I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to understand what the GP means in practice. I know people sometimes use questions passive aggressively, but that wasn't my intent. A more even distribution of all the wealth looks like people having a few thousand dollars of wealth. Much less if we're equalizing the whole world and not just the US. What are we imagining happens?

I'm from a former Communist state (one of those states that became Communist at Soviet-tank-barrel-point :-) ). So Communism doesn't have much appeal to me.

My personal perspective is that equalizing things fully doesn't work. You want incentives to motivate people. However, it's quite amazing what motivates people - after all, for the average billionaire going from $62bn to $63bn isn't really some sort of milestone, unless they somehow surpass some other billionaire. Sometimes the things that motivate people are a lot more fine grained that it seems. So pure financial motivation is rarely the main incentive.

On the other hand, such huge imbalances do eat away at democratic principles.

My personal opinion is that at some point, companies should be treated as utilities/companies of vital national interest. After all, that's how rich people make most of their money, through shares, not through salaries.

So, basically, once a company is taller than X, the country this company is based on gets a certain share of the company, 5%, 10%, 20%, it doesn't matter. I'd also make these shares non-voting. Even better, I'd force these companies to give out a certain percentage of these shares to employees (after all, they're "the people").

We'd have fewer billionaires, we'd have more stable middle class people, we'd have higher state revenues, we'd have less of a disconnect between totally private companies, regular people and governments.

As the owner of a company, you have a choice: create a huge company and have to share the spoils or stay small and nimble and have greater control.

Let's imagine the US govt takes 10% of the shares of Amazon. These are non-voting shares. Amazon doesn't pay a dividend as far as I know, so what is the point? The government doesn't have control over the company, the government doesn't get any revenue. The government can't sell the shares because then it just has to come confiscate 10% more shares from Amazon.

How do I, as a regular citizen, benefit from this? Is there some mechanism I'm not seeing? Because it feels like it's just a meaningless paper transfer.

Amazon won't pay dividends for a while. A country lasts centuries.

Secondly, that's why I was also thinking of a variant where employees get shares, too.

What is the difference between Amazon giving me, an imaginary Amazon employee, $100 in cash vs $100 in stock? Amazon is a publicly traded company, so any employee can choose to buy stock. Is the idea to force the employees to hold the stock without being allowed to sell it? If they can't sell it, what value do they get from it?

As an investment strategy, I never hold stock in a company I'm working for. That puts too many eggs in one basket. If the company fails for some reason, not only have I lost my job but I've also lost my retirement savings. I would personally oppose being compensated in company stock and would sell it ASAP if given the option.

Dividends, influence (the employee shares would have voting rights).

I'm not saying it's the best option or something I studied deeply, but we need something better.

Otherwise, with automation, we're back to feudalism.