Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
What creates wealth? Mining raw materials? Work? Ideas? Services? Do you think any billionaire has created this wealth in these ways? No, they "create" a billion dollars by creating not value, but valuation. If it's a public company, they issue stock, which people buy for money. In the open market, the price of the stock goes up. Their valuation goes up. Their currency goes up.
Billionaires become billionaires by creating indirections of wealth. They create currencies. Like bankers, they create wealth by lending money they don't have. Those stock certificates are a currency, and trading the currency on the open market pumps up its valuation. Who buys it? People who think they too can make money off it in the future. Who pays them back? Maybe with dividends? Who makes those dividends? Who creates revenue? Mostly the organization they create.
There aren't words you say sitting around your desk that will create a billion dollars. But the desks they sit at, they can say words and a billion dollars are "created." I think that's what you don't want to admit. Their decisions are just amplified by a huge apparatus that they sit at, and the market scrambling to snip off a little profit by trading their stock in the future.
Sure they have businesses and things, but holy cow, we lionize the words they say around desks like it's some kind of magic holiness. I just don't get it.
"it's not like the $2.5t Amazon is worth today would be distributed across Barnes and Noble, Pets.com and other retailers" I'm not sure how you get to this conclusion, it seems sort obvious to me that it would. It's literally why businesses go out of business from competition - someone else is providing the services in their place. Instead of AWS, Azure and Google's cloud offers would likely be significantly more widespread/valuable.