Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Repeat and scale multiple times over, and you've not only made money, you've contributed and made others lives better, happier, more entertaining, or less stressful, etc.
Using their businesses as leverage, most of these billionaires have made their fortunes creating billions of dollars worth of value for the masses. They deserve every penny of it.
I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. And if there are such individuals, they are the Teslas, Newtons, Einsteins or other true geniuses whose ideas have shaped the world and opened up new possibilities - not the oil magnates, plutocrats or Wall Street bankers that make up most of this list.
The only way one could argue that all of the uber-rich deserve all of their money is if you subscribe to an incredibly simplistic, idealistic, optimistic Milton Friedman-esque economic and political philosophy which assumes that the earning of income directly corresponds to value added to the economy and society.
Why not? Just because it was likely timing, doesn't make the impact less great.
Your point seems to be that such a person isn't inherently that much better than someone else. Ok, but no one is inherently that great. 90% of "making it" in any of the senses is timing and placement, so it's really all relative.
By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's?
Good point. I would say that no, my accomplishments are not. The fact that I spend more money on a nice dinner than some people make in a year is just another sign of the gross inequity in the world. Really that's all I'm saying - just pointing out that there is some sort of inherent injustice in the distribution of wealth, power and quality of life, and it is just much more plainly visible in the case of individual's with the purchasing power of entire nations. Just something to think about.
Creating value for others [1] or creating wealth?