Github's founders became billionaires by making powerful developer tools available to everyone at low or zero cost, thus making millions of developers more productive and wealthy.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires by making personal computers and software available to billions of ordinary people, making them more productive and wealthy.
Larry and Sergey became billionaires by making information and smartphones available to billions of people, and in doing so helping some of the world's poorest people lift themselves out of poverty.
What do you prefer: a world in which a handful of people are vastly more wealthy than the rest but where everyone's material wellbeing is improving, or a world in which everyone is equal but we all have little wealth and little technological progress?
I don't like to wade into black vs white ideological debates, but it's worth noting that every economic system has had wealthy elites and a relatively much poorer majority.
I'm all for discussing ways in which society's wealth can be distributed more fairly and how the worst-off can be helped to live more comfortable and optimistic lives.
But the evidence would suggest that when you constrain the wealth-generating capacity of the highest-achievers to reduce the overall wealth being created by a society, the people at the bottom are the first to suffer.
Like I said I'm not interested in ideological arguments on this topic, and the tone of your comments suggests you are.
The evidence I'm referring to is the comparison over the past 100 years or so between open economies where people can keep a substantial share of the rewards for their innovations, vs controlled economies where people can't. In any scenario, elites find a way to be elites. The comparison that matters most is how badly off are the poorest.
To answer your other comment and to avert a needless argument, I agree it's not black and white and I agree no system is perfect and that it's an unresolved question as to what kind of system is optimal in terms of generating wealth and distributing it fairly.
My initial comment was simply to point out to the root commenter that the action they recommended would more likely lead to the opposite outcome to what they hoped.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires by making personal computers and software available to billions of ordinary people, making them more productive and wealthy.
Larry and Sergey became billionaires by making information and smartphones available to billions of people, and in doing so helping some of the world's poorest people lift themselves out of poverty.
What do you prefer: a world in which a handful of people are vastly more wealthy than the rest but where everyone's material wellbeing is improving, or a world in which everyone is equal but we all have little wealth and little technological progress?