However if the product is being sold you are still taking someone's money. If you wanted to purely increase wealth for everybody you would be giving away the product for free. Many no-profits do that. (duh)

Yet, the tradeoffs are complex and some economic activities are purely exploitative.

In fact, inequality is rising across various societies and quality of life is actually decreasing for hundreds of millions.

Wealth redistribution through taxes has been a cornerstone of modern society and one of the biggest push to move societies out of feudalism. And now we are witnessing something described as technofeudalism.

> If Elon hadn’t created his businesses, his wealth wouldn’t be in the hands of other people, it just wouldn’t exist.

Either Musk made cars entirely by himself (which is not the case) or his employees did it. You are assuming that such workers would have all been unemployed if Musk did not exist, which is very unlikely.

Also, it's false that ALL of Musk's wealth would not exist. Only the fraction due to value created by the company (if any). [And I repeat, the products are obviously created by the workers]

An interesting question would be: if company X never existed, could the workers be doing something more beneficial instead? Plenty of organization has been described as a net negative for humanity.

And this is without accounting for negative externalities, e.g. causing pollution, or making another company go bankrupt, regulatory capture, creation of monopolies and the list is pretty long.

> The global GDP increases over time, which I interpret has new wealth being created

That's incorrect. Part of GDP is due to production of products and services, but a significant part is due to speculation that is not backed by any increase in productivity.

Additionally, GDP is in no way able to measure overall real wealth, quality of life, access to opportunities and so on: not destroying the environment does not increase GDP. As much as going for a walk with your SO does not increase GDP.

> I also assume that over 1 or 2 generations that his wealth will mostly circulate around.

This is provably false.

No, they would work, but would they be more productive in those other jobs? Possibly not.

I wonder what would happen if current engineers at SpaceX were suddenly "redistributed" to Boeing or Blue Origin. Maybe they would raise the technical aptitude of those companies. Or maybe not, maybe the companies would grind them down to their corporate level.

You can demotivate smart people and reduce their creativity to almost zero by insisting on idiotic corporate rules and punishing them for "transgressions" (e.g. innovation that wasn't approved beforehand). They will still be working in highly qualified positions, but their collective effort won't be as productive.

It is notable what a big portion of contemporary technology is attributable to relatively small organizations (such as Bell Labs) which were able to motivate smart and creative people to do their best.

On possibly yes - it depends. Yet, the company mission and priority is usually "maximize shareholders value".

Not "maximize worker creativity and happiness and empower them as much as possible".

Not "maximize technology, wealth, quality of life for humanity"

The last two might sometimes happen as fortunate side effects. Often not. See all the complaints from Tesla workers around safety and anti-union activities.