Would Bill Gates have worked so hard (presumably) if he didn't have that specific understanding of ownership and casuality? Isn't that type of motivation and incentive necessary, to grind through the obstacles?
First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", since I'm not sure there's an obvious thing that he could have done more of, even if he were so inclined.
Second, it assumes there exists some direct relationship between Bill Gates's personal work ethic and Microsoft's outsized success. Maybe all Microsoft needed was a good idea at the right time and would have succeeded about equally well with any minimally competent execution. Maybe they would have done even better had Bill Gates founded the company and then retired at 30.
Finally, it assumes that Bill Gates work ethic had some direct relationship with his financial compensation level. It is quite possible that he would have been more than happy to still give his best possible effort in return for being, say, a mere hundred millionaire. Moreover, plenty of people do hard work for all sorts of other reasons, from duty to boredom to artistic vision. Why do we assume that Bill Gates's internal motivation is predominantly financial in the first place?
None of those premises appear obviously and indisputably true to me. Maybe they are, but it'd be nice to see the case actually made (and made about real humans in the real world, not about perfectly rational actors in an idealized market).
Gates could have sold out to IBM or Apple or whoever and retired as a multimillionaire without taking the chance Microsoft would end up like Wang or Altair or hundreds of other companies.
“Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
[1]https://webfoundation.org/about/vision/history-of-the-web/
The guy who sells tables and chairs is likely to make more money than the guy who sells nails and hammers.