Relatedly, it's a skill that goes with positions that are clung to such that nobody else gets to practice and learn said skill.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-...
And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire. That's a bad thing to be.
I don't recall any. I remember when people were all agog when Gates became one.
> successful businesses were led by young people across the entirety of human history.
Sure. But billionaires?
> And you should not praise someone for simply being a billionaire.
If they're self-made, they earned the praise.
> That's a bad thing to be.
Creating value is not a bad thing. Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else. Creating SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are good things.
They aren’t and they didn’t.
> Being a self-made billionaire means they created a billion dollars of value. They didn't take it from you or anyone else.
Nobody is a “self made” billionaire. That value you’re talking about didn’t just spring into existence. It had to come from somewhere. There is always a source.
Who flew the rocket? Who built the rocket? Who built the parts for the rocket? Who mixed the fuel?
Building big ambitious things is a good thing. But consolidating an amount of money that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
For example, if you bake a cake the value you created is what you can sell the cake for minus the cost of the ingredients and the use of an oven. For SpaceX, the money spent to buy materials and pay employees takes away value.
> that nobody could ever reasonably spend into the hands of one person (especially when that money is just the excess value produced by the workers) is unethical and unneeded.
Musk doesn't spend much of his money. He invests it in creating more businesses.
> is unethical and unneeded.
You're arguing that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, etc., are unethical and unneeded. None of those companies would exist without Musk investing his fortune into them.
BTW, why don't you and your friends get together and start a rocket company and make yourselves billionaires?
Musk parlayed the loan into $trillions.
So cool.
Are you arguing that wealth is not created, but is transferred? Where was SpaceX's value transferred from? Where was the current wealth in the United States 250 years ago?
two of the people on the list did it via online gambling. Which is by definition a zero-sum game. No value was created.
Two of those examples are online gambling, which is controversial to the extent that it's partly outlawed in the US.
But more importantly, 13 isn't an awful lot. Approximately how many young people today have started successful businesses whose valuation is under $1 billion?
You can type such questions into google as well as I can.
> 13 isn't an awful lot
There aren't that many self-made billionaires of any age.