What The Gulf States Get Wrong About Silicon Valley and D.C.
What if the Arab powers were legit? Washington would like that very much, thank you very much.
I get asked a lot of questions ever since I started writing this Substack, but I don’t answer a lot of them. If you want to hire me for private research, well, happy to oblige or to refer you to someone.
To be honest I like breathing. Breathing has been good to me and I intend to live well into my nineties. But as my girl Zora Neale Hurston once put it, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
It’s time to answer some questions.
So what’s really going on with a16z, the massive multi-billion dollar venture fund? Why I’m so glad you asked!
It’s a way that the Saudis paid the Israelis (and their Jewish allies) during the Trump years.
Let’s be real: venture funds do what their LPs ask.
In the case of a lot of the investment it’s affinity stuff. You went to the same schools, live in the same neighborhood, etc. The most famous example of this is the Yale endowment’s David Swensen who had the good sense to die after investing the Ivy League’s endowment in crypto currency.
There need to be a lot stricter controls and regulations around these kinds of investments, especially when it comes to pension funds.
We can infer as much when we read about it in the press.
Think about it: Adam Neumann gets hundreds of millions for his fake real estate startup Flow. As you know, he’s not Israeli intelligence. No sir!
You can see it if you look closely at it. Oh, who I am I kidding! It’s all there, in its gross display. Neumann is going to bring Flow to Saudi Arabia.
"'Saudi has a founder,' Ben Horowitz said. 'You don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.” Horowitz said he was 'excited' to bring Flow there."
I know this is weird to say but does Marc Andreessen really need three Malibu mansions? Really? How does he decide which one he stays in?
But what if they aren’t really his? What if he’s really just holding them for someone?
Did the Emiratis and the Saudis get taken for a ride? It sure looks like they got taken for a ride.
Do you think the Gulfies — who are much more led by Gen X and Milennials — got suckered by our Boomer/Gen X scammers?
In a future post we will go hard and really examine how Silicon Valley took the Middle East for a ride and how, perhaps, the Middle East can turn the tables.
Imagine if the Middle East turned on Silicon Valley by initiating a series of lawsuits. How much could they claw back from the Silicon Valley frauds on behalf of retail investors? Revolutions are made of such things.
Until then, let’s have a bit of advice for our Arab friends as they consider the American market.
Be useful. Arab society has a lot to offer the world. Think back to your great past as a center of wonder. You gave us algebra!
Get better constructs. Your current crop isn’t really doing it. I recommend against going with the Gen X crowd. They don’t really have a good read on the geopolitics over here.
Rethink the type of weapons you want. Why buy the old stuff when you can invest in the new stuff? But invest in the stuff that actually works.
You should be asking which of these investors in front of you are likely to take the investment through to an IPO and not dump the investment on retail. Sure, you might get away with it in the short run but in the long run?
American public sentiment will turn decidedly against you.
But what if you guys were legit? What if you were great players on the global stage?
What if you helped America clean up its fraudster class?
Charles thinks MbS, like Matt Gaetz, is just misunderstood, and can be turned into a good actor with the right incentives. Is he right? Charles also thought Dersh was OK in 2006 and Trump was awesome in 2015.