And you're asking people in lemmy this?
It's like asking your highschool friends if models make good money
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Where should I ask then?
Financial advisors for the Uber rich. I remember hearing an interview of one on..radio lab or this American life or.. Something...I can't remember it was years ago, but anyway she described what it was like. They don't use passports, they would call her to find bracelets they lost in taxis, it didn't sound like they were working at all. I don't remember if she went into their work schedule, but financial advisors are treated like baby sitters, or at least she was.
I thought that might be a good place to start, I'm sure some of them have written books about it, or done more interviews.
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.
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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.
Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.
I don't think that's what you're saying, but I'll admit I've read your comment a few times, and couldn't really latch on to what you point was.
But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there's a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I'm in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I'd be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of "running a business" would all fall on me.
Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it's a gamble I'm more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.
The point is to explain what people mean when they say that nobody becomes a billionaire by their own effort alone. It's impossible for one, single human to generate that much value. Notch just got incredibly lucky.
You have a good point about the difference in risk versus reward of entrepreneurship compared to a job. People often choose the job because the alternative is destitution. It's not a free choice. Rates of entrepreneurship are much higher in countries that have a robust social safety net. Places like the U.S. actually have a relatively low rate.
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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.
Sounds exhausting 😅
Just look at the industrial amounts of bullshit spewing from Elon Musk's Twitter feed.
Clearly the answer is no.
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.
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I would suspect never.
Either they are obsessed with their "work" and do it far more than that, or they do nothing.
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.
Eat the rich
And tax their idle stock 1%, per share, per day.
I don't know about a million being life changing. Can't even buy a house for a million over here... Especially in USD, lol.
It's enough to wipe out most people's student loans, and buy a reliable vehicle, then put a down payment on a house. That's life changing.
Well, lucky you. But when houses cost over £2m, £1m down payment won't make me able to afford shit.
That's still a 50% down payment on that house, your mortgage payments will be a lot less than your rent. So you'll have a place of your own and more money every month, plus be investing in your capital instead of pissing money away. If that's not life changing for you then nothing is.
There's a 4.5x household income limit for mortgages in the UK. So if your combined income is £60k (for a family where both parties have average UK income), the most money you can borrow is £270k. And then you look at something that's not immediately falling apart and you see this https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/67606066/ you instantly know that you can't afford anything even with £1m in your pocket.
That's unless you want to settle for a garage transformed into a "one bed house" https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/66317679/
Another option would be to move to some part of London like Barking, but I'd rather live in a shed than a drug den.
So yeah, I'm happy for you if £1m is life changing for you.
But also as a general rule places don't let you spend over 30% of your income in rent, 60K that you mentioned for a couple is £4186 per month, so the maximum rent of that hypothetical person is £1256. Which wouldn't also allow you to rent a house like the one you showed, so it's pointless. The house where a couple that earns 60k lives can absolutely be bought for close to 1 million (if not less). Whoever is living in a 4 bedroom house like the one you pointed out earns a lot more than 60k and so they can finance the rest.
There's no limit on rents in the UK. You can spend all of your money on it if you wish.
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.
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.
I guess that would depend in what industry they're working or if they're making money from financial investments exclusively.
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.
What kind of dragon are they?
Are they a chromatic dragon like Bezos or Musk?
Are they a metallic dragon like Swift?
Either way they still smash smallfolk, it's a question of if it's purposeful or not.
No they do not. But they do emit about 1 million times more CO2 than the average person
Bold of you to assume they work.
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