There's a theory that there is no way to become a billionaire without fucking over a lot of people.
To become a trillionaire you'd have to fuck over 1000 times as many people. Without getting lynched.
To become a trillionaire you'd have to fuck over 1000 times as many people. Without getting lynched.
Sell something for $10 that's worth $12 to the buyer and costs you $8 to make. Repeat a billion times. The people you did business with got an extra $2 billion, you got $2 billion, everybody's better off.
The people you did business with got an extra $5 Billion, you lose $1 Billion. All the companies trying to offer the service for $10 (or some other fair price) will be eradicated by your company, because a company cannot compete selling things at a fair ($10) price when you are selling it at $7.
You need a moat to actually scale that business model. And the ethics of many moats aren't particularly squeaky-clean...
If you were really that philanthropic, why would you carve out a billion from that revenue stream instead of giving back, or investing it in better equipment or people?
So on the front end the billionaire had to give more than a billion dollars of value to society in order to get people to voluntarily do business with them. Then on the back end they have to turn around and invest most of that money back into society. In doing so they're shouldering the burdens of market research, diligence, and risk.
Society wins twice from this and in return the billionaire gets to spend a lot of money. Society wins there, too, because the economy benefits from their ridiculous spending.
Does this work perfectly? Absolutely not, but nobody has a better system that I've seen.