The Altruistic Case For Becoming A Billionaire
More people should try this
A while ago, I read an article from Applied Divinity Studies (ADS) called Life Advice: Become a Billionaire. I agree with that life advice. I think way more people should try to be billionaires if they’re interested in improving the world.
Most people don’t try very hard to become billionaires. Odds of success are low and while the benefits are large, they’re perhaps not worth the risks. If you’re just trying to maximize your own happiness, it’s not at all obvious whether becoming a billionaire is a good idea. While ADS argues convincingly that odds of success aren’t that low for smart and entrepreneurial people, you still probably won’t succeed. I have a friend who founded a start-up, and now it looks like there’s a few percent chance it will be worth a billion dollars (going by base rates of other Y-combinator funded start-ups).
But if you want to make the world a better place, becoming a billionaire is a great way of doing that.
The market inadequately incentivizes billionaires because people are paid in money which has declining marginal utility. Microsoft provided enormous benefits to huge numbers of people. Only a tiny portion of the consumer surplus was received by Bill Gates. Millions of people were made drastically better off, and yet Bill Gates did not receive an amount of well-being commensurate with the benefit he provided to others. Compared to the benefit his company provided to the world, Bill barely benefitted.
If we assume that how much a person pays roughly tracks how much good their jobs does, then there’s a major problem. Most people would probably take a guaranteed million dollars a year over a 10% chance of a billion dollars a year. But this means people would take jobs that do less good over jobs that do more good—for if a job does more good on average, but is riskier, people are less likely to take it.
And then there’s the most important point: if you’re a billionaire, you have the capacity to make huge charitable donations. If you give a billion dollars to givewell charities, that will save about 200,000 lives. If Elon Musk gave his net worth away, he could save about 73 million people (instead he’s chosen to do the opposite, and attempt to kill 73 million people). And while one will eventually hit declining marginal utility of charitable donations, one can do a whole lot of good before that point. Worst case scenario, if you make 10 billion dollars, you can just give away 10 dollars to the poorest billion—who largely live on less than two dollars a day.
The odds of success, assuming you’re smart, tech-savvy, and entrepreneurial, are more than one in a few hundred by even fairly conservative estimates. A 1% chance of saving 200,000 lives saves 2,000 lives on average. And if you become really, really rich—Elon Musk level rich—you can save way more than 200,000 lives.
My sense is that there aren’t that many EAs trying to become super rich. A lot of people earn to give at jobs with six-figure salaries, but few try to become billionaires. Despite this, SBF managed to become a billionaire. And while that ended badly—please, for the love of God, don’t do crypto fraud (hey that rhymes, I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it)—it shows that it’s not too astronomically unlikely that you’ll get super rich if you try. You should obviously not be a fraudster like SBF, but SBF could have remained a very rich and honest businessman if he’d simply abstained from fraud.
When confronted with the drowning child thought experiment, people who don’t understand how thoughts experiments work will often reply, “well, if children keep drowning in ponds, maybe we should build a fence around the pond or teach children how to swim—ever think of that?”
But if you have a billion dollars, you can actually do the thing analogous to building the fence. You now can majorly influence the world in ways that prevent huge numbers of humans and animals from painfully dying. You can make a real, major difference to the world.
Lots of EA funding comes from Dustin Moskowitz. If we had five, ten, fifty Dustins, we’d be in much better shape. When Dustin decides he doesn’t want to fund shrimp welfare, it loses a sizeable share of its funding. It shouldn’t be that way. We need 50 Dustins!
So if you have the relevant skills, try to be a billionaire. I might even attempt it were I good at anything other than writing and philosophy! You just might become super rich and save millions of lives! Bill Gates did. You could be the next Bill Gates!
(Note: at the advice of Aaron Bergman, if you’re interested in trying seriously to become a billionaire and want to be put in contact with some other people aiming at a similar goal, shoot me a substack dm and I’ll make a discord or slack group).
Put aside the altruistic argument. In a free market -- and assuming no fraud, force, externalities, monopolies*, etc. -- if someone pays you a billion dollars, you have provided at least a billion dollars in benefit to that person. If someone pays you $25,000, you have provided at least $25,000 in benefits. The first is more likely to have accomplished good in the world.
* Technically, a monopolist also provides at least what he is paid in benefits. But he captures more of that in producer surplus and inefficiently reduces output.
AIM's Founding to Give program ( https://www.aimfoundingtogive.com/ ) is more or less this idea, though what I've heard about the program as of yet makes me think they would be more conservative than you are regarding the odds of becoming a billionaire (or even reach something like 8 figures). I do think that it might not be neglected without good reason, and the reason might simply be that it is much harder in practice than it seems on the outside.