My cynical take is that the rest of us will be funneled into endless war and plague scenarios until the population is small enough to be less of a threat to those who enjoy that concentrated wealth.

There are probably easier and less chaotic ways. If you get like a nice AI enhanced VR world and some AI generated new drugs and such you can just have everyone live out their existence in a parallel reality in some kind of an oblivion. I’d much rather have that as a rich person than billions of dead and everything destroyed