Exactly. The vast majority of mom and pop investors don't hold voting shares. They're not connected to the board members. They don't control the corporations th

Exactly. The vast majority of mom and pop investors don't hold voting shares. They're not connected to the board members. They don't control the corporations their investments are allocated to, other than very tangentially through their ability to exert downward pressure on the stocks. Billionaires are different. They own the controlling shares of a corporation, even to the point where their votes count for more in the case of Facebook. They can take on corporate debt then use that to buy another controlling stake into another corporation. Use that corporations assets for more leverage to take out mortgages, etc. Their ability to then borrow against their own stocks gives them even more working capital without paying any amount of tax while they continue to differ capital gains. I'm not even going into the lobbyists or international tax schemes here. Just the power of layered leverage. I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm usually somewhere near the centre and tilt a bit to the left on most economic issues. I'm not against capital formation. But the economic and social damage that most billionaires exert on people in wealthy societies is a very real thing and it's going to keep getting more severe as computers allow for increasingly more centralization of information and control. "Data is the new oil." And all that. We don't need billionaires (or, soon, trillionaires) to have a well functioning capitalist economy. We could have a ceiling and we could refuse entry families that exceed these limits to our countries. Same thing with open source, etc.