You can make a huge amount of money that way, but not the MOST money.

"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.

"relatively small scale" is doing all the work in this sentence, no?

Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.

Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.

You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.

It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.

Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.

> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.

Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.

The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138558

Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.

It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.

Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.

Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.