Seriously the timing of this conversation cannot be a coincidence

So exactly like the Titanic until it was too late to ignore.

So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes? There are ways to "win the lottery" inside capitalism without breaking any rules. Sure, the amassing of wealth is in itself unethical in a country where many kids can't eat nutritious meals, but you don't necessarily have to be a backstabbing thief to become rich. You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off at the same time the technology becomes mature enough for something like online banking to be feasible.

lol yeah

So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes?

They're routinely the victims of them. Lottery winners are a scam target rich environment. North of 5% of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years, far above the national average.

You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off

Utterly clueless if you believe the advent of online banking was Peter Thiel's idea. I seriously doubt you understand how banks form or function.

I wasn't using Thiel as an example--at least not on purpose. Take any obvious idea and marry it to a technological revolution, and you'll have a bunch of rich people who got rich mostly by pure luck. Musk is a piece of shit, but the case for Tesla taking off was actually proven by GM's EV1 ~3 years prior. The main reason it didn't take off? Well it was twofold: first, GM was reluctant to commit to EVs because marketing them would make their conventional fuel vehicles look environmentally destructive, and second, the battery technology the EV1 used was nickle metal hydride. Tesla succeeded because it coincided with the proliferation of lithium ion batteries, and in that particular case, I don't think anything unethical happened. If Musk had stopped here we probably wouldn't think of him as an evil piece of shit.

eh, not really how it works. at certain point your wealth is just distributed across the market enough that it goes up with inflation.

But inflation doesn't make money worth more.

This is actually so true lmao literally South Park even mentioned this recently tbh.

...sure, but if your money pile (in the form of various core-sector investments/broad market ETF's, which always eventually track inflation), automatically goes up with inflation your not losing anything either.

when your rich, you have to actively go out of your way to lose money. because your $ can make more $ for you than you could ever make actually working.