• varyingExpertise@feddit.org
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      10 months ago

      Yep, I’ve seen friends reach the seven figure area through steady seven day weeks and some luck picking their trade and finding industrial clients over a period of fifteen to twenty years. I have seen how little they slept and how kids were basically only possible because they were pretty self reliant from age 12 or 13 and helped a lot around the house. I have no idea how a human could possibly create a thousand times that value in their lifetime.

      • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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        10 months ago

        They can’t. Billionaires can only exist by taking value generated by others. Absolutely nothing Jeff Bezos could do within 60 seconds is worth continuously “earning” over 18.000$.

    • InputZero@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars. Although the millionaires have to stop clutching their pearls, step up and realize that they’re a lot closer in class to the homeless than the billionaires.

    • Avicenna@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Well you sure as hell can’t have generally high moral standards and earn a billion from scratch. You have to either screw the environment on a very large scale and/or screw lots and lots of people.

      And if you are in a context where you inherit a billion and think there is no problem with an individual having billions, odds are you are also not in a great position moral-wise.

      • exasperation@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        I think the main ethical pathway to billions is through intellectual property. Write a beloved book series where each installment sells over 10 million copies, gets adapted into a movie cinematic universe that grosses billions, sells a shitload of merchandise, etc., and taking a fair cut of all that economic activity might result in a billion dollars.

        Yes, in a sense it’s still rent seeking of being paid some kind of toll for someone else building on your work, but that foundation is still your own work.

        On a smaller scale, you’ve got songwriters, filmmakers, other entertainers, who can do one thing that gets seen/appreciated by billions. Same with inventors or artists.