Did something happen in 2020? Something big??

in 2020, yes something bad happened, which negatively affected Trump's numbers. Read the report in the link.

yes effects of big exogenous shocks are famously limited to exactly presidential term boundaries.

effects of excuses are thankfully limited to presidential term.

Woah, great gotcha! Did you really come to Hacker News to denegarte people you thought didn’t have a basic understanding of Economics? Right now I have a problem with both. Maybe deregulating the SEC helps poor people? I don’t hear anyone making that argument right now though.

Sincerely, I think there is too much emphasis on "rich people bad", the assumption being it is a zero-sum game.

Instead, we should simply focus on making this more and more true:

"provide value to the world -> get rich."

I’m ok with that general idea. I’d like to see a lot more people worth 10-100 million, and less people worth 10-100billion, and I think there’s too much wealth being generated from financial games, and not enough from creating valuable goods and services, thus my particular concern about Musk going into the SEC.

The rich don't get richer by sitting in their labs and tinkering until they invent something that nobody had before. That's so last two centuries. The way they get rich now is by making us pay more for the same stuff we already had.

Um, my Tesla today is cheaper than an Acura I bought 20 years ago. Tech has been deflationary. And overall, quality of life and life expectancy has improved over time under Capitalism.

Sure, if someone has a moat, they will try to maximize their profit. Assuming fair competition though, I would expect a competitor to emerge.