> And those kind of people have difficulty believing this.
No, we're really not all like that.
I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point.
I can imagine a world in which I had made "the right choices" with bitcoin and Apple stocks — perfect play would have had me own all of it — and then I realised this would simply have made me a Person Of Interest to national intelligence agencies, not given me anything I would find more interesting than what I do with far less.
I can imagine a future AI (in my lifetime, even) and a VN replicator, which rearranges the planet Mercury into a personal O'Neill cylinder for each and every human — such structures would exceed trillions of USD per unit if built today. Cool, I'll put a full-size model of the Enterprise D inside mine, and possibly invite friends over to play Star Fleet Battles using the main bridge viewscreen. But otherwise, what's the point? I already live somewhere nice.
> There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.
Does it seem that way to you because you yourself have unbounded desire, or because the most famous business people in the world seem so?
People like me don't make the largest of waves. (Well, not unless HN karma counts…)
> perfect play would have had me own all of it
I meant literally all of it: with perfect play and the benefit of hindsight, starting with the money I had in c. 2002 from summer holiday jobs and initially using it for Apple trades until bitcoin was invented, it was possible to own all the bitcoin in existence with the right set of trades.
Heck, never mind perfect play, at current rates two single trades would have made me the single richest person on the planet: buying $1k of Apple stock at the right time, then selling it all for $20k when it was 10,000 BTC for some pizzas.
(But also, the attempt would almost certainly have broken the currency as IMO there's not really that much liquidity).
* Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for just $1.
* Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent the web, making it free for public use.
* Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine - "can you patent the sun?"
* Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds could have easily sold humanity out for untold billions.
* Chuck Feeny silently gave away $8bn, keeping only a few million.
... And in any case, this is an extreme situation. AI is an existential threat/opportunity. Allowing it to be sidestepped into the hands of Sam "sell me your retinal scans for $50" Altman is fucking insane, and that's putting it lightly.
It's way easier to adapt an existing framework one way or the other if the political part is already done.
I don't trust the AI industry to be a good stewart even less then the tech industry in general and when the area where I live has a chance at avoiding the worst outcome (even if at a price) in this technological transition I'm taking it.
https://factmyth.com/factoids/the-robber-barons-gave-most-of...
It’s hard to find someone who has gotten to a position where they might have a reasonable shot at becoming the world’s wealthiest person who doesn’t think they’d be a great steward of the wealth. It makes much more sense for a titan of industry to make as much as they can and then give much away than it does to simply not make it.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.
