JD Rockefeller aside from starting a monopoly had deals with the railroads most people at the time found immoral and this was either against or before the concept of common carrier.

So like - there are a lot of ways in which - I want to be a sort of economically conservative capitalist. I want to live in a world where we have a set of rules that create a level playing field. But we’ve had this slow drip of deregulation and norm breaking over the past 100 years, and yet debates of socialism vs capitalism still sort of come down to oversimplified debates of “are you meritocratic or not”.

And then cap this off with the fact that business wealth is extremely concentrated in the magnificent 7; capitalism isn’t capitalism without competition. I forget the name of the group, but there are even though leaders on the right that see that like wealth is not currently distributed the way any reasonably moderate person - left or right - idealizes it to be. It feels like we are so far from the colloquial definition of - “someone has a good idea, invents it, sells it to people, and gets rewarded”.

On some level, if Elon musk sold 100 million cars and pocketed 10k each, I might not care if he was a trillionaire, but we need to realign incentives with tangible value and not financial games.

One classic experiment has the reseacher give the chimps tokens in exchange for simple tasks, like finding a pebble and bringing it to the reseacher. Then the chimp can exchange the token for food. The chimps will do this all day for slices of cucumber. But if a chimp sees the researcher give another chimp a grape in exchange for the token then suddenly cucumber isn’t good enough any more. If the researcher keeps giving the first chimp cucumber then it will scream and throw it back, even uselessly threaten the reseacher.

Rationally the chimp is still as well off as before. It still prefers cucumber over kibble, and it is still worth the chimp’s time to earn the cucumber. What it doesn’t like is the _unfairness_.

> But seeing valuation rounds of tens of billions and now a net worth of a trillion dollars - million times million - it just feels like the game is eternally uneven and I can't in good conscience support these ideas anymore.

Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.

Of course it’s not entirely a mistake to want fairness. Fairness is a good thing in many cases. But when it comes to self–improvement we have to look beyond fairness and try to be more rational. Earn those millions and be satisfied. They will provide you just as much stability now as they ever would have.

I went to the kind of elite east coast college where people were generally mostly pretty left and weren't too "capitalist" to begin with, but even my friends who were more business-oriented or economically moderate before are now openly pointing out that it's not working out well for the vast majority of people.