I believe pg meant there's a much larger percentage of rich people who were once part of a startup vs rich people that worked like everyone else. I'd say that's a fact right there.
P(becoming rich | working at a startup) != P(worked at a startup | is rich)
I don't want to parse statements here, but it's pretty clear PG suggests that starting up or working at a startup is the best way to become rich. I'd wager that, in practice, people become rich for a variety of reasons, with none being more effective than any other.
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EDIT: Above, I'm trying to point out how the fraction of rich entrepreneurs vs. rich employees provides us with no information by itself.
However, we can develop a distribution of probabilities for becoming rich based on the career you chose, using the careers of those who are already rich. I'd suppose this is PG's real point, and while I can't verify it right now I'd bet entrepreneurs become rich at a higher frequency than non-entrepreneurs.
Can't say we are saying anything much different but let's focus on what seems important. So there's a variety of ways to get rich and we want to know which one is easier: work for someone else vs start your own company. My point is that 99.9% of the world population work for someone else while only a really small percentage started a company. And only a really small percentage of the world population is rich. Even if only of 1% of the rich people started their own company, there's still truth to what the article said. So, I was saying it's a fact that your chances to get rich are much higher having your own company than working for someone else. Which I also believe is the point in the article.
You're right, we're agreeing violently. Above, you said that more rich people started a company than worked for others; here you're applying Bayes. That first assertion is not verifiable, but you're definitely right that starting a company increases your likelihood of becoming rich.
That depends entirely on your definition of rich. While P(earnings > $1M/year) is probably going to increase, P(earnings > $100k/year) is probably going to decrease. It's also unclear whether your expected earnings are going to increase, and note that most people's loss function is not even linear (e.g. you're not going to be 10x as happy earning $1M than earning $100k -- and you're going to be much less happy when you're broke).
It's ok, I could have been much clearer (but then I would also repeat what's in the article). I have the feeling people commenting here did not read the whole article or are just nitpicking, it's one of the best articles about the history of work and its current status I have ever read, everyone should read this.
