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The problem is simply that we can't all be rich. We can all be billionaires, but we can't all be rich. The intrinsic limit comes from the fact that wealth itself is relative.

Using your example, Microsoft's creation of value to such a large consumer base couldn't have happened if there had been thousands of Microsofts equally successful (e.g. not thousands of companies can have a 90% market share in the same market at the same time, for company A to have 90% of market share of a market it means company B doesn't have it. Opportunity cost).

When you have thousands of people at the very very very top (.0001% cf 1%) that thousand of people would have to either extract wealth (not value, that's different) from the rest of the economy. There is only so much wealth to go around, regardless of how you represent it, whether its US Dollars or Friedman's island's stone money. Accumulation of wealth is relative.



When quality of life is taken into consideration, especially against most of human history and large portions of the world today, then I'd say most of the first world is already 'rich', we just aren't billionaires.


That's debatable, but its entirely a different point, we are talking here about "rich" at the Bill Gates scale.




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