{"id":40939,"date":"2021-01-16T23:52:30","date_gmt":"2021-01-17T07:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/?p=40939"},"modified":"2021-01-16T23:53:43","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T07:53:43","slug":"billionaires-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pocketwisdominsights.com\/pwicolab\/finance\/finance-co-lab\/pwi-co-lab-staff\/billionaires-rescue\/","title":{"rendered":"Billionaires to the Rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Opening Insights: Billionaires to Help Us<\/h2>\n

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.<\/em>
ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means<\/em><\/p>\n

The following article was published by Yahoo! Finance, a division of Verizon Media, \"[connecting] people to their passions by bringing them more of the things they care about, with experiences they can\u2019t get anywhere else.\u201d It was written by Andy Serwer<\/a>, editor-in-chief of Yahoo! Finance, and Max Zahn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Informational Insights: World's Richest Person<\/h2>\n
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With all the attention on politics and COVID-19 right now, you may have missed this recent headline: \u201cElon Musk overtakes Jeff Bezos to become world\u2019s richest person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or maybe you did see it and thought, who cares?<\/p>\n

Well you should.<\/p>\n

(Before you continue reading, a trigger warning: This column is about staggering wealth. The numbers you are about to read will shock you.)<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not so much that Musk is now worth some $200 billion,<\/em> according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index<\/a>, versus Bezos\u2019 $182 billion, (of course Bezos could easily regain the crown at any point.) Nor is it a matter of the insane run-up in Tesla\u2019s stock recently, (although it is insane\u2014up some 800% over the past year.)<\/p>\n

No, the bigger point is simply how much money and power Musk and Bezos and other tech billionaires have right now. And that power ties directly to one of the greatest conundrums of our time, which is the unprecedented command and control tech giants\u2014Amazon (AMZN<\/a>), Google (GOOG<\/a>, GOOGL<\/a>), Facebook (FB<\/a>), Microsoft (MSFT<\/a>), Apple (AAPL<\/a>) and a few others\u2014have over us. It\u2019s a matter of contention that touches on everything from free speech to Donald Trump and our political divisions to national security to the very future of democracy. It\u2019s an issue I predict that will loom very large over the next four years.<\/p>\n

The question, according to tech investor Roger McNamee<\/a>, author of \u201cZucked,\u201d a book critical of Facebook, is \u201cdo you want to live in a country that's not a democracy? And I do think that kind of soul searching is going on. I do think in time the country is going to make the right choices. And I do know that there's lots of ways to have successful tech companies that are not harmful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before we explore McNamee\u2019s point further, let\u2019s return to the Bloomberg list because the top of it jumps out at you. Fact: currently eight of the 11 richest people on the planet are American tech billionaires. Can you imagine? In addition to Musk and Bezos, you have Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer. Collectively these eight individuals are worth a stunning, staggering $923.7 billion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an extraordinary concentration of wealth and power,\u201d says Chuck Collins, <\/strong>a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author with Bill Gates Sr. of \u201cWealth and Our Commonwealth.\u201d \u201cMaybe there were some parallels a hundred years ago during the robber baron, gilded age fortunes. A lot of those fortunes were people cornering some aspect of the natural resource world: coal, steel, oil, wood; in addition to finance. Here we are a hundred years later and you have what I would call democracy-distorting fortunes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consider that $923.7 billion and the rest of us. For instance, some 9.2% of the U.S. population<\/a>\u2014or 30 million people\u2014live in poverty (a conservative number BTW.) That $923.7 billion would be enough money to give each of those poor Americans more than $1,000 a year, every year for the next three decades. (Caveat: No one is suggesting that exact kind of redistribution of wealth could or should ever happen, it\u2019s just a thought exercise.)<\/p>\n

To be clear that list of eight people is actually quite the mixed bag. Some like Gates are no longer CEOs. Ellison is chairman of Oracle (ORCL<\/a>), a powerhouse company for sure, but not in the same league as Facebook or Google. And ditto for Musk\u2019s Tesla, (though more on that company\u2019s potential dominance later.) Also, not included are Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, CEOs of Apple and Google\u2019s parent Alphabet, respectively, who wield tremendous power and are very wealthy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important to note there are a number of other tech billionaires on the Bloomberg list\u2014including Michael Dell, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, Evan Spiegel, Marc Benioff, Peter Thiel, Reed Hastings and other familiar names\u2014and it makes sense to add them to this posse of tech billionaires.<\/p>\n

High up on this list too is MacKenzie Scott, the 23rd richest person in the world worth $56 billion, who is of course Jeff Bezos\u2019 ex-wife. (If the couple were still together they would be worth around a quarter of $1 trillion, richer than Elon, but that\u2019s another story.)<\/p>\n

The point is these American tech billionaires form a cohort, a cohort worth well over $1 trillion, with commensurate economic and societal power. And as I noted in a story recently<\/a> their fortunes have been growing much faster than the wealth of the rest of us. True I don\u2019t adjust my figures for inflation, (i.e., what is $1 trillion today in say, 2016 dollars), but when your stock goes up 450% over the past five years, like Amazon\u2019s has, and the annual inflation rate<\/a> has been between 0.7% and 2.3% over the same time period, there\u2019s really no need.<\/p>\n

So where did this great wealth come from? Overwhelmingly it accrued from the increase in value of these individuals\u2019 stock holdings\u2014mostly as founders of tech companies such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix (NFL<\/a>X<\/a>), Oracle, Dell (DELL<\/a>), Twitter (TWTR<\/a>), Snap (SNAP<\/a>) and Tesla. The value of their stakes in these companies has soared to unimaginable heights because the stock market assigned huge valuations to these companies. Why? Because these companies are massive money-making machines and are likely to continue to be so. Thus, the free market has spoken and designated these people to be the richest and most powerful people in the world.<\/p>\n

\u2018Breaking these guys up\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAGA, Antifa, liberals, conservatives and moderates, nearly everyone in America agrees that Big Tech is too powerful. But when it comes to exactly what \u201cthe problem\u201d is, we diverge. Republicans, wrapping themselves in the flag of free speech (which really doesn\u2019t apply to private companies) say Big Tech muzzles them, while Democrats say Big Tech is a national security threat by allowing foreign actors to manipulate elections and domestic terrorists to organize.<\/p>\n

And yes, Congress has called Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos et al to task and to testify numerous times. Myriad federal and local, nevermind international, investigations and legal actions are ongoing against Big Tech. And yet one thing is missing here, and that is to call into question the personal power and responsibility of this American-techno-billionaire oligarchy which holds sway over billions of lives.<\/p>\n

Before we delve into that subject, a quick note about Musk is in order because Tesla seems like the odd company out here as it isn\u2019t banning anyone nor is it enabling bad guys. Tesla\u2019s rise has been so swift it seems farcical to consider the company as a threat to society. In fact until recently people were saying it would go bankrupt. (Some still have serious questions about the company.)<\/p>\n

And yet\u2014and this is admittedly anticipatory at this point\u2014imagine the power that Tesla could wield over the transportation industry in short order? And BTW, Tesla is already a force to be reckoned with. Just ask GM, Ford and Toyota about that. Even with GM stock hitting an all-time high this week<\/a>, it still has a market cap less than one tenth of Tesla\u2019s.<\/p>\n

And let\u2019s not forget Musk\u2019s other endeavors. If SpaceX, SolarCity, Hyperloop, Starlink etc. (which have been created with an eye towards integration), pan out in a big way, Musk\u2019s empire would become even more impactful. Bottom line: Given that Elon is the richest man in the world, the market is telling us all this could happen.<\/p>\n

Back to the central issue at hand, which is the outsized power these individuals have. There is a course of action that addresses the problem head on, a solution not lost on Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business and a keen observer of Big Tech.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the place to start is with breaking these guys up,\u201d Galloway says<\/a>. \u201cI think that it's telling that we seem to be always begging the same one or two firms. I think increased competition would be good.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve broken up big companies in America before of course, typically for one of two reasons. In the first, management itself does the cleaving in an effort to maximize shareholder value. I lived through one of these when I worked for the biggest media company in history, AOL Time Warner, which sold off Warner Music, Time Life books, TimeWarner Cable, AOL, Time Inc. and finally itself to AT&T. Others in this category include GE, ITT, (two of its descendants are Starwood and Hartford Financial Services Group) and going back in time, Gulf and Western (known as \u201cengulf and devour.\u201d) The other group of companies were broken up by the government, most famously AT&T in 1984 and Standard Oil in 1911.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s talk about today\u2019s big tech companies. First understand, they were built for dominance. These notions of a \u201cflywheel\u201d (a favorite construct of Bezos) and an \u201cecosystem\u201d implicitly and explicitly have as their goals global scale with both vertical and horizontal integration. What businesses do Amazon, Google or Tesla want to get into? The answer is any business that can be melded into what they are doing currently, in other words just about anything. One thing that was never considered though: What happens if these companies become too successful?<\/p>\n

To be clear there is other work to be done here. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996<\/a>\u2014an anachronistic piece of legal code that allows tech companies to disclaim responsibility for what appears on their platforms\u2014has to go. (The law was created to protect poor little tech startups from being quashed by litigation. Today, these giant companies employ thousands of lawyers who face down billions of litigation like it\u2019s nothing more than swatting away a fly.) And there\u2019s the profiting-off-of-poison business models (selling falsehoods and divisiveness) by the social media companies. But those problems apply mostly to Facebook, Google\u2019s YouTube and Twitter, and not at all to Amazon or Apple. So we come back to the common denominator, which is size and power. Ultimately that is what must be addressed.<\/p>\n

The notion of a government-mandated break up of Big Tech has been around for years now. There\u2019s much that could be done: Facebook would spin off Instagram (love to see those two compete), WhatsApp and maybe even Messenger and Oculus. Amazon would split off AWS, Whole Foods and its devices (Kindle and Fire.) Google would shed YouTube, Waymo, as well as split off search from its other core products. In Musk\u2019s case, his companies should end up as separate public companies. Apple could get rid of the App Store and its music business. Microsoft would sell Xbox, Skype, Azure, and LinkedIn (I know, I know, you guys just bought it!)<\/p>\n

The snickers you hear come from the C-suites of these companies at the mere suggestion of this. As in \u201cSerwer, you are so ignorant and naive. It\u2019s impossible to do this! These businesses are intertwined!\u201d To which I answer, I may be guilty of the first charge but it\u2019s not impossible. Sure, some are more difficult to split than others, but it\u2019s all doable. Hollywood movie studios made exactly the same claim when the U.S. government successfully sued to separate movie theaters from the studios, (United States v. Paramount Pictures, 1948.) Note that both studios and theaters thrived after that.<\/p>\n

Shareholders would do very well by the stocks of newly severed tech companies. And I would bet more jobs would be created. But that wouldn\u2019t be the real reason to break \u2018em up. The real reason would be to put an end to this epidemic of bigness.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the critical part, I\u2019m not suggesting the government do this, I\u2019m suggesting the tech moguls do it themselves. Crazy? But why not? These people think of themselves as business non-traditionalists. Are they really? If Bezos, Zuckerberg and Cook et al did it themselves it would usher in an era of growth and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, the U.S. and the world. It could be a happy, proactive creative process, as opposed to the current defensive stonewalling. But most importantly it would restore, shore up, protect and enhance our democracy. What could possibly be more important than that?<\/p>\n

We often hear that we have moved beyond shareholder capitalism and are now in an era of stakeholder capitalism. It would be the ultimate expression of stakeholder capitalism for the richest men on planet earth to consider the ultimate stakeholder, America itself.<\/p>\n

It is also unassailable that if the tech moguls don\u2019t do this, their companies will eventually atrophy and fade, or more likely and much sooner, face an increasingly angry mob.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere's been a total inaction. [tech CEOs] have slow-rolled the whole thing effectively,\u201d says Galloway. \u201cBut I think that's about to change. The shadow being cast by the Biden-Harris administration has already resulted in more change at Facebook in the last 10 days than we've seen in the last 10 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is said to have remarked: \u201cWe must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.\u201d I\u2019m sure the tech billionaires know Brandeis\u2019 words. The question is, are the tech billionaires evolved enough to understand they have become part of the problem, and if so, can they sublimate their egos enough to do something about it.<\/p>\n

This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on January 16, 2021. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

https:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/news\/how-elon-musk-and-jeff-bezos-can-help-save-our-democracy-130007656.html<\/a><\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article originally appeared in YAHOO! FINANCE: <\/em>How Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can help save our democracy<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Possibilities for Consideration: Standing Against Tyranny<\/h2>\n

To stand against the immense power behind the technology, internet and financial organizations that are now in charge of our government, education institutions and most aspects of our daily lives, we must get smarter and do it together.<\/p>\n

SanctuaryCounties.com<\/a> is keeping track of the counties that are taking the constitutional protections for freedom seriously.<\/strong> AwareComm\u00ae offers a platform that provides the resources and the guidance for those looking to unite and take back their freedom and liberty. <\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not just that we need a solution, in this new environment nobody knows who\/what to trust, everybody is angry, nobody listens, commerce stops, efficiency diminishes, nobody cares.<\/p>\n

Our culture consists of perception, attitude, thinking and behavior and we have created a culture now rooted in distrust, fear and anger.<\/p>\n

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The following models illustrate the psychology of fear <\/strong>and control <\/strong>
being used to force America to its knees.<\/p>\n

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Whatever we do, however we do it, this becomes the basis for how we will build relationships at home, work, worship and play. These models will permeate all dimensions of our lives and must be reversed if our communities and our country are to survive.<\/p>\n

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The Real Solution: Founded in Spiritual Principles<\/h2>\n

A real solution, fully developed (tested, proven and paid for), is found in AwareComm's proprietary Adaptive Intelligence (AdI™) algorithm. <\/p>\n

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The AdI™ algorithm aligns with the intent of Pope Francis's call for a 'Good Algorithm,'<\/a> to reverse the damage done by the irresponsible use of technology.<\/p>\n

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Rebuilding Community Commerce - - Rebuilding the Soul of a Community<\/strong><\/p>\n

AwareComm's AdI™ algorithm is available in a community Collaboration Laboratory (Co-Lab™) Research and ePublishing Institute, where people learn to take charge of their communities by transcending adversity <\/strong>to diversity <\/strong>and solidarity <\/strong>through the application of responsible commerce<\/em>. Success is assured by applying the principles of Adaptive Intelligence to entrepreneurial thinking using socially responsible capitalism.<\/p>\n

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What comes from an established foundation of commerce rooted in spiritual principles and AdI™ is a new business model. This business model, for the application of Socially Responsible Capitalism, is our theme and driving inspiration.<\/p>\n

A Co-Lab™ is the implementation mechanism of the result of 30+ years of field research.<\/p>\n

Co-Labs™ create an environment conducive to learning, solidarity and change (old ideas are more quickly learned and new ideas are more quickly accepted and implemented).<\/p>\n

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Our Next Step<\/h2>\n

The AwareComm\u00ae Team is attracting partners in order to awaken in the people a desire for peace and solidarity as a way to fulfill their personal needs.<\/p>\n

Through a careful blend of AI + BI + HI + SI the Co-Lab™ Research Institute has the correct balance of technology, methodology, human understanding, spiritual principles and data science to put us on the right track to individual social and cultural empowerment.<\/p>\n

Due Diligence classes offer a deeper dive into the Co-Lab™ Research and ePublishing Institute to determine if this philosophy is effective for your community. You will learn:<\/p>\n