Well, this was discovered long time ago, by Vilfredo Pareto, this is exemplification of his 90/10 rule. Having said that... We should be more honest here when we talk about wealth.

If one asks "how much, say, Elon Musk, is worth" we see some crazy numbers with kirjillions of zeros. But those are not "his" money, this is how much his companies are estimated to have. Yes, he has large personal fortune, but it is nowhere near those huge billions of billions amounts.

Second, staying with Elon example, his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people, so there is huge army of people who have food in the fridge because of Elon Musk (I've seen some estimates around ~1 million people overall). Again, they are nowhere near to be as wealthy as Elon, but still, they have a decent live thanks to his companies.

It’s not about “cash at hand”, it’s about who owns “stuff”. In days past people knew that the aristocracy owned them, their families, the land they work, and the output of their work by a God given right flowing from the anointed King. It was easy to see too - those people living in palaces up the hill owned everything, you owned nothing.

It’s more hidden now. We all have rights and freedoms and whatnot. But there are still people who “own stuff”, and people who don’t. With shades of gray in between those two extremes. It’s good to be cognizant of the system you inhabit relative to what has existed throughout history so you can make good decisions and position yourself accordingly.

Don’t do the First Name Last Name thing and then get the ratio wrong.

I used to buy this sort of arguments, but then saw him fork $45B to buy Twitter, on demand, so...

> his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people

Yes, his companies, not him. He's not doing much, except distracting part of his workforce to work on vanity projects such as flying cars or mile-long vaccuum tubes, or spending some of his vast wealth to buy politicians that will further the cause of wealth inequality. Get rid of him, and the system works much better for everyone. Him and others like him.

> this is how much his companies are estimated to have

Not even ‘to have’, just ‘to be worth, if all of their shares could be sold at the price of the recent ones’. It’s a number only loosely (albeit obviously positively) correlated with actual spending power.

Elons ownership of those companies is not what puts food in people's fridges, nor is that amount of power concentration a natural, good or even defensible thing.

The whole point is that he shouldn't be able to exert autocratic control over large swathes of the economy and control that many people's lives.

this is such a tired argument, we'd probably be better off splitting musk into a million millionaires than having it all bottlenecked into one person

[dead]

But how can we tease people and instill them hate if we're being reasonable with arguments?