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