Paul Graham says you can earn a billion honestly. The thread did the accounting (paulgraham.com)
Graham frames the billion as pure exponential math: growth rate times market size, and "it will happen automatically if you just keep making customers happy." His honest-earner examples are Airbnb, Apple, Facebook.
The sharpest pushback wasn't outrage but bookkeeping. Creative destruction credits the creation and quietly writes off the destruction, one engineer argued. Another did the YC math back at him: out of ~6,500 funded, about 30 billionaires, under 0.5%.
Sign in to save