Why don't rich people do more awesome things?

115 points

15 years ago

I saw Paul Graham's post today (http://paulgraham.com/saveelan.html) about how someone should buy the building a restaurant he likes is located in. Isn't this sort of like a capable developer complaining to the core team of an open source project that they should implement a new feature. Why the heck doesn't he just buy it?

I don't mean to single out PG, who is a hero of mine. I'm more confused that this kind of thing seems to happen a lot: you'll see prominent, successful people mention that someone needs to raise $25k to X or $100k to Y, and I know that if I owned 5-8% of 300+ startups, I'd be cutting a lot of cheques.

Buying a car or a house in cash is showoff-y, singlehandedly saving a cause makes you a hero. Why doesn't this happen with regularity in SF and beyond?

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