> His wealth isn’t made up of financial resources and opportunities that other people could have used
This is literally how profit works. You make sure your costs (salaries you pay your workers) are less than the value they produce. In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.
That’s a hyper-localized view. The teams of people who tamed farming, semiconductors and medicine have added many multiples more value than they kept to society.
Imagine that a novel creation is worth 100 units of value to society. It’s entirely possible for society to take 50 units, the workers to share 25 units, and the CEO to keep 25 units and for literally everyone to be better off than if that creation was never made.
The view above compares against an alternative split of 60/35/5 while ignoring the case where the split is 0/0/0.
Even in a 90/9/1 split, why are the workers depriving society of such a large share by hoarding 9% for themselves?
> In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.
Those workers needed to be organized in such a manner that the value they produce is actually worthwhile and their productive output sustainable over a long period of time.
Think about the example of a production line worker in a Tesla factory -- is that individual worker being paid less than the overall value they produce for the company? Hopefully, or else Tesla will soon be going out of business (simplified obviously, but I think you'll see my point). Now consider if Tesla failed to profit off of their workers, and the factory did go out of business. Does that line worker now have more financial resources and opportunities than they would have had, which you claim were being in a sense taken from them by Musk?
Of course not! Instead, they're just out of a job entirely, because their productive output on that production line is worthless if the rest of the line isn't working (and the rest of the company isn't functioning). And chances are, that line worker doesn't have the vision, drive, knowledge, skills, etc. of Musk to get the Tesla factory up to being something economically sustainable and productive all on his own. That's not a knock on the production line worker, it's just a simple fact that such a feat is insanely difficult, and very few people have the characteristics, judgement, and luck to build anything of the sort.
So in the case of Tesla profiting off the worker, the worker gets some financial resources and opportunities, whereas in the case that Tesla fails to profit off the worker, the worker gets zero financial resources and opportunities (plus the world gets zero Teslas, battery tech improvements, etc). In the ideal, free enterprise truly is a positive sum endeavor.
This is literally how profit works. You make sure your costs (salaries you pay your workers) are less than the value they produce. In other words, you keep some of the financial resources and opportunities that others could have had.