New Phenomenon: Intentional Billionaire Employees
Context: I’m noticing a new phenomenon: the rise of intentional billionaire employees. Historically, a few extraordinary people might have been paid millions for their work, but no one’s labor was worth billions. The rare cases where someone ended up with billions were accidents of early equity, not deliberate shareholder-approved comp packages.
Market Signal: With AI, tech leverage, and global scale, the very best person for a critical role might now be rationally worth a billion. We’re entering an era where “billion-dollar labor” exists — not risk-taking founders, but employees whose day-to-day work generates outsized returns.
Takeaways:
This flips the old compensation logic. We’re talking about paying for talent at 10,000x the average worker’s value.
That’s not the capitalist equilibrium we’re used to, and the incentive effects could be wild.
The war for elite talent will only intensify, possibly rivaling founder-level competition.
Ask: I don’t have a formal ask, but I’m curious how others see this playing out. Is billion-dollar labor inevitable in AI, or is it a bubble in the making?