> The goal is personal wealth

The goal is power. Having 30 million of personal wealth is enough to retire in luxury and travel the world. They could all have this much right now. That's not what these types of people want.

Having 30 billion gives you the power to order legions of people around, buy and sell politicians, flood ad markets during elections, all with your couch cushion money. That's what motivates these types.

That reminds me of a different thesis on power as it relates to LLMs [0], and why rich investors might may be extra-interested in deploying them, as distinct from other kinds of AI:

> The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.

> In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.

> This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/

You're right, although I think the power is a means to end. The actual end is trying to fill some kind of bottomless psychological hole.