WB has not been immune to the political angle but they at least care about their IP and produce decent content. Of course Netflix would have used WB IP and Netflix’s “state of the art” movie making machine to maximise the value of the WB IP.

TBH I don’t care about the WB news media part through I’m not sure if they will really destroy it just to align with their political views. If they make CNN like Fox News the viewers will just leave. The right move for Netflix from a shareholder’s perspective would be to get into the short drama movies that are popular in China and recently the US too. That would allow them to cover the whole garbage media spectrum and make a lot of money.

It isn't that they get bailed out by the government (like the banks in 2008), it is that at the scale of their wealth there is no realistic way to lose it fast enough to make any significant negative difference when the neutral state of wealth at that scale is to snowball ever larger (mostly because we refuse to tax it appropriately).

Piketty’s central argument is that when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of economic growth (g), wealth concentrates over time into fewer and fewer hands. This is his now-famous r > g inequality.

The implication is that capitalism, left to its own devices, doesn’t naturally spread wealth around. It does the opposite. The relatively egalitarian period of the mid-20th century (roughly 1930s-1970s) was the historical exception, driven by two world wars, the Great Depression, and deliberate policy choices like progressive taxation. The longer historical pattern, which Piketty traces with extensive data going back to the 18th century, is one of increasing concentration.

His practical prescription is a global progressive tax on wealth (not just income) to counteract this tendency. He acknowledges this is politically difficult but argues it’s the most straightforward mechanism to prevent a return to the kind of patrimonial capitalism that defined the Gilded Age and the Belle Époque, where inherited wealth dominated and social mobility was minimal.

The book’s real contribution was less the theoretical claim (which economists had gestured at before) and more the empirical work. Piketty and his collaborators assembled an unprecedented dataset on wealth and income distribution across multiple countries and centuries, which gave the argument a weight that prior discussions lacked.

So far the only individual that has been meaningfully punished has been Ghislaine Maxwell.

This seems like a prime example of being too big to fail. The FBI puts on kid gloves whenever a rich person is accused of wrong doing.

Billionaires that were dumb enough to attempt to screw even bigger billionaires. Sure you can find exceptions to the rules, but Ellison isn't going to be one of those.

Billionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as hectobillionaires, just like decamillionaires aren't on the same level of wealth as billionaires.

he's gonna die just like the rest of us, just with a slightly odder uncanny valley look for himself when he goes.