Genuinely as a question, but what is it is through something that the person wholly created themselves through their sweat, blood, and effort.
For example with game devs (and yes they are bad people for other reasons), but Notch or Scott Cawthorn (before commercialization and merchandizing of their franchises). Wouldn’t the ten’s, if not hundreds of millions they made from their initial products be theirs and theirs alone (after reasonable tax)? They didn’t extract surplus value, their customers came willingly, and the product isn’t some unavoidable monopoly, such as water rights, they printed money off of.
Where would the territory of Marx’s “Sweat of his brow” end?
I do not believe it is physically possible to become as rich as somebody like Notch or Taylor Swift simply on your own. Notch’s wealth primarily comes from his $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to acquire Minecraft, at that point Minecraft was essentially a symbol of consumerism with a fuck ton of merchandise that was (obviously) being created by other people. Notch would have been making money from licensing fees simply because he owned the IP. He may have made the game but he was still essentially profiting off of the work of other people.
An example of a game developer who works entirely alone and does not sell the rights to the IP of his game to others is RobTop Games, creator of Geometry Dash which is one of (if not the) most popular games on the app store and Steam. He’s living comfortably sure but I doubt he’s worth much more than $5 million. He’s estimated to have grossed $21 million from the game and this is over a 10 year period.
Genuinely as a question, but what is it is through something that the person wholly created themselves through their sweat, blood, and effort.
I don’t think anyone has ever become a literal billionaire purely through their own effort. That amount of money is something I think most people cannot even begin to comprehend.
To use your game dev examples, I am sure some game devs that have stayed truly independent like Eric Barone (stardew valley creator in case anyone doesn’t know) live very comfortable lives. He worked very hard for years on that project and deserves his compensation, but he’s still not remotely close to a billionaire. Notch, like Jennie said, made his money primarily through the MS acquistion. Cawthorn is also absurdly wealthy, but according to some light internet searching is valued around $60 million. Well shy of a literal billion dollars. These are all already outlier success stories that don’t even come close to a billion.
There is no world where a single billionaire should ever exist. I cannot think of a legitimate exception to that statement.
Genuinely as a question, but what is it is through something that the person wholly created themselves through their sweat, blood, and effort.
For example with game devs (and yes they are bad people for other reasons), but Notch or Scott Cawthorn (before commercialization and merchandizing of their franchises). Wouldn’t the ten’s, if not hundreds of millions they made from their initial products be theirs and theirs alone (after reasonable tax)? They didn’t extract surplus value, their customers came willingly, and the product isn’t some unavoidable monopoly, such as water rights, they printed money off of.
Where would the territory of Marx’s “Sweat of his brow” end?
I do not believe it is physically possible to become as rich as somebody like Notch or Taylor Swift simply on your own. Notch’s wealth primarily comes from his $2.5 billion deal with Microsoft to acquire Minecraft, at that point Minecraft was essentially a symbol of consumerism with a fuck ton of merchandise that was (obviously) being created by other people. Notch would have been making money from licensing fees simply because he owned the IP. He may have made the game but he was still essentially profiting off of the work of other people.
An example of a game developer who works entirely alone and does not sell the rights to the IP of his game to others is RobTop Games, creator of Geometry Dash which is one of (if not the) most popular games on the app store and Steam. He’s living comfortably sure but I doubt he’s worth much more than $5 million. He’s estimated to have grossed $21 million from the game and this is over a 10 year period.
I don’t think anyone has ever become a literal billionaire purely through their own effort. That amount of money is something I think most people cannot even begin to comprehend.
To use your game dev examples, I am sure some game devs that have stayed truly independent like Eric Barone (stardew valley creator in case anyone doesn’t know) live very comfortable lives. He worked very hard for years on that project and deserves his compensation, but he’s still not remotely close to a billionaire. Notch, like Jennie said, made his money primarily through the MS acquistion. Cawthorn is also absurdly wealthy, but according to some light internet searching is valued around $60 million. Well shy of a literal billion dollars. These are all already outlier success stories that don’t even come close to a billion.
There is no world where a single billionaire should ever exist. I cannot think of a legitimate exception to that statement.