It's this idea of power corrupts.

It's part of the fundamental attribution error. A cognitive bias.

The belief that if I succeed, Or have "success" (however you define that), it's because I deserve it. I worked hard. I'm better than others who haven't achieved what I have. Other people who haven't achieved what I have are just lazy and stupid.

But if I fail, it's someone else's fault.

If others succeed it's because they got lucky. If others fail it's due to a personal trait. (Lazy, stupid, etc).

The farther you get from average, the easier it is to have this bias in the extreme.

Imagine you have no morals or ethics. And so you have no issue exploiting or using tragedies to profit. So you get rich from those actions.

You look around and others who didn't do that and think " they are just stupid. I'm obviously smarter than them because I saw an exploit and took it".

When in reality , other people know how to exploit, we just choose not to because of empathy. Or , in some cases, lack of opportunity to do so. You often need money to make money.

But yeah I think so many of these ultra wealthy people really do believe they are smarter than everyone else because they look for and take advantage of exploits. That's their whole business model.

This doesn't make them smarter. Infact from my perspective it makes them appear to have lower intelligence.

Sure I could have a lot more money if I had no issues walking into my neighbors' house, murdering them and stealing all their money And possessions.

I could do this a few places every night and be pretty wealthy at the end of the week.

That's not being "smart" or creative or anything requiring intelligence. That's actually the simplest way to make money. Just take it from someone else.

Real ingenuity is building sustainable business practices.
None of them are capable of that. Obviously.