How much should one person really be worth?
Elon Musk is worth 189.2 billion, Jeff Bezos is worth 202.8 billion, and Presidential candidate and fascist Donald Trump is worth a measly 5.1 billion and dropping. However the question is not how you feel about these men and their contributions to society or the ills they have caused society. The question is how much can one person actually be worth exactly.
We all agree we have intrinsic worth. A kind of self-worth. Economists and sociologists try to calculate the potential worth of any random individual, or rather what their average economic impact will be. I’ve heard figures around 2 million or higher. Currently, we live in a system where we work and spend money. We live in an economy based on the movement of capital, which is unequally distributed by any metric. This is not a discussion of what level, if any, of inequity is acceptable, but rather the question, how much can one person actually be worth?
There are also people who are the combination of other people’s worth — both metaphorically, or in the case I am using it, literally. Some men, such as the aforementioned Elon Musk and Donald Trump, inherit wealth in addition to the wealth they generate or have generated over the course of their lives. That actually additive value may be a little or may be a lot, but they did not start out with absolutely nothing. This is a question of how much one person can actually be worth.
Jeff Bezos is probably the closest example we have of a relatively self-made entrepreneur. No one, of course, is, but it would be hard to claim Jeff Bezos didn’t work hard. He succeeded in school, academically, and received a Master’s. He did work very hard, and he took a small, but simple idea, and expanded it, took smart calculated risks, and proved to be an adept business man at every turn.
Jeff Bezos, were he to be working a normal job, would be akin to making roughly $17,264,957 a day, or an hourly wage of $2,158,119. Sure, he may have made decisions that near immediately brought in similar profit, but the long term effects and management of those decisions fell to other people. It is a large company now, after all. The number one employer in many places. While it could be argued, I think very compellingly, that he deserves an awful lot of money for these decisions, maybe he doesn’t deserve that much, or maybe others under him, people his philosophy may help guide in finding, probably deserve a large share of that too.
How much can someone be worth?
I look for irreplaceability. Situations where I just don’t believe it could be someone else. That is tough to judge with men like Jeff Bezos. This is not to diminish his achievements, but besides maybe the initial spark or idea, many people graduated top of their class as he did, and might have, or probably could have made those same decisions. There are many effective managers and CEOs. There are many “very smart people”. So I think it is best to look for something more esoteric. Entertainers. Artists. Athletes.
I think Marvel and the MCU made the right choice when casting fake CEO Tony Stark with Robert Downey Jr, hot off his famous career in Prison, not the movie, the institution, when no film studio would insure him. People fought to get him back because he had an incredible talent. He’s an actor better than most, and he found a role in a B-List comic character tailor made for him. The snark. The attitude. The smarmy rich kid vibes. A character who’s famous arc was dealing with addiction and becoming sober, like the actor who played him. Robert Downey Jr. is now worth 300 million dollars. The MCU is a 54 billion dollar franchise that would not exist without him, and he is worth, or roughly a half percent of that. That seems fair.
Tom Brady took a joke franchise, The New England Patriots, to 9 Super Bowls, winning 6, and 11 AFC championships. He owned the division for twenty years. His combined net worth (about 250 million from the Patriots directly) is around 500 million dollars, maybe down slightly following the divorce. He made another 100 million from the Buccaneers, whom he took to and won a Super Bowl with, and another 180 million from endorsements and memorablia. Brady got around 3% of the New England Patriots 7 billion net worth, a figure that had sharply increased as a result of his contributions. Higher figure than Downey, but almost seems fair, until you recognize how many other players are on the field with him. He was very charitable to his friends while in New England, and garnered a ton of locker room respect. He also restructured his contract to make room for other players in ways most quarterbacks don’t, but still…
There are other players on the field. Specifically offensive linemen, who rarely are ever known as superstars, except with rarity. They also endure the most pain and injuries. They are the most likely to develop CTE. They are the most likely to develop knee and joint problems, and lose their ability to maintain mobility. They are paid, far less.
So how much is Brady really worth? The most generous man in football.
How much is anyone worth?
It’s hard to imagine any degree of fairness where guys like Lebron James is not handsomely paid for being both so gifted and dedicated to a craft. Same with Tom Brady. Same with Robert Downey Jr. They all come from different places, but they still put a ton of work in, and really earned those positions. This is not an argument either over priorities. I don’t care whether we celebrate nurses or actors; this is what we spend our money on now. I am simply using them to illustrate how someone can, in a concrete sense, work for their money in a way that is identifiable as work. Same thing if a writer spends all their free time practicing writing, or a painter, painting — it is obvious their work and the rewards — at least in theory, should be theirs to some extent, and that their product is exclusive and in many ways irreplaceable. Yes, the offensive line protected Brady, but they were there before. Yes, Marvel had other actors, but none that brought in and carried that initial success.
But can you really be worth that much money?
Robert Downey Jr, working 40 hours a week, makes 144,230 a hour. It should be noted, actors don’t do this. Actors, work reasonably, 100 hour weeks minimum. Not only are set hours long, but they have to exercise to maintain physique, and prepare for their roles, and go travel to promote the movie. That brings it down to a cool roughly 57,000 an hour. You could do a similar calculus for pro athletes. This again, is largely what the market dictates. In an actor’s case, this is scale plus rate. Scale for an actor is around $1000 per diem, or roughly $125 dollars an hour for minimum of 8 hours. Time and a half after 8. That is, of course, already a decently high salary. Big name actors will work out pay on top of scale, plus other demands, based on their expected market pull for the movie (sometimes). There can be other factors there as well. Perceived talent. Market expectations. Taking in 456,000, roughly, on top of his per diem. Except really most of his co-stars are under the exact same set of pressures and expectations regardless of how important their character ends up being to fans.
So really, how much can one person make in an hour.
It’s hard, with esoteric things, like the arts and sports, to gauge their actual value to society. Video games were once thought of as the dregs of entertainment. Something only weird nerds did to piss off their parents. Now it is a 214 billion dollar industry, more than movies, more than many sports. It is hard to gauge how “rational” that is as a choice we make. However their is, undeniably both an industry from it, and around it, and people make money off of it.
However how much is too much would still apply there, although admittedly I don’t know video games.
The idea of an “industry”; often used here as a kind of vague concept to describe facets of society we invest money and time into, is not important. What is important, is how much can one person really make?
In some way, we all agree some should make more than others. That labor is not just labor in a vague sense of that word. That labor must be attached to something to give it value, measured often by the value it brings to others. That part is not disputed here, but if you work one hour, or one day, or one week, how much is that really worth? To everyone and to anyone?
I’m going to use a counter-intuitive example here: Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro hosts The Daily Wire, he is the figurehead, and he also hosts The Ben Shapiro show which is just him saying Republican talking points into a camera. There’s really nothing else to describe here. But, I mean, really, is he the only guy who could do this? Like we all recognize he sucks, right? Like he’s bad at this. He only looks smart because he debates college freshmen and takes the mic away when they try to say anything intelligent. There are like seven Conservatives I can think of right now more entertaining than him, some on his network. The Daily Show changes hosts, why not The Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro Show? So it’s really not always about merit or even generic given talent, it’s about, I don’t know, some bullshit.
Ben Shapiro is worth 50 million dollars. He makes roughly 9,615 dollars an hour, or a 76,923 per diem as an actor I will laugably pretend works 100 hours a week for this calculation. A man who isn’t just rapidly intellectually and physically turning into Rush Limbaugh.
Remember, most actors get around a grand per diem, for longer, often dangerous shoots. Not sitting in a studio speed reading Republican talking points like John Moschitta.
Does he really bring that much though? How many people can say they make 77,000 dollars a day?
I think perhaps, if not unwittingly, Ben Shapiro is getting closer to a real figure here. I mean if we consider how hazardous, or potentially life threatening many careers are, it would not be hard to imagine scenarios where people would warrant such compensation. The chance of injury may be such that one shift could put make them unable to work for months, or their chances of “being let go”. Many industries thrive on turnover driven hiring practices. You can imagine in those industries needing pay that is both high and hazard proof to some degree. You might even understand that for a sport, like Football. Not for sitting at a desk complaining about influencers and celebrities.
At 77,000 a day, for a regular work week, for 45 years, amounts to $900,900,000, just shy of a billion dollars. So how hard can one man work, and how much can that work be worth? Really?
I’m ignoring the profession here. If society deems Ben Shapiro to be worth anything, so be it, but would 77,000 a day make sense? Can anyone really be generating much more than that? Or need that much more compensation for what potentially they are doing?
I think this is a question that really needs to be addressed. How hard, or how productive can one person really be? How much is that productivity being converted into funds for the person contributing, and how much additional value should we assign to one individual — especially in cases where that value is apparent to other individuals. Maybe just as undeniable as fact itself.
When we talk about vast fortunes, we talk about taxing people, we talk about getting the rich to pay their fair share, but rarely do we talk about “just how hard they actually worked” — I have no doubt that in almost all cases the answer is “very hard”, but what dividends, in any, should come directly from that labor.