I can believe making hundreds of thousands of (Am.) dollars from your own work. I can believe making millions of dollars from your own work. I don’t believe that you can make billions of dollars from your own work.

Instead you work yourself—yes—and hire thousands of people. Whatever surplus value you get out of those pieces of labor commodity becomes your billions.

With those billions you can even fund think tanks that sell the idea that billionaires build. Eventually you can even transform yourself from a practical cynic to someone who genuinely believes his own propaganda.

> If professional billionaire scouts know that exploiting people is not the skill to look for, why do some politicians think this is the defining quality of billionaires?

> I think they start from the feeling that it's wrong that one person could have so much more money than another. It's understandable where that feeling comes from. It's in our DNA, and even in the DNA of other species.

Here we see the hard-working rich person at work. First without ceremony dismiss any arguments that they might have had, of course. Then insert some armchair pscyhology and gesture at human nature.