It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.
And also, I love Google, and I love Apple, but once upon a time, unbeknownst to me, my salary at Google was being artificially restricted due to illegal collusion with Apple, among other companies.
Just because these companies have built amazing products that people want doesn't mean they still don't actively take advantage of their own employees. It isn't black and white.
What's wrong with this? Employees have different risk profiles than founders. Employees can jump from job to job within a few days. The same is not true for founders. Employees paycheck is (basically) guaranteed until the outfit collapses. The same is not true for founders.
If I dump all my time and savings into founding a company and it fails, will my employees bail me out and help me get back on my feet?
First, I would argue that most employees never get a meaningful offer to accept more risk if they so choose. I think it would be better if employees could choose to accept more risk in the form of profit sharing in place of salary, but it’s not typically on the table, even at a startup.
Second, the point here is that PG is misapprehending (or deliberately obfuscating) what people mean by “exploitation.”
When Marxists talk about exploitation what they mean is that employees (workers) are not paid the full value of their labor. This is usually explained away with “risk profile” by capitalists, as you did above, but most employees don’t have a choice to accept a higher risk profile in return for getting paid the full value of what they produce.
Employees have the choice in that they are free agents and can choose to accept or reject any contract. And they themselves can go and found a company just like the founders on the other side of the table.
Would it be nice if employees were given options to wiggle fixed comp to adjust to their own risk profiles - so they could choose more guaranteed pay with less risk, or more possible upside with more risk? Sure, absolutely. But I don't see how that should be a requirement, nor do I think companies not offering part-ownership are doing something wrong.
And I don't understand why employees would ever be compensated for the "full value of their labor". When you work for a company, your labor generally only makes sense within the context of the larger organization. Could that context explain the differences between what employees produce for the company, versus what they are paid?
"And I don't understand why employees would ever be compensated for the "full value of their labor". When you work for a company, your labor generally only makes sense within the context of the larger organization"
This is a good point. I've never understood why people who claim the full value of their labor is being stolen bother to involve themselves with the purported thieves at all. Why not work independently and take the "full value" of your labor for yourself?
The answer is of course because your Vue.js skills (or what have you) are not very valuable on their own without the whole organization; being capital, management, customers, suppliers, etc...
I think the commenter is using a paradigm where value is a function of labour. There are other viewpoints that disagree with that paradigm, like what you're suggesting.
You have to wonder how the billionaire looks at it though. Of course, they made money because of employees.
Would it be increasingly easy to convince yourself that it was actually all just you? Not the employees, not the hand full of high producing employees, certainly not the infrastructure provided by the government and society that enables wealth collection.
No, it was all the efforts of the Billionaire. I mean, you do have a billion dollars to prove it...
If billionaires build, they have to build something. That something should have value. Throwing money at creative destruction à la WeWork isn't building value but Adam Neumann sure made out well as did BenchMark.
Thank you so much for bringing up WeWork. I get PG's point, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that all billionaires are good because they simply must have made something that people actually want. Soooooo many people got hurt in the WeWork debacle, and continue to do so. This is an amazing read (and maybe something that PG is trying to counter): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-ca...
Nothing is stopping those employees from taking all the risks and starting their own businesses. Of course they'll give up their stable consistent paychecks and benefits for possibly years with only a small chance of high returns. Lower risk, lower reward.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll find that there are plenty of factors preventing some people from taking risks, and insulating and enabling others. You might even find that many of these factors are predictable and systemic!
At a personal level, a lot, if not most, billionaires never risked anything the vast majority of their employees would have to risk. They were either already rich-enough (or _very_ rich like Bezos), or from families that can support them if something fails.
At a company / systemic level, if say Musk or Bezos fail right now, their companies might be at risk and that can lead to thousands of people unemployed. But they already reaped the fruits high reward you're talking about.
And a LOT of people take the risks you're talking about, since new businesses are started everyday. But we're talking about billionaires in this context, and the current crop took a risk that the general population would consider it negligible.
Not everyone has the resources to be a founder. Even just starting a very basic business takes resources, but if we're talking YC tech startups, that's stuff like Ivy League schools, tech chops, good network connections, the ability to potentially not build wealth for years. It takes a ton of privilege, on average, and that just magnifies.
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It’s crazy that so many of these companies with billionaire founders have thousands of employees who are not billionaires, nor have a meaningful stake in the decisions the company makes. Wonder what that’s about.