alt Hacker News> Makes no sense.
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
You can't individually do enough work to do much of anything we take for granted in our modern era but you can design and build systems, mechanical and social, to do that work. A corporation is such a system often put in motion and helmed by a single person for a significant portion of its existence. It accumulates many people and a lot of capital along the way by means of exchange, cash for goods and services rendered, physical capital in exchange for cash or debt and people's work in exchange for wages. Those people don't own the corporation unless they are given or purchase stock in it. They have already been paid for their input. Expecting otherwise is like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.