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A stock market boom in artificial intelligence companies has added more than half a trillion dollars to the wealth of America’s tech barons in the past year, data shows.
The top 10 US founders and bosses of some of the world’s largest technology companies saw their finances swell to nearly $2.5tn, up from $1.9tn, in the year to Christmas Eve, according to figures from Bloomberg.
Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, has again proved to be one of biggest winners as the AI gold-rush has pushed US stock markets to record highs.
Musk’s net worth increased by nearly 50% year-on-year to $645bn. The tycoon, whose business interests include xAI, an artificial intelligence company, became the first person to have a net-worth of more than $500bn in October this year. He could become the world’s first trillionaire if he hits targets set by Tesla, the electric car company he runs.
Musk sits ahead of Google co-founder Larry Page and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the overall rankings of the world’s wealthiest billionaires. Page is estimated to be worth $270bn, and Bezos $255bn.
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That’s it?
It only made them all half a trillion this year and they’re all-in?
Pathetic.
Stop calling them “tech barons” and call a spade a spade. They are tech oligarchs.
Barons is a reference to the robber barons of the 1890’s. Who controlled almost all industires and made life for the average worker hell.
They only got properly taken out by the new deal reforms after the great depression.
I don’t know how Elon is the richest man. At least Amazon and Google actually do things and make a profit. Not a single one of musks ventures is profitable???
Overvalued stocks. Tesla stock has no business being vakued at what it is. Elon’s wealth is all based on imaginary money until he cashes out. Unfortunately, he can borrow against those stocks while still owning them so it does give him some liquidity.
By the way, that’s why the rich really want low interest rates: so the loans they take out against their stocks have a low rate. If that rate is lower than what their stocks pay out they have a magical cash machine. And tha’s why we need to fix capital gains taxes; if you can borrow against stocks then that should be considered profiting from them and taxed accordingly.
Oh, and capital gains taxes, along with corporate taxes, should far exceed income taxes from labor, but I’ve digressed far enough.
Highly progressive wealth tax, starting super high. Like $50Million. That would be a start.
Have faith. It will trickle down, any second now.
Make it rain.
Because leveraged debt = “wealth”.
A lot of it is people’s pension savings collected via investment schemes.
They are human centipede-ing the money to keep the bubble inflating.
nvidia being the one feeding them food, and the shit is being sent back to them after digestion.
I hear tulips are a better investment
popcorn futures as well. and leopard conservation as well.
At least you could eat the bulbs as famine food.
Who is paying for xAI anything?
… How is everyone so dense. They sell your information and you are the product. And the best part is they can say they don’t because they are not making a profit.
They sell all of your information.
Gotta be a giant circlejerk with all that tracking. The same old info being bought and sold over and over again.
Sigh, it’s aggregated data on large populaces. It’s not just your data, it’s all of our data to create a picture to influence us with.
“Sigh”? Really?
Why not both, both macro and micro. Targeted ads and demographics, politics, whatever.
These billionaires think they are fucking God. They are going to create a GUI and use the AI to make the world their own little video game.
How do I know this? Because they are putting all the ingredients in the recipe to do this.
They want to make large city states, with swathes of agriculture slave populations outside to support the city states. They literally tell you they are doing it.
human centipede combined with ouroburos.
I don’t even know who is paying for most of it, to be honest. I know some people that buy an LLM subscription. I know companies will pay for per-seat licenses to things like Copilot.
But I see LLM use in Duckduckgo. I see it jammed into every product we are already paying for at work - MS stuff, Slack, hell, I lost track of all the places where some AI bubble has popped up saying how X product has added AI to help me summarize things. But who is really paying extra for any of that?
And don’t get me started on how I can download and run various models via Ollama or the like on even older GPU(s) and get decent performance for a lot of problems, all without handing over a CC# to someone, along with all my data for them to mine.
Let me put it this way. I can add AI to harvest everything you do and like you said inject it everywhere because people still think it’s benign. The royal Navy just launched autonomous drones with AI.
They are creating a culling ecosystem where the few will have control over the many via technology.
the only way is to sell it to advertisers, or surveillance companies.
My 87 yr old landlord had looked up some info the other day. I looked over her shoulder and saw she was reading it from DDGs AI bubble, so then had to explain why she shouldn’t do that anymore.
Yeah on paper. I can’t tell you anyone that I know who is paying for AI. The company I work for does have a Chatgpt subscirption. So i guess thats one.
My point is that we keep hearing about the AI spending, but im not noticing anyone who is paying or even enthusiastic about AI. Its a corporate buzzword and C suites dont understand it yet.
Yet it accounts for 60-70 percent of the growth in the US markets. Does anyone want to take a guess at how this AI boom is gonna end?
This is the most predictable house of cards ever.
they are trying to make business hop on it, so they are left holding the bag, in the end we will probably see even more layoffs than now.
That’s because your (data is) the product.
Thats been the game for years. I don’t think thats enough to offset the cost of electricity. I think their goal was to sell AI to business to replace workers. The problem is that it cant YET.
Eventually it will get good enough to replace some entry level folks, but this whole thing is one great big fucking swindle. When it does start to unravel everyone is going look back and see how obvious it was in hindsight.
You’re right that it can’t reliably replace workers yet, but that’s not stopping companies from doing it anyway. For example, try to reach a human customer service rep at any large company.
Straight up robber barons.
I feel there’s not enough regulation around imaginary money.
Wealth is finite.
They didn’t “add” money, no one can.
They redistributed it.
Half a trillion dollars to a handful of billionaires, from everyone else.
Call it what it is.
Wealth is finite.
Well, no. Work increases the value of material. Someone will pay more for a calzone than for its ingredients. More value, when distributed, becomes wealth.
That’s not what’s going on here. The value is all speculative and fake. But wealth is able to be created.
Yes and to add to that, wealth is always created by labour, it is only redistributed via ownership.
All investors just give labourers access to resources, it’s needed cause they hoard the resources and keep them scarce so they can leverage them for more.
The whole theory of what constitutes value is somewhere between tautology and handwaving.
Someone will pay more for a calzone than for its ingredients. More value, when distributed, becomes wealth.
Bro…
Do you have a magic pocket that makes money whenever you want a calzone?
Because that’s pretty cool.
In the real world no wealth is created. Some was moved from the calzone maker to the store for ingredients, then some other people paid more for a calzone than ingredients cost.
No wealth was created, it was redistributed.
If you spent $2 on ingredients and sold a calzone for $5, somebody just paid you $3 of their own dollars for you to do it.
How the fuck did sonmany people up otw you for just completly missing the point?
Yes, we are still trading on the same five acorns that were originally used as currency. /s
Yes, most of the wealth here is stolen, but the statement that wealth is zero-sum is absurdly inaccurate.
There is no value added, only an inflated $ value and malprovisioned funds. Everyone is worse off, but the rich who’s bank accounts go brrrrr faster than the world enshittifies.
Nah. Wealth isn’t finite. It hasn’t been for a long time.
You think more physical representation of money means more wealth?
Like, would you trade a $20 for 5 nickles since it’s a 5 for 1 trade?
They print paper money, but that doesn’t create more wealth, it makes paper money worth less…
Which is called “inflation” and requires for our exonomy to kind of function…
That’s not how wealth works. Wealth is not a representation of money, but money is a representation of wealth. Printing money doesn’t create wealth, it just makes the representation of wealth worth less. The implication that wealth has to be “taken away” from something or someone is just straightup wrong because that would imply the world has not gained any wealth ever, which would be a stupid assumption. Wealth is created by work and innovation - that’s why the materials inside a smartphone are worth significantly less than the entire smartphone.
You’re openly contradicting yourself and I don’t think I can help
I think you just realized you were wrong and don’t want to admit it tbh.
THE PLANET OWNS ITSELF MONEY, IN THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND YET, WE MAKE MORE? EEAT THE RICH!
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Removed by mod
Lol, pussy-mods doing their dirty work for them.
Don’t be afraid to fight back or support others fighting back.
The debate used to be:
Should we let rich people exist if they produce great products.
Now the second part isn’t true anymore, but to be fair, those who understand capitalism knew this was always the endgame.
I’m very disappointed this cyberpunk dystopia doesn’t have the cool gadgets to match, at least let me have that.
boom
Yeah, that’s the sound it’s gonna make soon
Somehow I feel like they will be fine when the bottom drops out and ordinary people will be the ones who pay.
