I think people have this naive idea that if, say, the Walton family did have their tens of billions, Wal-mart would have spent that profit on something other than making more Wal-marts (such as paying their employees more). That seems unlikely, especially since publicly traded companies are for-profit, and thus obligated to their shareholders to maximize return on investment. One of the arguments is "we all (the employees) contributed to generating that wealth". That is true, but they entered a contract with the company stipulating how much of it they were entitled to get, which is not billions of dollars.
Unfortunately we are in a situation as a society where a lot of the productive physical labor has been replaced by machines, while most of the productive mental labor remains beyond the average person (as has been the case for millennia). That's why there is an L-curve - only a few people have these skills that are in high demand (mostly financing stuff and making software), and they are not willing to take pay cuts to help out others who don't. Whether they should or not is up for ethical debate.
Another argument is that the wealthy somehow benefit more from everyone else from the stability a functioning government & society provides, and thus should pay a disproportionate amount. That already occurs to some extent with the income tax, and definitely occurs with social security & medicare taxes. I don't think billionaires benefit a million times more than others, and probably benefit less to some extent since they don't use a lot of government services. Also, if the police suddenly disappeared, they would probably be able to bank-roll private armies like feudal lords did for most of human history.