I never understood this line of reasoning, because it presumes that everyone should have access to the same opportunities. It's clearly silly once you throw a few counter examples: should a Private in the military be able to skip the ranks and be promoted straight to General? Should a new grad software dev be able to be promoted to lead engineer without getting any experience?

Clearly there are reasons why opportunities are gated.

> This idea that you can just get huge audiences and investments due to raw talent, keeps a lot of people coming to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to “make it” and living on ramen. But even just coming there proves the point — a talented rando elsewhere in the world wouldn’t even have access to the capital and big boys networks.

All those people start somewhere though. Excluding nepotism, which is tangential point, all those people started somewhere and then grew through execution and further opening of opportunity. But it's not like they all got to where they are in one-shot. Taking your Ashton Kutcher example - yes he had a head start on twitter followers, but that's because he executed for years before on his career. Why would it make sense for some rando to rack up a million followers before he did?

Talent will earn you opportunities, but it's not going to open the highest door until you've put in the time and work.

Of course, it's not to say inequity or unequal access to opportunities doesn't exist in the world. Of course it does. But even in an ideal, perfectly equitable world, not everyone would have the same access to opportunities.

So yes, it makes perfect sense that someone would give Ilya $1B instead of some smart 18 year old, even if that 18 year old was Ilya from the past.