This is a lengthy article so it's hard to find a single quote that encapsulates it, but the general theme is that in spite of the good Gates has done through his philanthropy, there are many critics on the left who argue that he has not paid his fair share, such as Elizabeth Warren and journalist Anand Giridharadas.
I think some part of the left-wing intuition regarding individuals like Gates could be glossed as: (1) your net worth, for all means and purposes, is an actual measure of what society assesses your value as a human being to be; (2) there is no way Gates or anyone is actually 10^5 times as valuable as the median adult.
It may be worthwhile to think about whether this intuition is correct, or what exactly makes it wrong. It is manifestly true that Gates did something of great value to society (orchestrated the design of the operating system which carried the personal computing revolution), so why may it feel like this doesn't justify assessing him to be worth 10^5 randos? I think the answer there is something like replaceability: if Gates hadn't built Windows, there probably would have been someone else who came along and built something similar to it (maybe a little bit later). If $110 billion is an accurate assessment of the value Windows brought to society, then it may be accurate to say that $110 billion is the total value to us of the set of all people who could have introduced Windows. That all of this value was awarded to Gates (as opposed to evenly split between him, the chief architects of OS/2 and BeOS and whatever else was or could have been in the running) is a glitch, and the actual point where "net worth" and the correct metric of value to society diverge.
Is there anything we could do to the market to transfer money from the accidental first mover to the putative legion of replacements who failed to take their place by what seems like happenstance?
(edit: I think the pure capitalist answer might go something like: If it's true that being the first mover allows you to capture all value and is essentially random, then the set of people who could make something like Windows should have formed a contract in advance to split the wealth whichever one of them winds up succeeding. The circumstance that they didn't essentially amounts to everyone in the class apart from Gates having gambled away their share of the group's total value, and Gates having won.
So for comparison, how would we feel if the richest person in the US were a lottery winner (with no other meaningful sources of income)?
Also, are VCs (1000 trash startups that burn money to build juicers and offer free beer pong, one that will get bought by Google) an instance of this sort of risk-spreading contract?)