She never once talks about how to address these people. Perhaps she was hoping it would be possible to enlighten people enough to make them look past such scammers and dilettantes, but if she was then I'd have to disagree severely with her position.
By ignoring "lucky money", she creates a logical loop in which money becomes a marker for productivity. The more money you have, obviously the more productive you are, because there are no productive poor.
It is also the problem of equating money with wealth. Money is just a good faith token between parties to expand the barter system to people who would otherwise have no basis to barter. For example, I am a software developer. I need a plumber. The plumber does not need software developed. Now, I can initiate a whole chain of exchanges that winds up with me having something the plumber wants, but that is inconvenient for day to day living. To short circuit all of that I give him a number of markers equal to the value we place on his time.
The markers aren't the point. That's the problem we have. We are emphasizing these markers and ignoring actual production. In a true idealized society based upon actual utility and such as Rand would have it, it would not be the scientists, artists, and executives at the top of the heap, but the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other doers and makers as they possess the skills of making.
Atlas shrugged is just CEO porn.
Also, I don't understand how people so readily apply vast utilities to carpenters and plumbers, but not business process managers and leaders who make a business vastly more efficient and productive. Is it because value creation that can't immediately be felt (it's not a fixed leak in a faucet) is beyond the capacity of most to imagine? It completely ignores the amount of operational leverage that such improvements have in large enterprises.
Not to say there aren't plenty of people who make plenty of money while providing questionable value creation.
I attribute vast utility to carpenters and plumbers, because without them you don't have a house. Whereas without business leaders, we still have houses. At the end of the day, you need people to do more than you need people to manage.
That's what I was trying to say. Rand's books are very limited in scope, but if you treat them as such then they're not harmful books to read and enjoy. However, she does very specifically mention looters and inheritants as being the evil sort of rich, that which doesn't create but merely uses. So my initial point still stands: She admits that there's a problem there, even if she never really explains what she'd plan to do about it.
What you do here is assign zero value to productivity changes. If a change in productivity has zero value, then the value of the original productivity has zero value as well.
The only way to claim that a person who makes carpenters more efficient is worthless is to claim that carpenters are also worthless.
But I'm also not arguing what you want me to argue either. I'm not saying that "leveraging synergies" is worthless, just that it is worth less. If we are to ascribe value to production and utility, those who can do are the top of the heap.