[ctdonath2]

The prospect of a billion dollars motivates people to take enormous steps to improve humanity.
Waltons have made home goods accessible and affordable.
Musk is slashing costs of transportation, finance, and communication.
Bezos improved the Sears model a thousand fold.
And so on.

What many can’t grasp: one person can literally be >1000x more productive than another, and thus earn >1000x as much.

[lepton]

What many can’t grasp: one person can literally be >1000x more productive than another, and thus earn >1000x as much.

---

Even in mundane metrics, I know an evaluation within an office showed that some individuals were upwards of 20 times as productive as some of the others - excluding the lazy - and some few tripled the productivity of the entire work-group. That doesn’t even take into account the logarithmic increase in productivity that you mention.

One doesn’t need billions to sit in the garage drinking beer and watching sitcoms. One might actually need billions to build a factory (or series of factories), or a datacenter. As noted above though, “need” has nothing to do with it.

[GOPJ]

The prospect of a billion dollars motivates people to take enormous steps to improve humanity. Waltons have made home goods accessible and affordable. Musk is slashing costs of transportation, finance, and communication. Bezos improved the Sears model a thousand fold. And so on. What many can’t grasp: one person can literally be >1000x more productive than another, and thus earn >1000x as much.

I seldom agree with every word... but this is one of those times. Great comment.