In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.

Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.

The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.

Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.

I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."

If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?

Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.

I think you overstate the power of money. Of course it helps. But it’s far from everything. Just look at the number of rich kid fuckups or CEOs with poor backgrounds. It’s just one component that smooths risk and occasionally provides a starter network, but it’s not everything.

We need a better system. We tried communism and that was shit, so this is the least bad system we have.

The Russian empire tried communism. It was better than what they had before or since.

The Chinese tried communism. It worked far better for them than what they had before.

We didn't try communism as far as I know. We hunted it down and murdered it in its cradle if I'm reading the CIA declassified archives correctly.

Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.