Comment by godelski

I struggle with this too. I struggle less when I remind myself of how much the tech sector has grown in the past 20 years. Not even just in power and control over critical infrastructure, but in wealth.

                              Market Cap by Year
   Year       0                  1                2                3                  4
   2025   Nvidia (4.6T)    Apple (3.9T)      Google (3.8T)    Microsoft (3.5T)    Amazon (2.6T)
   2020   Apple (2.3T)     Microsoft (1.7T)  Amazon (1.6T)    Google (1.2T)       Meta (777M)
   2015   Apple (598M)     Google (534M)     Microsoft (440M) Berkshire (324M)    Exxon (325M)
   2010   Exxon (369M)     PetroChina (303M) Apple (296M)     BHP (244M)          Microsoft (239M) 

             Some Billionaires...
   Year       Musk    Page    Bezos   Ellison  Zuck  Buffett
   Current    714B    257B    251B    244B     227B   148B
   2024       195B    114B    194B    141B     177B   133B 
   2023       180B     79B    114B    107B      64B   106B
   2022       219B    111B    171B    106B      67B   118B
   2021       151B     92B    177B     93B      97B    96B
   2020        25B     51B    113B     59B      55B    68B
   2016        11B     35B     45B     44B      45B    61B
   - There are currently 19 people worth more than $100bn!
     - 4 of them are not American (Arnault, Ortega, Ambani, Helu)
     - 27 of the top 50 richest are non-Americans
     - 57 of the top 100 are non-Americans
   - Bill Gates was first worth $100bn in 1999, becoming the first centibillionaire

It is hard to feel bad when we've seen such an explosion of wealth, especially over the last 5 years. I mean we had a fucking pandemic and all the big players doubled (or nearly) their market caps. We constantly hear about how these companies are having "money issues" but then keep announcing record profits and record bonuses to CEOs.

  > A lot of the abundance in software and technology we've seen in the past decade is possible only through this mechanism.

So I don't agree that it is *ONLY* through this mechanism. Or that if it is that it needs to be done to this degree. It is hard for me personally to take pity when we're on the verge of having the first trillionaire. Honestly, I don't care about a wealth cap and I don't think there should be. It isn't a zero-sum game. But I do care about the wealth floor. It is hard to think of that floor when just the top 5 richest made $887B last year and $1.47T in the last 5 (2024 was a "good" year. Musk is 519B/689B so 368B/781B excluding) and average people are feeling the pressure.

If times were good for the rest of us I honestly couldn't care less if Musk became a trillionaire. Good for him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But while wages are stagnant, while the job market is very competitive, we have major layoffs, while inflation is hitting average people hard, and while they keep pretending they can replace us all with AI; then hell fucking yeah I do care.

It ends up being a question about what is more right, than what is right. I'd feel more conflicted if we all, or the majority of us, were benefiting from the advancements. But sympathy is difficult when we look at those numbers.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

P.S. here's a fun game for understanding how much a billion dollars is. It's difficult because that level of money generates so much interest.

Imagine you have a billion dollars. You put it in an investment account that earns 10% yearly interest, compounded daily. On day 1 you need funds, so sit on your ass and do nothing. After than, on each weekday you hire a new employee at the cost of $250k/yr and is also paid daily.

How many employees can you hire before you have less than a billion dollars?

There's a lot of variants you can run on this kind of thought experiment and I think they're helpful for understanding that level of wealth.