Well, I wasn’t so much getting at what you’re saying—which I completely agree with btw—but rather, I’m trying to understand what prevents people from realizing that the reason for their poor living conditions is the accumulation of capital in far too few hands.

The reason for my question: the global resurgence of fascism, which, in my opinion, is the direct consequence of the influence of billionaires, because they use this mindless ideology with all their might to pit people against one another and thus distract them from where the real problem lies.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many democracies where people view immigration as the most pressing problem. Absurdly, this is also the case in my home country, Germany, even though the German labor market needs far more foreign workers in a wide variety of sectors.

This is classic fascist ideology, which we unfortunately know all too well in this country. What’s frightening, however, is that the billionaires wield their influence so effectively that even the German masses no longer remember their inhuman faces and now still parrot whatever the algorithm—or rather, the will of the billionaires—presents to them.

It’s a tragedy, and my question in this post simply seeks to understand how this can be—how people fail to grasp that it is the powerful, and by no means the powerless, who should be despised.

And who do you think has the greatest interest—and the resources—to set up the system you're talking about in such a way that it essentially serves only the interests of billionaires?

I'd say the U.S. demonstrates quite impressively how this works.

To me, the saddest aspect of this nation's decline is that the people who are paying the price have resigned themselves to their fate, since their ideology seems to make it appear inevitable to them.

In and of itself, it doesn't matter at all which country someone lives in, as long as you're aware of the answer to the question I asked.

The answer is simply: the billionaires—even if you think you can undermine that reality with a counter-question (in Europe, where I live, there are certainly billionaires as well).

However, if—knowing all this—you don’t come to the same conclusion, I can’t understand why not.

That’s what my original question was about, and so far no one in this thread has answered it: How does society as a whole benefit from the existence of billionaires?

I know my answer to that.

Do you know yours, since you say it wouldn’t make any difference whether they exist or not....

This strikes me as similar to the ideas of Lizzy Magie, arguably one of the most absurdly exploited individuals with noble goals that history has to offer. She invented Monopoly to illustrate the absurdity of land ownership—today, Monopoly is the game that teaches children cutthroat capitalism.

Magie received a ridiculous low sum for her Monopoly patent, while others became millionaires off her idea (the Parker brothers, whose empire still exists today, benefited the most).

Edit: Please don't get me wrong—I completely agree with you. I just don't think it's effective to focus solely on the one area where the world's wealthy accumulate their wealth. This is simply a realistic view, since no billion-dollar company operates in just one sector (for example, Alphabet, Google's parent company, is involved in real estate deals worth billions, even though it is, at its core, a tech company). So what I’m trying to say is: Regulations targeting only the real estate market cannot possibly solve the problem.

Aren't the circumstances that give rise to them simply the fact that societies allow individuals to become so wealthy in the first place?

The problem, however, is that the world's largest corporations pay virtually no taxes, which gives rise to the very serious problem the world is facing today.

I can't understand why you think of murder when it comes to the question of whether it makes sense for societies to allow people to become so rich that they rise above everyone else. In reasonably functioning states, this can be regulated by law.

You're probably from the U.S., right?

But why wouldn't it solve the problem if top tax rates were imposed that would make it impossible for such parasitic investment firms to emerge in the first place?

Well, that’s just the way it is when there are billionaires. As long as that’s the case, there can be no justice. That’s already evident in the very fact that society allows them to exist in the first place.

These people are responsible for the vast majority of humanity’s misery. One would think that should be more than clear by now.

Anyone who thinks the U.S. legal system has anything to do with justice is living in a fantasy world.

It has long been broken beyond repair, and now it is being used in a particularly unscrupulous manner by a fascist regime—not merely to get away with the most serious crimes, but to make them possible in the first place.

As a result, conditions are becoming more and more like those in Russia, China, Israel, or North Korea—and, to be honest, they hardly differ anymore: The U.S. is definitely a state where injustice reigns.

Edit: The Lego scandal videos by Reckless Ben, for example, illustrate this point very well—albeit on a much smaller scale—if, given all the corruption and the fact that the regime is still in power rather than locked up in prison, any other examples are even needed.

Indeed!

“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”

I think that pretty much sums it up.

The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.

The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.

Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.