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?