One of the founders of Y Combinator, he writes fairly long essays about Silicon Valley and investing in general. And with each one it's becoming more blatant that he's justifying not just his own massive wealth but the entire system that enabled it.

Without the damping effect of institutions, there will be more variation in outcomes. Which doesn't imply everyone will be better off: people who do well will do even better, but those who do badly will do worse. That's an important point to bear in mind. Exposing oneself to superlinear returns is not for everyone. Most people will be better off as part of the pool. So who should shoot for superlinear returns? Ambitious people of two types: those who know they're so good that they'll be net ahead in a world with higher variation, and those, particularly the young, who can afford to risk trying it to find out.

The switch away from institutions won't simply be an exodus of their current inhabitants. Many of the new winners will be people they'd never have let in. So the resulting democratization of opportunity will be both greater and more authentic than any tame intramural version the institutions themselves might have cooked up.

Not everyone is happy about this great unlocking of ambition. It threatens some vested interests and contradicts some ideologies.[8]


[8] It's unclear exactly what advocates of "equity" mean by it. They seem to disagree among themselves. But whatever they mean is probably at odds with a world in which institutions have less power to control outcomes, and a handful of outliers do much better than everyone else.

It may seem like bad luck for this concept that it arose at just the moment when the world was shifting in the opposite direction, but I don't think this was a coincidence. I think one reason it arose now is because its adherents feel threatened by rapidly increasing variation in performance.

tl;dr The rich get richer, and that's as it should be. In fact, it's more democratic. And if you don't like it, it's because you're afraid someone will out-compete you.

For a guy who will spend weeks working on an essay explaining the minutia of investing, he seems suspiciously unwilling to put much thought into what "equity" might mean and why some people seem to favor it.

He's writing for people like himself, or more accurately who aspire to be like him. He always presents the things he's already doing as simply rules of nature, if you just spent the time to think about it. When someone describes you and your habits, and then says those habits are clearly good and true, you really need to question their motives.