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Comment by SquibblesRedux | Hacker News Reader

Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

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> Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Nope. (Any government incentives were available to all the other car companies.)

> Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Where do you think he got the money to sustain those losses? Investors! Including me. That is not a "transfer" of wealth, as in exchange the investors received an ownership share of the company.

> Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

It still is the opposite of short term thinking.

I was not making an argument that the economy is zero-sum, or that Musk or Bezos did not build wealth. I merely pointed out methods they used to build their empires. For example, Musk did take advantage of government incentives, sidestepped regulations, etc.

Again, I never claimed there was any sort of zero-sum transfer of wealth. I'm simply pointing out there are varied ways to build up wealth; people have various opinions about those ways. It's right to call out misconceptions or outright falsehoods, but it's also good to understand what leads people to form or accept those misconceptions in the first place.

Government incentives were available to all the car companies. There were no government incentives for SpaceX or Twitter or Starlink.

As for "sidestepped regulations", you'll need to be more specific. He did have some court battles with regulators, and won them.

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