[dragonwriter]

> This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators.

No, they aren't. “Job creators” aren't a thing. They are labor purchasers, but that's only incidental and to the extent that labor has no cheaper substitute for their commercial users.

[astrodust]

The true job creators are the people buying their products. The factories are just arbitrage between demand and raw materials.

[PeterisP]

The true job creators are the people who fill whatever is the bottleneck for demanding new jobs.

For industries and products where capacity exists but production is limited by demand, more people buying their products create jobs (and more capitalists won't).

For industries and products did not exist despite people wanting it, R&D who create those products create new jobs, and people wanting such products don't - the jobs won't ever happen unless/until the particular product gets developed.

For industries and products where volume is limited by outside competition, local jobs are created by effective management and capital investments that make production more effective and bring/keep the jobs locally. In any case, the main initiative for change and the possibility for action comes from the factory, and not from the consumers.

Statement "The factories are just arbitrage between demand and raw materials." has truth only for pure commodity industries - and is not at all true for companies like those built by Sam Altman and Elon Musk given as examples above.

[astrodust]

If nobody wanted cars then Tesla would be bankrupt. People wanting cars creates jobs for those in the car manufacturing business. If Tesla makes a better car, they might have more people working for them over time.

It's hard to say if that creates any jobs at all, or simply shifts jobs from other companies that make cars. A lot of the companies in the Sam Altman portfolio are involved in "disruption", which is to say, shifting jobs from one company to another. They're not net creators. In many cases these companies succeed because they require fewer people to operate, so they're job destroying by nature. Wether or not that's a bad thing is irrelevant here, it's just a fact.

The only thing that actually creates jobs is demand, and the only way to create demand is to radically reshape what society is. The automobile created a huge shift in demand: Many people wanted a car because of the economic opportunity it brought, and with the car came other opportunities, like owning a house in the suburbs, owning a cottage, travelling more, and so on. It encouraged people to take on debt, to spend money they normally wouldn't spend, and to work harder to afford it.

There hasn't been anything quite as profound as that in the last century. The introduction of the internet has, if anything, eliminated demand for many things previously taken for granted like print media.