"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars..."

Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.

The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".

Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.

Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.

Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.