Fwiw I agree with you in disliking the “eternal power“ dynamic that seems to come with being rich. I’d prefer to solve this by requiring more disclosure in lobbying efforts, restricting the kinds of donations you can make, etc. Money shouldn’t lead to political power IMO.
I'm saying that a system in which someone with poor judgement manages to accrue his level of assets is broken somewhere.
Policy settings under which "having capital" allows you to grow your wealth while making terrible decisions are bad policy settings.
Various alternative policies exist, the most obvious of which is adjusting taxation settings such that growing your wealth requires consistently making good judgement calls.
I'm pointing out that across a great many economic nations, times, and economic systems, the core problem of every social system is not the obvious stuff like "how do we allocate resources" - it's "how do we remove bad decision-makers" - because those people are implementing "how we allocate resources".
There's a great many ways to solve this problem, but there's little evidence that _anything_ is currently being tried. I'd support any policy that seemed reasonably likely to improve this situation.
This is a difficult task, because people with decision-making power tend use that power to alter the system to solidify their position.
Capitalism, at its finest, does this by letting people make bad decisions with their money until they haven't got any. This was an improvement on, say, holding wars until enough people decision-makers get killed off. However, a variety of long-term policy shifts have meant this no longer appears to happen - merely possessing capital is so profitable that even astonishingly poor decisions cannot reduce your wealth enough to matter.
IMO, through this statement Larry Ellison has demonstrated the kind of poor judgement which a functional society cannot tolerate in a decision-maker, and lacking an effective way to remove this from the decision-maker pool is the primary cause of societal trouble today.