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This is a big deal. The corporate cultures of Musk Inc, Alphabet and Anthropic, and probably most of the other founder-controlled tech megacorps, are all such that your equity is de facto a perpetual non-voting zero-coupon preference share. Mark Cuban famously said that these should be valued in the same way as baseball cards.
I don't really see how the shareholder agreements would constrain someone if they were in a position to "take over the lightcone".
It's the standard problem of constitutional governance, you can write the best constitution ever, the hard part is getting them to follow it.
Shares in any company basically seem dependent on the US government having more power over at that company and the ability to hold them to their arrangement.
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I think this is an oversimplification. I imagine that if Anthropic takes over the light cone, ASI Claude might allocate 1% of its solid angle to shareholders (for them to use in not-abhorrent purposes). They might likewise allocate another percent evenly to all of humanity alive at singularity. So if you invested a hundred dollars in them you might end up with twice the real estate. This seems like a decent enough return of investment.
Of course, it also depends on ASI Claude judging that investing in Anthropic was an ethical thing to do which should be encouraged through acausal trades. If instead it finds that Anthropic was reckless in building it then it might instead reduce the allocations for anyone involved in its creation. Personally I will not be investing in them because it is unclear to me if they are net positive to my ethics.
In a world in which corporate governance really starts to look like actual governance, "a controlling interest is vested in Amodei's descendants" is not the most, uh, enlightened, form of government I'd choose to opt for. If you squint, maybe USD starts looking like shares of America, Inc (tm): we can issue bonds or mint new shares to cover debts, for example, but we don't weight votes by dollars.
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