These people were all popularisers and marketers, not original inventors.

There is actually no good theory of social value underlying capitalism. "More money = good, less money = bad" is crude and unsophisticated nonsense.

The reality is that there are many different activies creating "value": original invention in different flavours, packaging and industrialisation, marketisation, promotion, sponsorship, monopolisation, wealth capture and tribute collection, destructive resource extraction, sustainable resource extraction, and so on. Among others.

Only some of these generate real value. Others consume real value. But market theory is too clumsily unsophisticated to highlight the distinctions in a way that maximises productive creation while minimising unproductive capture.

Page Rank is named after Larry Page (not, as some erroneously believe, after web pages). Google is unique among the companies named in that it did actually grow out of original search engine research.

With respect to Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, you are more correct. For instance, MS-DOS was originally QDOS (Quick 'n' Dirty Operating System) and bought off of another Seattle company by Microsoft.

Page Rank is not rocket science. Sooner or latter someone else would have come to the same conclusion (using incoming links to asses popularity).

I don't doubt that Larry Page is a talented man, but he was in the good place in the good moment. Now Google is in a dominant position and there's no place for any competition, but if Google never existed, we would have some other company doing similar things as Google. Maybe they would have appeared one year later.

> Sooner or latter someone else would have come to the same conclusion

Indeed, at the same time as Larry Page was thinking about PageRank, Li Yanhong created and patented RankDex (a very similar page ranking algorithm) over in New Jersey - and built Baidu out of it.

>> Page Rank is not rocket science.

Many scientific discoveries seem simple after the fact, like the Einsten's E=mc2, yet somehow it took one of the greatest minds in history of mankind to come up with it.

there is a big difference between scientific discovery in a science-hostile environment back than and todays norm of continuous discoveries though...

Depending on which country you live in, the government might well be described as "science-hostile".

But then, why should particular individuals capture such massive capital when their success has more to with circumstance than anything else ?

It's also funny how we make heroes out of corporations themselves, not only their heads : technological advance is often attributed to some specific companies, and we don't see that as appropriation of the results of particular circumstances, but as a sign of the performance of this company.

However; Would there be no XXXXX if we didn't live in an environment that attributes the results of circumstances to specific individuals ? I really don't know.

I don't find your point coherent. Why should anyone be paid well for anything if their revenue generation is due more to circumstance than anything else?

How far down the rabbit hole would we be going to go with this? Who gets to decide what the capital cutoff point is for "too massive" and the contribution cutoff point is for "due to circumstance"?

If I don't believe in free will, and thereby claim you make too much money because you technically weren't responsible for any of your actions and never chose the outcome that happened, can I incite a communist revolution and seize your assets? If I feel someone won the lottery because they were lucky, do I get to take all their money because they didn't contribute value or "earn" it in a way that I find agreeable?

Can you give me an example of someone who is wealthy who earned their money in a manner that isn't arguably due to circumstance? As it stands, I can't think of an example that is materially different from a tech CEO who happened to be in the right place and right time. Go far enough back and every idea and execution on that idea is due to chance. But that applies to everyone, not just tech CEOs, or whoever the robber baron of the week is.

Who gets to decide? How about all of us voters, taxpayers, and citizens, collectively, in a democratic fashion?

I'd be fine having a discussion about what's "too massive" for a company and trying to figure out how to balance the interests of society and any given company (and its constituent individuals). But I'd like to start from a position of, what do we want society to look like? rather than a position of, how do we preserve the status quo?

You do get to decide. You either reward them by being a consumer of their products/services or you don't.

Sorry, looks like you got outvoted.

Now you want to sit on some panel of judgement to overrule the public.

I love it when people say stuff like this. Society has spoken. You simply don't like their decision so your answer to is to create some super-powerful organization that can veto the public and instill its own version of what society should look like.

What? Those companies exist because society has granted them permission. That "super-powerful organization" is the government. Always has been, always will be.

Fortunately, now, for the most part, in the west, we all get a say in that super-powerful organization.

It, and everything it spawns, like mega-corporations, exists to serve us, not the other way around.

Playing devil's advocate: because the chance of winning the lottery is a big motivation...

I don't follow - wealth itself is motivating to people who want it. Why single out the lottery?

GP is likely referring to the startup lottery. Why did amazon win and pets.com fail? Why Facebook and not Myspace or orkut? Right place, right time + skill to make it + lucky = lottery.

You really believe that the different between MySpace and Facebook is total lottery? Circumstances? MySpace sucked. It was an idea that was executed very poorly. Letting users turn their profile pages into CPU sucking machines was one of many poor choices made by the company. The reason Facebook succeeded and MySpace failed was because Facebook made different decisions than MySpace did.

This whole concept is like saying, well, one guy decided to do the things he loved, go to baseball games, get drunk with his buddies, and watch copious amounts of TV. But this other guy spent 8 years educating himself and working his butt off accomplishing many things. Let's reward them equally because they both grew up in the same town thus should have equal outcomes.

They take large risks, and do work that not many people would be able to do - there aren't that many Bezoses and Musks out there. It's not just luck and circumstance, despite the current common narrative around success. That's certainly one component, but people at least partly make their own luck via their outlook and skills.

If you want people to continue to take large risks, you need to offer them good rewards if they succeed, and/or reduced downside in the case of failure.

>If you want people to continue to take large risks, you need to offer them good rewards if they succeed

Is this what you think drives people like Jobs? The guy who had billions, worked relentlessly, and died of Cancer at a fairly young age?

The reward is the power to do what you want, and bend the world to your whim. Money is the enabler of that. And yes, I think that the power to do what you want is a very large driver for people like Jobs, Musk, and Bezos. If you prevent them from getting lots of money for their efforts, you necessarily limit their ability to gather power. Everyone seems to always think that money is for getting a faster car or a bigger house, because that's most people would buy a car or house if they had money, but that's not really the primary driver past a point.

I had a teacher in highschool that put it this way (paraphrasing): "After a certain level of wealth, it just becomes a game and money is just points to keep score."

> there aren't that many Bezoses and Musks out there

How would you disprove this belief, short of an alternate-universe device?

To me, it feels a bit like saying: "There aren't that many apex predators, therefore Leo the Lion must have incredible intrinsic properties"... Ignoring the fact that the local ecosystem doesn't allow that many contenders in the first place, and overlooking how many baby lions Leo kills.

Anecdotally, if you know a lot of people who act like them. I know very few that are that driven in the face of no further material wants. Not everything needs to be proven. You need to have a bit of a lust for power to want to push to those levels.

The ability to kill all your other competitors does imply something about your intrinsic properties. But I don't think that's very apt in this case, Musk and Bezos aren't intentionally killing lots of competitors in the cradle. The ecosystem comparison might be a bit more apt, and there are certainly a number of people who are very driven and long-term-focused who never achieve the same heights, because you can only have so many megacorps in each field. But I think those people that don't achieve the peak still end up much better off financially than pure luck and circumstance would imply.

I was mainly arguing against the sad-sack sour grapes tendency I've noticed recently to say that very rich people are just luckier, and are no more deserving of their status than anyone else. That is, frankly, bullshit, unless it's inherited.

That's not to say we shouldn't strive to give the educational and financial resources for everyone the opportunity to thrive, I certainly think we should do more there. Bolstering our state university system so that it once again offers everyone the chance for a very cheap high quality education would be a great start.

I think that human nature biases us so strongly to inventing stories/causes (even when there are none) that it's almost impossible for us to accidentally assign too much importance to random factors.

It's a constant (and often un-examined) uphill battle against stuff like the "hot hand" fallacy or fundamental-attribution-error.

That's why I feel the default assumption should be that they got there by chance rather than that there's some kind of narrative cause we find instinctually pleasing.

Gates bought his OS from Seattle Computer Products where Tim Paterson wrote it over four months merely to fill a temporary gap. So many people have written OSs for convenience, pleasure, etc. We needed an OS monopoly about as much as a financial plague. It made Gates et al rich at all our expense.

It's easy to go wrong in both directions here.

The naive version you argue against here is fairly common. Some people actually think that if Edison hadn't invented electric light, we'd still read by candle light!

In reality, someone else would have invented the same or similar things fairly soon afterwards if these "heroes" hadn't done it first.

Then again, advancing the state of science and/or technology planet wide is enormously valuable, even if just by 1 month.

There is no way to measure this, but my guess is that without Steve Wozniak, microcomputers would surely have happened, but maybe 1 year later. What's a jumpstart like that worth for humanity as a whole?

The French micral was a microcomputer and dated 1972. Others also existed after. Apple I was out 4 years later.

It's really hard to tell if without the work of these people the world would have been different today. But I thin there is more than that, even if you grant that no something like Microsoft would not have existed without Gates, it probably would not have existed without people like Gates, and without the incentive for those people to manifest themselves. And it surely it wold not have existed without huge amounts of money to be invested in this venture.

Hero entrepreneurs become heroes for two reasons: 1) vision, and 2) the ability to coordinate massive effort in order to achieve it. Many people have vision, but don't have influence to make a change. Many people have influence but don't envision anything ground-breaking. And finally, the vast majority of people have neither vision nor influence. It's the combination of both which is extremely scarce and at the same time extremely efficient, which rewards bright individuals who have it.

It has to be noted though, that the same is also true for people with a criminal mindset that look to game the system. It's generally a hard problem to create laws that encourage "good" heroes and discourage "bad" ones.

don't call them heroes. that degrades the word hero. it would suffice to just call them "successful".

I'm referring to the term used by the parent.

Because execution is often the difference between success and failure. There was a social network before Facebook. Actually there were several. MySpace comes to mind as the biggest. Even without Facebook, MySpace was on the way out. The difference? Execution.

I could give the same movie script to 10 different directors and fund the production of 10 different movies and I guarantee you that at least a few of those movies you won't even know if they used the same script. People interpret the same information differently and have different visions based on that information. One might make it a RomCom. Another might decide it's an action movie.

And if one of them makes one that people overwhelmingly prefer and it makes a billion dollars, would you suggest that they give the money back because there should only be so much success afforded to a single person when 10 different people all had the same script?

You seem to imply that there would obviously be an operating system without Gates so why should he become rich? Well, there were several different operating systems, some might even argue superior operating systems, but they failed as businesses.

Coming up with a new or revolutionary idea is hard. What's equally difficult is turning that into a successful business. Microsoft could have easily been a total flop had it hired the wrong people or made the wrong decisions. Google could have ended up as neat little experiment that never quite got off the ground had they not brought in the right people.

But that's not just tech, that's not just business, that's life.

careful here - for incremental advances this is true. There are still major developments and path dependencies that wouldn't have happened without key individuals (Turing, Einstein, etc).

Who does something when matters. If the leaders of large tech companies were personally committed to free, open, and interoperable communications, we might have avoided the walled-gardens that we're currently stuck in. Similarly, if the NSA won the clipper chip debate back in the 90's, precedent for cryptography would likely be very different that what we have today.

Calculus would have happened without Newton (Leibniz). Special relativity without Einstein (Lorentz). Etc, eventually.

Gates is no hero for Microsoft, but his philanthropic efforts are probably heroic.

Even if his philanthropy allows him to pressure governments to change intellectual property laws around the world?

Interesting dilemma that.

The good his foundation does is much greater than the evils Microsoft have done, perhaps.

Was Robin Hood a hero?

No, he wasn't real.

Robin Hood has more reality to me than grogenaut does. Funny how that works, considering that presumably you have a human body and Robin Hood never did.

Given grogenaut is an internet personality, this is entirely true understandable.

Meg Whitman almost bought the Governorship of California because somebody wrote an auction program. First mover.

> does anyone really believe that if these particular individuals hadn't contributed their talents, the world would have turned out much different?

Do you know the names of CEO's of Nokia and RIM? Do you know the name of the CEO who introduced the iphone?

I guess that should answer your question.