[andrepd]

17 firms manage over 40t dollars in assets. Tracing the people on the board of those firms, who actually make the decisions, we arrive at about ~200 people. By making their decisions exclusively based on profitability, they perpetuate things like environmental damaging industries (and of course their lobby to delay any action on climate change, extremely profitable decision), or cigarrete companies (the biggest killer of the 20th century, let that sink in). It's profoundly undemocratic, the disproportionate power those people wield to shape the course of the world.

It's detailed e.g. in this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40923001-giants , which also includes influent orgs like the group of thirty in its count, and of course heads of state of powerful countries.

Also the well known fact that the eight richest people are worth more than the bottom 3,800,000,000, but that's a separate metric.