Of course, this argument is a pretty piss poor one when the example held up is Musk…

His first jolt was selling a website to a relatively clueless Compaq that did nothing with it except throw money at Elon. No idea if Elon’s site was any good or not, but it didn’t matter because the reality is that it folded without an enduring impact as part of the dot-com collapse. He used his winnings to try to make X.com the first time, and was a comparative failure next to Paypal, which, somehow, agreed to merge and put him in charge and he almost tanked it. Then ebay bought it out and Musk got maddening amount of money for doing nothing but screw it up.

Tesla is probably the first example of him not actively screwing it up, though his drama around “I wanna call myself a founder” was dumb. That said, any investor could have done it, so his ‘value’ was his lottery-like wins leading to that point.

There are others that are arguable, though recently had it happen where someone kept giving out names of impressive and seemingly valuable ‘billionaires’, and we kept checking and every last one were ‘only’ millionaires. So it seems like ‘billionaire’ remains a stupidly over the top concept that isn’t particularly redeemable, with the defensibly decent folks staying under a billion through not being super greedy and/or philanthropy.

“If you weren’t my slave then you’d have nothing to eat at all.”