alt Hacker News> Is it not correct that a handful people own most of the US and that most likely the same is true in whatever country a prospective immigrant comes from?
No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think this is likely also true for most countries around the world that prospective immigrants to the US might originate from, simply because it's difficult for a "handful of people" to retain ownership of something like an entire country; but there's a lot of countries around the world and it's hard to generalize over every single one of them. Maybe Kim Jong Un specifically can be reasonably said to "own" the entirety of North Korea - although this has fairly little to do with whether or not I benefit from North Korean immigrants trying to move to the place I live.
> Is it not correct that chances are you and I and whichever immigrant are on the don't-own-most-of-the-economy part of the divide?
This is trivially true because no single person or unified entity owns most of the economy. It has very little to do with my opinion of either immigration policy or of Sam Altman and OpenAI.
> Is it not correct that conversation about immigration keeps us focused on being angry with people that generally also are just trying to get by and live a good life as opposed to, y'know, the thing this submission started out about? You can see it happening in this very thread!
Lots of people who are just trying to get by and live a good life (by their own standards) do things that justifiably make other people angry. I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman; but being unrelated just means it's not really on topic in this thread about this article, not that your opinion about Sam Altman needs to be related to your opinion of immigration to Western countries in any specific way.
> No this isn't correct. It's not true that Sam Altman specifically owns most of the US and it's not true of any particular famous rich person either. What it would mean to "own most of the US" is pretty ill-defined, but I think there's no reasonable definition of "owns most of the US" such that any individual or "handful of people" would qualify.
I think you're falling for the STEM-oriented trap of seeing everything through an overly literal reductive lens. Yes, of course Altman and his ilk don't literally have a deed saying "50.0001% of the US" on it framed up on their wall.
But they control the ruling institutions - see the way they act in unison with the American regime, see them sitting alongside leaders of state at the G7 summit [0], see his colleague Musk being invited to purge the government with DOGE.
Power and ownership isn't always quite so clear, especially in increasingly authoritarian systems. As another example, think of Putin - officially he's just a simple government employee drawing a modest salary. But you might agree with me that there's a bit more than that under the surface.
However, even in a literalist reading, the trends are obvious and alarming: Twelve people own more of the world's wealth than the bottom 50% of the population (!). [1]
> I agree that the political question around immigration to the US or other western countries isn't directly related to how people should think about Sam Altman
And yet, the conversation almost immediately got deflected to immigration, because staying on topic - Altman's impunity - would've been an ideologically difficult fact to examine.
That is my point and the mechanism I think is worthy of further investigation.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/anthropic-amodei-google-hass...
[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...