This is Ridiculous...

[Master Raiden]

In my opinion this is just an awful and extremely unhealthy mindset to have. Wealth is a measure of how much money you have. Nothing more. ... the one thing we can say about wealthy people is that they are good at making money.

Good at making money = good at making other people give money to them.
So wouldn't you say that they are good at providing valuable things that people are happy to pay for?

On an individual level, a CEO of a large company does only a tiny percentage of the work of the company as a whole. That's not to say they don't work hard - they obviously usually do - but if we want to be fair, we should evenly distribute our "benefit-to-society points" among everyone involved.

No, I don't think it should be evenly distributed. The reason why the employees are able to work and provide value at all is because someone came up with an idea, then did the hard yards and created the business. In other words, the business owner created the opportunity for them and their employees to provide for society, and so they should get more for that. Had the business owner not done that, no one would be providing anything for anyone.

Claim. Great things come from hard work and perseverance.
Counterexample. Many PhD students are pushed almost to death (or even to death, given that suicide rates are so high for this group) for half the minimum wage.
...
A lot of academics work hard their entire life - really hard. Most aren't successful, despite their best efforts. None are rich.

That's because getting a PhD and working as an employee is not how huge wealth is built. So if your goal is to become very rich, getting a PhD isn't really the best way to go about accomplishing it. "Great things" would therefore refer to something else for those people, such as achieving a breakthrough in their field, or having a paper become internationally recognized.

Hard work does not correspond in any way to greater wealth, or even to greater success.

Not sure I agree with this. While hard work alone might not always be enough for success, I'm pretty sure putting in less time and less effort reduces your chances of succeeding. At least that's what I've experienced in my life.

In general, you also need to remember that many people, especially those who are financially challenged, are also educationally disadvantaged. Not everyone is born into situations that can endow them with the means to succeed or better themselves: essentially, they're doomed from the start. This doesn't just happen with those who are financially challenged, either. What if you're born into a particularly oppressive or abusive family? What if you're born with or develop some kind of mental or physical impairment? This kind of thing is another reason why success is mostly dependent on sheer luck.

This reminds me of this video. I suppose luck is quite important if you're after huge success such as becoming a multi-millionaire, but I still think hard work alone is enough for smaller goals such as increasing your annual income from something average to above $100,000. Something like that will, for a lot of people, change their lives enough so that they won't need to accuse the system of being "unfair" and rich people of being "greedy".

The second is that your position seems to be an inversion of the widely-held, subconscious belief that "poor people are good, rich people are evil". You can disagree with this without putting down people who aren't rich.

This is what I tried to make clear at the end of my post. I didn't mean to put down anyone, however it annoys me that many people choose to point the finger at anyone/anything besides themselves when most of them are capable of doing more. The comments section of the Wealth Distribution video is a good example, and my post was aimed more towards people like that.

I appreciate your response. It certainly gives me more to think about.