He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).
I wasn’t saying he didn’t, in fact that’s a part of the point. If doing all that and selling to Disney was advantageous, buying it back would not be. As it stands right now, he’s going against the billionaire director playbook here.
If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas’s company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I’ll simplify this for you.
If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I’m not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining…
$3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.
Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it’s likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.
Just because one person involved has billions of dollars doesn’t mean none of the other people do either, plus some of that money without a doubt has come from other projects which few if any of the people involved in his flagship ones were involved in.
If you can name another person from LucasFilm that also had, at some point, several hundred million dollars, I’ll make an effort to look into that claim.
Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it’s sale to Disney.
Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely notfrom LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not “hundreds of millions”.
I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don’t try very hard. In either case, you aren’t worth my time anymore.
You need to own the franchise first. Unless I misunderstand you.
Where do you think he got his billions?
He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).
So yeah, he did own the franchise first.
I wasn’t saying he didn’t, in fact that’s a part of the point. If doing all that and selling to Disney was advantageous, buying it back would not be. As it stands right now, he’s going against the billionaire director playbook here.
Or he could have distributed the billions he made, as he was making them, to more equitably pay everyone who’s work generated that wealth.
That’s my point.
Did he not? Are people not supposed to pay their employees? I don’t understand.
If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas’s company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I’ll simplify this for you.
If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I’m not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining… $3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.
Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it’s likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.
Just because one person involved has billions of dollars doesn’t mean none of the other people do either, plus some of that money without a doubt has come from other projects which few if any of the people involved in his flagship ones were involved in.
If you can name another person from LucasFilm that also had, at some point, several hundred million dollars, I’ll make an effort to look into that claim.
Kathleen Kennedy. Harrison Ford. Mark Hamill. I could throw a dart on a list of names and get such a person.
Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it’s sale to Disney.
Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely not from LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not “hundreds of millions”.
I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don’t try very hard. In either case, you aren’t worth my time anymore.