[have_faith]

I'll agree that it's rare for people to get to the top in life without taking some dubious shortcuts but that maths doesn't seem right. Someone being 1.2 times smarter than average (or some other metric) can probably extract orders of magnitude more value out of the system with enough intent and motivation (without being dishonest). I think it takes much less than you're thinking, but I don't have anything to prove that.

[ayewo]

People often underestimate the role that luck plays in how wealthy you can become.

Steve Balmer is a billionaire today due to landing a job as an early employee at Microsoft.

[runnerup]

I personally wonder whether “luck” is underestimated more among most, or whether they’re moreso overestimating the degree of the value creation of the person who was lucky to find themselves in a position where they could create lots of value.

There’s a perception that guys like Ballmer created $10B of value and managed to capture $1B of it. Just because he was lucky to be there doesn’t mean he didn’t hold a pivotal role and make a huge difference in the outcome of the enterprise, and may have been awarded a small % of that value created.

Maybe other people could have created that value too, but he was lucky to be there, they were lucky to have him there instead of someone worse, and he still only captured “10%” (or whatever) of the value created.

My thought is that many of these billionaires do have a large “value over replacement” where replacement is just some random person with the resume for the position.

But I don’t think the enterprise creates nearly as much value as has been assigned to it. I think much of the value is created by the public infrastructure, an existing public education system which provides affordable skilled labor, and much of the laborers themselves.

So personally I think Steve Ballmer did get lucky, did create a lot of value for Microsoft, and captured some portion of that MSFT +value, but Microsoft captured a lot of value that was created by others (the government/public) and likely more should have been captured by them instead.

[hackeraccount]

Yeah. Lebron James (or whoever the best paid NBA player is right now) is probably only marginally better then the average or even worst or even almost but didn't quite make it to the NBA player.

Everyone is paid for the last 5% of performance though not the first 95%. People get confused about that when they complain about the BS of jobs. You're not getting paid for the BS - you're getting paid for the moments when you bring something to the table.