Lee you are perpetuating a lie about Barack Obama's "you didn't build that..."
Obama was listing examples of things built with public money such as roads and bridges. Then remarking that an individual did not build that. Society did. Society has built a lot of things we enjoy and which are crucial in allow each individual to prosper. No man is an island, but libertarians like to pretend they are.
To counter your example of millions of people who did not become great. Likewise there are millions who were hard working and talented and achieved nothing. Either because of bad luck. Bad timing or living in a shitty society without good schools, infrastructure, laws and regulations.
Send Elon Musk to the Sahara desert and see how many rocket companies he is able to start. Musk was able to piggy back on talent that was floating around in the US thanks to public investment in a space industry. Without NASA, the knowledge Musk used to build this rockets would not exist. The large pool of talented engineers whe could draw from would not have existed.
People of talent and drive will always pop up. But if society does not have the structure setup to let them prosper then they will get nowhere.
Individuals and society work in symbiosis. By providing good health care, education, safe neighborhoods, law and order, good regulations etc, society creates the conditions for individuals to take an idea and make something big out of it.
Just following profit leads you down a dangerous path. Look at IBM which profitted from and aided Nazi Germany in the Holocoust. That is the Ayan Rand world. This is where selfishness takes you. Profit over people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
It is easy to shoot back that Nazi Germany was a political creation.... indeed but the German Nazi party was basically broke and destroyed at one point. It was rescued by a cluster of rich German industrialists. Selfish rich people, who no doubt would have loved Ayan Rand, who only looked after their own interestes and did not think about the wider implication of enabling a Nazi party.
