> A lot of customers are served, and presumably got something they wanted.

The question is how often you run into the broken window fallacy there. An arsonist makes money burning down houses. A real estate developer makes money since they can now get the land for cheaper. The arsonist also supports local restaurants and gives to charity. But the total economy is still down one house.

>IMHO, making money IS providing something positive to the world. A lot of people are employed, and those people get to buy art or cookies or college for their kids or whatever.

Yep, I think that's fair. I just mean that this is generally the good that a company does: not its stated "mission."

I agree. Just be careful not to call it "trickle down" because it's a trigger word for people. For example, who cares if a billionaire buys a yacht--the building of said yacht employed dozens of craftsmen, caused thousands of supply chain orders, and will support hundreds more in maintenance over time. Also, for luxury goods you can be sure that the margins at each step are quite healthy.

The real problem would be if the people making all this money just hoard it which often happens. The only way that gives back is by providing bigger balance sheets for banks to lend out more money which has a miniscule effect.

> The real problem would be if the people making all this money just hoard it

It’s not actually really possible to hoard money. A dollar is meaningless until you use it to convince someone to give you something.

If you just accumulated $1T in cash and hid it under your mattress, all those people wouldn’t just do $1T less stuff. They would just do a little more for $1 than they would’ve before. That adjustment might take a little while so the fed might (did) print $1T to speed things along.

Also, when some one like Jeff or Elon is worth $300b - it doesn’t mean he has $300b. It just means that other people are willing to purchase their shares in eg Amazon such that if were to sell all of them at that price, it would add up to $300b.

But that money didn’t change hands, it’s just indicative. And of course if Jeff were to say “I’m selling all my shares right now who wants em” the price would change dramatically because nobody actually wants to buy all that. So really he would get about half of the money or something.