Nothing says Happy New Year like explaining to all you not-so-rich people that rich people work super hard.
Silicon Valley Says Happy New Year to the Non-Lazy Rich and More!
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But welcome to the mega-essay by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham about income inequality. Spoiler: Turns out rich people in Silicon Valley deserve to be rich.
“Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them,” opined Graham in defense of not squelching entrepreneurism. (As many have noted on Twitter already, it is a sentence that one could perhaps unpack very differently if you factored in privilege and other greased wheels that some get while others do not.)
Still, he marches on: “You can’t end economic inequality without preventing people from getting rich, and you can’t do that without preventing them from starting startups. So let’s be clear about that. Ending economic inequality would mean ending startups. Are you sure, hunters, that you want to shoot this particular animal? It would only mean you eliminated startups in your own country.”
Graham’s was by far the most serious of the weighing-in at the start of 2016 compared to other well-known techies.
Here’s a sampling gleaned from Twitter:
VC Marc Andreessen is not digging Neil deGrasse Tyson’s New Year’s take.
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/682912289935106048
Blogger Arianna Huffington gets inspirational.
https://twitter.com/ariannahuff/status/682960900643500032
Uber’s Travis Kalanick celebrates being a billionaire (in rides, but he passed the other kind a while back if you believe these unicorn valuations).
https://twitter.com/Uber/status/682324032428048385
Benchmark’s Bill Gurley tweetstorms board departures.
https://twitter.com/bgurley/status/682369349601116162
Eponymous VC Vinod Khosla blames me and my kind for I am not sure what.
https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/682965772646264833
Box’s Aaron Levie keeps it real.
https://twitter.com/levie/status/681581487905349632
Yahoo’s Katie Couric clearly resolves better than I do.
https://twitter.com/katiecouric/status/682973313241579520
Twitter’s Jack Dorsey deftly goes for the California sunset shot, because who doesn’t like a California sunset shot.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/682732748918792192
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
