He is currently upper class by virtue of his net worth and literal title as a knight.

A bit off topic, but a knighthood doesn't make you upper-class. In England, the real upper-classes are landed nobles with hereditary titles (who will look down on any parvenu with a knighthood and a few billion).

Also most of the upper class don't have much money left, those houses cost a fortune to maintain.

The battle between capital and the labor is class warfare.

Maybe so, but traditional left-wing thinking would put Silicon Valley engineers firmly in the bourgeoisie—a group that pretends to have interests in common with the proletariat, but doesn't really. If it is class war, you guys really aren't on the same side as your nannies, cleaners, gardeners, and the people who serve you food in your free cafeterias. Their interests are very different, even if it pleases you to think that defending your elite benefits somehow helps them too.

(If you take the class-war rhetoric seriously, that is. Which I know most of you don't. Not really.)

They might have a lot more in common with the gardeners and carpenters if these hedge funds have their way. Capital is much better at capturing wealth than laborers and that's the core structural issue.

Do we know that the people laid off by Google, or advocated for layoffs by this billionaire, don't include the cleaners, gardeners and people serving food in the free canteen?

I think painting this as a "capitalists vs the left" thing is reductive and unhelpful. Personally, speaking as someone who Americans would probably consider extreme-left, I very much agree with your second paragraph, but I don't see this as "capitalism vs the left", I see it as the elite rich abusing their position to the detriment of everyone else. A story as old as time.

Then I guess he should stop engaging in class war, shouldn't he

Let's be honest, a big part of the goal of the fed action and these layoffs is to even the playing field between labor and capital. Silicon Valley type engineers especially were getting dangerously close to escaping precarity (and did in a lot of cases). Now the FAANG club gets to the join the rest of the precariat in the "I'm constantly worried about losing my job, probably shouldn't be too ballsy with my vacation or ask for more money" world. Obviously the $ values are higher than a lineworker at Ford, but lets be honest if you are a mid level dev with a family in silicon valley your standard of living is the same or below that line worker in the 70s.

> even the playing field between labor and capital

No, the goal was to keep it tilted in capital's favor. Which group wields greater decision-making power? Which type of income is more lightly taxed? Capital vehicles (corporations) have almost all of the rights and practically none of the responsibilities - or vulnerabilities such as mortality or geographic limitation - of human laborers. Yes, the playing field needs to be leveled ... the other way.

I wouldn't count among the downtrodden proletariat the extremely well-paid Silicon Valley engineers who sell themselves to rapacious advertising companies. This is one elite individual saying something other elite individuals don't like.

This is elite class war, it’s turning the low income against the high income to the benefit of the wealthy and elite. Software engineers are no doubt better off than the vast majority of people, top 3% easily when looking at income but most of them are still “wage slaves” and their luck can turn. Pitting us all against each other is the goal.

The goal is to make silicon valley engineers part of the downtrodden proletariat. Lots of jobs used to be high paying until they weren't.

Someone making $1m a year would need to work 7,400 years in order to be worth as much as this dude. Silicon Valley engineers are certainly well off but they are in nowhere near the same class as the kinds of people who are worth $7.48B.

He obviously should pay himself less so there is more money for the real value-generators. Owning Google stock doesn't help them do anything, but coding, testing, operating, marketing certainly does.