American Spectator: Luke Skywalker was tempted by the Dark Side — but didn’t give in to it. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did.
Both began as promising free market Jedi — but have become Sith Lords of crony capitalism.
Musk went from earning an honest living as one of the founders of PayPal, which made buying things online much easier and so facilitated the rise of online commerce — which in turn made buying things online cheaper.
But then he gave himself to the Dark Side as the founder of Tesla Motors — which hasn’t earned an honest dollar since it came into being 15 years ago. Every car it “sells” it actually gives away at a loss of thousands of dollars per car — and every car it has ever built exists only because of government subsidies and electric car production quotas.
Bezos became a Sith in similar fashion.
Amazon started out as an online bookseller that grew into the retail outlet for everything online. As such, it embodied the free exchange of goods and services.
Bezos — like Musk — became extremely wealthy. And deserved it.
But money earned through the free exchange of goods and services apparently wasn’t enough for either of them. Power — through connections in DC — was the irresistible temptation that led to the Dark Side.
Amazon — like Tesla — is becoming a crony capitalist operation that depends on government more than the free market. But the scale of Amazon’s rent-seeking dwarfs anything Tesla has managed so far.
For example, Amazon Web Services is on the verge of landing a ten-year Department of Defense contract for Cloud Storage of government data worth $10 billion.
To put that in perspective, Tesla has only lost about $5 billion so far — over the past 15 years.
The DoD contract is also “winner take all,” which would mean that all the Pentagon’s cloud-stored data would be under Amazon’s control — and on the taxpayers’ nickel. Lots of nickels.
Hopefully Bozos loses this.
Bozos chronically looks like he’s taking it up the ass. Just look!
http://time.com/collection/2017-time-100/4742754/jeff-bezos-2/
For the last f**kin time, Elon (the peon) Musk had NOTHING to do with the founding of Tesla!
Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning founded Tesla in 2003!!
“Musk did not build Tesla from the ground up. He was a significant investor to the company a short while after creation. He used his money from the sale of PayPal (which, also contrary to common knowledge, he did not build from the ground up) to take Tesla from an engineering project to a production car company. After he became an investor, a nasty battle between him and Eberhard (that started when each person blamed the other for drastically missing the budget) caused a lot of press and a lawsuit, resulting in Eberhard being kicked out of the company, and Elon being allowed to represent himself as a founder, since his money and involvement were critical to the company.” ~ Brian Cox, Founder, The Organization Corporation
How else do you think Bezos got the cash to buy the WaPo, keep it running while it hemorrhages money AND buy the biggest mansion in DC, with enough left over to buy a better entree to that stratosphere?
We’re the CIA; we’ll help keep your friends in high places. Until we don’t. Nice symbiotic relationship both have going on there. Crap. The entire preezy administration was just a series of moving pieces from one sector to the other, spreading out across the Potomac like locusts, plopping them where they’re going to eat best, giving the best bang for the buck. Things got really fun when the SES was invented, right?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/