I find it odd that a site started by a rich guy who decided to put together a for-profit enterprise based on the idea that helping entrepreneurs get their first startup off of the ground would both make him richer, and make them richer, is frequented by so many people who want to believe that the "rich" are "evil" and need to be punished in some sort or another. (and this article is trying to put a scientific gloss on that belief.)

Not only is PG an existence disproof of the belief, but the mechanism by which he is getting richer is very much the same mechanism that other rich people employ, though often with less obvious social benefits. So, PG is not an anomaly that proves the rule. He's a more visible example of the rule that is often obscured with hot air, but that applies in the vast majority of cases. For instance, while I truly despise Bill Gates, I must recognize that Windows made billions of people's lives easier[1] and thus Gates made his money by improving the world.

Some people can get wealthy via pull and theft, for example, many politicians get wealthy essentially by trading pull. I'm sure there are examples of non-politicians that get wealthy this very same way (trading political pull at a net loss to society.)

But the real way to get wealthy is to make other people's lives better-- in fact, this is the startup advice often seen in other contexts as "find a real pain point and solve it."

[1] ...not easier than if those people had a good operating system, but that's not the comparison. The comparison is to those people not having any operating system, or having only MS-DOS if they already had a PC.