How much of that success was a direct result of the CEO, though? The more time goes on, the more any company depends on the historic collective achievement of humanity. The company couldn’t have succeeded at all without an educated workforce, infrastructure, “the economy”, or a million other general social, economic, and political factors completely outside the company’s control.

Think of it like this… Most of math as we know it, and by extension computer science, wouldn’t exist without Euler. Does that mean Euler, or Euler’s children, should own all value generated by Euler’s math? How about if he started a company that copyrighted those algorithms? All tech companies in perpetuity? How about the VC that conducted the hostile takeover with other people’s money? Should the CEO who leads the robotics company that replaces the human workforce, rule ALL of humanity for the remainder of eternity?

Even though my examples are fucking ridiculous, the way the world actually works is that any CEO who started an ultimately successful company, regardless of whether or not they were pivotal or hindered the company, and even average executives who jumped in for a year just before IPO, frequently end up wealthier than hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people — wealthier than entire nation states — weather than people who had many orders of magnitude more influence in the success of the company than they ever did…

Ultimately, no matter how much you do or achieve individually, human civilisation and all its achievements could not exist without the collective effort of billions of people (and counting). In the grand scheme of things every hot shot CEO is just an inevitable statistic fulfilling a role that someone else would have fulfilled if they had never been born.