4 ms·

The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but cha

by toolz 4y ago

The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? I'll take the people who risk it for progressing tech and innovation any day of the week.

ABeeSea 4y ago
Bezo’s isn’t progressing tech and innovation? Odd since there are very few areas of tech that Amazon/AWS aren’t on the cutting edge of.
- toolz 4y ago
  The only tech advancement I can name off the top of my head from AWS is the dynamo paper in 2007, which to be fair has a substantial amount of influence. In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day. I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries. Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
  - ABeeSea 4y ago
    Amazon has a starlink competitor in project kuiper. AWS has made massive investments into solar and wind energy. AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform. AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
    - whatever1 4y ago
      Amazon is also the most advanced logistics company on the planet. Literally off the charts, to the point that benchmarks do not even include them due to the huge gap from the competition.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    I've really been enjoying the cashier-less grocery store experience.
BaseballPhysics 4y ago
> The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon? Please. None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are. Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.
- toolz 4y ago
  so if you painted a picture today that had sentimental value to you, so you would never sell it, but someone offered you 1 billion dollars for it (therefore making your net worth instantly 1 billion) would you suck just because you wouldn't sell your picture and give away the money? Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
  - BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    > Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences. That's... not how the rich access their wealth. Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes. In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles. So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal. Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.

by toolz 4y ago

ABeeSea 4y ago

Bezo’s isn’t progressing tech and innovation? Odd since there are very few areas of tech that Amazon/AWS aren’t on the cutting edge of.

toolz 4y ago
The only tech advancement I can name off the top of my head from AWS is the dynamo paper in 2007, which to be fair has a substantial amount of influence. In terms of social impact I would say starlink alone will have more impact than any advancements amazon has made. There's no telling how many decades may have passed before people took terraforming mars seriously without someone like Musk - and that appears to have serious potential to save our species some day. I think that's hard to compare to AWS that effectively just enables better monetization of the internet through various bloated digital service industries. Granted I understand everything I'm comparing is extremely subjective, so I wouldn't say you're wrong by any means. My perspective is just very different than your own.
- ABeeSea 4y ago
  Amazon has a starlink competitor in project kuiper. AWS has made massive investments into solar and wind energy. AWS owns a chip company (Annapurna) producing cutting edge networking, virtualization, and server chips. AWS has a leading industrial IoT / computing at edge platform. AWS played a huge role in the development of Alexa, especially in regard to network latency. Even 15+ years later, S3’s new sharding algo and use of formal methods and proof based testing are as cutting edge is it comes.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    Amazon is also the most advanced logistics company on the planet. Literally off the charts, to the point that benchmarks do not even include them due to the huge gap from the competition.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I've really been enjoying the cashier-less grocery store experience.

BaseballPhysics 4y ago

> The vast majority of my peers prefer him to any other billionaire and why wouldn't they? Do you prefer the Zuckerbergs and Bezos' that do almost nothing but chase profit? All billionaires suck, but Musk sucks the least so get on the fanboi bandwagon? Please. None of these tech billionaires deserve to be treated as anything but the robber barons they are. Musk? He's at best an unhinged narcissist. And that's being kind. The fact that he's bought into his own fan fiction and thinks of himself as a noble futurist doesn't matter much to his overworked employees, the people Musk has defamed on Twitter, or the shareholders he's defrauded through blatant market manipulation.

toolz 4y ago
so if you painted a picture today that had sentimental value to you, so you would never sell it, but someone offered you 1 billion dollars for it (therefore making your net worth instantly 1 billion) would you suck just because you wouldn't sell your picture and give away the money? Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  > Because that's not too far off from the vast majority of billionaires who simply can't/won't liquidate their potential net worth because it would have negative consequences. That's... not how the rich access their wealth. Musk himself has taken out massive margin loans collateralized by his Tesla stock. This allows him to live a very lavish lifestyle without actually having to liquidate his positions or pay any kind of income or capital gains taxes. In fact, this is how most extremely rich individuals operate: their wealth is locked up in equity and then they take out tax advantaged loans to fund their lifestyles. So yeah, if I had a painting worth a few billion dollars, and a bank offered me a 500M loan collateralized by that painting, yeah, sure, of course I'd take that deal. Though ironically, Musk has also recently sold billions of dollars worth of shares, first back in the fall, and again in advance of his purchase of Twitter. So I'm actually not sure how your hypothetical applies to Musk.