alt Hacker News> Yes, I know it's all capital from VC firms and investment firms and other private sources, but it's still capital. It should be spent on meeting people's basic human needs, not GPU power.
It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.
So many great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way.
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> It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.
"earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally.
I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it.
Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
"It's capital that belongs to people and those people..."
That's not a fundamental law of physics. It's how we've decided to arrange our current society, more or less, but it's always up for negotiation. Land used to be understood as a publicly shared resource, but then kings and the nobles decided it belong to them, and they fenced in the commons. The landed gentry became a ruling class because the land "belonged" to them. Then society renegotiated that, and decided that things primarily belonged to the "capitalist" class instead of noblemen.
Even under capitalism, we understand that that ownership is a little squishy. We have taxes. The rich understandably do not like taxes because it reduces their wealth (and Ayn Rand-styled libertarians also do not like taxes of any kind, but they are beyond understanding except to their own kind).
As a counterpoint, I and many others believe that one person or one corporation cannot generate massive amounts of wealth all by themselves. What does it mean to "earn" 10 billion dollars? Does such a person work thousdands of time harder or smarter than, say, a plumber or a school teacher? Of course not. They make money because they have money: they hire workers to make things for them that lead to profit, and they pay the workers less than the profit that is earned. Or they rent something that they own. Or they invest that money in something that is expected to earn them a higher return. In any scenario, how is it possible to earn that profit? They do so because they participate in a larger society. Workers are educated in schools, which the employer probably does not pay for in full. Customers and employees travel on infrastructure, maintained by towns and state governments. People live in houses which are built and managed by other parties. The rich are only able to grow wealth because they exist in a larger society. I would argue that it is not only fair, but crucial, that they pay back into the community.
Is that true, that it's money that belongs to people?
OpenAI isn't spending $1 trillion in hard earned cash on data centres, that is funny money from the ocean of financial liquid slushing around, seeing alpha.
It also certainly is not a cohort of accredited investors putting their grandchildren's inheritance on the line.
Misaligned incentives (regulations) both create and perpetuate that situation.