I feel bad for your sister. Only one reasonable option for an essential utility and all it costs your sister is hundreds a month plus sending all of her private data to a Nazi billionaire who is using it to train his AI while externalizing the costs of light pollution and space congestion/garbage onto the entire rest of the planet? It's looking like there's more than one trick to capitalism.

Society shares in the value because - insofar as the company is now worth say $X - that's because they have some way to create value that justifies a price of $Y per year for N people. And for those N people to be willing to pay $Y, they presumably have to be getting more than Y value (otherwise they wouldn't bother). So the real consumer value minus $Y is the 'value' created - the consumer surplus. Obviously there are exceptions but I think this is true in general.

And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.

> Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions.

That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.