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I can definitely see how a super intelligence might be able to build an even better super intelligence, but it seems unlikely there wouldn't be some substantial diminishing returns at some point in the process. And if those happen when it's still within the relative grasp of humans, then conquest by them would be a lot more difficult, just like how smart humans don't actually seem to be ruling the world over dumb humans. That it too could replicate and do so near perfectly helps that (if it was 100 humans vs 100 smarter robots, the robots probably win) but it would have a ways to go to get past the "just nuke the server location lol" phase of losing against dedicated humans.
IIRC the correlation between IQ and net worth (roughly proportional to what fraction of the world you rule) is like 0.4; I'd agree that's not very impressive, but if there's a single more significant factor I don't know what it is.
I'd argue that there's a strong restriction-of-range effect here, though. Humans went through a genetic bottleneck 20k generations ago, and our genetic diversity is low enough that the intellectual difference between "average environment" and "the best we can do if cost is no object" is two standard deviations. If you consider intelligent hominids just a little further removed (Neanderthals, Denisovians, and there's fainter evidence of more), there was enough interbreeding to pick up a couple percent of their genes here and there but it's not too much an oversimplification to just say we wiped them out. And that's just a special case of animals as a whole. Wild mammals are down to about 4% of mammal biomass now, and that's mostly due to deliberate conservation efforts rather than any remaining conflict. A bit more than a third of biomass is us, another several percent is our pets, and the majority is the animals we raise to eat.
It definitely 100% helps to be intelligent, but net worth isn't really that proportional to the fraction of the world you rule, especially when you exclude the times where someone took power and then used that power to become wealthy. There's been plenty of idiots in powerful positions before (like most of Russian history), there are plenty of idiots in power today and there will be plenty of idiots in the future.
Putting it down to just mammal biomass is misleading IMO, we make up 0.01% of total biomass and 2.5% of animal biomass. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth
The majority of life on earth are plants, accounting for over 80% and including bacteria it goes up to 95% of life. These are not just dumb, they are (to the best of our knowledge) incapable of thought and yet not only dominate the planet but do so through such an extreme that we can not live without them.
Even the very animals we eat as food are thriving from the perspective of reproduction and evolution. Until humans are gone (or stop eating them for some reason), their survival is all but guaranteed. Happyness might be something we as thinking beings strive for, but not necessary from the biological perspective of spread spread spread. Our pets are very much the same way, they benefit drastically being under the wing of humanity.
An AI might not be in need of humans in the same way, especially as we begin to improve on autonomous movement but human conquest of Earth is not a great example to use IMO. The greatest and smartest intelligence ever will keep us around if we're seen as useful. They'd probably us keep around even if we aren't as long as we don't pose a threat.
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