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A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.
Even if they earned it ethically, they literally can't spend this much money. They can't spend the money fast enough.
They hold on to this much money to keep score.
This is exactly how I have always thought about it too. Pure greed. My father ran a company for 35 years and for 3 of those years he took either no payout or a very small payout so that he didn't have to let anyone go. I asked him why he didn't just downsize and he said that other people needed the money more than us. That's how shit needs to be run. People centric not profit driven.
Unfortunately it is in human nature to compare oneself to other people, and becoming big in other people's eyes is easiest when other people around you are already smaller than you.
This becomes truly predatory when you become the person deciding on other's situation.
Do you know a single business where an employee makes more money than his boss? Because I sure know lots of businesses where employees posses much more knowledge or skill than their supervisor, yet none of them surpass them in earnings.
I've had one supervisor in a large enterprise company make less than me - and they were damn good at their job. I was also told at another job I applied for (different firm) that I couldn't realistically request to make more than the manager.
Business owner here who's best employees earn at least as much as me: an often overlooked fact is the risk of invested time without equal payout for founding a business and ally the time until it eventually all works out.
All the employees at my age bracket already bought a house, and although my business starts working out now, after 10 years invested, my kids don't play in their own yard yet.
We need people creating ethical business and they need to earn quite a lot more money after all that first to catch up money wise and then to justify the risk. Of founding at all.
Most employees forget that for all their economic security there was somebody before them taking the risk and pay cuts to make that a possibility. Which is understandable, but sometimes a little sad. :/
Though I have known business owners who have made less than their employees at times, it's always been small 2-10 person businesses, and in a hard time when the owner was trying to weather the hard times with their own equity (ie paying the company to keep people employed). But that's only a small amount of time, and never a business that the majority of people in the county knew the name.
As for businesses with shareholders. Hell no. Never would happen.