How does one extract this from what I said, really don't understand.
Facebook, Amazon etc....
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You are certain, I am not. Try going to a bank to start a business and tell them you have 0, then try the same and tell them you have a quarter million ready to go. Think to yourself that if you start a business and it goes bust, you'll owe the bank forever, then think the same but someone (your parents for example) can help you out.
I don't buy for a second these advantages are common.
About the wages, c'mon man be realistic. If you start working at 18 for 12 bucks an hour how much will you have when you're 30? Rent, food, utilities, transportation... even if you have no social life whatsoever, how much do you realistically have by that time?
I really don't get why you find so hard to admit that the vast majority of people, even in the US or Europe, have nowhere near that kind of cash to risk in a business.
The weird thing is, given his phenomenal success, he started online selling books. Books! Not digital products or services suited to the Internet... books... with warehousing and shipping costs. It always struck me as odd to start with books. Shows what I know.
I didn't extract anything, that's why I was asking. I don't really think you believe anyone living paycheck to paycheck is lazy, but clearly it's not strictly true that anyone with a regular job can get $250k in assets.
Bezos was VP at 30 at D.E Shaw. It's safe to say he was gonna get a loan from a bank as he probably had enough money that he earned himself. Despite that, he got most of the money from friends
These advantages aren't common for the whole world but in the startup and tech scene they are common. The amount of people who have these advantages and many more yet still fail are staggering. Top level players earn 250k a week and most have not gone to achieve 2 percent of the success of Amazon. So the idea that this money automatically put him on the path to success is not true. It's an advantage like anything in life, just like Europeans who have an advantage in life over the rest of the world.
You said if you never spent a cent of your life, which is what I answered to.
Vast majority won't have that sort of cash which is why vast majority can never become billionaires. However, vast majority will and can get access to $500 but I don't see vast majority turning that into million percent (or even thousand percent) returns. Reason being this is a very difficult thing to do and takes a very rare person with a rare set of thinking, which Jeff Bezos is.
Books seemed logical at the time since he could gain advantage over traditional brick and mortar book stores (Barnes & Noble and Borders in the US at the time) by selling them cheaper due to the lack of brick and mortar overhead. He could've of course stopped at books and music, but kept adding things over time.
No they are not lazy. Point is $250k in assets in America is achievable and therefore the median net worth for retired Americans is indeed around that figure. So I'm not suggesting something that isn't currently happening.
It's far more relevant in the case of me or other people like me whose families are in the top 20-30th percentile of living standards in their respective countries. In Bezos case, his achievements causality is enormously contingent on his incredible intelligence, vision and execution ability. If all under-privileged people had the stable upbringing Bezos had, an incredibly miniscule number of them would have achieved what he would have.
We could be doing this in every thread of completely outlier achievers. If under-privileged people had Mozart's reasonably stable upbringing, we might have produced one more Mozart maybe? These are people who are 1 in billions. This is just woke politics of little relevance.
When you say amount, can you quantify that? What's the percentage of western citizens (since you mentioned US and Europe) that can easily access that kind of money to risk in a business?
Yeah my point is that 250k is A LOT of money, and you basically made my point, it would take an 18 year old 12 years of work and not spend a cent to get what Bezos got in one go. If that's not the definition of advantage, I don't know what it is.
The last point, I guess the saying "it takes money to make money" is true. It's obviously easier for someone who has 1 million dollars to turn that into 2 million, than someone who has 10k to turn it into 100k. The huge financial advantage open many doors, possibilities, investor, etc, that someone with 10k will never have.
Thanks for that. That's very informative. He actually warehoused "a couple of thousand titles", but it was being a storefront for the massive number of total items in the niche which interested him. I didn't know that before, but it makes a lot of sense.
The fact that he worked for a quant fund on wall street probably means he had a good bit of money already before Amazon.
Summed up my thoughts better than I could.
Yes, obviously? "Reasonably stable upbringing" is more than a little misleading, considering how incredibly privileged Mozart was for his time. He was the son of a composer and grew up in a famously musical family, getting to travel all around Europe on the invitations of royalty and nobles in an era when most people barely left their village. There might have been a thousand Mozarts out there at the time, but we'll never know because the vast majority of people were living in abject poverty.
I really don't see how you think this is any kind of gotcha argument. If anything, you're making my argument for me. One of the successes of the modern world is increased social mobility, certainly compared to Mozart's time.
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That's a skewed probability question.
They didn't just throw their 250k casually at yet another business venture to their sons. They did it for Jeff Bezos, a man who up until that time was the highest performer at every stage of his life. He clearly had a gift beyond others. What you should be asking is how many families would be willing to part with their savings for a business given their son is at that level.
Again, it's not that relevant. Why don't you focus on the amount of people who indeed do have 250k to spare but don't have successful businesses?
I think one poster said why should Bezos be considered a genius and not Mozart and as far as I know this was in response to that.
There are probably other Bezos out there in countries like Iran, India, Nigeria etc who don't have the platform Bezos did but my problem is that often the ones who go "yawn, rich kid" themselves are quite privileged living in the west.
EDIT: don't wanna drag it
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I think there are at least a few differtent conversations going on here, at the same time, and it's giving me a headache.
Well, I asked because from what you write you make it sound so easy, but I don't think a significant percentage of people ever find themselves in that position. Maybe in little tech bubble that doesn't represent the average population in the slightest.
Most families wouldn't part with their savings because a) many don't have them, and b) if their kid failed they would become poor. I doubt that was the case with Bezos' family.
I entered this discussion to point out it's silly to suggest 250k is not an advantage, when it obviously is, regardless of how many people wasted that advantage and didn't succeed.
Again that statistically does not ad up. Many families that have even a million to spare don't end up with anything like Amazon. Not even half of it. That alone should tell you how little of an impact it had, if any, for Bezos.
Nobody has said that everybody who starts off with that kind of advantage becomes a multi-billionaire, but it's sure as shit a prerequisite or very close to one.
What you've said is like saying that most people with legs won't make it to the PL anyway therefore being a double amputee isn't a disadvantage.
I don't get your argument to be honest. Just because something is hard even with an advantage, doesn't mean the advantage is not there.
This picture presents the assets but - as you can guess - only a small percentage of these assets is available in fresh cash... in a country where saving is relatively low compared to European countries...
Of course I 'realise the impact Amazon has on the world'. Not an entirely positive one either. I'm not denying he is a very intelligent person, and clearly a very good hypercapitalist. Calling him a genius for coming up with an offshoot of an existing idea, believing in the idea, and creating a company that then became the leader in an area, then multiple areas(a company of over 1m people now) is ridiculous, in my view. Bullying other companies into submission, feeding off the ideas and work of your staff, none of those things make for a genius. He is a very good business man, and has created an incredibly successful business, that's it.
To address your question, Amazon did not invent cloud computing, hyper scaling, or any of the concepts they use. I'm sure they have hundreds of patents for specific implementations of concepts, but Bezos himself has not created these technologies, his company has commercialised them.
Being a genius is a prerequisite of being a billionaire? You can’t seriously believe that. Even billionaires don’t think that. They are the example of the most successful people in our era, using our current values. If you go through history to look at the most successful people, based on their values, I don’t think you’ll see genius as a primary factor. Likewise if you flip the question.
Uhm, are you suggesting that, when Bezos started his online bookstore, he already envisioned all the rest? He's been good at picking up new directions for Amazon, but let's not go overboard. His initial vision was to start an e-commerce store, specifically for books.
Great post. Yes, what Bezos achieved with Amazon is quite remarkable, but any portion of praise has to be accompanied by a big serving of blame for having created an enormously exploitative company that's easily profitable and rich enough to sustainably treat its employees and competitors with dignity, but continues to choose not to. In short, feck him and them.
As a general point, since the discussion seems to skim along that subject, I'd point out that the level of social mobility in the US is relatively low among OECD countries. This indicates that these rags to riches stories are, in fact, relatively and unnecessarily rare in the US.
This 'woke bashing' is really boring. You do realize it serves no point, right? You're basically name-calling people who don't think 'woke' is a bit word. I don't see how it's anything but WUMming.
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It is probably low, which is to be expected in a horse race society with such a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship and competition which results in far more haves and have nots.
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To my knowledge, though, that's part of the same mythological complex, as the US doesn't score relatively high in entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial spirit either. (Sorry, can't look up my source right now.) So except if I'm misremembering this, it's not an actual excuse or reason.
Edit: some quick searching online doesn't help too much, but it does look like I might be underestimating entrepreneurship in the US.
Thanks mate, i just don't think anything is achieved with surface level fluff of the last few pages. I believe how societies shape policy and use these billionaire life stories is the core focal point, and critique of said policy using examples of exploitation and a winding back of the state in the name of entrepreneurship/bootstraps is a much more fruitful path for reform and solid criticism.
Obviously some want to burn down the system without any real plan for a rebuild and some just want to lick boots, so i'll take what i can get in a fast paced discussion
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And either way we're not rebuilding society on this forum.Thanks mate, i just don't think anything is achieved with surface level fluff of the last few pages. I believe how societies shape policy and use these billionaire life stories is the core focal point, and critique of said policy using examples of exploitation and a winding back of the state in the name of entrepreneurship/bootstraps is a much more fruitful path for reform and solid criticism.
Obviously some want to burn down the system without any real plan for a rebuild and some just want to lick boots, so i'll take what i can get in a fast paced discussion
I was thinking after my post that I don't really see the tech vision behind anything Bezos has done. He obviously has great business acumen (which unfortunately he has used for negative purposes), but I don't know anything special he's done in tech. E-commerce wouldn't be conceptually different if Amazon didn't exist: it may just have been more diverse, although the current IT trend to have most of the market dominated by a few giant companies suggests that probably some other company would have become like Amazon if Amazon hadn't. All of Amazon's other ventures aren't unique to Amazon either, to knowledge.
So what's left, to my mind, is someone who has made the most of the start in business that he had, in a way that has been great for himself but not really for most everyone else. And the key thing, then, is that those negatives are unnecessary and avoidable. As you say, people like Bezos are presented as admirable success stories, but from a country-as-community point of view, I see nothing admirable. He's rather an example of how you don't want your community (i.e., society) to function.
It wasnt an advantage because it wasnt necessary. He was doing a fundraising round and one of the investors happened to be his parents. Im sure it was nice to have but he got much more from others and would have easily gotten that 250k from somewhere else because he had a great business idea. You cant discredit his achievement in any way because of it.
No. He raised. A million from investors. $250k from parents.
Nobody has said that everybody who starts off with that kind of advantage becomes a multi-billionaire, but it's sure as shit a prerequisite or very close to one.
What you've said is like saying that most people with legs won't make it to the PL anyway therefore being a double amputee isn't a disadvantage.
If you or I were one of the senior most members of DE Shaw at 1992 at the age of 30 guaranteed we could raise that sort of money as well.
Irrespective of the 250 grand the guy went to Princeton, he obviously had a decent leg up in life
He’s made the most of it in fairness, and now he’s reached the apex of capitalism by shafting his workers, destroying small businesses, avoiding tax and attacking unions
Well done, cnut
He’s made the most of it in fairness, and now he’s reached the apex of capitalism by shafting his workers, destroying small businesses, avoiding tax and attacking unions
Well done, cnut
In a nutshell.
Please don't compare Jeff Bezos to Mozart. It hurts my soul.
In the U.S it's the median net worth of a families at retirement.
Allow me to add another dimension to the upbringing/hardwork discussion.
The median is literally folks with employed status throughout their lives and not unemployed. So, yes.
Median is not everyone, that's his point.