"was productive" is doing a hilarious amount of work in that sentence.

i don't really understand attempts like these to back-propagate some narrative that there was an epic, fair struggle between some set of individuals and one came out on top, ergo that justifies their estate all the way until the modern day owning some ridiculous share of the world's wealth

seems way more likely that once particular individuals amassed slight advantages in power, they just leveraged it into gaining even more ungodly amounts of power, often times using the state itself as a weapon to manifest that outcome

it's almost like you need to have access to capital to really make it big

hmm, that sounds strangely like what's going on in 2020... probably a coincidence though