Source? I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there. $140 billion is not that much when you compare the productivity gains just these four people have given the world.
The reality of physics and human capability?
> I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this.
They had a part in it, but it's the people/ecosystem that creates the wealth, not an individual. Linus didn't create all the distros. He didn't install it on all the servers around the world.
> Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there.
They themselves didn't create $140 billion of anything. It took the efforts of hundreds of thousands/millions of people, along with highly favorable laws and the society in which they lived in. Also, Bezos and Gates destroyed a lot of businesses as well with their monopolistic practices. As a matter of fact, when it comes to gates/microsoft, I'd say it's an overall net negative as microsoft set back computing/computer literacy more than anything.
I thought the fallacy/myth of the "great man" nonsense died with Jobs. There were plenty of people who thought Apple was over when Jobs died. But I guess it's alive and well today.
What's the right wealth level for people? I don't know. Personally, I think the best way combat wealth inequality is to create laws to foster competition so that one company doesn't become a monopoly. But instead, we are in an era of mergers, monopolies and consolidation. So wealth inequality will inevitably continue to grow.
One is a much more replaceable skill than the other in this equation. That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.
What is? It takes as plenty of skill to build a distro ( along with the package management systems, etc ) as it does to write a kernel. I understand that to most people, "kernel" = magic, but it really isn't. Not to mention many people helped develop the linux kernel.
Linus deserves credit, but so does red hat, slackware, debian, etc. Without those distros and GNU project, nobody would know of linus or the linux kernel. And the vast majority most of the GNU/Linux OS ecosystem is non-linux.
> That's why Torvalds has contributed more to world productivity than most.
The "great man" nonsense really has staying power. Using your logic, Torvalds' mother has contributed even more than torvalds to world productivity because she created linus...
I think that speaks for itself.
This is the principle we are discussing.
This is like asking why JK Rowling is a billionaire but your neighbor who only sold 10 children's books is not.
Teachers and Scientists who scale are billionaires[1][2] or centimillionaires [3]
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/30/indias-newest-billionaire-is...
2. James Watson, Ronda Stryker, Gordon Moore
3. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Jane Goodall, Noam Chomsky
