Last December, Jeff Bezos offered an interesting reframing of wealth: believe of it not as the money one accumulates, but as the value one creates for others. It is an elegant considered. It builds wealth a shared asset, something virtuous and inclusive, with the added advantage of skipping over the somewhat inconvenient fact of enormous wealth for the few. If wealth is simply a byproduct of creating life better for millions, then the billionaire becomes a kind of accidental altruist.

There is something about this formulation that catches attention. To believe of wealth generated rather than only wealth accumulated does shift the meaning we usually attach to it. To conceptualise businesses as agents of good, distributing social benefits in the name of enterprise, warms the hearts of those engaged in it.

But for all its surface appeal, the idea does not really stand up to scrutiny. For one, this is hardly the dominant mental model of wealth in the West. Western capitalism still venerates the individual accumulator: the heroic founder, brilliant investor, solitary architect of personal fortune. Bezos is not describing how the West believes. He is offering Silicon Valley’s preferred self-portrait, a moral alibi for sudden and overwhelming wealth.

The deeper issue, however, is conceptual. Is wealth really outward-facing as Bezos argues it should be? If that were true, professions that distribute the greatest benefit to others – teachers, caregivers, farmers, nurses – would not sit at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Wealth would naturally flow to those whose contribution is greatest, not to those whose position is most advantageous. Using this logic, Karl Marx should have been a billionaire.

But modern markets do not reward contribution. They reward leverage, capital, proximity to money and timing. They reward being in the right place, with the right insulation, at the right moment. To turn outcomes of this system into a moral metric is to read the scoreboard as if it were the rulebook.

Hedge funds offer the clearest demonstration of this conceptual problem. Hedge fund managers can become extraordinarily wealthy. Some of the richest people on Earth belong to this tribe. And, yet, what value do they create for others, beyond their own investors? They do not build industries, create products, generate employment at scale or solve collective challenges. They redistribute, rather than create. Their gains come from the losses, or limitations of others in the marketplace.