Marc Andreessen, the cofounder and partner of Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, has an estimated net worth of $600 million bucks. Despite the busy schedule he must have managing all that money — I'm imagining something like this:
— he still finds time to tweet — averaging 164 tweets a day per a February 2015 count. Ten of those 164 (or so) from yesterday were a lecture for all of us on how the sharing economy will get rid of the income gap.
Ready for your free-of-charge lesson in econ? I knew you were! Here we go.
Well, this is great news, isn't it? All you need to do is drive people like Andreessen around in an Uber and soon the gap between your income ($23.52 an hour, according to Uber) and Andreessen's (like I said before, an estimated $600 million) will be reduced. Soon this will be you:
OK, not so fast. Several of Andreessen's twitter followers suggested that he had it wrong, saying things like this:
@pmarca this argument doesn't work. Regular non-rich humans in Austin were ablaze with stories about how Airbnb is inflating the market
— Jenna //\\ Wortham (@jennydeluxe) March 19, 2015
NO ONE IS ACTUALLY SHARING RT @pmarca 1/Sharing economy services like AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, et al reduce income inequality, as follows:
— Caleb Garling (@CalebGarling) March 19, 2015
@pmarca Q: What about health benefits? Former cab drivers turned independent contractors are now w/out benefits. What's the math there?
— Connie Guglielmo (@techledes) March 19, 2015
Or, as Business Insider reasonably points out:
In the case of Uber, Lyft, and Instacart, the companies are literally under siege from the people Andreessen purports to be benefiting from reduced income inequality. They are all being sued by their "drivers" or "shoppers" for being misclassified as contract workers rather than employers. Rather than reducing income inequality, these companies are increasing the burden on individual workers in the economy by denying them the benefits of being employees.Any moral outrage aside, if the workers win these lawsuits, the companies in the "sharing economy" are going to have to seriously rethink their business models.
It's likely not a coincidence that these companies proliferated during a time of high unemployment and depressed wages.
Opposition like that was enough to elicit a bit of a defensive response from Andreessen. You guys, just because he's rich doesn't mean his feelings don't get hurt when his wisdom is rejected.
"I'm upset about income inequality!" Well, here's a way more people can make money, thereby reducing inequality. "Now I'm even more upset!"
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 19, 2015
In other words:
Related: Uber Investor: The Bay Area Bubble Will Pop This Year, And More Than Tech Will Suffer
Shark Tank Billionaire Says 'This Tech Bubble is Worse Than The Tech Bubble of 2000.' Is He Right?
The New York Times Warns That Silicon Valley Bubble Might Be Ready To Pop And Ruin Us All
