What's the far future end-state that these shareholders and execs envision? Companies with no staff? Just self-maintaining robots in the factory and AI doing the office jobs and paperwork? And a single CEO sitting in a chair prompting them all? Is that what shareholders see as the future of business? Who has money to buy the company's products? Other CEOs?
That seems pretty optimistic. The shareholder / capital ownership class isn't exactly known for their desire to spread that ownership across the public broadly. Quite the opposite: Fewer and fewer are owning more and more. The more likely case is we end up like Elysium, with a tiny <0.1% ownership class who own everything and participate in normal life/commerce, selling to each other, walled off from the remaining 99.9xxx% barely subsisting on nothing.
> The shareholder / capital ownership class isn't exactly known for their desire to spread that ownership across the public broadly.
This seems like a cynical take, given that there are two stock markets (just in the US), it's easy to set up a brokerage account, and you don't even need to pay trading fees any more. It's never been easier to become a shareholder. Not to mention that anyone with a 401(k) almost surely owns stocks.
In fact, this is a demonstrably false claim. Over half of Americans have owned stock in every year since 1998, frequently close to 60%. [1]
