If money was distributed in the USA for something that is actually competitive, like athletics, then people of African descent would rule the country, as they seem to dominate this arena, even in venues like golf.

If you look at the wealthiest people in the US, they are people like the Koch brothers, who inherited their wealth, or the Walton heirs, who inherited their wealth, or the Mars children, who inherited their wealth, and so on.

You could also look at others. Bill Gates was born with a million dollar trust fund - his great-grandfather ran National City Bank, his mother was on United Way’s executive committee with the CEO of IBM, his father ran a law firm, he went to Lakeside high school (current annual fee: $33,000) which had teletypes and access to a GE mainframe in the late 1960s. Warren Buffett is also "self-made". His grandfather owned a chain of grocery stores, his father was a congressman, he went to UPenn and Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg's parents are professionals, he went to high school at Phillips Exeter (current tuition $36,000, more if boarding there).

The first group did absolutely nothing. They're not really being "rewarded" as the article says. They can just jet from Aspen to Monte Carlo their whole lives, expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who work and create wealth. You can watch the documentary "Born Rich" which was made by one of these people (it's sometimes on Youtube) and is about these people. The second group - 1%ers who made it into the 0.1%, I suppose transitioned from one class to another, and had a hand in codifying how a large number of people worked. Even doing some of the initial stuff themselves - porting BASIC to yet another platform, selling a CPM ripoff to mom's friend on United Way's board, starting yet another social network (and being sued for stealing it), beating the S&P 500 year after year.

This is all helped by a massive mechanism of basically all of society tilted to let this class of what I consider parasites to expropriate the surplus labor time of those of us who work. It's a social relationship - workers work and create wealth, and heirs expropriate our surplus labor time and the wealth we create during it. And use it as a cudgel against us not just in the world of business, and not just in the governments they created and maintained, and the schools those governments run, or the media they created and maintain and to a large extent monopolize, but also other social organizations as well like churches. Through the corporate owned news I learn Trump, an heir and businessman now running the government, this week signed a document which would allow churches to be more involved in selecting who is and is not in government. All goes into each other - you organize the wretched of the earth at the bottom of society to believe in some superstitious fantasies in order to select certain leaders who will be even more vehemently against their economic interests. One part of society flows into another, but it all flows back to the center, which is what we all wake up and do most days - work and production, and the relationship between the worker and those who are parasites on worker's labors and who have the upper hand at the moment.

Of course, several centuries ago it was the royal families who had the upper hand on the poor and the workers and the merchants, so these things seem to shift around as history marches on.