I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims. He just does some math and shows that exponential growth is fast.
What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.
> I would have liked the essay more if PG had actually engaged with AOC's claims.
I don't see why he should have engaged with them any more than he did, because AOC's claims are BS. He gave them more attention than they deserve.
What he should have engaged with is, what happens when a startup stops being a startup? All three of his poster children for startups, Apple, Google, and Facebook, are now notorious for treating their users badly and making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data. And at the last of those three, the founder is still in charge, so even if PG can argue that Zuckerberg earned what he got from Facebook in its startup phase, that doesn't mean he's earning the money he makes now from Facebook in the same way. (And the other poster child he mentions, AirBnB, can't be said to have clean hands either at this point.)
To me that's the biggest gap in PG's worldview more generally, that I never see him address in his essays: once the startup phase is over, the company drops off his radar and he pays no attention to the collateral damage it causes when it's a tech giant. (And of course AOC's claims have nothing to do with this genuine issue either.)
The timing doesn't matter because monopoly -> enshittification was always the plan. Hence FAANG were valued with the expectation that they could turn the profit knob at the right time.
You seem to be confusing "listing" - the stock exchange where a company chooses its stock to trade (i.e. NYSE, AmEx, Nasdaq) with "indexes" - a list of stocks that is often the basis for index funds.
The Nasdaq 100 is not the same as Nasdaq. A company can be in many indexes but only one listing. There may have been competition for the listing but there is not competition between indexes for inclusion.
Thanks for that! I have been on Levine's website recently and for some reason thought they may deviate in content or something. But will try it out. It's a daily newsletter which is kind of high volume for me (which is why I hadn't subscribed prior) but will check it out.
I actually may have been sub'd previously and had to check out because the push-model was slightly too much; would kind of prefer a pull model.
Great idea and just a note to anyone doing this (as I just did) - Bloomberg will send a confirmation code to the email which you have to get out of the feed. Took a few minutes, but it worked!
It's not just Schwab, there aren't any options traded on BIRD. And shorting is not a guarantee. First you have to find a borrow, which if it's available probably costs >1000% annualized today. Then you have to be able to maintain that borrow, even if BIRD doubles from here.
Based on the price action today, this seems like a short squeeze.
Yes this would defeat it, but standard practice is that you can keep betting a couple rotations into the spin. The reason for that is that some people believe the croupier can target his shot to some extent. (I don't think it's farfetched that someone who spins a ball 8 hours a day could get above chance at targeting.)
I believe the croupiers also have rules on how hard they must throw the ball, in addition to rules that define how long they have between picking up the ball and throwing it. In the first case it’s usually at least 3 full rotations, and in the second case it’s before the spot the ball was pick up from passes their hand.
I don’t think a croupier can meaningfully cheat with these rules, especially since they’re not on the hook for people winning too much. If they could cheat I think most would cheat against the casino.
You neglected to mention:
- It was company policy to keep coffee excessively hot (180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home). This was to make customers drink it more slowly and request fewer refills
- Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy
McDonald's, then, was willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers in order to save themselves a few cents in coffee.
In light of those facts, I think a $2M verdict was too low, and the executives who decided to continue keeping the coffee that hot should have been criminally charged with reckless endangerment.
> 180-190 degrees Fahrenheit, vs 140 or so for coffee brewed at home
Did you just make up that 140 number? To add to the other sibling comment, SCA (https://sca.coffee/) requires that water contacts the grounds at a temp of 195-205 F and that the coffee be at a temp of 175-185 up to 30 mins after brewing in order to certify home brewers:
> The SCA ensures that the brewer's carafe is appropriately sized for its designated machine and can maintain the coffee's warmth. Specifically, the brew must stay within the range of 176 °-185°F (80°-85°C) for at least 30 minutes post-brew. While retaining this warmth, the machine must never actively reheat the brew, ensuring the coffee's nuanced flavors remain intact. (from https://us.moccamaster.com/blogs/blog/certified-by-the-sca-m...)
Then you say
> Other customers had suffered similar burns, and McDonald's knew about it and did not change the policy
Again, lots of people cut their fingers off, accidentally, with knives. I don't think this means knife makers were "willfully and inevitably causing injury to random customers" because their product was too sharp.
> Not very smart itself. How sad to reduce the whole thing to ignorant stereotypes
It's hard to call it an ignorant stereotype when it is the explicit policy of some police departments not to hire smart people. And to go to court to defend that policy.
There is one story about one police department. Does the sheriff's department in the OP do that? Does it apply to these particular people? If you don't know, it's ignorant and it's a stereotype.
I don't think that's obvious at all. I think there are obviously a mix of wars where the outcome was inevitable, and where it was decided through a series of one or more battles.
In WWI, for example, if Germany had won the battle of the Marne, they would have captured Paris in 1914 and likely (eventually) have won the war.
What did the founder have to do to keep growing at 93%? Good solid business fundamentals and identifying a new solution can get you some growth. But eventually you've done all that and the only way to continue growing is extraction -- buy out your competition and raise margins, outsource your workers, enshittify your user experience. THAT is why no one "earns" a billion. The last $900M pretty much always requires using your resources in clever but unethical ways to extract money from customers and financial markets.
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