I just found this out about Michael Bloomberg: He is a "self made billionare"

[unblock]

70. none of what you're asking has anything to do with the term "self-made billionaire"

really, all i'm advocating is that people acknowledge that every billionaire had a lot of help, directly or indirectly, from a lot of people getting there.

generally speaking, though our system is messed up in a lot of ways. good ideas are worth legitimately worth millions. but getting billions takes a number of problematic things that go way beyond good ideas and may well have nothing to do with good ideas.

microsoft is famous for making billions upon billions with bad ideas, from ms-dos to their version of a windows operating system to excel and so on. much of what they have done has been to take inferior products and leverage their operating system and distribution power to push other out of business or get them to surrender by acquisition.

conversely, tim berners-lee invented the world wide web. he's worth around all of $10 million today. great idea, vastly useful to oodles of people for oodles of things the world round, yet he's worth only 1% of a billionaire.

musical acts may make a ton of money, yet they still have to fork over an insane amount of money to ticketmaster for the fairly mundane service of providing tickets to customers.

there are many, many problems with our economy that fly in the face of the notion that wealth is legitimately earned through hard work and good ideas alone. yes, hard work and good ideas certainly matter, but unfortunately, so does skin color and ethnicity and gender and proximity to wealth and control of production and distribution channels and so on.


i'm not at all a socialist, whatever solutions there are would have to come after there's a sea change in attitudes towards extreme wealth. people have no sense of proportion. bloomberg may have had a great idea and he may have worked hard, but if he wound up with a measly $50 million, how on earth could anyone see that as wrong in any way? from an economic perspective, it simply doesn't make sense for him to have been able to amass over a billion dollars. there's economic and social utility in having him generously rewarded for his contributions, but there's no justification for absurdly high numbers like that.

rather it's a sign that something is deeply wrong with our economy.