Asklemmy

I don't think you understood my last apple analogy at all, but honestly, I'm not really emotionally invested in trying anymore.

I think our impasse at it's core is that we simply disagree on how much luck plays a factor in becoming a "X-ionaire."

You seem to think that the ones who did it are just the best of the best at being unethical businessmen. I look at the ranks of those who made it and I don't see genius Machiavellian strategic masterminds. I see people who capitalized on exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.

I can't pont to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Musk and say, "ah, this was the unethical strategy that got them to the top." I see that they were at the right place and time to fill a massive unfilled niche in society, and to beat everyone to the punch.

That's not skill. That's luck. That's not masterful strategy. Luck. It's not the inevitable outcome of their unethical business practices. It's dumb luck.

Are they unethical? Absolutely. Did that help along the way? To a degree, certainly.

But like, think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.

And why is that? Because life isn't perfect information, and opportunities aren't evenly spread.

To make one final pass at the apples example. In life, the apples aren't uniformly spread across the trees. You have to have the thought, "I bet there are some apples over in that part of the orchard," and then go look for them there. Sometimes there's a few. Sometimes there's a lot. Sometimes there's none. Not every area you search will be bursting with apples. Sometimes, very very very rarely, there's 200 billion apples in the area you go looking. And not everybody knows what's going on everywhere else in the orchard at all times. Sometimes you and 5 or 6 buddies stumble onto the same patch of 200 billion apples at the same time, and you fight to the death over them. Sometimes you leverage that big pile of apples you just got to force others to look for big apple patches for you. Sometimes you use the influence from your big pile of apples to change the apple finding rules in your favor. Or sometimes, you're a random dude who thinks, "man, I bet there's a bunch of apples over there," and you find them and pick them all on your own. At the end of the day, the people who have big piles of apples have them because at some point they either looked and found a motherload of apples, and beat out anyone else who saw it while they were picking, or someone who did gave them all their apples on their deathbed. And being unethical can help you kill off the people in your immediate vicinity who saw the same bunch of apples you did, but to even have that opportunity to crush your competition means that you were lotto winning lucky to even be in the race at the start.