Ummm... are you misreading my comment?

Bezos had to work to found a successful business. Which came with a ton of benefits.

Political power is a (un?)intended side effect of owning that successful business. That side effect is the problem.

I'm not sure how this is apparently a controversial point. There's vast and obvious evidence that this is the case. More Dunning-Krugerism from the tech industry.

Good thing you're immune.

"Political power" is an unavoidable side effect of having power, simply – this almost reads like a tautology, but it's worth keeping in mind that the former is effectively an extension of the latter.

I argue money is power in a free market society. I'm not sure there is a way to fix the first part of that sentence without completely modifying the latter.

Actually there is significant research that successful people significantly overestimate their skills/contributions even if they rely largely on luck or advantageous starting conditions. There is also significant research that shows that even in a relatively "fair" trading scenario wealth distribution very quickly becomes completely unequal, just based on luck in the first couple of trades [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

It was actually gifted to him by his parents, in the form of a $300,000 loan. How is it so difficult to accept that the vast majority of the wealthy were helped by having wealthy parents rather than pulling themselves up their bootstraps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Business_career

How many people with $300k go on to build Amazon? Nobody is saying he didn't have any help, and that's frankly not the bar we want to measure people by.

Statistically, people with wealthy parents are far more likely to be wealthy than those of poor parents. Bezos would have been far less likely to create Amazon did he not get that loan. Do you dispute this?

I don't dispute that, but also don't want to write policy to change that. It isn't really an informative fact. It's almost obvious, really.

Maybe. So what? No one is an individual. “He” is also a product of his parents’ DNA mixing to produce an intellectually healthy and superior brain. His parents also stuffed copious amounts of useful information into that brain. As did people around him growing up. And his parents used savings, likely derived from many generations of people passing on their wealth/culture/knowledge, to aid in the continuation of their DNA’s importance to humanity.

> loan

People borrow $300,000 all the time to buy a house.

$188,700,000,000 - $300,000 = $188,699,700,000

This is exactly the same level of mathematical sophistication as in Paul's original post.

I don't exactly give a shit, I googled Bezos current net worth. I'm savvy enough to know it's not liquid cash, if you're trying to make a snarky remark. Or you could just say what you mean.