Comment by closingreunion

Money is earned either by extracting rents/profits/taxes, through borrowing or by selling something. None of these have to actually create value.

You can advertise something without value and “earn” money selling it. The perceived value was created by advertising, but didn’t actually exist.

You can raise funds, sell at a loss, buy out the competition and later drive up prices without creating any value. This is how Amazon got started.

You can go to the bank, borrow money(increasing the money supply, driving inflation, thanks to fractional reserve banking), buy up houses (driving housing inflation), and extract rent without doing anything useful for your community.

In fact, cloud computing is largely that: buying up all the compute and renting it out to those without the capital to buy themselves.

A person can create value without earning money (parenthood, volunteering), and one can earn money without creating value (rent extraction), although the word “earn” is under a lot of strain.