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No account can be nuked by anyone else, regardless of how much stake they have.

It's a figure of speech meaning the account rendered powerless or useless. It is easily done to a minnow or even dolphin account whose reputation being destroyed can mean no longer being able to reach an audience making both social interactions and monetary gains significantly more difficult. For example it is a nuked account when downvoted so many times that the account holder is forced to power down and move to another account or another platform. Larger accounts that do not post can also be rendered powerless (proven by the abit&smooth experiment before the hardfork) but what you say about this user not having special privileges is a lie. We can see he is not held accountable like everybody he holds accountable himself. Blind eyes are turned with every thing that this user does that other users cannot do without "having their account nuked" or rendered powerless.

It makes me wonder how incestuous the top really is.
How many of the accounts with four digit numbers are all the same person?

Actually I can answer that. 4 of the accounts up there in the top 10 if you include @steemit appear to be @ned. I believe @freedom to be a developer but not a co founder. @blocktrades is an early investor. @val-a is an employee and I'm not sure who @mottler is but I believe them all to be 4 different people. Which brings us to #6 BS or NGC or engagement or whatever you wanna call him has climbed back up despite powering down heavy since the 13 week power downs started and maintains his spot as a top "investor" who clearly never paid a penny into the system aside from maybe buying the accounts off some rage quitters.

Yeah! Crapitalism.
Id bet the first 10k accounts that are still active are heavily salted with insiders playing roles.
#m2c

I like this.

All minnows can and should do at this point is cash out and leave steemit to bernie and his bot army. It's a lost fight because the people with the power put their greed waaay ahead of their desire for steemit to be a successful content platform. And since that's not about to change, and bernie and his bots will just get stronger, I recommend you cash out and seek out other platforms for content monetization.