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This is an amount that would be a meaningful change to most US states' gross annual economic output that we're talking about, and a few people control it. Sounds pretty centralized to me.

The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars to throw at something that may or may not work while working people can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to their health insurance company only to have claims denied is insane.

> fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars

This is disputed [1]. In reality, a handful of individuals have the capital to seed a half-a-trillion dollar megaproject, which then entails the project to raise capital from more people.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/musk-pours-cold-water-on-trump-back...

It's disputed by the guy who has a business interest in making sure his competition can't do as well, and this notice of dispute is printed in a paper that is literally named after a place where the vast majority of people have never had to do any real labor in their lives.

Also the guy disputing it is trying to regain control of an entity that he was too distracted to hold to its original mission, is on record as agreeing with the statement that Jewish people are the enemies of white people, takes copious amounts of mind-altering substances daily, has lost billions of dollars on purchasing a company that had a path to (modest) profitability, and did what could easily be seen as a Roman salute at an inauguration speech. Maybe he's not a great source of statements on objective reality, even within the AI industry.

With regard to the monetary amount, understand, once you reach a certain point, the amount of capital held by the quantity of individuals we're talking about is immaterial. Any capital they raise is usually derived from the labor of others and they operate a racket to prevent any real competition for how that capital is distributed by the labor or the customers who are the source of their actual wealth. The average Oracle employee (I know a few), for example, probably has a few more immediate things they want the surplus value of their labor to be spent on than Larry's moonshot. However, he ultimately controls the direction of that value through a shareholder system that he can manipulate more-or-less at-will through splits, buybacks, and other practices.

His customers would probably also like to pay less for what are usually barely Web 2.0 database applications. Of course, he has the capital to corner markets and shove competition out of the space.

All of this is to say when you reach this amount of money in the hands of one individual, they're more likely to regularly harm people than beat the odds on their next bet in a way that actually uplifts society, at least in a way that could beat the way just disbursing that capital among those who created it could.

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Right as usual. This is more like a "promise" to invest a few $B and then continue to invest more and more if things go well
Free movement of capital and the ability to identify promising projects and allocate our resources there are why our society is prosperous and why we are able to devote more resources towards healthcare than any society that has ever come before us.

This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each year.

Is that why I, and a lot of other people my age, have a lower standard of living than my parents did at the same point in their lives?

The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move the capital one direction: up to the people who needed the labor of others to reach such wealth.

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Having to spend thousands for insurance every year (even if you’re totally healthy) and not having it even be remotely effective, is not my definition of “prosperous”.
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It's a great thing that they can throw half a trillion at something that may not work. Every great tech advancement came from throwing money at something which might not work.