Borrowed) They worked hard for this washing columbian snow and collecting exotic crystals. Some of them just extracted essential oils from dessert sands, landlording there, cursed with resources as.. a landed gentry.

Owning a few slivers of a company doesn't make you nobility. Let's draw a few lines. Do you work for a living or own things for a living? In other words, which flavor of incentives is predominant in your life? Whenever a company pulls a Scrooge McDuck move, do you own enough shares that on net this benefits you or does it still hurt you like it hurts most? Do you have enough of a stock that it make sense to hire a lobbyist for a 10% chance of pumping its value by 10% (i.e. does lobbying look like an expense or an investment)? Do you always pay 30% income tax or sometimes pay 15% capital gains tax?

For most of these "are you nobility" questions, you can draw a line on a net worth chart where the incentives and privileges are one thing below the line and a different thing above the line. Each question gives you a different line, but for the most part you and I are on one side of the lines and, say, Bill Gates is on the other. It's important to understand that the world is mostly owned by people who feel a structurally different set of incentives from what you and I feel.

The nobility doesn't directly control the monopoly on violence like they did under Feudalism. However, they still make a living by owning things rather than by working, this still gives them crossed incentives to most commoners on a wide variety of issues, and they still exert outsized political influence in furtherance of those crossed incentives.