Wealth beyond a certain point won't buy you any greater material comfort, but it affords you influence. Look at Elon Musk. The market thinks that Tesla is a val

Wealth beyond a certain point won't buy you any greater material comfort, but it affords you influence. Look at Elon Musk. The market thinks that Tesla is a valuable company, Musk owns a large proportion of Tesla, so the market has decided that Musk gets to make a lot of decisions about how the world's resources are allocated. Musk has decided to allocate resources to sustainable technology and space exploration. Gates has allocated resources to the eradication of disease. Roman Abramovich has allocated resources to sports teams and a series of increasingly massive yachts. $10bn might get you a football team or a big boat, but it won't get you to Mars. It's not necessarily fair or just, but it seems to be quite effective. Lots of alternative systems have been tried, but they've all been woefully inefficient at directing resources towards activities that generate more resources. Capitalism is the best system we've found for coupling "stuff-making ability" to the amount of stuff you get put in charge of. Capitalism doesn't reward hard work, which feels very unfair; there's no real relationship between how hard you work and how much value you create. The typewriter industry was full of incredibly talented and hard-working typewriter designers, but the value of the best typewriter is far less than the value of a crappy computer. Capitalism is also really bad at distinguishing between fairly created value and value that has been captured by theft, fraud or coercion. For that, you need an effective legal system. Free markets and bad laws create a lot of rich gangsters. People who control a lot of resources can use those resources to influence the legal system, which is inherently dangerous unless you've got really good checks and balances.