Nothing wrong with criticizing people! Many smart people do bad things that deserve criticism. But if you trick yourself into thinking they're not smart, that their success is just pure happenstance and anyone could've done it in their shoes, you're going to end up very confused about the world. People talk a lot about how silly the $100M pay packages are, for example, but Zuckerberg paid $76M per employee for Instagram in 2012 ($110M inflation-adjusted), and in retrospect that was clearly a worthwhile bet.