alt Hacker NewsIn the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.
Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.
The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.
Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.
I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."
If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?
Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.
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We need a better system. We tried communism and that was shit, so this is the least bad system we have.
I think you overstate the power of money. Of course it helps. But it’s far from everything. Just look at the number of rich kid fuckups or CEOs with poor backgrounds. It’s just one component that smooths risk and occasionally provides a starter network, but it’s not everything.