It's strange to me that you conclude that accumulating six zeros indicates luck, but accumulating nine zeros indicates skill. Why doesn't it indicate just more extraordinary luck?
Because great wealth is accumulated through a series of bets. Moderate wealth (6 zeros) could be single or few transactions.
For instance, you could have bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin in 2010 much like people bet $1,000 on a sports game. You got lucky and became a millionaire.
To become a billionaire I guess you could have bought $100k on Bitcoin as a gamble but that requires much higher conviction and discipline. If you're the type of guy to gamble $100k on random crap you're likely not going to be rich for long.
But realistically people become billionaires by building businesses. And this requires a series of decisions. Picking the field, raising money, picking co-founders, hiring, product development, sales, etc.
In other words its like flipping a coin to determine if there is bias. One flip doesn't tell you anything. Multiple flips tells you more. And the more flips, the more confident you are on bias. Getting to a billion usually requires a huge number of decisions so that the outcome tells you a lot more about bias (in this case real skill or insight of the individual)
It seems like the key to your argument is having more money to gamble with, like would come from family money. Like if your father owned an emerald mine, or your parents gave you a quarter million to start a business, or you started a hedge fund with a million dollars raised from “family and friends.”
Alternatively, there are a lot of people out there. Flip enough coins and some will come up heads 10 times in a row. You don't need some special talent, you need to start with money and connections and hit the right number of coinflips.
That argument makes sense if your question is what are the odds a specific person becomes a billionaire through sheer luck, but the real question is would a population of billions of people worldwide produce billionaires even if the process of becoming a billionaire involved randomly succeeding a number of times in a row.
The answer is yes for surprisingly unlikely outcomes for any particular individual. Using your coin flipping example, assume everyone in the US was flipping a coin a number of times in a row and the billionaire winners were those who got all heads. It would take ~20 coin flips per person to produce the actual number of American billionaires. Clearly the chance of any specific individual flipping a coin 20 times and getting heads all 20 times is ridiculously small, but there are a lot of people in the US and math is math. Should we ask what special qualities those all heads people possess? Allow them outsized influence in how our country runs and how we live our lives?
