Not to mention the insane benefits these employees get, these are the best employers in the world. It’s clear employee happiness was much more important during good times than any investor sentiment. Investors just shut up as the business was still growing.
Investors are a rule are smart enough to realize that they - by virtue of being 'passive' - allow people that know more about the business to run it. Back seat drivers are hardly ever welcome as investors, if you're that good you should go and run another company, surely that's a better use of your talent then than to try to run a diversified fund.
With AI, capital will dominate everything. Crass inequality will be the norm. The only path out of this will be paved with blood. Except if humanity is much smarter than I think it is.
FWIW I don't think that it is pointless to talk about the effect that billionaires are having on our lives precisely because their billions insulate them from the consequences which effectively makes them our new kings with their own dynasty. And the kings of old were at least somewhat accountable to their population in times of hardship and their influence was limited to the countries that they governed (or decided to go to war with).
I sincerely believe that if we don't find a way to reign this in that it will come back to haunt us.
Perhaps this is a good thing. You can’t make emotional decisions when you are responsible for millions of people potentially. You literally wouldn’t be able to have leaders if leaders were emotionally involved in tens of thousands of peoples hard lives.
What is your blueprint for achieving this practically, instead of saying nice sounding dreams?
You asked for an example, I gave you one.
Have a read to see how Switzerland created their political system out of necessity:
As for me being naive: I am pretty realistic in my expectations but I do believe that the achilles heel of these characters is exposed: their wealth stems from a bug in capitalism that allows the unfettered collection of money, power, influence once you achieve a certain base. The fact that we don't have a way to effectively tax transnational entities is something that is absolutely fixable, and we currently do not have rules for that. Changing the game entirely is throwing the baby away with the bathwater, taking care of < 500 individuals in such a way that their tricks are no longer going to cause the upheaval of the lives of 100's of thousands of others is definitely something I would be happy to see implemented.
The game needs to be changed entirely, and we need to talk about how. Communism didn't work, capitalism does not work anymore, and the topic you'd like to discuss is really just a logical consequence of raw capitalism. I understand that capitalism was probably good to you in particular, so you are not interested in changing the game, just fixing it here and there, but that is pointless, as I already said.
My empathy with overpaid Googlers is also quite limited. Maybe they can now do something useful with their lives. I don't think Google's website works better than 15 years ago, so what are all these people doing?
Capitalism, like democracy is broken, but it is the best we've got - so far. Replacing it outright with some new system that somehow magically overcomes all of the shortcomings of the old and does not introduce new ones is a pipe dream, but you can make moves to fix the biggest holes and then keep doing that until you have incrementally arrived at a much better solution.
As for my empathy with overpaid Googlers: given the choice to sympathize with them or with their nil contributing rent seeking shareholder billionaire overlord I will side with them, and given the choice between them and a homeless person, inmate or mentally ill person my sympathy will be with the latter. Dealing in absolutes will get you quite literally nowhere, it's tilting at windmills at best and a distraction at worst. But feel free to pursue your goals in your way and leave me to do the same in mine.
There isn't a hard choice between these and no reason why we can't both pursue our goals in different ways and end up in a better place. It increases the chances of positive change.
I understand the follow up argument about a majority of people might not hold ownership in any public company at all, but that feels like a separate topic.