Not really. That's why I said no one can work a billion times smarter.

There is a "hack" to wealth, and PG has explained it here. You need a large addressable market with little competition where you can capture a small amount of value from a huge number of people at scale.

Individually, that value is often not worth much. A surgeon can save your life, and you'd give up most of your fortune for it. A starving person would do almost anything for food. Most startups don't create that kind of value for any one customer. They create a little bit of value for a lot of customers, and at scale that turns into enormous wealth.

That's what people are arguing when they say scale is a form of cheating. Maybe you got into the position to own it through harder work, smarter decisions, more risk taking, more grit, or more luck. But not a billion times more. Once you own it, you've locked yourself into a growth curve that scales with little additional work. In many cases, it gets easier as it grows.

Past a certain point, wealth is no longer tied to your work. It's tied to your ownership.

That's also why CEOs want equity. They don't want to be paid solely for their labor. They want ownership in large scale production so they can benefit from the growth of the system itself and eventually sell that ownership for far more than they could ever earn through wages alone.

This is why, as a software engineer, I favor equity compensation and have benefited from it myself. But I don't think I've worked harder than countless people in jobs that don't have this characteristic.

I wasn't paid more because I worked more. I was paid more because I owned something that scaled.

That's the "cheat."