Let me summarise their real missions:
1. Power and money
2. Power and money
3. Power and money
How does AI help them make money and gain more power?
I can give you a few ways...
Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.
See https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma
or the fact that John D. Rockefeller was furious that Standard Oil got split up despite the stock going up and making him much richer.
It's not so clear what motivates the very rich. If I doubled my income I might go on a really fancy vacation and get that Olympus 4/3 body I've been looking at and the fast 70-300mm lens for my Sony, etc. If Elon Musk changes his income it won't affect his lifestyle. As the leader of a corporation you're supposed to behave as if your utility function of money was linear because that represents your shareholders but a person like Musk might be very happy to spend $40B to advance his power and/or feeling of power.
Wealth is something that is counted and accumulates (or decrements).
Power is ranking. If you double your wealth, but maintain (or reduce) your power ranking, net-net you've lost power.
There are other elements at play. Discretionary wealth and power also matter. If you're in a position where all your wealth and/or income are spoken for (e.g., a business with high cash-flow but also high current expenses such as labour, materials, services, rents, etc.; or a governmental unit with high mandated spending / entitlements), then a numerically high budget still entails little actual discretionary power. Similarly, an entity with immense resources and preeminent ranking but where most or all options are already spoken for, where there are no good discretionary options, has nominal power but little actual power.
A classic example of the latter is a regime which embarks on a military misadventure only to find that it can pour in vast amounts of blood and capital for little actual return, ending up bogged down in a quagmire: Vietnam, Afghanistan (multiple instances), the Western Front (WWI), Gallipoli (WWI), winter invasions of Russia (Napoleon, Hitler/Barbarossa), the Charge of the Light Brigade, Waterloo, Agincourt, the Spanish Armada, etc.
America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.
Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.
So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.
But even Meta's PR dept seems clueless on answering "How Meta is going to get more Power and Money through AI"
The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that everyone at OpenAI or Meta is a bad person, I don't think that's true. Most of their employees are probably normal people. But seriously, you have to tell me what you guys are smoking if a mission statement causes you to update in any direction whatsoever. I can hardly think of anything more devoid of content.
Just top of the head answers.
We keep trying to progressively tax money in the US to reduce the social imbalance. We can’t figure out how to tax power and the people with power like it that way. If you have power you can get money. But it’s also relatively straightforward to arrange to keep the money that you have.
But they don’t really need to.
For the past few decades, the ways and the degree to which we have been genuinely trying (at the government level) to "progressively tax money" in the US have been failing and falling, respectively.
If we were genuinely serious about the kind of progressive taxation you're talking about, capital gains taxes (and other kinds of taxes on non-labor income) would be much, much higher than standard income tax. As it stands, the reverse is true.
Please keep in mind that at these maximums, taxes are still progressive just probably not as much as you want. You really want to make taxes more progressive? Either get rid of SS or make it taxable on all income. SS contributions are by far the least progressive part of the tax code.
It's been cited as unshakable truth many times, including just before places like Washington State significantly raised their top tax brackets—and saw approximately zero rich people leave.
There's a lot of widely-believed economic theory underlying our current practice that's based on extremely shaky ground.
As for how SS taxes are handled, I'm 100% in agreement with you.
PS The last several CA (I used to live there) tax increases resulted in decreased tax revenue too.
The former does not lead to the latter.