> Do you think the "greater share" he "earned" is really 10,000x the average tech worker?
Yes. It doesn't seem unreasonable to the point of dismissal to consider that he's changed the world to within many orders of magnitude of that which the avererage person, particularly the average minimum-wage earner, does. That doesn't mean he has. But the number being four or five orders of magnitude doesn't strike me as damning.
The key here is "changed the world". In a capitalist economy, there's no rule anywhere saying the change has to be good or productive. Often, the best way to make money is to do purposefully destructive things.
For example, consider the Tobacco industry. While yes they did, and somewhat still do, make a lot of money, they did not create any value. They siphoned it - they exchanged the purchase of tobacco for the cost of healthcare. I'm speculating, but if you were calculating the communal cost, that is the profits of tobacco minus the healthcare costs, I'm positive it would be negative.
Therefore, tobacco has a negative value onto the world, but it is profitable. The profit is a facade, that money is really stolen. This demostrates one of the core flaws with current economic systems - you can create profit without creating value. You can simply move money around and get some profit, and you can even destroy money and yet make money.
Keep in mind Facebook gets it's profit via advertising. The money they make is due to manipulating people to spend their money on things they wouldn't otherwise buy. The analysis is difficult, and I'm not saying what they're doing is bad per se, but the actual value they create is certainly debatable.
All that is to say, simply changing the world is a meaningless metric. Certainly, I can change the world for the worse, if I want, and profit in-between. In such a scenario not only am I not equivalent to a janitor, I actually create less value. While making orders of magnitude more money.
Yes. It doesn't seem unreasonable to the point of dismissal to consider that he's changed the world to within many orders of magnitude of that which the avererage person, particularly the average minimum-wage earner, does. That doesn't mean he has. But the number being four or five orders of magnitude doesn't strike me as damning.