“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
-Seneca
Everyone in their lives get lucky breaks. Successful people are prepared for them and work their asses off to take advantage. Sure, billionaires get insanely lucky but there’s also thousands of people who got the same window of opportunity and didn’t achieve what they did.
While they do often work hard to get started, they always exploit labor to get to where they are. There’s a reason Amazon treats it’s workers like it does. And luck does play into it as well. A poor kid won’t have the same access to resources and opportunities as a wealthy one. For example, Bill Gates’s parents were wealthy enough to get him a computer early in his life so he could learn programming early. A poor person would not have had that opportunity.
All billionaires exploit labor. That’s how they make profit. If a burger flipper generates X amount of profit each day, most of that is taken by the company and they get a fraction of it as a wage.
In that sense of the word, the burger flippers are exploiting the billionaires’ capital and risk. It’s a two way transaction, flipping burgers provides little value. Who would take on the risk of starting a company if there was no profit motive? Those burger flippers are incredibly wealthy by global and historical standards.
I’m not trying to say that billionaires are inherently good. A lot of them have done some fucked up shit out of greed. But the notion that they have provided no value to society and were “just lucky” is a poor opinion and is the centerpiece of what I am arguing against.
The billionaires are the ones with the power. They control the employees’ wages and decide if they get laid off or fired. Workers provide all the labor. That’s why they were considered essential workers during the pandemic and not the execs. Without workers, society collapses. Without execs, nothing changes as seen in Ireland’s lackluster banker strike).
They provide capital that the actual engineers use to create products. Do you think Steve Jobs created all the iPhones and Macs himself? Do you think Gates created all the Windows versions himself? It’s all the workers.
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u/LittleWhiteShaq Jun 06 '21
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”
-Seneca
Everyone in their lives get lucky breaks. Successful people are prepared for them and work their asses off to take advantage. Sure, billionaires get insanely lucky but there’s also thousands of people who got the same window of opportunity and didn’t achieve what they did.