Of course it is, otherwise why take risks?
But this does not justify the 1000x inequality that we have today separating CEOs from laborers and 10000x separating founders from laborers.
What if those numbers were 100x and 5000x? Might we see even more innovation, and stronger communities?
The payoffs figures of today are also used to justify truly stupid risks. There are ponzi scheme type people who would rather masquerade at being a founder 10 times over in search of getting lucky once, screwing over investors and laborers in the process. Maybe if the disparity weren’t so eye popping, the same people would go into other fields instead.
Indeed. Or to elaborate a little:
"Back then, we did not have as much inequality, but the super-rich did not deserve their wealth. Now, we have substantially more inequality and compounding human misery, and I am super-rich.
Because I am unable to identify any specific moment in my life when I made unethical decisions personally it is not possible for me to understand a view of the world that sees my current existence as the product of an unjust system."
It also didn't discuss that it seems more so that there is a new technology which is enabling a shift on riches, but it's likely that the next phase is one of inherited wealth again. Unless he believes that the children of those new fortunes won't inherit anything or will keep being surpassed in riches by the next generation startups. But I'm not so sure, I think it's just a cycle, refresh most company from a non tech based one to a tech one, and once that's done, it'll go back to consolidation and inheritance, until the next big technology.
In general, I tend to agree with Rawls that this notion of 'deserving' is irrelevant to the question of how we ought to distribute goods/welfare in society.
Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/06/28/book-rev...
Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/the-tyranny-...