Where are the GenZ multi millionaires and billionaires?
4•moneyhungry•7mo ago
Mark zuckerberg became a billionaire at age 22. Where are the young self made billionaires or multi millionaires and in what industry are they mostly ? Is it still mostly in tech, or are sectors like social media, content creation, and crypto taking over?
Comments
PaulHoule•7mo ago
I think you really can't make that kind of money at content creation or crypto.
Remember Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and company didn't become billionaires by making a company that made a billion dollars, they became billionaires by starting a public corporation that became worth billions and billions. It's been getting harder and harder to do that ever since not least to laws passed after the Enron scandal, the 2008 crisis and such. Every social media company that had the possibility of going public got bought by Facebook or Microsoft.
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
Optimize/redesign the low-D from high-D mechanism to be self-amplifying :)
Gen-A/Z, low-D (cool,IT-immune) by surfeit of youth & dearth of means, growing up in high-D millennial culture (rich,online & cringe)
Are you saying Gen-A/Z is subaltern in a way different to the traditional disaffection of youth?
> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment..." —HMH's Bishop
Aha, so Aristotle would say high-D types have an excess of prudence (or at least phronesis, in the sense of knowing how to turn affairs to one's own advantage) as well as a deficiency of justice?
Not all researchers in that field would 100% agree but I see D as the old dark triad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy) plus Sadism which is conspicuously absent from the triad.
My own take is that the modern moral rot is founded in Narcissism as described in
which was thought to be about the 1970s when it came out but actually talks about longer term trends that have been tracked to the 18th century in the US, Tokugawa Japan and ancient Rome. Psychologists see Narcissism as an underdevelopment of the personality
so it's not like a High D person is a Low D person that went bad, but rather a High D doesn't have a lot of insight into how Low D people work. In a Low D culture a High D person might be forced to be a "wolf in sheep's clothing" but a silver lining to being in a culture that celebrates High D is that High D people are proud to fly their flag.
When I was a hungry college student I thought "gee Charles Manson was good at picking up chicks"; today I realize that Charles Mason was good at picking up murderous chicks. That is, High D people aren't good at ripping off or seducing low D people, they're good at ripping off and seducing other High D people. See
>In other words, only by enhancing the competitiveness of individuals in the job market and acquiring problem-solving skills, can they enhance their psychological satisfaction.
I'm vibing that rightwingers prefer streaming because of the compressed time scales, while lefties prefer blogs because the game becomes more "iterated".. this "explains" (institution-supported) percolation of lefty narcissists attempting to cross timescales?
>I'd wish the losers could become psychopaths by having [per Aristotle... or Jefferson] some business *of their own* which they could mind. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254503)
Been mulling this (emphasis mine) as well.. that comment sounds now like giving GenA/Z Psycho-Ed (like Sex-Ed but not conducted by prigs)
Secondarily, their savings rate is not going where Thiel expects, which means one's gotta encourage them to redirect these savings to bootstrap their businesses
Psycho-Ed -> Psycho'ed (=purely motivational) venkatrao had a post teasing motivation vs meaning -- also 2 time-scales
Reflexively, I'd guess that GenAZ can break the cycle because they can (potentially) get a more accurate sense of history than millennials. (Worse state capacity for formal education can help?) You'd want to look at ethnocultural crossovers in NYC (it looks promising that ICE is targeting Turkish agitators, because among frenemy immigrants, their polarization entropy most closely approximates that of the host nation-- ime)
[Only]>good at ripping off and seducing other High D people.
Thus suggesting that both sama & YC are high-D :) One would have to shake-off accusations of envy from the narcissists/prigs, if one weren't cool enough
Update: before today I was thinking that, unlike the further left, right+center+epsilon have always been able to coalesce around the very reasonable idea that institutions are fundamentally good (compared to the leftist version for individuals) but Paul's subaltern comment makes me wonder also about timescales with respect to genz/a building their own alt (LOW-KEY) institutions
Re: Rao, I found that I had to deliberately read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in small chunks with large breaks, because otherwise it all blurs together in terms of being a bunch of h saps being awful to each other. More specifically to his introduction, one can see big differences in the "tournament" between say 1250 and 1500: over that period they go from being a sort of open wargame with a racing-for-pinkslips feel played over the several km of hill and dale between villages, to a sport played in an enclosed pitch in front of an audience, limited to vetted entrants with the appropriate gear.
(I'm also carefully going through the possible reasons why upvotes on cmmnts on HN should be secret but while downvotes are almost not at all ;)
Ignoring ftm the not too interesting clusters of "prophet at home"+"hermit no-one will admit they take seriously" ideas:
-I assumed when Paul says "Republicans" he always means the guys in the Inner (& some portion* of Outer) Party.
-In my not even half baked model it's an inverted pyramid where the anti-intellectual/anti-institution ("subaltern") swing-voter base is sovereign
-Trump can go full subaltern because the guys (right+center+epsilon) that sincerely believe in (the sanctity of) the Institution "know" that It cannot be touched
-check with the very short list of "talk left walk left" historical examples, and see why no uh party member believes that "talk left smash everything" could happen -- that's way too subaltern for a moneyed dude.. and well it doesn't (not in any meaningful way-- he can't touch the Fed?)
-you may still handwave that perceptions are everything
-or you can help with baking the model (eg *what portion)
>In defending this ''union of desire and esteem,'' Lasch reveals himself as a true puritan -- not in the pejorative sense of being prudish, but in the sense of believing that good societies (on the small scale of families and the large scale of political communities) can be sustained only if desire is sanctified by respect. This is why the New England Puritans (to whom Lasch grew increasingly sympathetic as he grew older) thought of marriage as a ''miniature commonwealth,'' a model for human relations in which
appetite and obligations are held in delicate balance. Lasch agrees, which is why he may be fairly described as an economic liberal and a cultural conservative
-- a liberal who thinks that humane societies must curb excesses of wealth and poverty, a conservative who thinks that individual members of such societies should be held accountable to a standard of personal responsibility.
Emphasis mine: Edwardian Liberal
But also:
"The feminist movement,..., far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own.
082349872349872•7mo ago
alternative sol'n: bring on the Centrifugal Bumble Puppy parks; who needs actual progress as long as it's possible to sustain the illusion :-)
(come to think of it, evaluating "progress" requires the ability to compare across longer timescales, so the goldfish* of the Brave New World need not even have the illusion, because they never reflect)
* would an Edwardian complain that our recent discovery of "Goldfish with PhD's" has created entities which can expound upon the meaning of everything but the value of nothing?
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
Oh no, the cavalry scared off Paul I think :(
some times I can't even begin parsing what you mean :) it scares me a little, but also thrilling-- like very very abstract BDSM? Hope that's reciprocal :)
Which means: I see value in your (rhetorical?) questions.. because .. I still sense deep unease? (Pardon the manic schizo)
Like you always say, & I try to hold to heart: a problem worth its salt must bite back. You nibbled, but confronting the nature of (emergent society-wide) "sadism"(?) that is still somehow also seductive (to the most based of "us", I imagine), that's putting 1's head in the lion's jaw? Abstract, but feels very real<=>live Swiss style mil exercise?
In short, let's hasten slowly, so that we can one day put 3's and hope that'll choke the lion for a bit.. meanwhile shall we concentrate these dangerous thoughts on the periphery of our minds? (Ie centrifuge)
Paul mentioned pornography elsewhere.. he has a far less sophomoric style imho (being fullish time father of real boy explains it for me*) than either of us?
But I also don't see myself as the kid in that pic, more as the memeshirt, or beer, or daisies ;)
082349872349872•7mo ago
> scared off Paul
Maybe if we're still he'll be curious enough to come back? One of the distractions of the world of atoms is that a fox near us had 3 kits a few months ago, and we often see them early morning/late evening. Now they're getting old enough to be scared off by humans, but when they were really small they would either be curious about us or (when multiple) ignore us because they were playing among themselves, so we managed to get within a few metres a few times...
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
(Trying to get into other people's heads is like trying to get a post on the front page (when you're not handicapped) I am all for that endeavor ;)
I think he just has a different reply strat, we have little choice but to follow his low visibility lines (seems most HN compliant in retrospect)
Sorry about the one line responses to your technical posts, I wouldn't do that if I didn't think that's the best way to get interesting followups
That's on my stack as well but too deep down atm so I'm only lurking abt
wmf•7mo ago
You can definitely make billions in crypto but beating the criminal charges is harder.
PaulHoule•7mo ago
It's keeping it or getting it out that's the hard part. Look at the case of Satoshi Nakamoto who hasn't touched his main BTC cache. Often you hear about some shitcoin that has an eye-popping valuation and the people who started it still own most of the coin but if they tried to sell much of it the value would drop.
neom•7mo ago
It goes in cycles. The late 90s into 2010s was getting everyone "online" 2010s to 2015s was "online stuff" and 2013 today has been moving all the software to the internet, people got rich in each wave of them. I wish I could find it but I once saw a super early day interview (not the Bambi Francisco one) of Zuck asking about turning down billions and he's just like "I have facebook..." - he could see what was in front of him. Personally I'd guess the next big wave of young rich folks will come out of hardware. On your comment about content creation/the creator economy... I hope for a resurgence of the value of individual art and creativity. The greatest joy I had working on building deviantart was technology disappearing into the background so creativity could shine. Now that we have a sort of interesting tech maslow in place, I hope many young folks are able to find ways to make comfortable livings doing cool things using tech over the next 10 years, and I hope we continue to de-emphsize the want to become a billionaire, the richest people I know are the least happy.
PaulHoule•7mo ago
Remember Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk and company didn't become billionaires by making a company that made a billion dollars, they became billionaires by starting a public corporation that became worth billions and billions. It's been getting harder and harder to do that ever since not least to laws passed after the Enron scandal, the 2008 crisis and such. Every social media company that had the possibility of going public got bought by Facebook or Microsoft.
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
Gen-A/Z, low-D (cool,IT-immune) by surfeit of youth & dearth of means, growing up in high-D millennial culture (rich,online & cringe)
Low-key (paywalled) epicenter of memes "vibe shift" AND "hype dad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210610081555/https://www.8ball...
(Subtext lifted from old goat Gramsci!!)
Cited but not linked here https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-obituary-for-millennial-c...
082349872349872•7mo ago
> "We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment..." —HMH's Bishop
PaulHoule•7mo ago
https://www.darkfactor.org/
082349872349872•7mo ago
PaulHoule•7mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics
Not all researchers in that field would 100% agree but I see D as the old dark triad (Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Psychopathy) plus Sadism which is conspicuously absent from the triad.
My own take is that the modern moral rot is founded in Narcissism as described in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism
which was thought to be about the 1970s when it came out but actually talks about longer term trends that have been tracked to the 18th century in the US, Tokugawa Japan and ancient Rome. Psychologists see Narcissism as an underdevelopment of the personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Analysis_of_the_Self
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/kernbergs-borderline-c...
so it's not like a High D person is a Low D person that went bad, but rather a High D doesn't have a lot of insight into how Low D people work. In a Low D culture a High D person might be forced to be a "wolf in sheep's clothing" but a silver lining to being in a culture that celebrates High D is that High D people are proud to fly their flag.
When I was a hungry college student I thought "gee Charles Manson was good at picking up chicks"; today I realize that Charles Mason was good at picking up murderous chicks. That is, High D people aren't good at ripping off or seducing low D people, they're good at ripping off and seducing other High D people. See
https://leverage.fandom.com/wiki/The_Long_Con
and "You can't cheat an honest man".
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
) I've been struggling to relocate some old convos so full responses will take some time :( So here I trade prudence for urgency :)
>The_Long_Con
I expect to find discussions of (at least) 2 time-scales there :)
(OT? Note that "prudence" morphed into "prude" (=prig) ... Only if you care to bite this "Calvinist" bait!)
>plus Sadism
Have to also revisit old Convo about "more cruelty than [absolutely?] necessary" VS psychopaths extracting benefits from win-win games
While looking for DISC numbers for Taiwan vs China (& similar studies comparing states of (Maha)Bharat)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/14/2613
>In other words, only by enhancing the competitiveness of individuals in the job market and acquiring problem-solving skills, can they enhance their psychological satisfaction.
Reminds me of Thiel's cooperate internally, compete externally. (? Generalizing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...)
I'm vibing that rightwingers prefer streaming because of the compressed time scales, while lefties prefer blogs because the game becomes more "iterated".. this "explains" (institution-supported) percolation of lefty narcissists attempting to cross timescales?
>I'd wish the losers could become psychopaths by having [per Aristotle... or Jefferson] some business *of their own* which they could mind. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42254503)
Been mulling this (emphasis mine) as well.. that comment sounds now like giving GenA/Z Psycho-Ed (like Sex-Ed but not conducted by prigs)
Secondarily, their savings rate is not going where Thiel expects, which means one's gotta encourage them to redirect these savings to bootstrap their businesses
Psycho-Ed -> Psycho'ed (=purely motivational) venkatrao had a post teasing motivation vs meaning -- also 2 time-scales
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/be-history-or-do-his...
Reflexively, I'd guess that GenAZ can break the cycle because they can (potentially) get a more accurate sense of history than millennials. (Worse state capacity for formal education can help?) You'd want to look at ethnocultural crossovers in NYC (it looks promising that ICE is targeting Turkish agitators, because among frenemy immigrants, their polarization entropy most closely approximates that of the host nation-- ime)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42956827
[Only]>good at ripping off and seducing other High D people.
Thus suggesting that both sama & YC are high-D :) One would have to shake-off accusations of envy from the narcissists/prigs, if one weren't cool enough
Update: before today I was thinking that, unlike the further left, right+center+epsilon have always been able to coalesce around the very reasonable idea that institutions are fundamentally good (compared to the leftist version for individuals) but Paul's subaltern comment makes me wonder also about timescales with respect to genz/a building their own alt (LOW-KEY) institutions
Lagniappe https://youtu.be/qvdt2FZ0_B8
(Outcool'd Jeff goldblum from Jurassic park lol)
Okay over and out no more edits
082349872349872•7mo ago
Paul's subaltern comment reminded me strongly of "Life of Brian": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4&t=92s
Re: Rao, I found that I had to deliberately read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Civilization in small chunks with large breaks, because otherwise it all blurs together in terms of being a bunch of h saps being awful to each other. More specifically to his introduction, one can see big differences in the "tournament" between say 1250 and 1500: over that period they go from being a sort of open wargame with a racing-for-pinkslips feel played over the several km of hill and dale between villages, to a sport played in an enclosed pitch in front of an audience, limited to vetted entrants with the appropriate gear.
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44477779
Those 2 sets of aggregated data seem to correlate (cross-validate?), but I haven't checked numerically, hoped for some input from Paul first
So far, his website link seems VERY sus :)
(Come to think of it, Ireland makes sense now-- that HN post of sick graph pairs also comes to mind)So-- you might disagree-- that's something [not puppy-/goldfish-like] that I am alright with leaving in the centrifuge (for) now ;)
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
https://youtu.be/gNn9NxZH2Vo
>This is an anime ... with [legendary] Chinese [hero]... and ... a Hungarian song as the intro
082349872349872•7mo ago
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
(I'm also carefully going through the possible reasons why upvotes on cmmnts on HN should be secret but while downvotes are almost not at all ;)
Ignoring ftm the not too interesting clusters of "prophet at home"+"hermit no-one will admit they take seriously" ideas:
-I assumed when Paul says "Republicans" he always means the guys in the Inner (& some portion* of Outer) Party.
-In my not even half baked model it's an inverted pyramid where the anti-intellectual/anti-institution ("subaltern") swing-voter base is sovereign
-Trump can go full subaltern because the guys (right+center+epsilon) that sincerely believe in (the sanctity of) the Institution "know" that It cannot be touched
-check with the very short list of "talk left walk left" historical examples, and see why no uh party member believes that "talk left smash everything" could happen -- that's way too subaltern for a moneyed dude.. and well it doesn't (not in any meaningful way-- he can't touch the Fed?)
-you may still handwave that perceptions are everything
-or you can help with baking the model (eg *what portion)
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
>In defending this ''union of desire and esteem,'' Lasch reveals himself as a true puritan -- not in the pejorative sense of being prudish, but in the sense of believing that good societies (on the small scale of families and the large scale of political communities) can be sustained only if desire is sanctified by respect. This is why the New England Puritans (to whom Lasch grew increasingly sympathetic as he grew older) thought of marriage as a ''miniature commonwealth,'' a model for human relations in which
-- a liberal who thinks that humane societies must curb excesses of wealth and poverty, a conservative who thinks that individual members of such societies should be held accountable to a standard of personal responsibility.Emphasis mine: Edwardian Liberal
But also:
"The feminist movement,..., far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own.
082349872349872•7mo ago
(come to think of it, evaluating "progress" requires the ability to compare across longer timescales, so the goldfish* of the Brave New World need not even have the illusion, because they never reflect)
* would an Edwardian complain that our recent discovery of "Goldfish with PhD's" has created entities which can expound upon the meaning of everything but the value of nothing?
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
some times I can't even begin parsing what you mean :) it scares me a little, but also thrilling-- like very very abstract BDSM? Hope that's reciprocal :)
Which means: I see value in your (rhetorical?) questions.. because .. I still sense deep unease? (Pardon the manic schizo)
Like you always say, & I try to hold to heart: a problem worth its salt must bite back. You nibbled, but confronting the nature of (emergent society-wide) "sadism"(?) that is still somehow also seductive (to the most based of "us", I imagine), that's putting 1's head in the lion's jaw? Abstract, but feels very real<=>live Swiss style mil exercise?
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/europe/paying-scho...
In short, let's hasten slowly, so that we can one day put 3's and hope that'll choke the lion for a bit.. meanwhile shall we concentrate these dangerous thoughts on the periphery of our minds? (Ie centrifuge)
Paul mentioned pornography elsewhere.. he has a far less sophomoric style imho (being fullish time father of real boy explains it for me*) than either of us?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44492326
*so, not quite sabra as Joseph https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d601f74ae9201df318403b8c7e25b32...
But I also don't see myself as the kid in that pic, more as the memeshirt, or beer, or daisies ;)
082349872349872•7mo ago
Maybe if we're still he'll be curious enough to come back? One of the distractions of the world of atoms is that a fox near us had 3 kits a few months ago, and we often see them early morning/late evening. Now they're getting old enough to be scared off by humans, but when they were really small they would either be curious about us or (when multiple) ignore us because they were playing among themselves, so we managed to get within a few metres a few times...
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
I think he just has a different reply strat, we have little choice but to follow his low visibility lines (seems most HN compliant in retrospect)
Sorry about the one line responses to your technical posts, I wouldn't do that if I didn't think that's the best way to get interesting followups
https://youtu.be/e3mGcSu_IZ4
For adults, relative size is a consideration? (But this one looks a bit on the young side? And the eagle was the curious one here :)
gsf_emergency_2•7mo ago
+(arguably self-)
It looks to me u guys could collab or at the very least mildly banter about parsing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369612
That's on my stack as well but too deep down atm so I'm only lurking abt
wmf•7mo ago
PaulHoule•7mo ago