You are taking three elements for granted: first, dependence on someone to trickle down a salary upon you; second, that the amount of money given to you basically depending on the quality of the job you do; and, third, that the mass market will stay there for ever, and under the same conditions, for you just to delve your spade and start hoarding gold from it.
You can work sixteen hours a day, be the fundamental piece in an enterprise, and still be in rags. You know that, no matter all the official discourse about hard job and excellence, much of the megabucks are given just like in the old days of ruling aristorcracy: you are rich more for enjoying a position and having the right contacts, than for actually "doing something on your own" which is of real economic value, and there are too many very wealthy managers who got paid millions for literally screwing businesses. So much for management.
As for excellence in performance in other activities, like entertainment and sports (well, in fact, both are the same, but they keep treating competition sports as something special, even in the news, as if it were so different and far above gossip), since when it’s the most talented athlete, say, Kournikova, you get more money for being considered pretty than for being a good player. Than even Federer or Nadal get millions of dollars for posing, while only thousands for “working hard” on the play that, supposedly, is the base of their fortune. Of course it is: just like in the case of the Kardashians, it’s not the talent, it’s the image and attention what gives money, and only the prudish or the clueless stupid believe it’s “talent” and “hard work” what is rewarded. The “something on your own” that you must do is simply to charm people, whether with your make-up or with your political promises.
Finally, we get to what has made Gates, Bezos or Buffet: the XXth century. Yes, the Unicorns like Amazon-Bezos are not the future, they are the culmination of that "mass market" you referred to, which is the essence of the XXth century. The golden globalization under the rule of the British in 1917, with which the middle class could have the world delivered to their feet, is different from today's globalization, in which Amazon and Google deliver, in the substitution of the ultimate dependence of the British government and its interests with the ultimate dependence and interests of capital fiefdoms, that is, the interests of certain big companies.
But that globality depends of the maintenance of the political climate that allows it: from 1917 to 1947 the basis of a new system that lasted over four decades was put in place, and only in the last twenty-something years, after the final implosion of the communist nonsense, we reverted to that world in which all the masses became a free market to exploit. But would you bet the next decades will continue the same dynamics: will all the terrorist threats, the instability in parts of the world that, decades ago, has been maintained stable for business development thanks to ruthless dictators and, most important, the increasing irrelevance of industrial production and massive consumer spending in the ultimate creation of wealth, along with the increasing loss of power of big global trademarks in favour of more local-based, and individual-oriented products, maintain the world in which Coca-Cola became a stalwart investment in Buffett's portfolio?
