Well, sometimes they only do stuff that should be illegal.
Superfast arbitrage, which is Jane Street's main thing as far as I understand, doesn't really produce anything of value to humanity. Yeah, I guess the contributions to OCaml are worth something, but maybe not 10 billion?
Jane Street is one of the slower market making firms and generates a significant share of revenue from being everywhere on everything (MUCH easier said than done). You want to trade some Canadian lumber ETF? Jane Street will be there. Some bond product with constituents that trade across 3 different trading sessions? Jane Street's active in that market. None of that is to say they don't have any presence in major products or don't have real short term alphas/edges of course.
They've never been at the forefront of latency games, like Jane Street isn't the firm sweeping equity markets since they have the fastest radio network out of CME (dubious value) or getting their quotes first-in-line every time.
They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.
well, running the financial system is overpaid work but it's the high-order bit in the current form of capitalism.
it's the operating system, some people might think it's a tax on everything, some people might think it provides the foundation to produce everything of value.
similarly, Google is the high-order-bit in the information or content economy, the creators get underpaid, the people who do ad optimization get overpaid.
no financial markets -> no IPOs -> no VC -> no Google and Silicon Valley as we know it.
the closer you are to the money and the transactions, and the high-order bit, the better the opportunities to redirect and organize to your advantage, and the more you get paid.
