I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
You can tell that he doesn’t really think too deeply about any of this, because the way he wants to illustrate the point is by typing the numbers into a calculator.
It’s as if the money comes right up out of thin air, isn’t it?
He inadvertently gets close when he talks about Facebook being about people doing stalking. PG, is stalking a good thing or a bad thing, hmmm?
There’s no conservation rule for an asset’s value. Market cap comes mostly out of thin air because people believe a company is valuable. If they change their minds, it disappears.
(Market cap is estimated based on transactions that are a small percentage of market cap.)
No, market cap does not come out of thin air. Money flows in one direction and human activity and real changes in the physical world flow in the other direction.
Nobody is mad about the billionaires having a lot of money - they are mad that people are pissing in water bottles to make their route, or having the city’s public infrastructure privatized, or the many other fantastic real world changes that are on the other side of these fantastical market caps.
Market cap is based on people making estimates of future cash flow. (Especially for growth companies.) Predictions aren’t physical and can be wrong.
It’s also true that these companies raise and spend money and that results in physical changes in the world, but angry people on the Internet aren’t necessarily well-informed about what those changes are. There are lots of myths.
Your argument here is either - the money is fake, because it's based on a future prediction that is eventually going to be wrong; or it is "what billionaires are doing is fine, actually."
The first one is dispensed quite easily: if a person becomes a billionaire by lying about what will happen in the future, then the "wealth" is fake and obviously not earned.
That second one is very straightforward and can be addressed. You have to ignore a lot of obvious evidence to believe that coinbase, opensea, flock safety, one of the many gig startups... (to use a few of PGs billionaires) are a net positive force on society.
Thanks for educating me on the meaning of a valuation, but it's not really needed. Those "future cash flows" are eventually realized, and the first category converts into the second (in most cases).
You have to understand that when people are upset, they are upset about real changes that they see in their lives. They see the world that bezos, musk, peter thiel, etc are building, and they hate it. And yes, this group of people includes PG.
Traditionally, the value of a security is a prediction of its future cashflow to perpetuity discounted by a capitalisation rate. While it is true that some securities these days are sold as something not dependent on future cash flows, and insiders are paid off by selling something misleading to retail investors, that is known as a Ponzi scheme and is traditionally prohibited by securities regulations.
There is nothing physical about any financial transaction (except some electrons moving I guess), that doesn't mean that they aren't supposed to approximate something that happens in physical reality. A billion dollars is control.
Now the corollary. For each country, given existing borders, place the capital directly in the geographic area centroid? Population centroid? Which capitals move most?
If I had a few dollars for every time I heard “that’s so beyond the pale, it couldn’t possibly happen”, I would be buying some more RAM for my homelab right now.
Piketty argues that if r > g, wealth will accumulate into fewer and fewer hands over time. R is the rate of return of capital (rents, stocks, bonds, etc) and g is the growth of the economy over time.
If the economy grows at a higher rate than the rate of return, the pie gets bigger at a higher rate than wealth can concentrates. If the rate of return accumulates capital at a higher rate than the growth of the economy, wealth will inevitably concentrate over time.
He uses a lot of examples and economic history to argue that r > g, except for a few small periods. I think given the amount of wealth concentration we are seeing, and the political effects thereof, it is a compelling argument. Taxation (of wealth) is the proposed solution.
Well, we've seen the Labor Theory of Value here, and the idea that people get wealthy by stealing from others, and it is bad that some people have more money than others, and so on.
...You are using "wealth" in a way completely foreign to how I have ever seen it used linguistically. The abundance of resources available to an individual that we call "wealth" colloquially being transferable or tradable is basically the hallmark of a market economy. It can absolutely concentrate within one, because if it can be traded, it can absolutely be not traded decreasing the velocity of that value transfer to zero. So... Yes. If only one or a handful of people are buying, because everyone else is having to sell to stay alive, then wealth does, in fact, concentrate.
The term you're looking for is "surplus". The consumer sees a surplus of value because the price they paid is below the maximum they're willing to pay, and the producer sees a surplus because the price they charged was more than the cost to produce the good. In this economic system both parties benefit. Economic surplus is the thing that is "created" with every transaction. "Surplus accumulation" as a concept doesn't make any sense, and is isomorphic to what you think people are saying when they use the phrase "wealth accumulation." You should update your definition of "wealth".
Why are you asking? My hope is that you are asking this genuinely from a place of curiosity to better advance this discussion, as there is apparent confusion from people working from different definitions of the same word.
> because the people trading with you thought the exchange was of equal value, or they wouldn't have engaged in it
If this was true I would have emphatically agreed with you on all counts. But it simply isn't true.
Many find themselves in a position where they have their arms twisted to accept a deal they don't like. Yet they accept for some existential reason or another.
I think the idea here isn't the absolute numbers, but that if Elon manages to successfully fleece everyone's retirement, it will collapse confidence in the market, which could wipe out far more value than SpaceX alone.
IF SpaceX is actually worth 400-500bn and it's a few hundred billion dollars of fleece, sure, that's a "small" amount (still.. lord almighty it is never enough for these people). But the hazard is that it is a fleece. That would shake confidence in the system, the bear case is basically unlimited at that point.
Claude Code was a huge huge huge step up when it came out, absolutely massive.
It was barely marketed. I always turned copilot off, never found any benefit from Cursor. Claude Code was vastly different in conception, function, and capability, a product that defined an entirely new category of product.
Perhaps to others, that found copilot or cursor useful, it was merely marketing. But to me it was function and productivity, that I had never seen before.
People try to dismiss these things as LLM wrappers, but the LLM will be commoditized, and the wrapper will be where the real product design goes and where the real differentiation happens. Owning that unique process of communication between the dev and what the dev wants, figuring out the most stuff with the least complete spec, and maximizing every bit of the very tiny communication channel between the dev and the LLM and the code on disk, that's where 2026 and 2027 will be focused, until the next category defining product is created.
I started using Claude web with sonnet over chatgpt before any of the coding tools came out and noticed other founders were using it too and the reason was pretty simple - it was much less likely to hallucinate non existing APIs than ChatGPT
Our lives are just a big collection of experiences. The wall-clock minutes that actually matter in our lives are the minutes that we spend with other people. These minutes are literally all we have; the next minute you have is literally the only thing you lose when you die.
Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.
> Talking to machines is only ever something I have to do so that I can put food on the table. I never remember the minutes that I have spent talking to a machine, they are not memorable because they are not valuable.
Bro apparently you didn't play Need For Speed Underground 2 on release. That shit was better than 99% of human interactions I have.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
reply