spend an hour objectifying women with him before heading into the office. Quick hello, report from your executive team, and now it's time for a power brunch with the man who sources child slaves for you to have sex with. Private jet flight to the next city over for lunch, you have a corrupt mayor to bribe so the minimum wage won't go up. Then it's time to fly back and spend an hour in your office looking important. You ended up sleeping with your secretary instead of getting anything done, but hey, we can't all be faithful to our wives. Now that it's 2pm, you've got to go play golf with your "professional contacts". You refer to your caddy with a racial slur. At 4pm, you go back to the office for the last time today, where your son is waiting for you. It's very hard educating a young man on how to inherit a fortune 500 company that runs itself. You spend most of the next hour telling him about golf. At 5pm, finally get in your limousine to go home. You've been working all day, and you're beat. You praise yourself for your work ethic, and wonder if the single day you work next week is going to be as hard.
At which part of the day do you sit around and shitpost alt right propaganda on Twitter for hours?
You write all of that in the middle of the night to distract yourself from the guilt which robs you of your sleep, before your heavy medication kicks in. You give it to your social media staff in the morning to post throughout the day.
It's not work it's more like a hobby. Work is what people do to survive. See working class vs owner class.
Wealth hoarders can either obsess or not obsess about hoarding more wealth, like any person with a hobby.
So, how much time they spend on their hobby and what hours they spend on their hobby really depends on their temperament.
There isn't one type. There are the ones like Bezos and Dell, who got rich by growing one or more businesses, and are still at it. They likely don't work normal hours, but they likely work more than 40. Some of those, like Gates, get older and move on to other things like foundation work, but not an actual job. Hard to say what kind of hours they work. Then there are the ones like Christy Walton, who inherited their wealth and don't really ever work.
they don't work, they are the real bums doing nothing all day, living with the profits of OUR (the working class) hard work.
They don't work and are the reason why the workers don't have a good life.
And you're asking people in lemmy this?
It's like asking your highschool friends if models make good money
Bold of you to assume they work.
They don't really have to work at all.
Just look at the industrial amounts of bullshit spewing from Elon Musk's Twitter feed.
Clearly the answer is no.
No
I would suspect never.
Either they are obsessed with their "work" and do it far more than that, or they do nothing.
Nope. A lot of them pretend to work, though.
Typically there's an entourage that includes the people who actually run things and/or communicate the decisions made by the oligarch. They will own the company but rarely make direct decisions for the company. They may make business decisions in the beginning of the company history but by a certain size they are detached from most operations and hand down proactive choices about what the company should be doing with its resources.
The primary vehicle for their money is the control of the company they own, the actual stocks that they borrow against for spending money.
Since they have access to any amount of money they want, there is no need to do any actual work. Any interaction with the company is just personal preference and the owner is more useful as a mouthpiece and investment magnet for the company. With few obligations each week, days start to not matter and sleep schedules are fucked. Sobriety becomes a burden since there is nothing to live for - it has all been accomplished. The only thing left to do is get drunk/high and spend money.
Owning a successful company, even a successful local business, is usually enough to detach a person from the average experience of daily work and set schedules. Millionaire business owners are just as warped as a billionaire so it becomes a question of where the shit happened. Billionaires go overseas to do fucked shit.
Anecdotally, most millionaires don't work. Some have hobbies that make a few thousand here and there but they don't worry about schedules. They are on rich time.
Edit: the ones who are in business leadership and making millions each pay period are literally sociopaths. They run shit to exercise power. They don't actually need to be there either except for some decision making meetings and coordinating with other organizations.
Some will, some won't. Not a hivemind.
At some point they venture off to hobbies and try to pat themselves on the back with a bit of philanthropy.
You become a billionaire with stocks. Which requires others to work 9 to 5s.
No, they just scroll thru Twitter all day
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