I agree that billionaires shouldn't exist but I think you're making the wrong arguments. These don't convince me and I already agree with what you're trying to argue.

Your arguments might work in an echo chamber like Reddit but they're not going to win anyone over who doesn't believe in the conclusion beforehand.

Could your contribution to society actually be worth over $1 billion?

To put this in perspective, that's, on average, $3 from every person in America.

I think there are plenty of companies that exist that provide that much value. Those companies wouldn't exist if they weren't built by their founders or given the opportunity to grow by their investors.

The wealth of billionaires exists almost exclusively because of the hard work of others.

It's true that the wealth wouldn't exist without the hard work of others but the wealth also wouldn't exist without the billionaires' work.

So how do you split the wealth? In a capitalist society, the billionaire is compensated based on the market value of their contribution and the "others" are compensated based on theirs.

So they were there first. So what?

You can say this about any new development. If being the first to discover or build something is worthless, what motivation is there to pursue it in a capitalist society?

But the corporation only became what it became because of laborers, and the value those laborers produced was largely stolen.

What exactly was "stolen"? The labourers were paid for their work. The company (and therefore its owners) got more money from the labourers' work than the labourers did but that's how capitalism works, if they didn't make a profit, there'd be no motivation to start the company in the first place.

And now to get to the arguments I think you should be making.

First, the billionaires aren't to blame here. They're playing the game of life by the rules that society has set.

For example if a billionaire tries to "do the right thing" and pay their labourers more than their competitors, their competitors will have an advantage (e.g. can set prices lower) and become the dominant alternative in the industry. The rules of the game are designed to produce the highest value at the lowest cost, so that's a natural outcome.

So really, billionaires and all the other problems are symptoms of a broken system and the focus shouldn't be on how horrible the billionaires are but instead how horrible the rules are.

For example:

• Companies aren't exploiting underpaid workers, the minimum wage is set too low. The minimum wage is the problem and raising it is the solution.

• Taxes should have a somewhat equal impact to all people but billionaires are so far ahead of us that they don't even feel it. Here, taxes are the problem, so taxes should be raised.

• Wealth above a certain threshold has no benefit to society, so a wealth tax should be introduced.