Literally this. There is no leftist billionaire tech CEO because you cannot both be a billionaire and also have leftist ideals. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
Well you might be a billionaire and support some regulations to squash smaller companies. You can deal with them because you are big, they are small and will not be able to move as fast under the new regulatory regime.
By this logic you can't be a leftist while making a top SF tech salary. While any sufficiently sophisticated person will have their own opinions which don't perfectly align with either party, suggesting you can't be both rich and a Democrat/left wing is silly.
In America, neoliberalism with classical social liberalism is considered to be “left wing”. We are so embedded in capitalism in the Western world we have forgotten what actually leftist ideals are.
This is the best comment of the bunch, I think. Judging by the vote tally and engagement on my original response, you’re spot-on that people are so Capitalism-drunk that they cannot see the broader ideological planes around them.
There are good leftists who do big tech work (the main detraction of the HN crowd who don’t want to feel guilty over their salaries), it’s just that none of the ones I know are active in cesspools like these. They’re too busy living in a modest home and spending their excesses on people’s rent, bills, necessities, and generally uplifting others since they no longer need anything themselves. My interaction with the HN crowd is that most would balk at the idea of using their funds to support others’ fundamental necessities, and yet that is far more leftist than anything any SV profiteer has previously pushed for.
Arguably one can't be a leftist when making SF tech salaries either. A casual check of an L5 at Google (as a representative example; they do have an office in SF) says their total comp. is about $413k, putting them in the labor aristocracy or at least in the "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" type of leftist.
Why shouldn't an employee at one of the world's most profitable companies be paid well? Should they work for less so that the company can profit more and they can somehow prove a point?
Indeed. Arguably, a true Marxist would say that $413k/year is underpaid. The average profit-per-employee at Google is $1.95M/year, and the Marxist ideal of cooperative ownership prescribes that workers deserve a larger share of that than $413k.
The true Marxist would be trying to demolish Google and other tech companies and their unreasonably outsized profits as being unfair to workers as a class. But unsurprisingly, people are interpreting it in a way so that they can continue to rake in a gloriously fat paycheck and live a lavish lifestyle. In a peoples' revolution, they'd get what the kulaks got.
The fact that articles like the one submitted are increasing should alert you that the working poor do not see overpaid techbros as on their side, no matter how much they claim they are.
I've always felt like tech workers view themselves as a modern-day petite-bourgeoisie, and this is why the industry has been so successful at keeping out the unions.
As an aside, I had friends who had to declare bankruptcy during DotCom 1.0 because of stock options and the Alternative Minimum Tax. This could have been fixed with legislation but it always seemed like the DC inside-the-beltway crowd saw the whole thing as class treachery and refused to intervene.
> The fact that articles like the one submitted are increasing should alert you that the working poor do not see overpaid techbros as on their side, no matter how much they claim they are.
What I can’t square is why they (probably correctly) don’t see overpaid techbros as on their side, but they do see their bosses, and others even more alienated from their lives and struggles as in their side.
IMO, one side is openly condescending ("learn to code" / "voting against their own best interests"(sic)) and insulting (e.g. religion) to them on top of not helping them. The other side doesn't help either but at least pretends to listen to their grievances and says things to make them feel powerful. When you're struggling and miserable, a little sympathy goes a long way; far enough to put some very bad people in the White House unfortunately.
