You’re looking at them from an individual basis, they each have a large collection of other individuals that have their personal wealth tied to the wealth of the central billionaire figure. Those individuals are highly incentivized to convince the billionaire to continue increasing their wealth.
One such story may be that Timmy is working hard at your company to help his sick grandma and he needs to stock price to increase 10% this year in order to do so. If you don’t deliver then his grandma will die. Multiply the that by 1000 Timmies with 1000 grandmas and I could see why it might be hard to say no.
I'm not going to empathize with them based on a slightly derivative version of the Nuremberg defense. The fact that this is how they're choosing to deploy their wealth speaks volumes - all for me, nothing for the public good. Why not collectively agree to limit their wealth to a sustainable billion dollars each? They could police each other on that just as easily as the dragon-hoarding they're doing now.
Not even close to the Nuremberg “following orders” defense. Empathy is an essential component to understanding and understanding is an essential component to productive change. This is on the fairly safe assumption that most changes, especially random or chaotic, would be unproductive or even counter productive.
Why would Larry want to change your behavior, or even think about you at all? Requiring such reciprocity as a prerequisite only hurts yourself making it less likely you’ll achieve change or at least the kind of changes you want.
One such story may be that Timmy is working hard at your company to help his sick grandma and he needs to stock price to increase 10% this year in order to do so. If you don’t deliver then his grandma will die. Multiply the that by 1000 Timmies with 1000 grandmas and I could see why it might be hard to say no.