Plus, while rich people get a lot of pay, they’re also often the ones that usually gained their job from the ground like everybody else or were the fouders that had to make a lot of invertion to make it work in a high risk high reward situation. If you don’t compete, then you can’t get the huge pays for yourself.
I feel comfortably certain that, while standouts certainly exist, the majority of rich people today inherited their riches. And that the majority of those inherited riches didn’t come from hard work or invention, but from sheer luck (at best), or most likely ties to nobility, royalty, clergy, politics, or pure crime/evil deeds.
If you’re born with money, making more money is really really easy.
Fun-fact: There’s a major law family in this state who even has one of their own on the supreme court in the state, which is considered a victory for the disabled because he’s a literally blind judge. But here’s the kicker: it’s pretty strongly implied by history that the family’s wealth came directly from crime. As the story goes great grandpa ran with one of the local depression era gangs who knocked over banks left and right and no one could catch them. That is until great grandpa turned himself into the police after the statute of limitations was up.
Police still arrested him because in one robbery they took a hostage and that was a kidnapping charge. But he kept all that money. So all the kids went to law school and now they do law on the east side of the state.
But beyond that many of the major tech billionaires running silicon valley - or all of them - already had money. Bezos, Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates weren’t without considerably class money to have gone to college. And not just college for any “”“useful””” degree but some stuff people call stupid, philosophy, art and design, or they just were. Steve Jobs was an art major not an actual engineer. And to even think of that as a good choice is a upper middle-class WASP thing to do. Elon Musk himself had some good money from his family he used to but up ownership stocks in PayPal to start his empire of calling people pedophiles.
The Koch family isn’t new money either.
You’ll find more rich people from humble backgrounds in actors and rock stars (Harrison Ford and Bruce Springsteen come to mind). And at risk of pissing off Commune they’re not out of the same boat as the rest of us in so far as they don’t even own everything they do. They’re still at the hands of private capital from the same old money producers that run the industry who are even light years wealthier than them.
