Usually, things handled by governments suck in orthogonal ways to private companies. Private companies suck due to greed. State owned stuff sucks due to incompetence.

Where I live, we have a state owned insurance company, but others are allowed to compete with it. Optimistically, they competing with each other making all of them better. Pessimistically, you choose the one that sucks least from your point of view. Either way, better than any proposed alternative.

Right, so let’s burn all the money. Everyone will just work and help each other from the goodness of their hearts.

I can’t argue points this absurd. We obviously don’t share the same perception of reality, so I am done here.

Goodbeye.

They wouldn’t agree that a company’s market share should directly translate into compensation for individuals, because it has “intrinsic value”.

It doesn’t have intrinsic value. At least not the same as its market cap. I use it as an (imperfect) approximation for the value a company creates by providing goods or services.

Personally, I’d argue “intrinsic value” is subjective bullshit as we people are the harbingers of meaning and in turn value

If you don’t think goods and services have intrinsic value, what is the point complaining about wages? Money is tied to the value of goods you can exchange it for. So if value of goods is subjective, then so is value of money. Therefore, fair wages are subjective and there is no way to compensate people fairly.

exactly. A company tant doesnt overexplore its workers cannot grow like alphabet did

No, alphabet has always made most of its money from their ad business, supported by search. Most of their other efforts, including YouTube were never profitable or insignificantly profitable. If they did not over-explore, they would create even more value per employee by not wasting resources. Maybe even more value in absolute terms.

The idea of one being multiple times more valuable due to their market is in direct conflict with the idea of “a person can only make so much”.

Yeah, I am arguing against their belief by showing a contradiction with an obvious truths such as that things have intrinsic value and people can increase said value by much more than others. That is what arguing is. If you think disagreeing with people is straw-maning them, then there is no point for me to waste my time with you.

Would that market cap be so high if all those employees were paid that extra million yearly?

Yes, that is what I meant by simplification.

On the other hand Google as search engine and ads (the part that makes money) needs fraction of the employees alphabet has. If they had to pay them that much, they would have never hired most of them.

That massively depends on what you consider fair.

Is a million dollars a year fair?

Alphabet (google parent), based on employee numbers had about 1,550,000 man years of work put into it in its entire history 1.

Alphabets current market capitalization is 2.5 trillion dollars.

If each employee was paid an extra million $ yearly in addition to what they were already paid (excluding stocks), there would still be almost a trillion dollars left over for the founders and investors.

Now sure, I had to make a lot of simplifications to calculate this, but even so, it should give you an idea just how valuable Google actually is, compared to the amount of work put into it.

So unless your definition of fair is something along the lines of splitting the profits evenly among employees, then they absolutely could have become billionaires while paying people fairly.

They said that it takes a lot more than the sweat of literally only 2 people to make Google. And “No one has ever…made a billon dollars by…their effort alone.”.

I am not arguing they made a billion alone, I am arguing their work increased the value of Google by billions (which IMO makes them deserve some percentage of the billions).

If all the support staff went to do the exact same work for a average different company, the product/value of that company would be less than Googles by over a billion. I used Bing as a comparable example.

Billionaires cannot possibly create added value to account for their wealth

Also, you accuse me of straw-maning while straw-maning yourself? What is this, Donald Trump debate club?

Are you really gonna be pedantic about me using the word “good” one time?

The title of the post is “The only good billionaire”. You seriously expect anyone to believe that was a slip of the tongue and not denial of the title?

You are a living meme, and I mean that in the worst possible connotation.

What do you expect? You guys are regurgitating quotes and theories with so many holes the Marvel movies are more believable. Of course the only reason I reply is to watch you rage, struggle to come up with excuses or desperately try to change the topic when I call out your nonsense. Bonus if it ever helps some lemming not to fall to this brain rot.

Want a genuine constructive good faith discussion? How about instead of regurgitating anticapitalist quotes, you post something worth discussing seriously. For example a plan for a fair system that does not fall apart as soon as some people act greedily and selfishly, like they always do. Or at least an outline of one, that we can work on to refine. Or you know, if you can’t come up with a whole new system, how to improve the current one.

Until then, you and lemmings like you are my comedic relief.

Huh, I misunderstood that word for quite a while. Fixed it now. Thanks.

Which is irrelevant when discussing the morality of a person who bridged that divide by giving his wealth away.

Google what straw man argument is. I am asking a question.

There are two types of employees in google. The ones who created the search engine SW and the support staff. He claims the creators of the SW are not the people who created billions in Value, so it must be the support staff. The support staff that does more or less the same kind of work as support staff in all other tech companies, yet Google is wastly more profitable per employee, so these support staff somehow create much more value by doing the exact same thing. So who exactly is creating the Value?

No, you claimed

It still would have been better if workers got the money in the first place. There are no good billionaires.

Claiming this specific billionaire is not good either. Now you are trying to switch the topic to a systemic issue when your self-serving claim was called out.

The very valuable company isn’t run by just those two people. That’s the point. No one has ever made anything or worked so hard they made a billion dollars by their effort and their effort alone.

So you think that the same people doing the exact same work (marketing, sales, etc.) produce 10x more value if you put google logo on them vs Bing? Because the companies can be run in the exact same way with the core sw being the only differentiator.

What about a janitor. Is his cleaning the floors 10x more valuable if the building has Google logo on it compared to Bing?

each of the other nodes of the chain is equally as important.

So do you believe that if I have two quality assurance people doing exactly the same procedure, if first checks Nokias and the second checks iPhones, the exact same work of the second one is 10 times as valuable, just because he works on iPhones?

What about a baseball player signing a ball and changing its value from few $ to 10s of thousands. Is he stealing the wages of the people that made the ball if he doesn’t trace back the people who made the ball and share portion of the money?

In case of google, if it is not the founders who made the valuable part, the same marketing and other support people doing the exact same thing generated 10x the value than their colleagues at Bing? What about the janitor? Is his floor cleaning producing 10x the value if the building has Google logo on it instead of Bing?

What about people making parts like screws? Does the value of a screw retroactively change based on whether you put it into a Nokia or an iPhone, or an Alibaba alarm clock?

again, the www is founded on the work of uncountably many people. the person credited is usually the one at the end of the chain of production.

Ok, so how does this work? Group of people makes a computer, that is used for accounting at CERN. They take equal part of the Value created by the accounting, split with the actual accountants. But then a researcher creates www. The computer was suddenly worth much more and they should retroactively get more money? What about the accounting Value? Do they have to return money to accountants because their computer was used for www and since it was used for multiple things, the share of accounting Value they took originally was too high?

Google is rightly credited to two people and valuable enough to make both billionaires.

World wide web is credited to a single person, idk if rightly. It is probably the most valuable piece of sw in history, despite being given away for free. Even if it was really made by a decently sized team, would be billions in value per person.

Maybe look up definition of wage theft first. The one most people use.

In addition:

Billionaires cannot possibly create added value to account for their wealth, just as you or I cannot become billionaires at the sweat of our brow.

1. Value and create in this context is mostly subjective.
2. Ever since internet and software became a thing, they can. It is absolutely possible for one person to create sw worth billions.

people become billionaires through wage theft.

Quite the assumption assertion. Can I also just assume assert bad things you did with no evidence? PS: I mean that he specifically became billionaires through wage theft. I am sure many others did.

Plus, the starving are unemployed because the unemployment rate is artificially controlled economically in order to pressure the working class into accepting bad work conditions.

Which, even if it was true, he would be unable to change, just as the two of us are.

What makes you think the workers downstream from him are not among the starving and homeless?

Because RoyaltyInTraining made that statement without referring to any additional information? So I obviously assume that he made his statement based on the information in the post.

Besides, even if they were, would donating the money be less effective than paying them in wages? Charitable donations are tax exempt, wages are not. Also, you assume he was in a position where he could do anything about the worker wages, which seems unlikely given how most companies work (wiki says he was not a full owner, just co-founder).

You’re a guy who thinks not being rich makes you morally superior to a man who anonymously donated over 99.9% of his wealth to charity, likely helping millions of people. 🤣