I'm going to start off by saying that my initial comment on rich people not doing anything and being freeriders was mainly an angry comment directed at people l

I'm going to start off by saying that my initial comment on rich people not doing anything and being freeriders was mainly an angry comment directed at people like the author of this article. My mistake for not making that clear. There are certainly many rich people who work hard. Despite that, this does not mean that hard working rich people deserve their wealth... Onward: >But when you look at modern American billionaires like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, they made their fortune by working intensely hard and smart in very competitive markets, and inventing or making available to the mass-market products that created billions of dollars in value. It can definitely be argued that a single individual can create billions of dollars of new wealth, and not on the "back" of others - there's a lot of very wealthy early Microsoft and Apple employees out there, and billions of dollars of value created for its customers over the last couple decades. I disagree. Those innovative mass market products may be created under the leadership of one hard working man, but it is fundamentally impossible for a complex product like the iphone to be entirely the work of one man. The iphone, the boeing 747, and many other complex projects can only be built with the expertise and labor of multitudes of people. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates cannot build such wealth without exploiting the labor of their corporate empires.