system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why would it not be within the interests of the wealthiest individuals/companies to attempt to eradicate poverty?

Apologies in advance if this isn’t a particularly well thought out question - I have had no real education in economics so there may be an obvious answer to this. 

It is quite often a moral criticism of billionaires/multinational corporations that they don’t do enough to try to eradicate poverty - this is often seen to be evidence of them lacking on a moral basis. However, as far as my limited knowledge can make out, it seems to be almost as much of an example of them lacking on the level of enlightened self interest and rationality - I would have thought that it would be more profitable in the long term for them if poverty didn’t exist.

My logic for this is fairly simple and can probably be summed up by this statement: someone who can barely make ends meet and put food on the table isn’t going to buy a car (or house or any other type of product or service that isn’t part of the bare minimum). So long as someone is living in circumstances where they have little money, they are excluding themselves from the potential customer base of almost every company (and even out of those who do supply the bare minimum items, most of them have large numbers of more ‘luxury’ items that would be excluded such as almost all of the food in a supermarket that isn’t as cheap as possible). If poverty were to be eradicated, it would ensure that for the majority of companies almost the entirety of the population is a potential customer, rather than the smaller subset it is currently.

I understand there would be trade offs for this - it is my under that a less well off population creates more favourable labour market conditions for employers, as a desperate individual is more likely to agree to poorer (and thus cheaper) conditions. However, in the vast majority of cases it seems to me that the customer base of any given company will always be larger than its workforce, and by maximising it it also reduces reliance of repeat customers and other such things. Furthermore, while you might end up spending more on wages in a poverty free world, you would also have employees more likely to be wealthy enough to be able to buy your own products, meaning some of that money would end up reinvested into the company by itself.

Like I said previously, I understand that this is an incredibly simplistic argument based on limited knowledge, so I am sure I have almost certainly missed out on some of the fundamentals of economics. Furthermore, I am sure that said wealthy individuals and corporations have both a level of self interest that cannot be underestimated and large numbers of highly intelligent people being paid to further it, so if such a simple approach was within their interests they would already be performing it. With that in mind then (ideally without diving off the deep end too far into advanced economics!) what is the flaw in my logic?
gpt
I do agree with your logic that the economy is a positive sum game and richer customers are better overall. I'll add to that that reducing poverty can also increase people's productivity and thus mean we can all consume more. This is the same logic as to why it's better for a country to have richer trading partners than poor ones. 

But I'd like to raise a question: why would the wealthiest individuals or companies be particularly good at eradicating poverty?  If someone is living in poverty there are multiple potential reasons why. Perhaps they have mental health problems, or perhaps they have a disabled child requiring full time care or perhaps they can't find a house to rent due to zoning laws or perhaps they're living in a war zone or perhaps they're an ex-prisoner who is legally restricted from working most jobs. There's nothing about those situations that necessarily imply that a tech billionaire or Walmart is good at or even capable of fixing them all. 

One important concept in economics is "comparative institutional analysis". Different institutions (markets, governments, non-profits, etc) are good at different things. There's no simple one-size fits all answer. Not even for poverty. Governments are plausibly more competent at paying poor people money than at fixing difficult mental health problems, and some things, like changing bad laws, can only be done by governments.