Five richest men have doubled their wealth since 2020

Yes, but only if that 401(k) is entirely invested in a (relatively risky for retirement accounts) S&P 500 index, which is unlikely.

401Ks usually target a somewhat safer subset of the market for investment than the raw S&P

Your 401(k) is probably set up to invest in what's known as a target-date fund, where you pick a year (often rounded to the nearest one divisible by 5) you want to retire, and the fund manager allocates among various risk asset classes based on that. Almost always, the further away you are from retirement, the more risk you can take; when you near retirement, it's probably almost all in bonds and other less risky assets.

Sometimes employer-managed 401(k) fund managers take a much larger management fee compared to, say, Vanguard, which adds up over decades, so you could be mad about that.

That depends entirely on the ratio between how much you already had invested at the start of that time period versus how much you invested throughout that time period. If the ratio is nearly infinite (i.e., you had a lot to begin with and hardly added any more) then yeah your S&P500 balance should've grown about 100%. But if the ratio is nearly zero (i.e. you didn't have much at all invested at the start but contributed heavily since then) and for simple math we say that the S&P500 grew linearly, then you should expect only a 50% growth because only the early contributions rode that train while the recent contributions hardly had a chance. In reality it'll be somewhere in between.

And as pointed out by others, this assumes S&P500. If you're in a lifecycle fund instead, that's a bit like having mostly S&P500 when you're young and hardly any when you're old.

> One person can now buy/exert even more monstrous political power and influence over the media than before

People say that, but if that were true, we would have a President Bloomberg sitting in the White House now, with perhaps a Koch brother as the junior senator from Kansas. Tabloids wouldn't be printing Bill Gates's association with Jeffrey Epstein. Ocasio-Cortez would still be a bartender.

In reality, it turns out that being rich is neither necessary nor sufficient for being powerful, influential, or noteworthy of any kind.

> I guess they're totally the same thing.

Sure, mathematically it's literally the same thing; both people have doubled their wealth. If your argument is that rich people have it easier than poor people, that's absolutely true. If your argument is that the same market forces that made someone's $10k worth of stocks become $20k should not have the same effect on someone else's $10B worth of stocks, well, I guess you could start by blaming the Fed.