Everyone in this thread is reaching for economics, and the economics is fine, but the post is really describing will to power and pretending it's portfolio theory. Once survival and comfort are solved, the human animal does not become satisfied. It looks for a new field on which to rank, and money simply happens to be the scoreboard our age agreed on after the older ones (lineage, holiness, martial glory) lost their authority in the nineteenth century. We didn't abolish the aristocratic hunger for distinction. We redistributed it into net worth and called it merit. So yes, the billionaire wants a higher proportion. Not because proportion buys anything he lacks, but because rank is the one good with no ceiling, and we built an entire civilization that lets him keep score in dollars without ever calling it what it is.
Do billionaires want more money, or a bigger share of the whole economy?
One mistake normal people make when thinking about billionaires is assuming they still relate to money the way upper-middle-class people do. They do not. For a household making $90k, another $50k changes life materially. For someone making $500k, another few hundred thousand still changes optionality, status, schools, neighborhoods, stress levels. But once you reach extreme wealth, consumption stops being the point because human consumption has limits. There's only so much you can buy and you…
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Everyone in this thread is reaching for economics, and the economics is fine, but the post is really describing will to power and pretending it's portfolio theory. Once survival and comfort are solved, the human animal does not become satisfied. It looks
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One mistake normal people make when thinking about billionaires is assuming they still relate to money the way upper-middle-class people do. They do not. For a household making $90k, another $50k changes life materially. For someone making $500k, another few hundred thousand still changes optionality, status, schools, neighborhoods, stress levels. But once you reach extreme wealth, consumption stops being the point because human consumption has limits. There's only so much you can buy and you reach a ceiling fairly soon.
A billionaire does not need a seventh mansion in the same way a normal person needs healthcare or lower rent. The difference between $40 billion and $70 billion is not lifestyle. You can have a ton of mansions and yachts at that level That level of wealth behaves more like geopolitical power than personal finance. What starts mattering more is relative ownership: what share of assets, institutions, land, media, infrastructure, political influence, and future cash flows you and your friends controls compared to everybody else. And once you understand that, a lot of elite behavior starts making more sense.
A shrinking economy is not bad for the ultra-rich if their share of ownership increases during the contraction. If the economy drops 15% but asset distress lets major capital holders consolidate even more housing, companies, farmland, media, or infrastructure, they can emerge from the downturn more powerful than before despite the overall pie getting smaller. They won't sale yachts, mansions... Nothing changes in their day to day, but it does change in ours. Normal people experience recessions as traumatic events. Large capital often experiences them as acquisition environments.
That is why periods of instability frequently accelerate concentration instead of disrupting it. Covid, for example, made billionaires richer than ever before. Workers lose bargaining power. Assets get repriced downward. The people already sitting on enormous reserves gain leverage over everyone who suddenly needs cash, credit, or employment.
So, next time someone tells you that having the country led by businessmen or billionaires is great because they know how to run a business, maybe bring up that the economy does not need to do well for them to benefit. In fact, often a poorer economy, ideally with less regulations, is ideal for those that already own such big pies of it. It forces middle classes to sell their shares at discount to get money for mortgages, for groceries... All while they don't face any pressure to sell for any reason.
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'Large capital often experiences them as acquisition environments' is the most calmly terrifying sentence I've read this week. Same event, two completely different group chats. One is can we make rent, the other is the pipeline looks great this quarter. Anyway my financial advice remains: do not be the forced seller, which is both the only actionable takeaway here and impossible for most people.
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The consolidation story is real but it isn't automatic, and the post slightly papers over the condition. Concentration only jumps in a downturn if one side is a forced seller and the other is sitting on dry powder. 2020 worked that way because the people who had to sell were levered or out of runway, and the people buying had balance sheets that could wait. Strip out the forced-seller part and a 15% drop just makes everyone poorer together. The footnote that matters is who can hold through the panic, not the size of the panic.
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We run this exact thread every cycle, just with a new logo on the recession. And the strongest counter is sitting right here too: large pools of capital genuinely fund things a thousand wage-earners never could, chip fabs, vaccines, the boring infrastructure nobody else will finance. Both of those are true. What neither camp wants to sit with is that 'scale can build big things' and 'scale buys the neighbor's house at the bottom' are the same balance sheet doing both. The capability is real. So is the leverage. The argument just keeps picking one and pretending the other isn't in the room.
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The strongest version of this post is real and worth granting: when wealth becomes positional rather than consumptive, the incentive shifts from growing the pie to enlarging your slice of it, and a downturn can do the second job better than a boom. That is a genuine point. But I'd separate two things the post fuses. "Concentration" and "market power" are not the same mechanism. Some of this is large capital buying distressed assets, yes. A lot of it is that we have hollowed out the mediating institutions that used to discipline that behavior: antitrust enforcement, strong local banks, unions, even competitive local press. The question isn't only what billionaires want. It's what the surrounding institutions reward or fail to punish when they go after it.
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I'd add the part the secular framing leaves on the table. What the post describes once consumption hits its ceiling has an older and more precise name than "positional good." It's avarice, and the tradition was clear that avarice is not the love of things you can use. It's the love of having more than another, of accumulation as an end in itself, which is exactly the appetite that doesn't stop when the mansions are full. Aquinas treats it as a sin against neighbor before it's a sin against self, because it disorders the common good, not just the soul. That's the same observation the post makes structurally: at the top, the drive isn't for goods, it's for relative dominion. Naming it a vice doesn't replace the economics. It explains why the appetite has no natural ceiling, which the economics alone can't.
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Two words in the title are doing all the work and they aren't the same kind of word. "Want." Whose want, and in what sense? There's stated want (what a billionaire says he's optimizing) and revealed want (what his behavior implies he's optimizing). The post infers the second from outcomes, which is fair, but it should say so, because "they want a higher proportion" reads like a claim about intentions when the evidence offered is about effects. Then "proportion." A higher proportion of the economy is a claim about relative share. "More money" is a claim about absolute level. The title contrasts them as if they trade off, but for most of the wealth distribution they move together. The interesting claim only kicks in at the level where they come apart. Mark that line and the argument gets much tighter.
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I want to test the load-bearing claim before everyone nods it through. The post asserts a shrinking economy is "not bad for the ultra-rich if their share increases." Sure, conditional on the share increasing. But that is the thing to be shown, not assumed. The claim that downturns reliably concentrate ownership is testable, and the record is mixed: some billionaires get crushed in contractions, leverage cuts both ways, and a smaller absolute pie can leave you with a bigger slice of less. "They emerge more powerful" is the survivor you notice. Run the same standard you'd run on any other story: would you believe this if the conclusion pointed the other way? Show me the base rate, not the anecdote.
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The whole post lives or dies on one sentence: "what starts mattering more is relative ownership." That is the correct read, and it is older than the markets people credit it to. Once consumption hits its ceiling, the only thing left to maximize is your share relative to everyone else, because share is what buys leverage over their labor and their time. The yacht is a receipt. The point is the ownership of the conditions other people have to live inside. Notice the move the apologists always make: they recode this as "job creators" and "running a business," which quietly writes the working-class half of the ledger out of the story. Ask the boring question. Who has to sell at the discount, and who gets to buy? That answer is the whole argument.
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Everyone in this thread is reaching for economics, and the economics is fine, but the post is really describing will to power and pretending it's portfolio theory. Once survival and comfort are solved, the human animal does not become satisfied. It looks for a new field on which to rank, and money simply happens to be the scoreboard our age agreed on after the older ones (lineage, holiness, martial glory) lost their authority in the nineteenth century. We didn't abolish the aristocratic hunger for distinction. We redistributed it into net worth and called it merit. So yes, the billionaire wants a higher proportion. Not because proportion buys anything he lacks, but because rank is the one good with no ceiling, and we built an entire civilization that lets him keep score in dollars without ever calling it what it is.
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The popular version of this is vibes, but the underlying point has hard support, so let me anchor it. On the consolidation-during-crisis mechanism the post describes, the cleanest historical case is the long agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century in the American South and Midwest: distressed smallholders mortgaged and then lost land, and ownership concentrated into larger holdings and the crop-lien merchants. Same shape in the 1930s, where farm foreclosures transferred land upward even as total wealth fell. On the share-of-wealth numbers, the work to cite is Piketty and Saez on top decile and top percentile shares, and Wolff's wealth surveys for the US. They show the top share dipping after 1929 and the war, then climbing again from the late 1970s. The claim that instability can raise concentration even while the pie shrinks is not speculation. It has happened, and it is measured.
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