You seem to believe the rich have the ability to somehow buy up all the supply of some good (land, water) and then arbitrarily raise the price.
As they buy up premium estates in major cities around the world, supply gets constrained, more people gets priced out of home ownership and must agree to pay ever increasing rents to those investors.
You are deeply confused. Buying up housing does not reduce the supply of living space; similarly, a rich person investing in a copper mine does not reduce the supply of copper. If the rich person makes improvements (e.g., buying land and building flats on it, buying a copper mine and expanding it) then they increase the supply.
Again, where in Piketty's book do you believe he shows that the rich buy up and artificially limit the supply of a scarce resource? Please cite a page #.
When there are 100 houses and 100 buyers in market, demand and supply is met and likelihood that transactions will yield fair prices is high. When investors from China and Wall Street descend on markets, you suddenly have 200 buyers and only 100 houses in market. If you live in a major city in western world, go meet the real estate agent nearest to you. Ask them how many bidding wars happen and how many deals are all cash. Most all-cash deals are almost always investor purchase. This is the reason (along with local laws on new construction) why we have housing inflated by massive 10% a year even though population gain is all but negligible. The result is that typical family now pays huge chunk of their income in highly inflated mortgage payment which is nothing but wealth transfer from them to super rich who hogged up critical resource in the hope to increase their investment return.
You are conflating supply of housing with real estate speculation. You might as well complain that GOOG is up $750 and AMZN is $630; this is completely true, but it doesn't make searching the internet or buying stuff online cost more.
He may be doing that, but he is not alone: the government has spent the past 8 or so decades trying to conflate the two in everyone's mind, and at this point, the only way to keep that up is to make housing into a de-facto collectible by strictly limiting its supply. This means that all those terribly high housing costs in SF are mostly economic rent, which is not productive and also tends to increase inequality. But that's not a problem caused by billionaire business owners, for the most part. It's caused by upper middle class worries about their speculative investment and the schools their children would go to, and the resulting regulatory capture.
As they buy up premium estates in major cities around the world, supply gets constrained, more people gets priced out of home ownership and must agree to pay ever increasing rents to those investors.
You are deeply confused. Buying up housing does not reduce the supply of living space; similarly, a rich person investing in a copper mine does not reduce the supply of copper. If the rich person makes improvements (e.g., buying land and building flats on it, buying a copper mine and expanding it) then they increase the supply.
Again, where in Piketty's book do you believe he shows that the rich buy up and artificially limit the supply of a scarce resource? Please cite a page #.