What is wealth?

There it is again.  In Barnhardt's latest, she is being interviewed when she mentions some entity is trying to amass all the wealth unto themselves.  I'm thinking:  money and wealth are being confused.  Or, am I confused?  What is wealth?

To me, wealth is the skills and the ability to produce value---not the money itself, nor the valuables.  But that is not the definition provided by the web

A measure of the value of all of the assets of worth owned by a person, community, company or country. Wealth is the found by taking the total market value of all...-Investopedia

Thus, although Saudi Arabia is sitting on a vast pile of oil, the oil being the valuable commodity, it is not wealthy itself because the people there really didn't produce it.  It was produced for them by those who had the skills to discover and bring it to market.  Perhaps over all these years, the Saudis have developed some skills.  But that was not the original case.  They just happened to inherit the wealth by virtue of being in the right spot at the right time.  They are a country full of Ted Kennedys.

You may have read in your history books about the so-called "robber-barons".  Well, those guys created the "wealth" we now enjoy.  We are like the Saudis in that we have just inherited the wealth that others created.  In our case, it was the "robber-barons".  But robber-barons found the oil in Saudi as well.  Without the robber-barons, we'd all be poor share-croppers.  Of course, that's not what we're taught in these history books.  We are taught to hate the robber-barons, even though the robber-barons are feeding us.

I think our civilization has hit a dead end because those who have are preventing those who have-not from becoming wealthy.  That is to say, those who have wealth today are protecting their wealth and assets that would not have existed if they weren't allowed to create it.   The "wealthy" are preventing wealth-creation.

Why would they do this?  In order to preserve their position.  If a new energy source is found, it would destroy oil wealth.  But it wouldn't destroy oil wealth.  The real wealth is what found value in the oil and delivered it to the market--- not the oil itself.  There's a confusion there and I don't know if 1 person in a hundred knows the difference.