• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    Some gained wealth legitimately

    Nobody gets truly rich by playing within the rules. Show me a billionaire and I’ll show you a list of crimes.

    • adjectivenoun@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes? There are ways to “win the lottery” inside capitalism without breaking any rules. Sure, the amassing of wealth is in itself unethical in a country where many kids can’t eat nutritious meals, but you don’t necessarily have to be a backstabbing thief to become rich. You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off at the same time the technology becomes mature enough for something like online banking to be feasible.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes?

        They’re routinely the victims of them. Lottery winners are a scam target rich environment. North of 5% of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years, far above the national average.

        You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off

        Utterly clueless if you believe the advent of online banking was Peter Thiel’s idea. I seriously doubt you understand how banks form or function.

        • adjectivenoun@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          I wasn’t using Thiel as an example–at least not on purpose. Take any obvious idea and marry it to a technological revolution, and you’ll have a bunch of rich people who got rich mostly by pure luck. Musk is a piece of shit, but the case for Tesla taking off was actually proven by GM’s EV1 ~3 years prior. The main reason it didn’t take off? Well it was twofold: first, GM was reluctant to commit to EVs because marketing them would make their conventional fuel vehicles look environmentally destructive, and second, the battery technology the EV1 used was nickle metal hydride. Tesla succeeded because it coincided with the proliferation of lithium ion batteries, and in that particular case, I don’t think anything unethical happened. If Musk had stopped here we probably wouldn’t think of him as an evil piece of shit.