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There are almost a thousand billionaires in the United States. About one third of them inherited their wealth; in the U.S., 70% of billionaires are billionaires because they started a company and were successful at it. Most of their wealth is tied up in their ownership stakes; if you were to confiscate the wealth of every single billionaire in the country, it would not fund the United States federal government for more than a single year. Asking them for money "when it's time to contribute to the public good" is pure grandstanding. They simply haven't got that much real, actual money. Their valuation is as real as international borders, that is: it takes its reality from the collective faith and expectations of humanity.
I know a handful of billionaires and many, many multimillionaires. I have also met government officials whose control over the economy and other things makes them effectively billionaires and millionaires, for all practical purposes, even when their personal assets are not that great. Wealth and power are functionally interchangeable. People in all such positions often develop strange outlooks on the world! They are frequently out of touch with the "normies."
To my eyes, then, your post reads approximately like this: "there are some powerful people doing things that upset me, and I think it's because they are too powerful and it has driven them insane. Can we pick some different people, empower them, and take this current batch down a peg?"
But of course, you've already seen what happens when people get power. Giving different people the power will not fix the problem. It will simply cycle the cast. China is full of "billionaires," not just the ~500 monetary billionaires but all the government officials with contextually absolute power. They're not any better (or worse), over there. They're just different people.
And, importantly, there's a distinction in how you get there and what the side effects are. In a capitalist system, the way to become a billionaire is to create or invest early in a billion dollar company. In a capitalist system with no holes or exploits, this means you generate multiple billions of wealth in the economy and extract a fraction of that as profit for yourself. In a capitalist system with holes and exploits that usually involves a combination of wealth creation, rent-seeking, and market capture. But it's still almost always positive sum. The world is so much better because Amazon exists than it was before it did.
Government bureaucrats mostly don't create wealth, they suckle on the teat of the wealth creators and enrich themselves off someone else's work. Theoretically there could be exceptions, if one has an especially important job and creates especially efficient legislation or regulations that smooth things over for everyone else as individuals they can do more good. But there aren't capitalist feedback loops, so there's nothing causing the better ones to be richer than the worse ones. Giving them more money and power might incentivize more people to want to be them, but that doesn't create more wealth the way incentivizing more people to want to be tech founders does. It just creates more competition to suck wealth that other people created.
Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos shouldn't be billionaires because they're good people. They should be billionaires because they reached into the void and pulled out billions of dollars of wealth and shared some of it with us, and kept some of it for themselves. They did that, who are you to confiscate it from them? And if you do, who else is going to risk reaching into the void when they could just become a confiscator instead and do the safer job of reaching into wallets?
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