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The story
After YouTuber Tetsuya built himself a mansion, a man working in finance posted on X (formerly Twitter): “I’m seriously jealous. It’s making me feel like busting my butt at a real job is pointless.” The post got picked up on 5ch’s Nanjo G board and sparked a debate. The core question: unlike salaried workers, is YouTuber or entrepreneur income really a reward for taking on risk? One camp argued that simply posting videos doesn’t earn you the right to that kind of payout, while the other insisted that succeeding in entertainment or business is itself the risk. The thread wandered into salarymen’s income ceilings and bureaucrats’ pay scales, but never reached a consensus — commenters couldn’t even agree on what “risk” means.
So even winning-team elites get jealous of YouTubers?
Source: x.com / Original post here
What people said
That one's scale is all messed up, so it's kind of a letdown.
And about half of that gets eaten up by taxes.
Maybe bureaucrats are the exception — administrative vice-ministers can pull in like 40 million yen.
They're putting in the work too.
Re: #16
What risk, lol?
He just uploaded videos to YouTube — that's not taking any risk at all.
Come on, that logic doesn't hold up.
Making it in the entertainment world is no easy feat.
What exactly is the risk, specifically?
For what it's worth, the Finance Ministry's administrative vice-minister apparently lives in what's basically a rabbit hutch (slang for a tiny, cramped house).
That's just because it's Tokyo.
Excuse me, it's us salarymen paying the taxes that keep Japan running.
Nobody would even notice if YouTubers disappeared.
But if the business fails, they risk being saddled with debt.
Losers who bailed out of that bet don't even have the right to be jealous.
What's risky about just posting on YouTube?
So if I upload a video too, I'm taking a risk as well, huh?
If you think you can make a living off that, go ahead and try.
Exactly.
Quit your job and give it a shot then.
So then taking shady gig jobs (yami baito, slang for illegal gigs like scam-call recruitment) to make money,
or becoming a yakuza to make money, whoever earns the most wins, right?
So Japan's a country where working hard honestly is pointless?
Guess I get it now.
Maybe I should take a risk too, huh?
Unfortunately, that's everyone's beloved capitalism for you.
Calculating each kind of risk is left up to individual responsibility.
For the record, I'm anti-capitalist though 🥺🟥
Isn't that rule seriously broken though?
If this were a mobile gacha game, the devs would be slammed as trash management for sure.
Letting lazy incompetents reap the same rewards would be an even more broken rule — this is just the slightly-less-terrible garbage rule we're stuck running on instead.
Seriously, this.
And the fact that you can earn more as a yakuza, a hangure (quasi-gang street thug), or in entertainment than by working an honest job is just a glitch in the system.
YouTubers just got lucky with talent and fortune, right? Yet they get to hog all that money — that's simply a loophole in the system.
Then go do it yourself.
I clearly have zero talent, so that's a no-go.
Talent is something you're born with — meaning capitalism is a garbage rule where mere birth circumstances lock in massive wealth.
Seriously, exactly.
Working hard honestly just feels pointless.
You never know though?
You could give it a shot with nothing to lose.
Maybe a rosy future is waiting for you instead of grinding away as a corporate drone in a crappy life.
Then you should become a business owner too.
Sure, why not.
Crappy companies can't even get employees to show up anymore anyway.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
What split opinion in the thread was how people defined “risk.” One side used the word to mean the possibility of ending up in debt from starting a business or investing, while the other saw no such debt risk in the mere act of posting videos — both sides kept using the same word with different meanings and talked past each other. Figures like “a salaryman’s income caps out around 20 million yen” or “even a vice-minister only makes 40 million yen” were simply impressions from individual posters, with no sources or statistics cited anywhere in the thread. They should be read strictly as the subjective going-rate assumptions of anonymous posters, nothing more. Criticism of how capitalism ties reward to talent and luck is a familiar topic these days, but the thread never dug into the structural debate, eventually settling into the circular “just go try it yourself” stalemate.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nanjo G board) thread “Finance company man: ‘I’m seriously jealous that YouTuber Tetsuya built a mansion. Makes working hard feel pointless’.”
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