In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc.
And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes:
> Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.
> In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.
In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds.
We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)
I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.