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"a billionaire is an example of market failure" This is at least funny, but might have a lot of truth in it as well. I formulated something similar about the marching almost-monopolies like Apple and Facebook: they are a gigantic failure of competition.

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The simple question is whether most billionaires have actually contributed $1B of effort in producing value. The answer is mostly no, that most of that value was extracted from other workers who were disproportionately less rewarded than people who were able to structurally secure more ownership than the value they conteibuted

My point is not some kind of value judgement on billionaires but that their wealth should have been competed out - there is not a cadre of multi millionaires who offered a billion went "no thanks i'm fine"

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