For instance I know some lawyers and insurance CEOs who built the company themselves and run an ethical business model but because of innovation have made a ton of money. One lawyer has made a name for himself only defending those who have been hurt my big corporations and their life is ruined. The other made an insurance model that helps these hurt people invest their court winnings into annuities to guarantee they’re financially taken care of for life. These are not billionaires but both companies have won for their clients/work with hundreds of millions if not billions.
How can one clearly define someone like Musk or Bezos as bourgeois whereas these hard working individuals who came from nothing and build a huge business actually from nothing and help people?
Hoping for a non-black and white answer. My local MLM group declares everyone evil who isn’t their exact ideology. It doesn’t make sense to apply this thinking when someone whose become rich through helping people isn’t the same as someone whose has taken advantage of people for generations.
Edit: getting downvoted to hell when I am asking a question sure isn't welcoming.
You don't, the accumulation of wealth is a zero-sum game. There's no way to "win" that doesn't involve others losing.
Plus, nobody gets rich by honest labor. Your ethical friends are almost as far from actual riches as the rest of us. Even I "Work with hundreds of millions if not billions" and my paycheck barely covers the bills every month.
What you're asking for is a demarcation between the bourgeois and the petite-bourgeois, but the difference is only one of scale. Small business owners enrich themselves with the profits their employees produce, while Bezos and Musk have a thousand times more employees to exploit.
The two people I describe do most of the work. The lawyer is the one who defends all of the cases and the insurance one creates all the formulas. They’re not extracting anything. Both are helping the poor, the only loser is the corpos.
Hence why your friends aren't "rich". They might be a lot better off than the average person who works for a living, but it sounds like they don't exploit enough people to quit working and live off other people's labor in perpetuity.
Got it!