- Incredibly lucky.
- Benefitting by an initial position of advantage. Most often family or nation of origin, though gender, race, or religion also. "Winning the birth lottery".
- Benefiting by externalities.
- Exploiting monopoly advantage.
- (Frequently) Lobbying for advantage.
- (Frequently) Engaging in illegal activities.
- (Frequently) Engaging in unethical or exploitive activities.
There are numerous super-competitive hard workers who are not billionaires. Some were unlucky, some born in the wrong place or time, some burdened by consscience or ethics, some crushed by existing monopolies or entrenched interests.
Africa with a population of 1,216 millions has ... about 20 as you state (my tally from Wikipedia is 18, but I'll take the higher number).
By billions of population, that works out to 1,160/billion North America, and 16.4/billion for Africa.
It would seems odds might somewhat favour one born (or living in) North America. By a factor of roughly 70.
One might similarly compare Germany and India, with roughly similar counts of billionaires at 107 and 102, respectively, though slighly differing populations: 83 millions vs. 1.3 billions. The rate per billion works out to 1,289/billion for Germany and 75/billion for India, differing by a factor of 17.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_populati...
Or is it just hard work?
The assertion to which I ras responding, and disputing, was your statement: "The people who are billionaires are billionaires because they are super competitive and super hard workers."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24395252
You are now asserting a markedly different, and I would suggest inconsistent, position.
You conveniently skipped over the part where the comment you're responding to said "family or nation of origin". If anything, more billionaires in 3rd world countries got their wealth through corruption and family connections. Take the top billionaires in Africa:
1. Aliko Dangote: see "Family and Personal Life" on his Wikipedia page, which includes "He is the great-grandson of Alhaji Alhassan Dantata, the richest West African at the time of his death in 1955."
2. Nassef Onsi Sawiris: His Wikipedia entry starts with "is an Egyptian billionaire businessman, the youngest of Onsi Sawiris' three sons". Onsi Sawiris was a billionaire.
3. Mike Adenuga is more self-made, but even then, "his mother, Omoba Juliana Oyindamola Adenuga, was a businesswoman of royal Ijebu descent."
There are other more notorious examples from that list of billionaires, like Isabel dos Santos.
I'm interested to see how you re-evaluate your argument "when put against facts".
It's weird, you're arguing against a point that no one else is making. Of course there are many billionaires whose individual intelligence, innate gifts, hard work and diligence were crucial to them earning their fortune. Just as obviously as there are many billionaires who earned their fortune through family, connections, graft, etc. (It's also pretty easily arguable the majority of the wealthy earned their money this way, given that for every "self-made" rich person there are usually loads more family members/connections who inherit or benefit from that wealth).
But the larger point is that nobody makes their fortune in a vacuum - even all these "self-made" rich relied upon the structures of their society to enable their wealth accumulation, so it seems more than morally fair that that society has a claim to some of that wealth so the next generation can reap the same benefits. Just look at all the Internet billionaires, or billionaires who rely on GPS. Both the Internet and GPS were created by the government, and it seems fair to me that the government take a chunk of the wealth enabled by the enormous investments into those systems.