The people who create real value rarely make any money.
Linus Torvalds created Linux which allowed companies to use commodity hardware. Before Linux, every company had to pay massive taxes to Sun (Solaris) or IBM (AIX) to run a server. With Linux, commoditty hardware ecosystem blossomed, and the first companies like Google built massive datacenter. This wouldn't have been possible if they had to buy Solaris servers to run their datacenters.
The value created by Linus is probably tens of trillions of dollars. I don't think he is a billionaire. There is a guy who is a trillionaire today. It is hard to make an argument that Musk created more value than Linus. Tesla is a trillion dollar company with negative YoY growth.
Linus Torvalds is not a visionary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-YL0BeWZyU
The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it. They have either inherited wealth or in the right networks. The example PG gives of starting with 2 million USD is someone who is already incredibly wealthy and in the top 1% (1% globally, not just US). As always, there may be some rare exceptions where the founders actually created value and became billionaires.
> The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it
Give me a break. Elon has created a huge amount of value. Every third car I see on the road is a Telsa and the US was relying on Russia to reach the ISS before SpaceX.