I'm not sure if this is a straw man or what.

Let's phrase this a different way. Everyone has values that they live by.

Some people value family and community above all else. For example, even if their town has very little economic opportunity, they will stay there to support their grandparents, their parents, their cousins, and so on.

Some people might value artistic expression, and they will forsake money for the chance to be, let's say, a musician. They might become incredibly successful, or they might not, but they will always focus on playing music. That's the thing that they value whenever they have to make a choice. That one goes first.

Billionaires value money. I'm 100% certain of this. I've had a sort of interesting life and happen to have been quite close to and worked with at least twenty billionaires, some of whom I've known for decades and watched their progression. I'm telling you for certain that they value money incredibly highly.

This, of course, really should be obvious to even your average child or anyone who takes even a passing interest in the topic. A couple of million dollars here or there can be an oddball side effect of some luck or strange life choices. A billion dollars cannot, it is an absolutely staggering amount of money, and anyone who has achieved it has aggressively sought it out and has been given dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to focus on something else instead and settle for some large amount of money that is short of a billion dollars.

Again, this should not surprise anybody at all who has a functioning brain. Imagine Jane Goodall heads into the jungle to study a tribe of gorillas and discovers that most gorillas have a dozen or so bananas, but then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.

How do you think she'd fare trying to make the argument that this gorilla was actually focused on other things besides bananas for most of their life and the pile just kind of happened as a side effect?

>then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.

Then she didn't discover the billionaire gorilla, she discovered the lottery winner or the trust fund kid.

The billionaire gorilla has thousands of acres of banana trees, with enough bananas to reach the moon and back if all picked and stacked.

The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas. A complex machine with fractal parts whose ultimate output is bananas.

Meanwhile the other gorillas are laser focused on the height of their banana stack (which is rotting and half aren't even aware). Telling themselves if they had a stack 1000ft high they would never work a day again.

I'm pretty sure you understand this, and part of me thinks we are saying the same thing.