Ask him why star athletes who are the GOAT in their sport like Serena Williams aren't even billionaires. If the claptrap about meritocracy is actually real, then the richest people in the world should have far more GOAT athletes. They are visionaries of their respective sport on top of being physical freaks of nature with unhuman levels of discipline, the creme of the crop of humanity in terms of physicality, the 0.000000001% of humanity. This Forbes articles list a whopping number of 4 athletes who earned more than a billion dollars, and it's total lifetime earnings, not net worth. Lebron James puts far more effort to earn his money by playing a single professional NBA game than someone like Musk does for an entire year.

And you could legitimately credit Lebron or any other GOAT athlete's sports success mostly to themselves and a modestly sized coaching staff (the source of their wealth, of course, has more to do with endorsements and investments like any other capitalist) while Musk or Gates or the Zuck obviously has an army of wage slaves behind them doing all the real work. The James, the Messis, the Williams, and so on have to spend their off-season practicing and actually perform on stage while people like Steve Jobs can simply steal from people who were actually talented like the Woz. The vast majority of athletes can't even steal credit like that since the tape doesn't lie. At best, they might play in a way that makes their personal metrics look good but is bad for the team or they might be very good at self-promotion or they might snub early influences, but they, unlike the Musks of the world, still have to put in the effort. And this is not even getting to the injuries that athletes routinely suffer.

The only arena where capitalist meritocracy has even a sliver of truth is sports, and I suspect the reason why people don't like to focus on it is because most people understand that athletes like Lebron are freaks of nature on top of earning less than "normal" people like Musk. But if the only place where meritocracy sorta kinda is true involves the people at the top being there due to the luck of being born with a particularly configured body and being at the right place at the right time, then what does that say about the rest of capitalist society?