>He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM,
And on that, as on so much else, he's more than a little wrong.
Apple and Microsoft simply couldn't have happened without the mega-corps - not least HP, but also IBM, and Fairchild and its spin-offs - which only existed because of post-war military and civilian "socialist" state support for technology.
By the mid-70s that support had been influencing economic policy for more than forty years.
Apple was a product of that system, not a cause of it. Companies like Apple do not happen in a pure deregulated neoliberal market paradise because markets don't have the kind of strategic intelligence that can fund projects like Whirlwind, TX-0, and the original Arpanet - all of which are essential steps on the road to making an Apple or a Google.
>Absent a healthy middle class, which was created by the era of conformity and relative income equality, would there have been enough consumers to create a market for a $5k computer? As we see income inequality rise, are we not also going to see the opportunity for wealth creation diminish as capital congregates in the hands of a class that largely conserves it?
And this is why they can't happen. You can't build your economy by impoverishing your customers with hand-wavey idealism about "market rates." If you try that, at best you run out of customers, and at worst you get a violent revolution.
The smart way to understand the economy isn't as a number of acquisitive centres for a vague thing called "money", but as a way of amplifying collective intelligence and distributing the gains as widely as possible. Status games for their own sake - which include most purely speculative and acquisitive activity - are the opposite of collective intelligence because they concentrate acquisition instead of distributing it.
You can get localised negentropic blips in a speculative economy, but the overall trend will still decrease collective opportunity over the medium/long term rather than increasing it.