alt Hacker News> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.
That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.
I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.
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> companies don't run without employees, the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders
That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit.
One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion dollars.
The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.
Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.
> There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"
I can think of a few. You've got things like Shapley values. But it's not a "neutral" way to attribute outcomes to actors.
It's funny actually, I read about Shapley scores ages ago, and then the go-to example was basically political corruption: assume a bunch of political parties with varying vote weight but no principles whatsoever, aiming to secure a majority to split a "prize" among themselves. But looking at Wikipedia now, it's practically presented as a method to guarantee fairness.
Either way, there's no neutral measure of value (or for that matter, effort) either. What a dollar gets you depends 100% on who else has dollars and how much, so productivity or efficiency can never be separated from distributional concerns.