Which the corporate overlords are going to spend billions to ensure it doesn't happen. I was quite sad when Bernie lost. He'd have tried to at-least shake the system.
>>"You may beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride..."
I have paid a small five-figure sum defending myself against various contempt of cop charges (multiple alleged violations over the years); my last arrest was for 0.009 grams [†] of marijuana (literally a flake of potleaf), wherein my Texas defense attorney [0] laid it out clearly: "if the marijuana laws in Texas changed, *I'd be out of the job..!" (boo hoo).
[†] same Class B Misdemeanor for all possession between 0-1.9999 ounces
[0] former Travis County prosecutor, of course; at the time, this should not even have resulted in an arrest ("arrest and release" was the county policy), but Rollingwood gonna Rollingwood (the wealthiest suburb of Austin)
Everything in the attention economy is. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. They are paired with some genuine uses like sharing knowledge or connecting with distant friends/family but ultimately the main engine in them is to steal attention and that will always be their most prominent effect on society.
I mean, there are plenty of social media mind viruses. But Zuck and Sheryl exhibit especially naked intent to get in bed with any dictator who will let them in, at the drop of a hat. The only metric they care about is growth. If burning America to the ground improved their numbers they would do it.
> the psychological scars of being used as a chess piece while Pete Hegseth thinks he’s a version of Call of Duty where the consequences aren’t real.
Majority of Americans voted for Trump. Trump and his goons like Hegseth, Bessent, Bondi don't really give a shit about Americans other than their close family.
We are Banana republic. Let's see how the midterms play out.
This is objectively not true. Alibaba, DoorDash, ARM, Slack, etc. were all SoftBank deals. Alibaba alone is considered one of the highest ROI's in the history of investing.
Does SoftBank have some absolute blunders on large bets? Totally. Do they make some super weird billion dollar bets? Absolutely. Can you scrutinize them for making some terribly and laughably large bets go to complete zero returns? Sure. But this would be like saying Michael Jordan had a "bad track record" for scoring points because he had games playing for the Wizards where he had like 5 or 10 pts in a game.
When you can throw billions around for investments then on balance you will make a lot of money because you can take a lot of risk. But it does not say anything about any particular investment and if you look at the ratio of good bets to bad bets then SoftBank is terrible. That does not mean they won't make money or that they won't be able to keep doing this. Capital - especially at this level - begets more capital.
> How does this explain a $20M bet on Alibaba that netted $60B?
It's a 26-year-old investment. The advisors who suggested it are long gone from SoftBank, and the stake in Alibaba was sold to provide liquidity for bagholder investments like WeWork.
SoftBank was lucky, and now their luck is gone. Son had an investment in Nvidia that would have been worth $100+ billion, but sold it in 2019 for only $3.6 billion. Uber is struggling, Arm is a laughingstock of a business, their stake in OpenAI is comically overleveraged, and Softbank Vision Fund is one of the most heavily ridiculed and mocked international VC funds anywhere in the world.
We have to move past a decades-old bet, SoftBank's current state is not reminiscent of their prior investments.
Luna, Terra, Sol, Astra - are a good setting tweak on how much you want to spend vs what you want to get out of it.
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