Everything I've seen feels like the aftermath of a leveraged buyout.

Yeah they don't want to destroy everything, they want to own everything, and shrink the costs of ownership by any means necessary. Labor costs are one of the more untolerable aspects of ownership of entire industries.

I haven't seem much evidence of them wanting to destroy the economy. Trump may do some damage with his trade war everyone and run up the debt policy but I think he wants America to do well even if the policies are kind of dumb? (Brit here - I may be quite wrong).

This only works if they are able to detach wealth from the cost of labor (ie. AI for service jobs robots for physical jobs). At that point the populace will have no way to generate value so the elites dont need them anymore. It remains to be seen if this comes to pass. My daily AI screwups need to be fixed if we are to even consider this.

I didnt say it was going to work. They are morons.

Sounds like Yanis Varoufakis's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism

Varoufakis is a member of the World Economic Forum, comes from a wealthy family and his wife is the daughter of the biggest clothing manufacturer in Greece. He's part of what he complains about.

In feudalism, there is some mutual dependence despite hostility. The peasants need the nobles to defend them from other depredation, and the lords need the peasants to feed them and fight their wars. The only problem is that during the future, if automation continues, the proletariat/peasantry will be surplus to requirements, i.e. not needed by the ruling class, so it won't really be feudal.