My understanding is that unchecked wealth only remains that way until its owner acts irrationally on a stock exchange, at which point it is quite rapidly checked and becomes someone else's unchecked wealth.

Which is to say that Elon Musk can inflate any market he wants, but only by losing sums of money that will become increasingly significant as more and more people find out about the free cash giveaway.

I’ve used it.

There’s no functional difference in how markets work when 99% of wealth is owned by a handful of kings vs 99% of wealth being owned by a handful of oligarchs.

I don't really think so. You just swapped the term king to Oligarchs. In fact the Oligarchs are even worse because people think that they have freedom when they might not in fact have such freedom in the first place.

I swapped “kings” plural for “oligarchs” plural

I am laughing if its a joke lmaooo, just now realized it all of a sudden lol

pardon me I wrote king instead of kings and what you wrote in this comment felt like questionable to me first but now comical LMAO.

But my point still stands and aside from this mistake, I am curious in knowing the real answer to my question even now!

I don’t have an opinion on if it’s worse or not because some people mistakenly think they are free.

I meant that from the perspective of how market forces play out, hyper concentration of wealth into a few actors looks the same whether the title of the those actors is “king” or “oligarch”.

You start losing the wisdom of the crowds effect the market gives if you have a handful of people making the decisions for the entire market