Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?
All you find is stuff, presented as super valuable, and people very very keen to sell it to you. They’ll do whatever you want. It attracts a certain kind of person. The people who have the means for this lifestyle seem mostly disappointed.
It’s not the situation this guy has created for himself. His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.
So that you have security for the rest of your life and your children have security for the rest of theirs. And likely their children as well.
Not everthing bought with money is superficial. Certainly a lot is less superficial than dedicating your life to “in app payments made easy”. Turning down generational wealth so you can continue to pursue your dream of being a tech CEO seems like a wildly selfish decision to me. Just start a new company!
I know from the outside this seems very simple, but it's more complicated than that. Certainly, if the objective is (merely) security for one's children, that can be secured with much (much) less money (and likely was secured in the secondary that the author makes reference to); having nine figures of wealth is not an unvarnished good, and in particular makes raising grounded, self-reliant kids pretty complicated. To appreciate this dynamic, read Graeme Wood's outstanding 2011 piece in The Atlantic, "The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich"[0].
> having nine figures of wealth is not an unvarnished good, and in particular makes raising grounded, self-reliant kids pretty complicated
Sure, but I’m pretty sure if you asked those parents if they’d rather lose all their money to make parenting easier their answer would be a resounding “no”.
Those aren't the choices. You don't understand how the poster passed on nine figures -- but if the secondary sale netted 7 figures (likely), the choice is in fact between having enough wealth to have total security for one's family versus having so much wealth that the wealth itself creates anxiety.
Then have someone manage the money away from you. Put it in a lifetime trust, whatever. The idea that you’d turn down that sum of money because of the anxiety it would cause you is simply not logical.
> Certainly, if the objective is (merely) security for one's children, that can be secured with much (much) less money (and likely was secured in the secondary that the author makes reference to); […]
See perhaps Nick Maggiulli's post "The Ideal Level of Wealth":
> Financial Independence (28.6x Your Annual Spending): $3.5M. Assuming you never wanted to work again, you would need about 28.6x your annual spending to cover your costs indefinitely [$120,000 * 28.6 ~ $3,500,000]. This 28.6 comes from the Kitces research[1] showing that the 3.5% Rule[2] is the safe withdrawal rate for a 40-year time horizon and beyond. This research suggests that if you can make it 40 years while withdrawing 3.5% per year, then you’ll likely make it 50 years (or more).
[…]
> Whether your goal is Coast FIRE or full financial independence, the ideal level of wealth in the U.S. is in the low-to-mid range of Level 4 ($1M-$10M), or $2M-$5M. I know this is a lot of money and many people will never reach it, but that’s why it’s an ideal. It’s something to strive for. It’s enough where you don’t have to worry about money anymore, but not so much that it becomes a burden or warps your identity.
Adjust the $120k annual spend for your own lifestyle and cost of living.
You're not going to fly private, but it will take most of the worry out of life. Morgan Housel, author of the recently release The Art of Spending Money (and previously The Psychology of Money):
> 00:50:16 […] You have the independence to be who you are and wake up every morning and say, I can do whatever I want today. That’s wealth.
I won’t disclose details out of respect for the other party, but no, not necessarily. As I wrote, it was a good deal for the founders and some investors, but not for everyone, including employees. There are many ways to structure a sale, and unfortunately not all of them split the cake equally.
I just don't understand the mentality of the author. 9 figures is generational wealth, potentially perpetually with good multi-generational money management plan. With that kind of money invested, you have beaten the game, and can literally do any side quest you want to do, forever. This is the biggest no-brainer ever. What the fuck are you waiting for?
Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTech) company still work. You're done. You can do anything you want and yet you voluntarily continue to amass more?
> Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTech) company still work. You're done. You can do anything you want
Has it occurred to you that perhaps what they want is to be the CxO of a big tech company? There’s a lot of power, prestige, and impact on society that you can’t easily have if you quit. Maybe they really enjoy the work itself too.
Because it's genuinely not about the money for them. It's hard to believe, but some people really do want to make the world better in their way, with whatever tools they have that their disposal.
No, your robot vaccuum cleaner itself made _your_ life better. The _company_ made _the_ world worse, by over-charging, exploiting, and polluting. The fact that they happened to create a product that you personally enjoy does not negate the overall negative effect.
Anyone can have security by living very safely within their means, by learning how to be satisfied. What people really mean when they say what you are proposing, is “guarantee a certain future lifestyle”. But the appeal of future lifestyles depends on not obtaining them. Without an ability to be satisfied, acquisition is always disappointing. It’s why a pay raise in a job that doesn’t address your needs, loses its shine after a month or so.
As someone who has experienced family adversity in my life (health, disability) I couldn’t disagree with you more.
Things happen. Expensive things. The security to be able to afford expansive cancer care without worry, to pay for therapy and specialized schooling for your child… these are huge, huge things and they happen to you (or your children, or your children’s children) no matter what you do or don’t do. This isn’t just about being happy to be frugal.
Things happen, it’s true. And in the world there are many enterprises that spring up to present solutions as long as you fork over all your cash, and here in the USA, based on the market, that means lots and lots of cash.
That’s just a perspective on hardship, it’s not the only way. People deal with hardships with many many tools. My favorite tools are dignity, grace, courage, personal strength, and ingenuity. Money is another tool, yes, but it tends to prevent mastery of the others.
Elsewhere in the comments there was talk about legacy. You can give your kids a bank account, and the examples that you had money to pay off problems. Or you can give them something else through your example. I choose the latter.
With respect, those words feel very empty. Face the prospect of, say, chemotherapy you can’t afford or death. See how you feel about dignity and grace then.
We're deep in a thread questioning a founder's choice not to sell their company. a) The company is 8 years old, b) the founder's stake is 9 figures, and c) they've done at least one secondary, meaning d) the founder has almost certainly cashed out $10m exempt from federal taxes (founder has held shares > 5 years for QSBS treatment, and $10m < 10% of founder's stake, a common threshold of concern for investors).
You're right, financial freedom is completely unfulfilling, instead it's really meaningful and impactful to be involved in a tech economy whose primary value has been in undermining democracy and social systems!
> Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?
Buy freedom to chose what to do with your life. I've never sold a company and netted 9 figures but i have been lucky enough to work for a hedge fund and make enough that I and my family can do what ever we want from the age of 30 onwards.
That is an incredible amount of freedom and one that I wish most people would have.
You seem to think only in materialistic ways.
But having enough money to not have to work again allows you to be a better and more available parent. To be able to provide your kids and nieces and nephews with schooling to put them apart from other kids.
Its not always about owning another home, Just knowing that my kids are set for life before they start their own lives in case something happens to me was enough for me.
> Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?
Regain your own time. As a former CTO who has recently exited, recovering my own time again is more valuable to me than the money (although the money means I can retain my own time going forward).
> His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.
Your work is not you and if you think that way, you're gonna be crushed when you come to retire. Even though I loved what I did for a career, it's better to do what you love for yourself, not "employees and customers and partners". Many people have other interests outside of building tech, but even if building tech is your only thing, exiting is a chance at starting something fresh and on your own terms.
You can live in the heart of San Francisco on $2k/mo, including rent. You don’t need to work 10hours a week as a software developer, to support that lifestyle.
I could fit a solar system in the gap between your two options of a) full time CTO or b) 9 figures to ‘win back your time’.
Personally I believe you’ve been operating on autopilot, and not designing your life to suit your own needs.
Bro, what? $2k? I just double checked and everything available for less than $2k is awful if you care about, IDK, having a family, a pet, a kitchen, outdoor space, green space, not having to share everything, including peace and quiet, with a revolving cast of characters.
Not that these things are required to “live,” but I certainly am not interested in making these tradeoffs.
Yes I exactly did that! Moved into an SRO on the edge of Chinatown. It's a nice tiny apartment, I'm on the edge of a mecca of affordable grocery stores, and I'm two blocks from my part-time job that gives me free-time to self-fund my software hustle. But there are other options. What's wrong with living with good people in a room share?
Finding good people to live with is a miracle and not a permanent one. All it took is one good roommate to decide he didn't need to take his antipsychotics anymore for me to never want a roommate again.
So enjoy your situation while the good times roll, no shade, but people have their own reasons to never consider living in an SRO besides mere materialism.
BTW I was originally searching for an SRO but I landed a 'micro-apartment' (I just double-checked terms), it has its own kitchen/bathroom. Had I stopped looking I wouldn't have found this great situation. Great enough that when I won a housing lottery the following month, for a nicer apartment at the same rate, I was content to give it up and let someone else receive it.
> Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed.
There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this:
Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!
The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.
Medicare tax is uncapped as of several years ago, I thought?
I don't think you can uncap social security without either blowing up the useful fiction that it is (mostly) mandatory old age insurance or uncapping the benefits. Maybe that fiction is going to expire soon anyway.
> Medicare tax is uncapped as of several years ago, I thought?
Yes, it is, but it's taxed far too low relative to its spending given the current healthcare cost structure. As a result, only half of the Medicare costs are funded by the Medicare Trust Fund, the other half is deficit funded.
In other words, unlike the Social Security tax, Medicare isn't self-funding from the Medicare tax because it's set artificially low (or healthcare costs are too high, if you prefer).
> Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!
The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.
> The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
So for social security - Actually it’s not “the 1% are capped at 1% of their income” but rather capped at the same number, not percentage, as everyone else - which is around 180k per year. That was the argument being made.
> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.
As far as I know there are quite a few loopholes to be exploited which don't trigger a taxable event, loans using assets as collateral is one of them but there are a bunch of other nice holes that creative and well paid accountants/lawyers find if you have enough money for their services.
> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care
It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time.
You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations.
> You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.
> It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs
I'm seeing no evidence that how much a nation taxes corporations affects its standard of living or political systems one way or another[0]. Norway and Cuba collect similarly high amounts (as a percentage of total tax receipts); the US rubs shoulders the likes of Spain, France, and Finland, as well as Cabo Verde and Tunisia in its relatively low collections.
re: " the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway" - not as much as you make it out to be. Large US corporations keep a pile of their profits outside the US. In theory this money would be taxed when it would be re-patriated to their US-based investors. In practice the corporations wait for the next Republican president to pass a tax holiday during which money transferred from outside the US to the US-investors is not taxed. GWB did that, Trump did that in his first term too.
You can make the same argument about the income tax and similarly limit the taxable income from it which will lead to the tax revenue being cut approximately in half.
Also, after Congress raided the Social Security account, they made the point that Social Security is just another tax subject to spending in the general budget.
If that's the case, there are as many arguments for capping/uncapping the FICA taxes as for all other taxes. The problem with such arguments is their appeal to a notion of fairness which has as many faces as economics theories out there - basically a dead end - courtesy of our not-so-diligent economics "science".
So, it's better to use the achievement of better economic, political and social results as the only guidance for fiscal policy, although that requires a level of analysis which far exceeds what mainstream economics has to offer.
Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."? What do you mean by that? AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
> Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."?
I'd ask you, and others reading my previous comment, to scratch this off as a bad choice of words on my part and replace it with:
"by moving to a pay-as-you-go policy for the SSTF, Congress made the point that Social Security is just another tax."
Previously I used "raiding" as a far-fetched metaphor for several different processes which are too complex to discuss here and it would distract from the main point: instead of complex itemization, SSFT & MCFT would be better off as parts of general taxation.
> AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
True in theory, but if we look at how surpluses are handled and how they depend on a manually controlled interest rate we'll see a different reality.
They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking.
Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws.
Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes.
Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling.
But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.
Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable).
"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.
I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"
No for the income tax, when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it was explicitly designed to apply mostly to the rich (off the cuff, I think only a few percent of people paid it for quite some time).
The working poor though earn most their money through wages, which get taxed at the bare minimum 12.4% (payroll + post-payroll SS taxes), and then usually 7-10% sales tax because they are spending all they earn. So the poor are paying 20% tax right off the bat, meanwhile the rich are paying ~20% on capital gains but spending very little of that on sales tax and none on social security. So about the same overall tax rate paid on the earnings of the working poor as the rich.
Social security has always been the main monkey on the back of the working class, to the point the government will literally tax a childless person back into poverty to make sure the quasi-pyramid* scheme is funded. I don't think SS payments are normally recorded in the income tax statistics.
“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions).
I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.
Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because there's a slight element of redistribution built in; it's not a straightforward "you get back what you paid into".
For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree.
That's okay. I also won't receive as much benefits from my income taxes as my aunt who has a serious brain injury and can't take care of herself. I don't exactly need the money.
Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
> That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse.
The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.
When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong.
The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse.
So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous.
Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.
>>How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?
Start with basic empathy and a simple sense of fairness.
No one here is saying everything should be even close to equal, and I certainly am not. But as many philosophers have pointed out through the ages, you can see how ethical a society is by how it treats its lowest members.
Seriously. Anyone who fails to see something is deeply wrong, when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by, while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, is morally blind.
So start there. When the system is producing this well-documented result, the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth.
>>Income tax is roughly ...
Yes, and you are appearing to be deliberately obtuse by focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden which is what counts when measuring which people are supporting society and which are extracting more than a fair share. And ignoring the proportion of income and wealth that sector takes vs what they pay in taxes.
When hedge fund managers bringing in $billions and Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries, something is deeply wrong.
Again, a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide. These are evidently foreign concepts to you, and I recommend you look into them.
> when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by
Real median household income has been steadily rising over the past few decades; it's up nearly 20% over the past 20 years[0]. American median disposable income is the highest in the world[1] that isn't a tax haven or a petrostate. Mississippi, often panned for its poverty, has a higher median household income than Germany, often considered the strongest European economy.
Now, you might point out that the CPI gets fudged in a way that doesn't fully capture the costs of living that these figures are adjusted for; I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the numbers are what they are, and the numbers do not support your claim that half of America is "barely scraping by".
> while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime
I'm not sure what your operating definition of "hoard" is. There are no Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins. The ultra-rich's net worth is based on ownership of companies that often times were founded by them (granted, some people inherit, though not as many in the US as in more egalitarian nations[2]), and is a fictitious figure based on the number of shares they own multiplied by the last-traded price per share. There is no world in which they could actually liquidate those shares to get the number of dollars that are thrown about.
And those companies are almost always publicly traded and owned by heaps of other people, retirement funds for middle-class workers, and whatnot; and generate value to the purchasers of the goods and services they provide. I'm not sure where in this picture comes hoarding.
> Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries
Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in federal income tax alone over five years[3]. A hypothetical secretary living in Omaha, NE making $300k would have paid $69k in federal income tax in 2025, with another $30k or so in payroll and state taxes. In five years, Buffett paid to the federal treasury alone 237 years worth of income, FICA, and state taxes that this well-paid secretary would have!
Besides, when publications talk about "lower rates" of the ultra-rich, they're always comparing taxes paid on their income against the rise in the valuation of the stock that they own. It's comparing apples and oranges to come up with sensational figures.
> the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth
The society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
> focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden
Are you claiming that there exist some other taxes through which the working masses are shouldering above their "fair share", whatever that may be, of the burdens of maintaining a functioning society? What taxes are those, exactly? Do you think if you added up all the sales, property, income, FICA, estate, etc. ad nauseam taxes that the average American pays, we'll actually discover that the unsung hero of taxation is someone making $50k a year?
Some estimate that the average American will pay roughly half a million dollars of taxes of all kinds through their lifetime, out of a lifetime earnings of about a million and a half[4]. So Warren Buffett in five years of federal income tax alone (not counting any other taxes he paid) paid as much as almost fifty average people would have over their entire lives in any taxable domain. Jeff Bezos over the same five years, nearly two thousand average lifetimes' worth. To me, it's hard to make the argument that the likes of Buffett and Bezos aren't paying enough.
> a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide
Countless millions of people have been immiserated by those preaching empathy and fairness, just in recent history. I prefer to deal in what works in the real world to enrich the lives of the average among us; and as it turns out, systems that let rich people be result in better median outcomes than systems that confiscate and punish.
What is your fair share? Moreover, what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
Sure "Real median household income has risen" and other nice stats exist. And much of the society looks like they're OK. But the reality is this is extremely brittle.
There is near-zero buffer for about half of the country's people. Only 55% of adults have enough savings to cover 3 months of expenses, and 30% could not cover it by any means. 37% of people cannot even handle a $400 surprise expense out of savings, 18% can't even handle a $100 expense! Only 48% could handle a surprise $2000 expense, which is a ar breakdown or a ride to the hospital. [0]
Seven percent of adults did not have enough money to eat at times in the prior month. [0]
28% of adults went without some kind of healthcare because of the expense, and 17% are carrying medical debt. [0]
You can quibble about the exact threshold of what counts as "scraping by", if you have to worry about your next meal, worry about whether you should go to the doctor, worry about being wiped out if your car breaks down or you have a minor accident, you are scraping by. And whether that applies to exactly half, sixty percent, or "only" one third, it is too much. The wealthiest society in the history of the planet should be able to care for all of it's residents.
>>operating definition of "hoard"
Of course there are not Scrooge McDuck vaults, and they are entirely unecessary for the activity of keeping for yourself amounts of wealth that are orders of magnitude more than one could possibly spend in a lifetime.
It doesn't matter how you got it, once you are past $20-$50million, it is not about personal wealth or lifestyle (the interest alone at $25mm is over $4,000 per day); it is hoarding wealth for power, and at the cost of the rest of society
>>Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in Federal Income Tax ... 237 years worth of [secretary's taxes]
Yes, and his reported $125million income reported was 416X the secretary's pay, and the $24Billion wealth gain over the five years was 16,200X the secretary's 5-year earnings. We can take Warren at his word when he says he's paing lower rates.
>> society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
Exactly. I'm glad we agree. A sound soceity is a NECESSARY condition to earning the wealth. We don't see many even millionaires coming out of low-tax states in East Africa, but they way you type scream about taxes one would expect them to be minting trillionaires.
>> deal in what works in the real world
Yes, we agree. I am not proposing any kind of -ism, only making a system that is fair for all and produced the most broadly prosperous society in history, specifically the US system based around a very broad middle class.
>>systems that let rich people be
I am not suggesting not letting rich people be rich, and certianly not confiscating or punishing; I'm suggesting a system that will actually have MORE people be rich
>>what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for?
OK, what is the billionaire's fair share of the labor stolen from workers paid exploitation wages?
When 20%+ of WalMart's full-time employees qualify for Food Stamps because we allow them to pay poverty wages, those billionaires do not have a business model, they have an exploitation model. They owe their employees a living wage, and they owe the rest of us the taxes they failed to pay to cover those food stamp benefits. They are stealing from all of us.
>>What is your fair share? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
Mine? I'm already above the threshold. OUR fair share is a fair system requiring EVERYONE to contribute, and contribute enough that the least among us have food, housing, healthcare, and education without undue worry. The entire society, especially the rich benefits when everyone is operating at their best potential, not primarily worried about being one slip from the ditch.
And while we still have income taxes (I actually think they should be eliminated in favor of transaction taxes, see other posts), the hedge funders should be required to pay tax on their millions of "carried interest", and capital gains taxes should be realized in ANY event where stock is utilized at it's current value, e.g., as collateral for a loan, not only when it is sold.
A lot of other detail, but it is not good to see the country which was the greatest in history with a large middle class slide backwards into a new corporate feudalism by allowing the rich to excessively hoard the wealth of the nation that made them rich. The irony is that the more wealth becomes concentrated, the harder it is to be and stay wealthy -look at any nation with a few rich in their gated communities - it declines for the rich even more than the poor.
Earnestly: why are you annoyed? I tried to make it clear that you don't have to make any changes. If you want, you can try ZJIT (which should not be anything other than a one character change), but you don't have to.
Because now YJIT is deprecated and at some point in a year or two I will have to have my team go through and switch everything from YJIT to ZJIT. So it's creating random tech debt busywork that will suck up dev resources that could better be used building features.
In isolation, having to switch from YJIT to ZJIT isn't that bad, but this same type of churn happens across so much of the frameworks and technologies that my company uses that in aggregate it becomes quite an annoyance.
I assume you upgrade your Ruby VM? You also upgrade to use YJIT? And you will upgrade to ZJIT?
Not only do you get them for free, you get performance improvement for free. And YJIT is still supported and not depreciated. Not only is Ruby on Rails dont have churn anywhere near the order of magnitude of JS world. It is perhaps one of the stablest and non-moving framework and languages, to the point it is moving slowly and boring compared to even modern PHP and Python.
I dont even work on YJIT or ZJIT but I find this entitlement on OSS, even when you are getting newer upgrade and improvement for free, for all the benefits it provides while having so little downside being called "random tech debt busywork" frankly very rude.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your "good enough" phrasing. It might actually not be good enough. It begs all sorts of questions about the state of things in the US that an extremely wealthy individual has the means to do this and at the same time that something like this doesn't already exist for the recipients via some other mechanism such as the entity that's responsible for a citizen's well being playing some role.
It is good, though. I think most folks who complain about it, though, wish it were better (better does not mean Dell spends even more of his own money on this, not directly anyway).
Many people view the existence of billionaires as a profound societal flaw. The accumulation of such obscene wealth by an individual is only possible because of systemic problems which prevented employees from capturing their fair share of their productivity, prevented competitors from entering the market to lower margins or prevented customers from being able to purchase at lower prices.
It's a good thing that he's giving away 4% of his wealth. He'll still have $140,000,000,000 left after this donation though, which is relevant context.
I use it on mobile via the web browser, it's pretty good actually. They don't have an official mobile app yet but there might be an unofficial one, I forget exactly.
They pretty clearly state their metric for performance is "unicorns per $1bn" (3.08 vs 1.22).
They're suggesting dollars invested in UK startups are more likely to create a unicorn than those same dollars put into us startups, hence higher performance.
Quite typically the highest return investments are picked first; as such there is a diseconomy of scale, it should be of no surprise that the ROI decreases as investment scales. Perhaps instead of thinking of it as a sign of efficiency it should be thought of as an underdeveloped market with the UK foolishly leaving money on the table.
Also it is not measuring average returns per $ but returns split by company then a vector operation of ceiling (1bn) divided by my 1bn then aggregated.
Thats a dumb metric. It is like saying conditioned on a doctor saw you, how many people were saved. You gotta count folks who died because they did not see the doctor too.
Some of the unicorns could be simply rent seekers making money by colluding with government people. Investors saw them sure shot and hence invested. That model is neither scalable not healthy.
Well, yeah. Presumably the way they achieve a good ratio is by being more discerning with their investments. If you try to scale that you get the US's numbers as you throw money at anyone with a pitch deck.
The thing is, the US model is still better in aggregate as it basically results in every single unicorn being birthed (in theory, there’s simply no lack of funding for plausibly good ideas). Focusing on a conversion metric is a vanity exercise when absolute value creation is available.
We would all rather own a huge low margin business than a tiny high margin business. Eg, 5% margin on $1B of sales is better than 80% margin on $10M sales.
I know nothing about UK investment culture, but I have been building startups for 15 years, volunteered for multiple accelerators, made angel investments and rubbed shoulders with many US VCs.
My impression of the US VC industry, especially near the end of the zirp era and even more especially during covid, the amount of VC capital being deployed far surpassed the number of competent VCs or startup founders.
Many VCs were making decisions based on factors that were NOT correlated with future venture success. Many VCs in fact probably biased companies away from future success, because they didn't understand what they were doing and their instincts from prior industries or investment regimes were directly the opposite of what was needed for an early stage startup.
In other words, there is risk aversion, and there is foolishness. I know for a fact there was a lot of foolishness going on in us VC investing (I even participated in some of it, learned from it, and I know better now).
I'm not just talking about VCs throwing money at anyone with a pitch deck. I'm talking about VCs having a backwards understanding of what makes startups successful and actively pressuring startups that could have worked into doing the wrong things.
There is a core of US VCs that are the world leaders in what they do, exceptionally aware of what makes startups successful and have the track record to prove it - this minority is overwhelming responsible for the industry's ROI. There is also a massive graveyard of fools who tried to replicate that success and failed for a variety of reasons.
Also if the UK investor says "we'd love to invest, can do the whole round, want you to send us your current cap table, we need to get the deal done before April because we have capital to deploy before end of the current financial year" don't actually expect the funds.
I had the misfortune to be pitching to VCs in the UK, the money was so expensive that it’s just not worth it, much better off moving to the US if you can.
That might be a case of selection bias. The only reason to put up with UK regulations and other issues is if you have a compelling reason to do so (compared to similar opportunities).
But a per capita figure is diluted by how big of a tech sector that country/region has relative to the rest of its economy. The more people work outside of that sector, the lower is any per-capita figure from tech. Fewer lines of code written per capita, fewer bugs per capita, ...
The figure per invested dollar is much better: how many unicorns emerge per billion of investment money.
Those who chase unicorns are mainly investors (plus people who want to join startups that become unicorns). That figure is directly relevant to them.
The tech sector in the UK is pretty big but also massively finance weighted. And salaries a lot lower than the US so a $ investment goes further. At my company a few years ago our one developer in Boulder earnt more than our head of software in the U.K.
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