Prime example is oil wealth. With their massive coffers, fossil fuel companies could be leading the transition to renewable energy, massive increasing human wealth as they drive the cost of energy down and drive their former competitors out of business by acquiring all the new renewables startups that will become the large companies of the future.
Tech, and the HN crowd in general, pursues a strategy of generally increasing the pie size, of disrupting themselves before somebody else disrupts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the economy in developed countries. And in undeveloped countries it's painfully easy to see so many wealthy people maximizing their own position in society over maximally growing their wealth.
Why are they NIMBYs when they could make much more money redeveloping their best-positioned neighborhoods as massive apartments they rent out?
Why did they not let wages grow, when the resulting increase in consumption will make them more profit?
If rich people as a class really were interested in max growth, they would have stayed Fordist-Keynesianist, but that did not happen. And indeed growth, while still present, hasn't been what it was in the past.
The rich and powerful "don't like" growth? Well, they've been failing spectacularly for quite some time: maybe they aren't so powerful? It makes no sense.