Here's the the disconnect though. There are hundreds and hundreds of businesses that have done exactly the same things that Facebook did and went nowhere. Same strategies. Same exploitation. Same formula.
What makes Facebook different isn't that they did those things better. It's that they did them in the right place at the right time to corner the market.
I think there's a good analogy to the music industry. The most popular/famous/wealthy musicians aren't that way because they are more talented, or ruthless, or have the "winningest" music strategy. There are tens of thousands of other musicians who can play their songs as well or better than them, with more natural talent and willingness to murder for fame and wealth. So why are the famous people famous? Why are they household names while so many who are just as good if not better, with the same drive and strategy and goals, can't earn enough to put food on the table? It's luck. They won the popularity lottery by being in the right place at the right time to play to the right people that started the ball rolling.
And sure, ruthlessness and being unethical can help on that path, just as natural talent and determination can. But ultimately, at the scale we're talking about, they're negligible forces in the face of raw luck.
To use the apple picking example, what I'm saying is this. If you remove all "extraordinary" luck, and just see how well someone can do by being the meanest, most ruthless, crafty apple gatherer it is possible to be, the most they could end the day with is, let's say, 10 million apples. But we know that some people have 200 billion apples. So how do we reconcile that? The people with that many apples found an apple pile. That's the only way to get more than 10 million apples. And sure, maybe you actually found some other guy who found the pile and killed him to take the pile from him, or had some system by which you could trick people into pile hunting for you, so that you have better odds of finding the pile, but at the end of the day you have to find the pile to get more than 10 million apples. There is no other alternative. And yes, being unethical can greatly raise your odds of finding an apple pile, but anyone can find it. It's just very likely to be one of the unethical people.
But all this is, again, irrelevant to your original position, which was that there is some dollar amount X that you cannot get or keep without engaging in unethical behavior. Not that it's unlikely to get or keep, but that it is an actual impossibility. Do you still hold to that position in the face of the lottery example?
I don't think you understood my last apple analogy at all, but honestly, I'm not really emotionally invested in trying anymore.
I think our impasse at it's core is that we simply disagree on how much luck plays a factor in becoming a "X-ionaire."
You seem to think that the ones who did it are just the best of the best at being unethical businessmen. I look at the ranks of those who made it and I don't see genius Machiavellian strategic masterminds. I see people who capitalized on exactly the right idea at exactly the right time.
I can't pont to a Zuckerberg or a Gates or a Musk and say, "ah, this was the unethical strategy that got them to the top." I see that they were at the right place and time to fill a massive unfilled niche in society, and to beat everyone to the punch.
That's not skill. That's luck. That's not masterful strategy. Luck. It's not the inevitable outcome of their unethical business practices. It's dumb luck.
Are they unethical? Absolutely. Did that help along the way? To a degree, certainly.
But like, think about it like this. Did Bill Gates ruthlessly stomp on others people and companies to grow Microsoft to what it is today? Absolutely. But how many competitors were there in that space that he needed to stomp? Five? Six? That means that out of 8 trillion people on Earth, he was one of 5, maybe 6, that even had the opportunity to corner that market.
And why is that? Because life isn't perfect information, and opportunities aren't evenly spread.
To make one final pass at the apples example. In life, the apples aren't uniformly spread across the trees. You have to have the thought, "I bet there are some apples over in that part of the orchard," and then go look for them there. Sometimes there's a few. Sometimes there's a lot. Sometimes there's none. Not every area you search will be bursting with apples. Sometimes, very very very rarely, there's 200 billion apples in the area you go looking. And not everybody knows what's going on everywhere else in the orchard at all times. Sometimes you and 5 or 6 buddies stumble onto the same patch of 200 billion apples at the same time, and you fight to the death over them. Sometimes you leverage that big pile of apples you just got to force others to look for big apple patches for you. Sometimes you use the influence from your big pile of apples to change the apple finding rules in your favor. Or sometimes, you're a random dude who thinks, "man, I bet there's a bunch of apples over there," and you find them and pick them all on your own. At the end of the day, the people who have big piles of apples have them because at some point they either looked and found a motherload of apples, and beat out anyone else who saw it while they were picking, or someone who did gave them all their apples on their deathbed. And being unethical can help you kill off the people in your immediate vicinity who saw the same bunch of apples you did, but to even have that opportunity to crush your competition means that you were lotto winning lucky to even be in the race at the start.