There's many things you can do to be worth a billion dollars. It's just the people that do them rarely receive the billion dollars. The standard example is Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs. Ritchie created C. Ritchie created Unix. They both died in the same month, but Jobs was the billionaire and everyone wrote a story about his passing. Ritchie was not a billionaire, he simply did the work that changed the course of human history. It's not an isolated event either. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, but none became billionaires.

The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible. It's just that if you do it, you rarely get the billion dollars.

> William Shockley invented the transistor, but [didn't become a billionaire]

In fairness that wasn't for lack of trying. Shockley founded a semi-conductor company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laborat...) and ran it so poorly that eight key people left (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight), founded their own company (Fairchild Semiconductor) and became enormously wealthy. Two of the eight then went on to found Intel and became even wealthier.

>The problem isn't that you can't do something deserving of a billion dollars. Clearly it is possible.

What's "clearly possible" is to create a product. Or to create C.

It's not at all clear than anything of the sort "deserves" a billion dollars.

Except if we reduce it to the trivial "as a product it can be potentially worth billions of dollars in the market". But "is worth" doesn't equal "deserve".

One is an economic claim (which nobody disagrees with). The other is a ethical/moral claim, which many disagree about.

A longtime friend of mine celebrated his 60th birthday, and the party was at a large venue that was packed with family, friends, neighbors, and (ex-)colleagues who all showed up to show their love and care for him -- he is undoubtedly the richest man I know.