Facebook was worth $35/share at $100 billion in 2013. Now make that $170/share, far exceeding the S&P 500 in that period. Same for Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which were already very big but became even bigger.
And yet trivial compared to what MS, Oracle, AOL, Yahoo and Amazon generated in the 90s (or 80s as well in the case of MS). The best part of Facebook's growth went to founders and accredited investors such as Peter Thiel, not the public markets the wider public could invest in.
A five-bagger is nothing when you're cherry-picking winners.
So it's unlikely that any one who invested in Facebook post-IPO will ever see 1000x returns ($100T market cap?)...or even 100x ($10T market cap) returns.
It still might be a buy...but is it life-changing returns?
Similarly, people are free to jump into GOOG or FB or AMZN, and if they want to accept the risk of paying sky high prices for the equity, then they might be rewarded with "life changing" returns.
There's never a free lunch. And most people don't have enough set aside where they can gamble it on large returns. If they did, they would have access to VC, PE, or HF.
If capital markets existed then as they do today, both of those companies probably would have waited until hitting $10B-$100B market caps before going public (although, McD being a non-tech company might be more difficult for them to raise money through VCs), totally squeezing average joe out.
100-1000x returns are life-changing even with as little as $500-$1000 invested. Plenty of retail investors with sub-million net worth have more than a few thousand dollars in disposable income.
There's college educated, six figure a year producers out there who don't qualify for "accredited investor" status because they didn't happen to be born into the lucky sperm club with a paid-for free ride to an ivy league school and a trust fund to boot. The regulations, as they are, are excessive and total bull shit.