Wealth and power are two different things, and the elite desire it for different reasons. The elite want to horde power because that's the natural instinct of humans and is a zero-sum game. If outsiders can have power, then they can eventually drive you out. The elite want to hold onto their power forever. That's why they spend a fortune on healthcare for themselves and are into transhumanism. Their biggest threat comes from anyone who can mobilize the middle class against them, and that's why they consistently back policies that will destroy these people while empowering their own allies (the laptop caste) as a replacement middle class. A trucking company for instance is upper middle class, but dangerous to the elite because they create actual value in the economy and have an independent base to oppose them. An NGO studying the effect climate change has on transgenders of color is also upper middle class, but creates no actual value (only the fictive value of GDP) and is entirely reliant on elite funding.
Wealth is a lot easier to explain. Creating new wealth requires a certain investment. Sometimes this wealth can be nigh-limitless, like investing a few trillion dollars every year for a few decades would open up the entire Solar System to human exploitation. However, it's usually easier to just take someone else's wealth. Da'Tavious doesn't need to invest his time in a job to make a hundred bucks when he can just hold up a white person or convenience store. The elite think this way too, and use their power to mug you in the form of public policy that benefits them and gives you little to nothing. For instance, lockdowns which close your business down but don't close down megacorps or foreign policy that supports aggressive sanctions against oil-producing nations while funding proxy wars against them all result in wealth transfers to the elite.
I can only speak for Burgerland, but here in the US the life of the middle class is fundamentally the same as the elites; the only difference is scale. We have cars- Toyotas and Fords instead of Porsches and Mercedes but we all have cars. We own a house and a small amount of land in suburbia, while elites have mega mansions and acres upon acres- but we all have a house and own land. We eat Walmart steak while the elites eat filet mignon, but it's still cow meat. The elites view themselves as better than anyone not of them- anyone not born into the right families, anyone who didn't go to a high-cost boarding school, and so on- but really, how can they truly be "better" if the only difference between their lifestyle and that of the gentry is simply a matter of scale? How can they be better if a man can be born a peasant, work hard, and die a rich man?
The only solution is to strip all that away from the peasantry.
It's always been like that. Free people (i.e. not serfs) existed throughout history and usually had exactly the same shit the elite did--they owned land, owned livestock, could afford a servant, and ate similar diets. But the difference between them and the actual elite was enormous. Most importantly, the elite
never had to worry about losing it all. If someone from the elite got fucked over, it was a national event--still is, look at the persecution of Donald Trump
. Nobody will cry if you get fucked over like that, and you won't even go to prison, you'll just die broke and in debt
.
There's also clearly other differences. The elite live to be 90+ on the regular because they can afford all the latest medical treatments. Most middle class families would be hard on cash if they had to pay for 7 heart transplants like David Rockefeller had (before he died at age 101). The elite also live a safer lifestyle than we do (unless they choose to do dangerous shit like visit the Titanic)--they don't take public transit, they can pay professionals to drive them around, and they live in gated communities with private security and bodyguards. That's why the real measure is how much of a household's income a given good costs, like for instance filling up a tank of gas costs me a few percent of my income every week, but a fraction of a fraction of a percent for someone in the elite.
