231
AI boom adds more than half a trillion dollars to wealth of US tech barons in 2025
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
231 points (97.5% liked)
News
33779 readers
2361 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.