The Five Tech Kingdoms: Was, Is, Will Be, Could Be
Who will be there collecting and safeguarding genetic data?
The only reason for a state to allow monopolies is so that they might eventually become national champions. I think about this truism often when I consider investing.
Of course no investor likes to use the dreaded “m-word” lest it get the attention of regulators (especially now) and we mustn’t have that happen! Or so the wrong thinking goes. (I’ve come to the conclusion though that sometimes the best thing for a stock is not to do a terrible merger!)
So instead, we look for businesses that have “strong network effects” and “pricing power” and so on. We look for monopoly by another name.
I’m not yet persuaded to be against all monopolies all the time. Indeed it may well be the case that there are no good monopolies—only necessary ones—and that the case as advanced by Matthew Stoler in Goliath is true.
I suspect we do need to roll back a lot of these monopolies, particularly when they’ve become penetrated by foreign and/or criminal interests.
Careful readers of this Substack will know that I’ve made a study of the five kingdoms of our time: Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Understanding these monarchies is terribly important for would be investors, especially as acquisitions, though down, continue to displace IPOs.
It’s my contention that a lot of the problems we have in our society today come from this concentration of corporate power, which, in turns, leads to (foreign)-compromised power.
If you run a monopoly, a state will always run you. The question is which state or states.
I crudely laid that out in a sort of chart on my Twitter.
Facebook a.k.a. Meta
Was… Likud.
We’ve written about this Facebook history here. Think of it. Sheryl Sandberg’s parents were deeply involved in Israeli activity within the U.S. Today she’s married to an Israeli and has a sister who works for ISRAID.
Is… Labourite British. To study Nick Clegg’s history is to strongly suspect that Mi6 has taken over the only bits that really mattered at Facebook.
Will be … lost in the metaverse, pretending that the metaverse is real. It isn’t.
I suspect that Facebook will survive though — if only because it has a very large scale.
Amazon
Was… WASP CIA (Bezos). We’ve discussed this at length by paying especial attention to Bezos’s grandfather.
Is… Jewish MBA and Big Law.
Will be… in the cloud, but disorganized.
There are, of course, real problems at Amazon, though. It’s messy.
The health stuff won’t really work, at least not to the extent it needs to work. They should go into genetics. They won’t though because that’s too controversial.
My sense is that Amazon won’t do as well because there isn’t as much of a desire to consume by the wider public.
It’s likely too soon to tell but I think we may have seen peak Amazon. Could we please wrest Bezos from retirement?
Apple
Was … a weird fusion of Lebanese cult/German mysticism, Polish-Scotch Irish workmanship, and Jewish-Canadian-American-Chinese mining/supply lines genius.
Ah yes, I suspect the real story about Apple involves Robert Friedlander. You’ve likely never heard of him but I think he was a key player in exposing Jobs to the Eastern way of thinking (and therefore Eastern foreign influence).
There are soupçons of this sort of thing throughout the Walter Isaacson book. I’ll copy the relevant section of Wikipedia for you.
During his time at Reed he met Steve Jobs with whom he shared an interest in Eastern spirituality. At the time, Friedland served as the caretaker of an apple farm south of Portland that was owned by his millionaire uncle Marcel Muller and Jobs would come on the weekends and help with the apple orchard, which served as the inspiration for the name of his company, Apple Inc. Friedland turned the orchard into a commune called All One Farm. His followers were not paid for working on commercial endeavors there.
You should absolutely watch this documentary on Steve Jobs as a way of understanding Jobs. The NHK go on at some length on Jobs’s ties to Sony.
Is… breaking up with China. Will it work to move to India? I remain skeptical but I’ve been wrong before.
Will be… a bank.
Turns out that when you have trust (i.e. access to Apple Pay) and you have convenience and you have access to everyone’s attention all day you end up essentially becoming a bank.
I take the view that Cook is a logistics genius. I’ve always seen him as the middle son of a middle class dockworker from Mobile done good. Now I certainly don’t countenance everything going on in Alabama shipyards — who could? — but I do think there’s something to how the best people at shipping are those who are smugglers.
Apple doesn’t really innovate anymore but then maybe it doesn’t have to.
Microsoft
Was…. mob compromised, Israeli, Chinese, WASP forced out. We’ve been on this quite a bit here. Search the archives for “Paul Allen,” “Microsoft,” and “Bill Gates.”
Is … bureaucratic Indian. Acquire, acquire, acquire. Oh wait! FTC is here! Run!
Will be… stuck. Video games are played out. Activision deal won’t happen. Open AI won’t deliver.
I give Nadella three more years. Maybe that’s all he really wants anyway?
Was … Russian-Jewish, compromised WASP.
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page weren't carrying on sexual liaisons with subordinates I guess they made a search engine. Hey, Brin and Page built a culture. Pichai only had to fire 48 people for sexual harassment.
Eric Schmidt, when he isn’t sleeping with Chinese spies, is a descendant of traitors. We could go back to his bloodlines. (He’s of Tory and Hessian stock.)
Or we could talk about how his dad died in a suspicious fire after working in the Nixon Administration.
Which makes Schmidt’s frequent attendance at Burning Man pretty suspect if you ask me.
Is …. Full CIA.
Will be … in the cloud
What will drive adoption of Google Cloud in a serious way? I suspect there’s only one alternative. Yes, you guessed it! Genetics!
Google recently announced a $70 billion stock buyback.
To be honest I am of mixed minds about whether or not you should do buybacks. I think it’s a tell that a company isn’t serious or innovative.
I’m positive I could find better uses for that $70 Billion.
They could start by offering to fully sequence every single one of their American customers — for free.
The amount of data that they would get would be staggering — and drive adoption of Google Cloud. They could store that data near Dulles so the deep state could keep an eye on it.
With it, they’d be able to do all kinds of geno-pheno matching.
They’d be able to test which ads work with which genetic traits. They’d be able to warn customers of potential illnesses that might be lurking in their genome.
Sundar Pichai wants to drive adoption of Google Cloud.
Well, that would do it.
Once upon a time Sergey Brin had the right idea with genetics. He just shouldn’t have put his wife in charge of it. Or partied with spies, traitors, and rapists. I guess 2008 really was a different time.
Until then you can download your DNA and upload it to Traitwell.com.
We will tell you as much as we can about your DNA.
Hope you continue to post here despite Elon’s K Meltdown on your account.
I subscribed to support your efforts dealing with the foreign law firm.
Questions regarding your tech kingdoms:
1. Nvidia
2. Elons Enterprise (SpaceX, Tesla, XAI)
Who inherits Elon’s tech after his departure? Does it matter?
Where is Nvidia’s loyalties? (Mellanox, Run:AI both Israeli acquisitions)
I found it interesting an, as you put, Indian Bureaucrat Roon (OpenAI Twitter guy) tweeted a couple weeks ago about the Mellanox acquisition being an effective monopoly for superior inter-GPU communication.
Run:AI is GPU resource management for training/inference processes which affords joint use case usage across accounts.
Any thoughts?
Thanks!
Tyler Bedford