I didn’t attempt to define the rich.

Are you attempting to make a “they provide jobs” argument? Because they wouldn’t if they didn’t have to. Jobs are an unwanted byproduct of a successful business.

Seems like you should just start a successful business then. The business owner provides no value and just gets tons of money for free. Sounds like an amazing deal. Why don’t you take it?

I think you would agree that success often depends on access to resources and support system - not everyone starts at the same point. Many who are celebrated as self-made often benefit from inherited advantages, which complicates the meritocracy narrative.

Lots of people have access to resources. Very few of them start successful businesses. Zuckerberg’s parents were dentists. They were well off, sure, but there are hundreds of thousands of dentists in the US, if not millions. Why don’t all of their kids start companies like Facebook?

There aren't millions of dentists :)

I think you know at least some of the reasons Gabe. There is a series of filters: intelligence, early skill development, a supportive environment, elite networking, risk tolerance, strong vision, perfect market timing, and a business model benefiting from network effects in a market that can only sustain a few winners.

This list might be incomplete. Would you like to supplement it, or do you prefer to continue with the socratic method? I'd like if you did the former, because the latter comes across as arrogant and condescending.

I said hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It turns out there are around 200,00.

Success depends on some combination of hard work / talent / luck. You can have an extreme amount of all three and get an extreme outcome like being a billionaire, you can have moderate amounts of 2 / 3 and still be quite well off. You can have extreme amounts of one and be successful from very little.

Access to resources helps, obviously, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

It seems like we agree, more or less. I'd say there are more factors, and talented and hard working people can still get pretty screwed, but that's beside the point.

To your original question about the wealth transfer, this isn't just the rich selling their subscription services to the poor or something like that. It's a much broader subject.

Some ways in which it can happen include inflation eroding wages while increasing asset values, high-interest debt, tax loopholes favoring capital over labor, financialization driving up costs of essentials, government bailouts benefiting corporations, privatization shifting public assets into private hands.

You'll probably agree that some of these things have been happening for decades, and some people want to accelerate the rate at which they're happening.

Yes, many of those things happen, for various reasons. Not one of those reasons is a cabal of cigar-smoking men in top hats twisting the mustaches and saying "Muahahaha, now I'll steal money from the poor!" like many people seem to think.

It’s way more mundane than that. They just rationally protect their self interests using the power they already have.

To claim that it’s not happening is not believable. Why wouldn’t they protect and expand their wealth and power at the expense of the serfs if nobody is stopping them?