"Some innovators are not rent-seekers" does not imply "No innovator is a rent-seeker" or even "Most innovators are not rent-seekers". This is an argument about

"Some innovators are not rent-seekers" does not imply "No innovator is a rent-seeker" or even "Most innovators are not rent-seekers". This is an argument about distributions, and you've provided a (very funny) datapoint that tells us almost nothing about the distributions, and which most of us were already aware of. The interesting question is: how much innovation and investment is going into rent-seeking vs building new products people actually want? There has been an argument from at least the 90's that rent-seeking was impeding innovation in technology. When Microsoft was the dominant force in tech the joke was that you couldn't start a company that would be the next Microsoft, but you could start a company that would get bought and just down by Microsoft to preempt any competitive threat, and that was just as good a way to get rich as building the next Microsoft. History didn't work out quite the way the advocates of that argument predicted, and it is unlikely to do so this time.