Sometimes they mix it up and go for money and power.

minute after minute, hour after hour

sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.

> sometimes they manage to meld it into one goal, because money is power.

Money is a measure of power, but it is not in fact power.

Power is a measure of money, but it is not in fact money.

See https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma

or the fact that John D. Rockefeller was furious that Standard Oil got split up despite the stock going up and making him much richer.

It's not so clear what motivates the very rich. If I doubled my income I might go on a really fancy vacation and get that Olympus 4/3 body I've been looking at and the fast 70-300mm lens for my Sony, etc. If Elon Musk changes his income it won't affect his lifestyle. As the leader of a corporation you're supposed to behave as if your utility function of money was linear because that represents your shareholders but a person like Musk might be very happy to spend $40B to advance his power and/or feeling of power.

To clarify you can have power without money, for example initial revolutionaries. Money buys power, and power could convert into money depending the circumstances.

Wealth is cardinal. Power is ordinal.

Wealth is something that is counted and accumulates (or decrements).

Power is ranking. If you double your wealth, but maintain (or reduce) your power ranking, net-net you've lost power.

There are other elements at play. Discretionary wealth and power also matter. If you're in a position where all your wealth and/or income are spoken for (e.g., a business with high cash-flow but also high current expenses such as labour, materials, services, rents, etc.; or a governmental unit with high mandated spending / entitlements), then a numerically high budget still entails little actual discretionary power. Similarly, an entity with immense resources and preeminent ranking but where most or all options are already spoken for, where there are no good discretionary options, has nominal power but little actual power.

A classic example of the latter is a regime which embarks on a military misadventure only to find that it can pour in vast amounts of blood and capital for little actual return, ending up bogged down in a quagmire: Vietnam, Afghanistan (multiple instances), the Western Front (WWI), Gallipoli (WWI), winter invasions of Russia (Napoleon, Hitler/Barbarossa), the Charge of the Light Brigade, Waterloo, Agincourt, the Spanish Armada, etc.

True, though money can buy influence and the opportunity to obtain power.

the people with all the firepower won't let you buy your own private military (or develop your own weapons systems without being under their control). The end-of-line power (violence) is a closely guarded monopoly.

But, on the flip side, coercive power cannot stand on its own without money too. The CCP's Politburo know beyond a doubt that they have coercive power over billionaires like Jack Ma, but they try to accommodate these entrepreneurs who help catalyze economic growth & bring the state more foreign revenue/wealth to fund its coercive machine.

America's elected leaders also have power to punish & bring oligarchs to book legally, but they mostly interact symbiotically, exchanging campaign contributions and board seats for preferential treatment, favorable policy, etc.

Putin can order any out-of-line oligarch to be disposed of, but the economic & coercive arms of the Russian State still see themselves as two sides of the same coin.

So, yes: coercive power can still make billionaires face the wall (Russian revolution, etc.) but they mostly prefer to work together. Money and power are a continuum like spacetime.

And the more power you have, the easier it gets to make more money, so it's self-reinforcing.

See also certain orange people not sweating bankruptcy because they can just go get more money.

The nouveau riche find out this is definitely not at all true the hard way. Easy come, easy go. If your children remain rich, they may get some respect. Your grandchildren will be powerful. You’ll be a crass old coot.

I guess from these cosmetic "company missions" we can make out how OpenAI and Google are envisioning to get that "Power and Money" through AI.

But even Meta's PR dept seems clueless on answering "How Meta is going to get more Power and Money through AI"

Same difference with social media too. I thought Twitter was for micro-blogging, LinkedIn for career-networking, Instagram for pictures, and youtube for video-sharing etc. Now everything boiled down to just a feed of pictures, videos and text. So much for a "network", graph theory, research, ...

Even if we assume you're correct and every company's true mission is to maximize power and money, the stated mission is still useful in helping us understand how they plan to do this.

The questions in the original comment were really about the "how", and are still worth considering.

Have you considered that people can just say things?

But we can still consider the consistency of their story, because they are telling that story to influence the perception of their actions.

The consistency of a mission statement? Are you guys for real?

To be clear: I'm not arguing that everyone at OpenAI or Meta is a bad person, I don't think that's true. Most of their employees are probably normal people. But seriously, you have to tell me what you guys are smoking if a mission statement causes you to update in any direction whatsoever. I can hardly think of anything more devoid of content.

A lie still tells you what the liar things you should believe of him, in this case what the public is supposed to think of these layoffs.

By replacing the cost of human labor? By improving the control of human decision making? By consolidating control of economic activity?

Just top of the head answers.

If they go after AI, they’ll for sure need power

Because a CEO with happy shareholders has more power. The shareholder value thing is a sop, and sometimes a dangerous one.

We keep trying to progressively tax money in the US to reduce the social imbalance. We can’t figure out how to tax power and the people with power like it that way. If you have power you can get money. But it’s also relatively straightforward to arrange to keep the money that you have.

But they don’t really need to.

> We keep trying to progressively tax money in the US to reduce the social imbalance.

The former does not lead to the latter.

I mean...what you say is not, in the face of it, false; however...

For the past few decades, the ways and the degree to which we have been genuinely trying (at the government level) to "progressively tax money" in the US have been failing and falling, respectively.

If we were genuinely serious about the kind of progressive taxation you're talking about, capital gains taxes (and other kinds of taxes on non-labor income) would be much, much higher than standard income tax. As it stands, the reverse is true.

Look into the Laffer curve if you want to know why tax rates are what they are. Basically, using tax avoidance strategies have both a cost (accountants and lawyers) and a risk. Making the tax rate too high and the percentage of the wealthy that choose to utilize tax avoidance strategies increases (also the aggressiveness of those strategies increases). The change in this rate forms a curve with a maximum. There is a tax rate that maximizes tax revenue. That rate is far less than 100%. In fact, US tax rates are probably pretty near those Laffer maximums.

Please keep in mind that at these maximums, taxes are still progressive just probably not as much as you want. You really want to make taxes more progressive? Either get rid of SS or make it taxable on all income. SS contributions are by far the least progressive part of the tax code.

I frankly don't believe this. (edit for clarity: the proposition that our current rates are highly likely to be towards the top end of what's feasible, not the existence of such a curve)

It's been cited as unshakable truth many times, including just before places like Washington State significantly raised their top tax brackets—and saw approximately zero rich people leave.

There's a lot of widely-believed economic theory underlying our current practice that's based on extremely shaky ground.

As for how SS taxes are handled, I'm 100% in agreement with you.

Rich people don't have to leave a state to use tax avoidance strategies. I live in Washington state. The recent state tax increases have reduced total state tax revenue. That's the point of the Laffer curve, tax rate increases result in less tax revenue. Now exactly the shape of the curve, that's hard to say. But you are obviously past the maximum when a rate increase reduces tax revenue.

PS The last several CA (I used to live there) tax increases resulted in decreased tax revenue too.