In 1985, the most powerful tech company in the United States was IBM. It was a giant of its era, boasting the highest market capitalization and the most substantial profits globally. To sustain this vast empire, IBM employed nearly 400,000 people. Joining IBM meant a family entering a stable middle-class life. Back then, corporate growth followed a linear logic: to earn more money, you needed more people. IBM’s prosperity directly supported the dignified livelihoods of 400,000 middle-class families and generated millions of additional jobs in surrounding service industries. That was a capitalism where benefits were widely shared. Now consider today. The current tech giant is Nvidia. Adjusted for inflation, Nvidia’s current market capitalization is twenty times that of IBM in 1985, and its profits are five times greater. By the old logic, Nvidia should be a super-empire with millions of employees, right? The reality is the opposite. Nvidia has only about 30,000 employees—roughly one-tenth of IBM’s workforce at its peak. This is an extraordinary achievement, yet it’s also deeply unsettling: creating twenty times the wealth requires only one-tenth the human labor.