Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like.

They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes.

The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc.

It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time.

In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people.

Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot.

That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process.

If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most.

It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen.

And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing.

For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.