He’s my favorite example to bust the “smarts and hard work” myth of billionaires. He had parents with good, union jobs that allowed him to go to Princeton, where he dropped out of a physics major (into CS) because it was too difficult. The school’s connections, though, got him a job at a hedge fund, where he was assigned to study the investment potential of e-commerce on the nascent Web. He saw the enormous potential, but was so bad at his job that he couldn’t convince the other executives that they wanted some of that money. So he left the job, got a large loan from his parents, and started Cadabra in a garage he rented in a conscious nod to Silicon Valley mythos. Oh, Cadabra? He was going to call it that, but his lawyer convinced him to go with his second choice of name, because that one sounds too much like cadaver. The company was profitable in a month, and then he used all manner of dirty tricks to run the competition out of the market.
Nothing in his story indicates anything but dumb luck of randomly being the one in the right time and place to succeed. If it was smarts and hard work, there were hundreds of other e-commerce contenders who put in at least as much as he did.
It’s hard to overstate how much Amazon has changed the economy. It has quite possibly the longest and most consequential game of enshittification in play. It’s already taken over a giant chunk of the retail market and destroyed local businesses in ways Wal-Mart and their like could only dream of.
It’s brought worker exploitation to Gilded Age levels. And there’s no doubt the ultimate goal is to create a monopoly over retail, so that they will later dictate prices. They’re already redirecting popular products to their own cheap, shittier versions in the searches they control. Their long term goal, like all tech companies that touch real world commerce, is to “disrupt” the system that worked for everyone before them, aka what’s left of competition in late stage capitalism, and replace it with monopoly.
Bezos is a would-be feudalist lord of retail in a technofascist hellscape. Peter Thiel will handle the surveillance. And they’ll all ride out the apocalypse on wherever they relocated Epstein’s island.
When I buy things online these days, much rarer than in previous - I deliberately avoid Amazon. For all the reasons you said, and a handful of others lol!
At least half the time the product comes in an Amazon box anyway. I think you might be understating how successful Amazon has been at reshaping things.
While others put in more work than he, and certainly he didn’t work as hard as most any minimum wager that tends to work the hardest, your example at least showed he put in some effort and acumen, so it wouldn’t be my favorite example to bust the myth.
Musk I think is even better since basically his entire fortune builds upon just luck and conning folks without ever putting in useful work. He had a leg up from rich family, then was so weird about his dot-com that he put a PC in a big plastic thing to make it ‘look like a supercomputer’ and despite how utterly amateur hour it was… It worked on Compaq and he got millions for a site that never got off the ground. Then he took his millions and worked to cofound the first X.com, which was getting beat by a competitive product Paypal. Somehow the owners of Paypal despite winning agreed to a merger and agreed to put Musk in charge. And he boffed it hard and was forced to step down because his incompetence was destroying Paypal. But he still had a huge stake so when eBay came knocking, despite Musk doing nothing but screw up the company, he got the most money from that transaction. To this day some people will describe him as ‘the’ founder of Paypal, despite all this. Then with Tesla, he saw a company doing something cool with electrifying a Lotus and wanted in. Then after being in he threw a hissy fit that he should be a founder, despite the company existing prior to his coming along. Also plenty of word that Elon’s first round of actually getting things designed somewhat the way he wanted was the Cybertruck… and well…
He’s my favorite example to bust the “smarts and hard work” myth of billionaires. He had parents with good, union jobs that allowed him to go to Princeton, where he dropped out of a physics major (into CS) because it was too difficult. The school’s connections, though, got him a job at a hedge fund, where he was assigned to study the investment potential of e-commerce on the nascent Web. He saw the enormous potential, but was so bad at his job that he couldn’t convince the other executives that they wanted some of that money. So he left the job, got a large loan from his parents, and started Cadabra in a garage he rented in a conscious nod to Silicon Valley mythos. Oh, Cadabra? He was going to call it that, but his lawyer convinced him to go with his second choice of name, because that one sounds too much like cadaver. The company was profitable in a month, and then he used all manner of dirty tricks to run the competition out of the market.
Nothing in his story indicates anything but dumb luck of randomly being the one in the right time and place to succeed. If it was smarts and hard work, there were hundreds of other e-commerce contenders who put in at least as much as he did.
It’s hard to overstate how much Amazon has changed the economy. It has quite possibly the longest and most consequential game of enshittification in play. It’s already taken over a giant chunk of the retail market and destroyed local businesses in ways Wal-Mart and their like could only dream of.
It’s brought worker exploitation to Gilded Age levels. And there’s no doubt the ultimate goal is to create a monopoly over retail, so that they will later dictate prices. They’re already redirecting popular products to their own cheap, shittier versions in the searches they control. Their long term goal, like all tech companies that touch real world commerce, is to “disrupt” the system that worked for everyone before them, aka what’s left of competition in late stage capitalism, and replace it with monopoly.
Bezos is a would-be feudalist lord of retail in a technofascist hellscape. Peter Thiel will handle the surveillance. And they’ll all ride out the apocalypse on wherever they relocated Epstein’s island.
When I buy things online these days, much rarer than in previous - I deliberately avoid Amazon. For all the reasons you said, and a handful of others lol!
At least half the time the product comes in an Amazon box anyway. I think you might be understating how successful Amazon has been at reshaping things.
“b-b-but Amazon creates JOBS!! Jeff Bezos DESERVES that money!!!”
- Guy who doesn’t understand that jobs “created” by Amazon are jobs destroyed elsewhere by its monopoly
While others put in more work than he, and certainly he didn’t work as hard as most any minimum wager that tends to work the hardest, your example at least showed he put in some effort and acumen, so it wouldn’t be my favorite example to bust the myth.
Musk I think is even better since basically his entire fortune builds upon just luck and conning folks without ever putting in useful work. He had a leg up from rich family, then was so weird about his dot-com that he put a PC in a big plastic thing to make it ‘look like a supercomputer’ and despite how utterly amateur hour it was… It worked on Compaq and he got millions for a site that never got off the ground. Then he took his millions and worked to cofound the first X.com, which was getting beat by a competitive product Paypal. Somehow the owners of Paypal despite winning agreed to a merger and agreed to put Musk in charge. And he boffed it hard and was forced to step down because his incompetence was destroying Paypal. But he still had a huge stake so when eBay came knocking, despite Musk doing nothing but screw up the company, he got the most money from that transaction. To this day some people will describe him as ‘the’ founder of Paypal, despite all this. Then with Tesla, he saw a company doing something cool with electrifying a Lotus and wanted in. Then after being in he threw a hissy fit that he should be a founder, despite the company existing prior to his coming along. Also plenty of word that Elon’s first round of actually getting things designed somewhat the way he wanted was the Cybertruck… and well…