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.
Tldr: basically there are owners and workers. (this is of course leaving out all of the people who can't or don't work or work outside of wage labor but that is not what we are focusing on right now). In an ideal world there would not be people who "profit" off of the labor of others.
That is not to say people cannot work together make each other's lives better and enrich each other, but it wouldn't be in a owner/worker relationship, it would be in a co-worker/community relationship. If your friends own a business and make the lion's share of the profit while employees who enable them to do their work only get a small share of the value created by their labor, they may be trying to help but they are still exploiting their employees for profit. A truly equitable company would need to have all workers treated equitably and no profit be generated for shareholders. This is 100% possible but it's definitely not the standard model people are taught.
I believe what people mean when they say there is no such thing as a good billionaire is, it is impossible to create that much personal wealth without exploiting others and, furthermore, amassing that large an amount of extracted wealth is inherently harmful to the exploited workers on such a level as to be undeniably evil. You cannot gain that much wealth without explicitly and intentionally stealing from those who created it. Even people who work hard, who could be argued are the only reason that wealth is generated, (thinking of Taylor Swift here) if they were truly good people they would see the profits that are being made by the Enterprise that they spearhead and know that it would be impossible without the people who work with them and support them to create that wealth and that it should be distributed as equally as possible between all involved. If they are keeping such a large portion that they become a billionaire, they are inherently evil, regardless of if that wealth could have been created without them.
I suppose there could be some argument for a theoretical company that was so profitable that all employees involved in creating the value reached billionaire status, but I have a hard time imagining any business that could create that amount of wealth without their business being exploitative in some way, even if all parties involved in that business directly are paid equally. An example of this might be a investment brokerage. People who invest in the stock market and get rich doing so are not employers directly but they are indirectly, through the stock market, siphoning the value of exploited workers from corporate profits.
This topic is of course a ethical and idealistic one. Expecting everyday people who have invested in the stock market through their 401k to not use the wealth that they receive from those investments to live comfortable lives In their retirement would be ridiculous in our current system. In an ideal world that wouldn't be necessary, people would be guaranteed food, housing, and healthcare for the entirety of their old age and retirement without requiring the explicit exploitation of wage labor, but there must be a division in our consciousness between what an ideal person in an ideal world would do and what an an evil person in our current world does and that it is the gray in between those two extremes that makes up the vast majority of the current population.
One last point to consider is that developing class consciousness is something that needs to be taught and learned and understood and that the current societal expectations and norms that we have instilled in us from a very young age need to be broken down internally before people are able to recognize how much harm the current system does. I guarantee that the people who profit the most off of their employees believe wholeheartedly that they are doing good by creating jobs for people who otherwise would have had nothing without the company that has been provided by their ownership. Getting people who benefit the most from our current system to see how harmful their "good fortune" is to others will be a daunting and thankless task and will take decades.