Honestly you can just remove the ambiguity and put the number right at 1 billion dollars of net worth. Up to that point is obscenely wealthy, but a billion is the line that guarantees the majority of your wealth came directly from the exploitation of the masses.
You can’t ethically make a billion dollars as an individual when the working class sees 1/10,000th of that in a year as doing fairly well in most areas.
Patents and the fact that these chips are massively complex designs. We are talking architecture on the complexity level of the empire state building, most of which is a blend of proprietary designs developed over decades.
Nobody is saying you can’t do it in your garage, in fact it’s easier than ever to start. Let me know how it goes, look into some of the recent tapeout challenges to get an idea of what you are proposing people just make in a garage.
Having more than one emulator available is good for people trying to get into development. It is still common to guide newer developers toward writing their own emulator for a very well understood system to gain an understanding of some of the more high-level concepts and abstraction. Having multiple different codebases gives you ideas on how to implement features in new ways.
Of course, the cynic in me says it doesn’t matter if the products aren’t competing in feature sets, the more robust system will be used and developed, but I don’t think that’s the point of the exercise.
Again, the issue is the scar tissue. Even if it didn’t develop into a cancer it will give you nasty COPD, gas exchange doesn’t happen with scarred lung tissue. Look at silicosis, potters lung, popcorn lung, and the plethora of other occupational diseases that are caused by particulate matter damaging lung tissue for examples of what asbestos would do without the cancer