Comment by hn_throwaway_99

This is such a critical point.

I used to lake to say that both hard work and luck were necessary, but neither sufficient, for outsized success. But as our economy has gone down the path of more and more inequality and winner-take-all markets, the luck becomes ever more important because at the very, very top it is more like a lottery.

That is, I think Zuckerberg and others like him have a lot of unique skills, but I can guarantee at least a thousand other people have skills similar or better, but who didn't experience just the perfect set of circumstances to be a mega billionaire. Those 1000 other people are not evenly distributed with, say, a bunch of them being mega-hundred billionaires.

The fact is that the circumstances that even allow billionaires to exist in the first place are actually so exceedingly rare that you have to take luck as the primary determinant.