Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
> If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
- being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.
Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer
That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-...
https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the...
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...
Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.