[keeda]

Here's a useful, easy-to-understand number: "Exactly zero"

That is the answer to the question: "How many of the top 50 billionaires in the world have NOT been in legal trouble for anti-worker, anti-consumer or anti-competitive practices."

Try it yourself! If you ask it to, Google AI Overview will even detail the infractions of each billionaire on the list.

[rayiner]

The fact that lawsuits exists doesn’t prove that unfair practices account for any particular share of the wealth. You can’t just wave your hands like Glenn Beck and say “connect the dots.”

[keeda]

Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire. The fact remains that every single of the top billionaires has been convicted for patterns of exploitation. Are we to reasonably expect that all of these were random, uncorrelated one-off occurrences rather than a pattern of behavior?

And that still underplays their overall scope of culpability. As a lawyer, you are probably best positioned to appreciate how asymmetrically difficult it is for anyone but the most well-funded to realistically take these giant companies to court.

[rayiner]

> Saying "lawsuits exist" obscures the fact that they have almost all resulted in convictions and penalties per billionaire.

You need to quantify it for these lawsuits to support your point. The fact that these companies sometimes color outside the lines doesn’t negate the enormous value they create otherwise.

You know who else has lost tons of lawsuits and paid a huge amount in penalties? The federal government. 40,000 lawsuits are filed agains the federal government annually. The government pays out billions of dollars a year for various wrongdoing: https://settlementinsight.com/research/federal-government-pa.... By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.

[keeda]

Here's a site you could play with: https://violationtrackerglobal.goodjobsfirst.org/ -- enter any of the large companies you want and see the laundry list of convictions, sometimes multiple per year with penalties and settlements ranging from 6-figures to 10-figures. That is a pattern of behavior.

Yes, they create enormous value, but they get convicted of rule-breaking with such regularity and such large penalties that "coloring outside lines" is not a "sometimes" thing but rather a standard mode of operation. At that point it becomes impossible to separate the genuine value created versus the revenues generated from exploitation.

As an example, look into Project Bernanke, which is part of Google's convictions in the latest Ad Tech antitrust it lost, wherein they rigged all their ad auctions to benefit themselves: https://www.adtechexplained.com/p/google-project-bernanke-ex... -- now try to explain how we could separate that from the profits they made during all those years, which would also require one to consider how they profited from the lock-in they reinforced through that time.

> By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.

I never said "the entire value" (see point above about attribution) but yes, it applies to governments too. From the site you linked the top reason for lawsuits seem to be Breach of Contract, which does sound somewhat "exploit-y" to me.

[callmeal]

>By your logic, we can assume that the existence of these lawsuits and payments means that the entire value of the government can be attributed to exploitation.

In the US? most def. I don't even know where to start with all the exploitative practices of the government - Regan's strike busting is a good place to. And don't forget the institutional practices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline