There are so few people who do publishable TCS research as college sophomores that it's very unlikely that the wealthiest person in the world is one of them by chance.
Of course not by chance: there is a common cause -- high IQ. This tells you that high IQ is very useful and can be used both for CS and for business success. However this tells you nothing about the relationship between publishing CS papers and becoming a billionaire.
Bill Gates also famously dropped out of college. Does that warrant a Bayesian update, too? (Peter Thiel probably thinks so :-D)
I'm not making an argument,
You mean you are not offering a proof. But you are still asserting things. For example, this
...as a practical matter, intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong technical ability in a quantitative subject tend to be at a major disadvantage relative to those who have.
looks very much like a point you're trying to make.
You mean you are not offering a proof. But you are still asserting things.
What I wrote is vague. (What do I mean by "tend" and major" and "disadvantage"?) It's very hard to convey quantitative effect sizes in words. I'm pointing at a phenomenon – the particulars of how I'm pointing to it are not of the essence. Bruce Lee said:
It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.
If you doubt that there's anything to what I'm saying then we can talk about that.
Something that I've come to realize is that as a practical matter, intellectually gifted people who haven't developed very strong ability in a quantitative subject tend to be at a major disadvantage relative to those who have. The quantitative subjects that I have in mind as "quantitative subjects" are primarily math, physics, theoretical computer science and statistics, though others such as electrical engineering may qualify. [1]
This point is usually masked over by the fact that people who don't have very strong technical ability are often reasonable functional by the standards of mainstream society, and don't realize how far they're falling short of their genetic potential. They tend to have jobs that don't fully use their strengths, and experience cognitive dissonance around being aware on some level of far they are from utilizing their core competencies.
Consider the following:
I can't give a brief justification for this, but I have good reason to believe that the ~10000x+ differential in net worth comes in large part from the people having had unusually good opportunities to conducive to becoming very technically proficient, that resulted in them developing transferable reasoning abilities and having had an intellectually elite peer group to learn from.
I know a fair number of brilliant people who didn't have such advantages. The situation actually seems to me like one in which amongst intellectually gifted people, there's an "upperclass" of people who had opportunities to develop very strong technical ability and an "underclass" of people who who could have developed them under more favorable environmental circumstances, but haven't. Many intellectually gifted people who didn't have the chance to develop the abilities mistakenly believe that they lack the innate ability to do so. And people who did have the opportunities to develop them often look down on those who didn't, unaware of how much of their own relative success is due to having had environmental advantages earlier in their lives.
[1] James Miller points out that graduates of elite law schools may have analogous advantages – that's a population that I haven't had exposure to.