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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.