Blog/2025-12-03/Why Get Rich
The point of getting rich is to be able to do more things. The people who I like and admire seem to all have this trait. For them, the amount of things you want to do is usually far larger than the things you have the resources to do. In fact, if I look among my friends, I suspect all of them have this same thing in mind.
p19k @peteralexbizjak Genuine question: how do you plan on building revenue with your OS? If you answered this somewhere before, can somebody please link me the source?
Sep 7, 2025[1]
DHH @dhh Replying to @peteralexbizjak
I don't need revenue. I'm already rich.
Sep 7, 2025[2]
Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Sep 7, 2025[3]
I, too, would like to get rich enough to do some other things. Fortunately, we are well-off enough that I have the time to explore some of the things I want to try before I have to go find a thing to do to get paid. And even more luckily, the knowledge cost of creating things is reducing at an unbelievable rate. But having money is good: it allows you to take risks, but also it allows you to deploy dollars to do things.
The opposite view of this is often expressed online and it is strangely incomprehensible to me.
Maybe I'm not creative enough but I've tried this thought exercise with friends and it's a fun one.
The question is, try to spend $1bn on stuff. Go.So then you start with big ticket items (like maybe a yacht or a house). That gets you to your first $500m. After that, stuff gets WAY "cheaper" where you just run out of things generally before even hitting $1bn.
And then at the end of it we try to imagine what it's like having stuff worth $250bn. And there's just no way to make that tangible.
I did try this with my son and he said he'd buy an A-list soccer team. But I feel that starts to get into "buying companies that make you MORE money" territory.
At a much smaller scale, it seems to be that $10mn is so much that you could live in a $2m house (good by any standard in any location), have a stable of cars, have full-time help, fly first class or even private everywhere, and vacation as much as you want. Or am I off by a lot given inflation?
I think that perhaps the least important things in the world are the cars and the yacht and all that. DHH, Mitchell Hashimoto, and Elon Musk seem to have the right of it, in my view. The point of making it is to be able to achieve the changes in the world that you've always wanted to make happen.
If I ever make it, I hope I remember to make an Indian equivalent of the UK Biobank!
Notes
- ↑ p19k [@peteralexbizjak] (Sep 7, 2025). "Genuine question: how do you plan on building revenue with your OS? If you answered this somewhere before, can somebody please link me the source?" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ DHH [@dhh] (Sep 7, 2025). "I don't need revenue. I'm already rich" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
- ↑ Mitchell Hashimoto [@mitchellh] (Sep 7, 2025). "I get asked the same about terminals all the time. "How will you turn this into a business? What's the monetization strategy?" The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
- ↑ atonse on Permalink: HN • news.ycombinator.com • 44904523
