Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work deciding to shake down a huge chunk of the web in a cash grab really isn’t a good look.
> Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work
The shorter time it took to make his wealth the better it looks because less time means better efficiency.
It's not like you're entitled to wealth because of how long you've worked. This is an idea that has lead few to financial success I imagine. Privileges and salary based on time keeping a seat warm somewhere is a union/government thing, not a common private business policy. In private business it's about the value you create, and Paul Allen and the early Microsoft team ended up creating quite a bit and did so relatively quickly.
To understand parent's comment you have to remember that not everyone believe that wealth correlates with work, or that lottery winners are immensely efficient. Some believe instead that wealth frequently comes from nothing but luck. In this model, quick gain certainly suggest more luck.
Which model is more accurate? I guess the huge majority of the inhabitants trapped in this planet do not need to think too long about it.
Comparing courageous entrepreneurs forgoing the safe route and staking out a claim for themselves in their passion, finding success thereof to a winning lottery ticket is not becoming and speaks of a mind filled with jealous spite and ill manners.
He only worked there a couple of years, and before MS got big. Did he really deserve the same cut as the other two (who worked for 30+) did? Maybe/not, but the question is valid.
Yeah I feel like this is an underrated point. Does being there at the early years of a company justify a cut of an unfathomable fortune that took the other partners many, many more years to fully form? It’s not so cut and dry, especially when we’re talking about the kind of fortune being fought over.
If the other partners want more value in exchange for continuing to work for the company, they should negotiate for more shares in a dilution event.
If they expected 30 years of service in the first place, then they should've put a 30 year vesting term on the shares from the start.
There's no right answer, it really depends on what people want and negotiate for. I may expect to put in 5 years and then retire with whatever value we end up with. That's totally reasonable. Just because my partner decides at that point to keep working doesn't mean our deal is suddenly no longer valid.
That's why I say, if you want to change the deal halfway through you need to get the board to issue more shares.
The subject is well trodden now, of course. But, ask me in 1981 and I wouldn't have had much in the way of clue. My first intuition is that they should have bought him out at a nice premium at the time he left.
On the other hand, it is so bad a cool guy won a 100x lottery? Worse things have happened.
For an extension of that thought: does being there in the early days of a company justify a disproportionate cut compared to the people who then work for the company for the next thirty years?
> You don’t get to repair that karma with some donated vaccinations and mushy blog articles.
I'm sorry, but why don't you? He's literally saving millions of lives through his foundation, and through getting other billionaires to give to charity through the giving pledge.
He was the richest man in the world. He could have done anything he wanted to with his life, and he chose to do good things. He deserves some praise for that.
While he was a tough business person and sometimes may have done things that were borderline unethical, he never murdered anybody. He's certainly redeemable. And I think he has more than redeemed himself the past two decades for any of his past transgressions.
I agree he and the Gates Foundation do wonderful things, but I will Never be entirely comfortable with one person sitting on that much money. He is worth in the range of 100 billion dollars. 100 billion dollars.
He has promised to give half of it away but as far as I can tell is no closer to doing that since he first made the pledge. I really wonder sometimes if that pledge was just PR for the absurdly wealthy. No need to tax us! We will be giving it away! But when?
He is doing good things but there is no way I can look up to someone who sits on such an obscene amount of wealth.
Bill has been giving away billions. He's just also been earning like crazy too.
I forget where I read it, but when Jeff overtook Bill, there were various articles highlighting that Bill would still have been a lot richer if you accounted for how much he'd now put through the foundation.
So just because his market net worth hasn't gone down (in fact it's gone up a bit), it's not from him not yet giving money away.
Gates most recent comments about Android and how he deserved to win the mobile market show that his attitude never changed. He’s the same person with better PR and an ineffective foundation trying to wash his money and extend his influence.
“That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win.” Interpret as you see fit. It comes off to me as if it was stated that the natural order meant it was deserved due to inherit superiority.
You guys are reading way too much into this. Its just an objectively true observation - not a declaration of "superiority". An OS company should win in the OS space.
I read that as more like "We're Microsoft, they're "Google"[Small fry]." Given the stature of the company, and the combined brain power of the staff it was their battle to lose
Especially given that prior to Android, Google was pretty
much just a web company whereas Microsoft had dominated the OS market pretty much the length of the entire personal computer industry. It WAS a natural thing for MS to win.
I think that's a very suspect use of "natural". Of course, many uses of "natural" are suspect, in that people smuggle all sorts of their personal prejudices into it. E.g., the way a number the Civil War declarations of secession mentioned how it was natural that whites should rule over blacks. Or the way today that religious conservatives think that the natural order is the dominance of men over women, and that gay people are unnatural.
Even in this case though, I don't think it means anything more than "we were so used to using our monopoly power to steamroll everybody that we expected to keep on doing that". Microsoft only ever dominated the personal desktop computer OS market. They were a minority player in server OSes their whole existence, losing first to big iron and later to Linux. The handheld market went from being owned by companies like Palm to Apple and Google dominating. I know less about the embedded market, but Microsoft has been trying to own that for 20 years, and I don't think they've ever had a dominant position. I think even their desktop OS dominance was less to do with Windows being an amazing operating system and more to do with it being the thing that ran Word, Excel, and other popular business software.
So I think tsunamifury is right. Gates got so comfortable winning he saw it as "natural", rather than a combination of luck and their willingness to be an aggressive monopolist in a newfangled industry and during a period where antitrust enforcement was falling out of vogue.
Or the way that modern progressives tend to skew everything towards race and class when a conversation is not even remotely about that, it seems like a natural thing for them.
It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.
Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.
You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.
I picked those examples because they're very prominent uses of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason that obvious examples in America are about things like race and class is that America was founded by a bunch of rich white dudes who wrote their systemic advantages into law, enforced them violently, and then tried to pretend it was just the natural order. If you don't like that, take it up with them. Were we in England, I could have used similar examples from the aristocracy and royalty, who thought their dominance was just as natural, but everybody else (we colonists included) thought were inbred, chinless goofs.
I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".
I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.
I think those who are defending Gates here naively believe they are of the same natural position, instead of realizing they are so far down they are more realistically his prey.
https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-...