199
AI boom adds more than half a trillion dollars to wealth of US tech barons in 2025
(www.theguardian.com)
Have faith. It will trickle down, any second now.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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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.
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.
Because leveraged debt = “wealth”.
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.
Straight up robber barons.
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.
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.
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.
I feel there's not enough regulation around imaginary money.
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.
THE PLANET OWNS ITSELF MONEY, IN THE TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, AND YET, WE MAKE MORE? EEAT THE RICH!
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.
Dilligas