Capitalism is kind of like a control system that selects for accumulation and profit. The ones at the top are those that have been filtered for, and have the most. If they fail, they are filtered out. This is why Marx many times explained how capital itself is above individual capitalists. I recommend reading Marx on Capital as a Real God by Ian Paul Wright, for a bit of a funky explanation of this.

The processes of capitalism demand reproduction on an expanded scale. Simple reproduction on the basis of capitalist development isn’t really sustainable, they are propelled forwards. In other words, grow or die, at economic scale. Individual megafirms, the ones with the elites at the top, have to continue growing and swelling until they burst, because they are not the masters of capital. That doesn’t make them guiltless, but more like priests of capital, as Roderic Day puts it.

Well Marx already talked about this. Capital is like a shark, if it stops swimming (accumulating), it dies. And capitalists are the physical embodiment of the system, its avatars. They aren’t individual “people” anymore, just vessels for capital. Their desires and ideology become perfectly aligned with the mechanics of capital.

In any given economy, there is only a finite amount of living labor to be hired out, a finite amount of embodied labor in goods/services to consume, and a finite amount of embodied labor in the form of machinery/assets.

All of this can be bought with money, and the correspondence between money and amount of labor is quite strong (not on a transaction to transaction basis, but on an aggregate basis)

So if everyone is competing to grow their amount of money, then they will get a bigger share of the pie. And if you don’t grow your own amount of money, you will pay for other capitalists share of the pie.

In market terms, no matter how good of a business you have, other capitalists will always be eyeing your market share. Sit on your ass too long and it’ll all be gone.

Under capitalism: Working class people think in terms of owning a house or a hobby item they like. Billionaires think in terms of owning countries.

The working class is (forgive my wording if it misuses terminology at all) alienated from the means of production and distribution, and as a result, alienated from power. Their sense of power gets reduced to a very confined scope of trying to have some kind of control over their personal life in their personal space (such as an apartment or a house, if they are not homeless on top of everything else - sometimes a singular room in a house, as they may have to share space with others and thus share control over what happens in it).

Billionaires are in touch with the means of production and distribution through ownership of capital and so they have a very direct relationship with large-scale power. In fact, they can’t really be a billionaire and not engage with the dynamics of large-scale power and ownership. Unless they want to try to sign off all of that capital/power to someone else (highly unlikely, since it would now mean they’re in the working class and subject to its oppression and anxieties), they’re going to be compelled by their position to manage the capital. Managing the capital requires a mindset of accumulation. If they don’t do anything with it, it can go into decline, lose its value, get bought out, etc., and then we’re looking at them heading toward being in the working class through loss of their capital that way. Capital doesn’t stay in a static state of value, but fluctuates based on the value of property, stocks, etc., so they have to stay ahead of this. This means looking for ways to increase the value of the assets they have. In order to increase the value, they have to do the typical capitalist things: exploit the working class, be a landlord, take advantage of imperialism, etc.

In order words, although you can probably be a billionaire who hands off the labor of growing your capital to a third party in exchange for a cut of the plunder, you can’t really sit on the wealth and not have anyone do anything with it and still maintain it. Because its value is part of a fluid system, a system where entities are in brutal competition of win/loss, looking to take control over somebody else’s thing to strengthen the power of their own.

There’s probably a more technical diamat language way to explain it, but it’s like a whole different relationship to power, is what I’m trying to get at.

Capital selects for a certain restless ruthlessness. The ones who are capable of retiring and enjoying do so before they get very big, and these generally do not build or retain serious influence within the system.

In the social production of their existence. Men (as in Humans) inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relation of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitute the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite -forms of social consciousness-. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

Karl Marx attempted to explain this here, however like all short explanations they fall prey to misinterpretations. You really have to read das Kapital. At least the 1st Book.

If you do that you can then read Antonio Gramsci, his prison notebooks, he has a lot to say on the topic of Cultural Hegemony, his work is difficult to digest, however, it’s written in Prison, during fascist rule, he substitutes a lot of terminology, I mean…, the guards would have confiscated it otherwise. A lot of the work is written in response to other works, so it can get quite tricky honestly.

The elites barely work at all minus some few exceptions. Their wealth just multiplies due to compounding interest by being invested in an investment fund or whatever (remember the rice chessboard story?), the people working hard to mantain high interest rates and thus multiply clients wealth are finance white collar workers who they themselves not have much wealth and act as the guardian hyenas of the elites looking to get a comission.

They have class consciousness.

It all comes down to competition, the motor of any capitalist society. If an enterprise does not strive to increase productivity, and therefore not generate enough surplus value, it will fall behind and be driven out from the market by other enterprises.

Think of it as a game of monopoly. There can only be one winner, and if you don’t play as ruthlessly as possible, you will end up like all but the winner: bankrupt.

The logic of capitalism demands that they play this way. The bigger your lead, the more mistakes you can make, but anyone who stops playing completely, or who makes too many mistakes will lose.

So what compels them to work hard (not productively, but still hard) to ammass ever more money?

One side point: most capitalists hire advisors and managers to do this for them. They don’t actually need to work that hard. Musk spends most of his day shitposting on twitter.

The capitalists own the means of production. That produces income beyond what they need. The surplus money allows them to buy more productive assets. These assets only need to be sold if the owner has a LACK of money (i.e. they hit a rough patch). Hence it continues to accumulate among fewer and fewer rich people who pass it to their next generation. They are in competition WITH EACH OTHER to accumulate assets.

So what compels them to work hard (not productively, but still hard) to ammass ever more money? Surely it’s easier to sit in a pool all day and collect tithes rather than strategizing about the new merger, the new apartment block to buy, the next politician to bribe ecc.

LOL. They don’t work at all. They employ someone to do the work whether it is the strategizing or the bribing.

wealth is power, if your wealth increases you buy more businesses, control more people, exert more power over politicians. in the most basic way, their pocket change can afford to hire like 10k mercenaries to do stuff, if you are multimillionaire you can afford like one dude (or more likely pay kidnapping insurance) and you have to think about it.

It is because of the Liberal ideology by Adam Smith in his book called “The Wealth of Nations”. Adam Smith claimed that maximal profit is good because it could only be achieved through mutual cooperation with mutual interest. He neglected that reality that deception and unequal market power ensure that a person can maximize profit at the cost of other people. The belief that private firms are all about maximal profit is also flawed since a person could not possibly know how to maximize profit over the long term due to the complex interaction between many factors. Private firms might need to depend more on connections, social relationships, and reputation for their success. They might depend on traditional norms, values, and beliefs to address lack uncertainty to maximize profit. A business manager can be like academic professors, doctors, and public officers in their morality.

Chapter 25, Vol. 1, Das Kapital.