A milder version would be: People are paid based on the marginal cost of replacing them. But still, either of those is a far cry from claiming it's "the value they create".
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.
Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago, nowadays all he does is tweet stupid stuff. Meanwhile his net worth has skyrocketed.
Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value. Plenty of net-negative, work-creating behavior gets rewarded with big raises.
> Elon Musk stopped producing value quite a while ago
No evidence of that.
> Everyone who's ever spent 6 months in big tech knows how easily compensation is divorced from value.
You could always sell your yourself to a big tech company with your expertise in who are the value ones. A person with that skill would be very valuable to a company.
Sir, I understand that you did some cool, useful stuff in your career and got rewarded for it and that's a case of the system working, but if you can't see various sycophants and crooks getting just as rich or richer, while contributing nothing, then I can't see it for you.
Count his tweets over the last few years, WaPo did a big story on it recently, its like 70 tweets/day. Then divide his remaining attention over the number of companies he's running. Or look at the effectiveness of his management of DOGE which is the most public/transparent example we have.
I do think up until 2020 he was useful, there's a reason nobody else made electric cars or self landing rockets work. But most of his wealth accumulation has been since then.
Brother, both Twitter and Grok had to be folded into SpaceX to hide their abject failure while he was spending all day on social media. People change, he's not the same guy as the 2010s Elon.
It's not hard to show either. Imagine you're on an island and have been gored in the stomach by a wild animal, and a skilled surgeon can save your life. Most people would instantly agree that continued existence is of immense "value".
However after making that decision, you discover that you're on an island where almost everyone is a surgeon and the going-rate is much lower than you expected. Are we supposed to believe that your new knowledge somehow reaches backwards in time and retroactively changes the "value" of Not Dying? No, that'd be crazy. Valuation is never the same as price-point.