The Ethics of a Billion

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on luck, leverage, and the limits of extreme wealth

I could have been a maid scrubbing hotel conference rooms after another champagne-soaked boardroom bash. Or the executive who proposed the toast. I could have been a waitress balancing plates at an oft-patronized corner bistro. Or the banker negotiating its impending acquisition.

The reason I am not any of these people begins with a hinge: twenty-five years ago, a woman in China left me outside a building, and another woman in New Jersey picked me up. Adoption was the first axis on which my entire life would spin.

In another iteration—one in which I was never abandoned, or was adopted by a family without established means, or was raised in a different country—the trajectory bends elsewhere. My education, my network, my financial literacy, even the periphery of what I can imagine is possible: all of it flows downstream from that single, unchosen event. Long before I could prove anything about myself, the baseline from which I would compete had already been raised.

I have spent years wrestling with belonging and worth—with the invisible arithmetic of what it means to “deserve” love and opportunity. But recently, a more disquieting question has taken root: if I could have been someone entirely different through no fault or merit of my own, what does that mean for the stories we tell ourselves about wealth?

The media loves the mythology of the self-made billionaire: the visionary who saw what others could not, the genius who outworked the room, the founder who “deserved” every zero. But the critique of modern capitalism posits a darker reality: that billionaires are less the inevitable outcome of pure talent and more the product of systems engineered to funnel gains to the top. Between 2010 and 2018, America’s 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2%, lower than that of any middle-class household. As of 2025, Forbes counts more than 3,000 billionaires globally, worth a combined $16.1 trillion. Meanwhile, research from the National Institute on Retirement Security shows that the average American worker has less than $1,000 saved for retirement.

We would like to believe that this concentration of wealth is the natural result of meritocracy. That if someone builds a company to a billion-dollar valuation, it must reflect extraordinary ability. But in Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney argues that markets reward scarcity, spectacle, leverage, and scalability—proxies utterly indifferent to moral worth or social necessity. An NBA player can make millions of dollars a year, while a sanitation worker earns a fraction of that, yet one could argue that the latter’s labor of keeping cities habitable is at least as essential to societal function as professional sports. Compensation, Carney suggests, tracks what markets happen to reward rather than any intrinsic contribution to collective wellbeing. When we conflate price for value, we risk building a society that knows the cost of everything and the worth of very little.

Success is partly talent. It is partly discipline. But it is also geography, timing, capital access, early education, family structure, regulatory environments, and sheer accident—the imperceptible inheritances that predate effort. If I had grown up in a rural village in China without access to advanced schooling, would I have been any less intelligent? Less capable? Or simply less positioned?

The Compounding Effect of Starting Conditions

At HBS, we are trained to think in terms of leverage and compounding returns. Capital compounds. Networks compound. Brands compound. But so do starting conditions. Many of us are about to step into careers that confer disproportionate leverage relative to the average worker, managing capital that exceeds the lifetime earnings of entire communities and advising companies whose market capitalizations eclipse the GDP of small nations.

If we accept that luck and structure guide outcomes, then extreme wealth cannot be interpreted solely as a referendum on virtue. Billionaires are often framed as proof of individual excellence, yet their fortunes also reveal a market in which gains scale infinitely for some while others remain bounded by hourly wages. At that degree of magnitude, effort becomes beside the point. What demands scrutiny is whether any system should permit the accumulation of more wealth than one person could reasonably spend in several lifetimes.

When accumulation outpaces necessity, wealth abandons the domain of security or comfort and becomes stored power used to influence trade, politics, narratives, and public goods. Defenders of billionaires argue that net worth is illiquid. That founders create jobs, drive innovation, and take risks that others will not. I do not disagree. Innovation, incentives, and growth all matter. But critics counter that such wealth is routinely built on the labor of thousands, on systems that underprice externalities like environmental damage and worker precarity, on regulatory arbitrage that privatizes gains while socializing losses.

And then there is philanthropy, which obscures the story further. When a billionaire donates $5 million, headlines call it generous. However, for someone worth a billion dollars, that donation constitutes 0.5% of their net worth, which is the equivalent of a middle-class donor giving away a few hundred dollars. What appears generous in isolation now looks modest in proportion. More crucially, if we believe that every human life holds equal inherent worth, then we must acknowledge the incongruity of a world in which some hold resources that could eliminate hunger, erase medical debt, or fund universal education but choose not to deploy them to such effect.

Is that choice defensible? Or does the very existence of such concentrated wealth signal a moral failure of distribution?

The Lives We Might Have Lived

I sometimes imagine the life I would have had if I were never adopted. Perhaps I would have grown up in an orphanage, aging out at 18 years old with limited support. Perhaps I would have worked in a factory, assembling products I could never afford, or as domestic help in a city apartment, upholding someone else’s version of success. Perhaps I would have found joy in a small circle of modest intimacies, never encountering the vocabulary of capital or the argot of high finance. If that had been the case, would my life have been any less worthy? Less meaningful? Less impactful?

If worth is intrinsic rather than market-determined, then the answer must be no.

And yet, our economic system assigns radically different monetary values to different roles. We internalize those signals, equating high income with high contribution and treating net worth as a testament to significance. But my own biography disrupts that equation. The difference between the life I live now and the one I might have lived is not evidence of superior character but of contingency. And if we are honest about contingency—about how thin the line is between the maid and the executive, the waitress and the dealmaker—then extreme inequality becomes harder to justify as simply the spoils of merit.

What We Owe Each Other

When I was a child, I believed that to be loved, I had to resemble the family that chose me. It took years to understand that real love is unconditional and incommensurate with performance. Maybe human dignity should be treated the same way. Maybe those who hold vastly more than they could ever need should consider what abundance says about how much they believe everyone else’s life is worth.

There is no alternate timeline in which I am the same person, but there are many timelines in which I never had the chance. And if that is true for me, then it is true for countless others—equally capable, equally intelligent, equally human—whose hinges swung differently. Once you see how much of your own life rests on a hinge you did not install, calling extreme wealth purely “deserved” becomes an act of willful blindness. What we are really refusing to see is whether we can actually forge a society that honors the equal worth of all lives while countenancing such profound asymmetry in the resources allocated to sustain them.

Because a culture that preaches equal worth and practices unworthy inequality has not yet decided what it actually believes. And, in the end, what we tolerate is what we have chosen.

Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.