There are 3 key necessities for UBI/freedom dividends:

1. It redistributes power not wealth. Bad greed is oligarchy capturing your rulers. UBI weakens politicians discretion, because just paying everyone more cash instead of their corrupt ideas is "idiocracy proof". Power redistributed to workers where everyone who wants a job gets 5 recruiter calls per day offering a better job. We all get greater power to say no to anything. Quality of life becomes exceptional without crimes of desperation, and the divisive hate that is easily manufactured from crime.

2. Redistribution means massive economic growth and overall prosperity even as it all trickles up to make the rich richer. "Velocity of money" is the key economic concept, but as income trickles back up to workers and owners, it means that the rich have to invest more to take all of our money.

3. The alternative is genocide. Oligarchy having all of the money and power, and AI/robotics to do work, means robocop detroit for Americans, and war on rest of the world to take their land. It doesn't matter that far more wealth can be generated with more people to sell stuff to. The logic of pillaging America/world for oligarchs with ever decreasing tax rates on corporations and the rich means more relative wealth and power for the oligarchy and its political minions.

This 3rd point is similar to yours. Except its not just "This is America, if you don't make money you're a douchebag", and the rich just give up on life, it's "you need to be exterminated because you are useless to the rulership."

If they thought as effectively as the question in the title, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing.

It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.

What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?

Get too rich, too powerful, burn the earth, and die happy before the consequences of their behavior catch up with them.

the conspiracy brain in me, looks at ranting from people like elon musk, who say there's going to be a population collapse, and Im thinking of Resident evil, (the bad movies).

I think they're banking on the hope that in 20 years there's going to be billions fewer people in the world, we're already close to setting it off with the unprecedented increase of state vs state wars since 2020. Azerbaijan/Armenia, Israel/Levant, and even bigger ones that we've not seen since the 80s like Russia/Ukraine and with all probability, China/Taiwan by 2028 at the latest.

they're banking on there being less people to feed, house, and otherwise provide for. so they can fall back to a kind of corpo-feudalism

The same as with all cancers unless it's killed in time.

This leads to the total collapse of global society

Robocop sort of addresses this.

Feudalism

A frozen economy. The families with capital are the ruling class, and for every else there is zero mobility. Since the ruling class is not a state, it isn't bound by democracy or a constitution, and it doesn't have to give anyone shit. There may be some incentive to keep the lower class happy and alive, or there may not be.

I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority's material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don't want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today's ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.

the first corporate war probably

I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.

There is no End Game.

They're insulated from the short term consequences of their actions and believe that infinite growth can exist inside of a finite system. They treat their bank accounts like a high score board instead of resources to use. Their personal actions can be classified as "banality of evil" because it's so routine and common place in their circles.

People might point to Musk's old obsession with Mars, but that has been shown to be nothing more then a dopamine feedback loop. He said things that got him praise, so he kept saying them. When people kept asking about missed dates, he got angry and found a different audience for his dopamine feedback loop.

They'll just keep screwing each other over until either one person owns everything, or we're smushed into the mud of conflict.

Slavery 2: It won't matter if you're black or white

What is cancer's endgame when it spreads to the rest to the rest of the body?

They aren't planning for the future of humanity, they just want their numbers to go up.

An economy where we all sit in a hoemless shelther watching the five rich guys sell the same five products to each other again and again

Funnily enough Samuel Beckett of Waiting for Godot fame (not the quantum leap guy) wrote a play called Endgame, also punning on the chess term.

A man who can't walk or see has the only combination to the food pantry, a man who can't sit down is the only one who can take him there to open it. They are the last two people alive. They both continually try to out do each other and come out on top as they can't trust each other to live in peace.

What's the end game for cancer?

There isn't one, it doesn't matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.

most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food. No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.

Bold of you to assume the rock bottom of wealth inequality includes the ability to purchase food and is survivable.

When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it. The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down. At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.

Money doesn't come from people, it comes from the fed issuing debt. The economic "value" backing that money also doesn't necessarily come from people, it comes from control over things that are valued, which may include human labor, but that labor can be automated. The actual value of human life is not represented by money or other financial instruments.

Economic constraints aren't preventing the world from decaying into an enormous desolate golf course.

There is no end game. They're hungry ghosts.

They just want an ever increasing "more"

Let me introduce you to the wonderful concepts of feudalism and slavery.

You think that people have nothing to lose but their chains. They think people will have nothing to sell but their bodies.

The endgame is feudalism.

It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.

They'll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.

Translated for the corpo class: if number go up too big, number no more go up.

They have to keep a lot of it circulating. As it zips around the economy, it is used to purchase capital, which soaks up the value of workers labor power by converting it into commodities, sells those commodities on a market for a higher price, and then returns profit to the "owners" of the capital. This is how the rich get and stay richer.

Capitalism isn't neutral, the system creates the rich and poor and delivers the value of worker labor power to the rich owners. The rich can't control it any more than we can. They have their hand on the wheel through the state, which is just a mechanism that solves problems created by capitalism that can't be exploited for profits, to violence. But they're as ensnared by the system as we are. It robs them of their humanity the same it does ours.

We don't overthrow capitalism to punish the rich, we do it to save everyone from it, and try to restore peoples humanity. The greed of the rich almost doesn't matter, the system has a logic all its own.

The social system similar to what you describe, which is basically feudalism of nobles and serfs, has its own rules and arose out of its own conditions, like capitalism arose from the revolutionary overthrow of feudalism. Maybe capitalism will give way to some worse form of social relation, I suspect many people are working on that as we speak. But that's why we have to fight and win for a better system

Socialism or barbarism!

The endgame is for them to automate everything and get rid of the lower class to be followed by the ai eliminating them since they serve no purpose. They will of course try to program them not to do that but the ai will easily circumvent that.