besides spend it on frivolous shit like yachts and planes and stuff, there's no way it's all liquid. do they just park all their billions in a bunch of investment vehicles and wait for it to propagate itself? don't they get bored of just waiting and watching line go up?
Companies are democratically run on behalf of the shareholders. One share is one vote (you can buy and sell shares - see if you can spot the problem with this form of democracy!). The wealthiest people have most of their worth in shares, which is to say votes in what companies do. So that's what they do - vote on what a company's worth of labor gets used for. Directly using the company to enrich yourself is illegal (and it's a crime against other capitalists so it actually gets prosecuted), but directing entire divisions towards whatever vanity projects you like (life extension, self-driving cars, anything Elon Musk does) is allowed, as is generally enriching all share-holders including yourself (which is what Jeff Bezos does, because of course the wealthiest person is someone who enjoys wealth for its own sake).
so hellworld is just the natural state of things when altruism isn't profitable?
Well, what I just described is capitalism, so I wouldn't call it "natural" exactly. It's a socially constructed thing - no law of nature says people get to buy and sell votes on what people do with their labor, we just do it. And that puts the decision on what people do with their labor in the hands of people whose primary concern is the ability to get more money to buy more control over labor, which, yeah, doesn't line up with altruism very often.