There are some good reasons for this:
- If you created such a company, you may still be running it. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Ellison. By the time you retire from that you're super wealthy and old, there's little reason to start over.
- Founding a company is HARD. Few people who went through that once are interested in doing it again. Paul Graham wrote about how he feels that way, although he did do it again with YC.
But I think the point is fair that success at that level requires not just skill but a lot of luck of being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right combination of skill and connections to pull it off. It's extremely unlikely.
You can certainly say Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerburg are skilled and they work hard. But it's clear they were also very lucky.
That's three billion dollar companies so far and counting. Is there anybody else who's done that? Not to my knowledge.
He quite likely has some kind of savior complex, he's quite literally trying to save the world.
A fascinating and incredible human being.
The fact that you think he's doing it for humanity is laughable.
Square is a fine company, but let's face it, it is not changing the world. It's just another payments company with nothing particularly special to make it stand out.
I don't think you can compare him to Elon Musk, except again, the fact that they both work hard. Plenty of people do.
It is certainly possible to beat index funds, many do so, some of them are mostly lucky, some of them are mostly skillful. - That is the trick ain't it? The hole point is that there is no way to distinguish between the two (a priori) and no way to deduct if it will lead to future success (posteriori).