>My original point boils down to one simple thing - the people who are good at dealing with people are more instrumental to creating big companies and fortunes

>My original point boils down to one simple thing - the people who are good at dealing with people are more instrumental to creating big companies and fortunes than the people with technical expertise. Getting the most value out of the deal comes back to dealing with people. Selling the most widgets is about convincing a lot of people. People, people, people. Re-reading the parent comment, I see now that I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought that you meant that 'great men' who created "the modern corporation" and other social structures are what drove innovation over the last century. I agree that social stuff has a lot to do with an individual's ability to accumulate money, and that a social specialist can still generally go further than a technical specialist (though, both get a lot of mileage out of knowing a little of the other's specialty.) I do note that the world is dramatically better for the socially unskilled now than it was 100 years ago; the trend is that nerds are more and more valued, to the point now where some of the socially skilled manipulators actually pretend to be nerds. but yeah, re-reading, I misunderstood your point. I don't really disagree that business people tend to make more money than technical people. (though, like I said, the trend is favourable for the technical folks.)