It is a fascinating take. One way to measure agency is whether Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have the power to destroy their creations. With exception of Bezos ( and only because he no longer has full control of his company ), the rest could easily topple their creations suggesting that system values you refer to are wide enough to allow for actions greater than 'zero agency'.

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blackoil 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They may destroy their creations but that would be a minor blip in overall system that will keep moving. Destruction of Facebook, Amazon, SpaceX won't destroy social media, eCommerce or reusable rockets. Previously destruction of giants like IBM/Apple(1st round)/Cray/Sun had no impact on PC, GUI, Supercomputers, Servers or any other fields they were pioneer in. Even if OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic all disappear immediately the void will be replaced by something else.

	▲	TeMPOraL 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not to mention, organizations don't just blip out of existence. A dying giant leaves behind assets, IP, and people with know-how and experience - all ready to be picked up and stitched back together, to continue doing the same thing under new ownership.

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TeMPOraL 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's actually a quite good high-level measure. However, I'd question your measurement: I doubt that Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel would actually be able to destroy their creations. SpaceX, Tesla, X, Meta, Palantir - they're all large organizations with many stakeholders, and their founders/chairman do not have absolute control over them. The result of any of those individuals attempting to destroy their creations is not guaranteed - on the contrary, I'd expect other stakeholders to quickly intervene to block or pivot any such moves; the organization would survive, and such move would only make the market lose confidence in the one making it.

There's no total ownership in structures as large as this - neither in companies nor in countries. There are other stakeholders, and then the organization has a mind of its own, and they all react to actions of whoever is nominally "running it".

	▲	ndiddy 12 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I don't know about the others, but Zuckerberg can absolutely destroy Meta. He owns a special class of shares that have 10x voting power vs. normal shares, so he personally controls about 60% of the votes. If there was any way of Zuckerberg getting ousted by investors, there's no way they would have let the company lose so much money for so long trying to make VR a thing.
	▲	blackoil 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Even if Tesla is destroyed by Musk, EVs and self-driving cars are here to stay. If not in USA than in rest of the world.
	▲	suddenlybananas 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Musk is clearly doing his best to destroy Tesla.

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goodpoint 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can also measure agency as the power to destroy other things.