Tech & defense 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Jeff Bezos' Amazon was competing recently with Microsoft for a $10 billion contract from the U.S. Dept. of Defense, and Microsoft got the deal in November. 

They will build out cloud infrastructure for the Pentagon over ten years under the project name, "Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure" (JEDI).

Unlike Google, Microsoft will do business with America's military. Their CEO puts it this way: "We made a principled decision that we’re not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.”

In Bezos' words, "“I know it’s complicated, but do you want a strong national defense or don’t you . . I think you do, so we have to support that.” He says (video below) that the U.S. Military has earned the trust and respect of Americans by doing hard things well for decades.

WaPo chaos

Washington Post used to be very influential and profitable. Jeff Bezos, who bought the newspaper in 2013, became aware of the fact that legacy media (including his newspaper) was losing ground. He said, "Americans Don't Trust the News Media."

He started taking bold steps to turn the paper around, probably hoping to hold off a loss in profit that would accompany the loss of trust. In 2024 he decided they would not endorse a presidential candidate (and lost 200,000 subscribers). In 2025 he told them to write about liberty and free markets (and an angry editor quit his job).

Bezos (photo) could not avoid or hold off staggering losses. The paper lost $77 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024, and another $100 million in 2025.

What business could swallow loss on that scale? Only a business owned by a billionaire who could absorb those losses, perhaps. Changes had to be made. 

Earlier this year he fired over 300 reporters, a massive 44% reduction . . and then another 60,000 online subscribers quit.

We're watching legacy media in free fall.

Vibe shift 4

Follow-up to these posts

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (photo) just made an additional change to the newspaper. In perhaps another example of the "vibe shift," he directed the opinion pages to write in support and defense of two new themes. He calls them "pillars," probably in the sense of American foundational values: personal liberty and free markets.

 

Not everyone is happy about it, so I have to wonder just what they have against personal liberty and free markets (rather than forced or coerced ones). When he asked his opinion pages editor to manage this new direction, the man chose to quit his job instead.

Other subjects will be addressed, but the policy shift is clear. "Viewpoints opposing those pillars," he says, "will be left to be published by others." 

from his X post

Billionaires

Here is the list of the ten biggest billionaires in the world by the people at Forbes, who keep track of these things. This animated chart shows the top ten by year, 2001 til 2022.

Big names make up some of the list of billionaires in the world. But many are not big names. Many are Americans, but many are not. 

The Albrecht brothers (Germany) made their fortune in selling cheaper groceries (Aldi and Trader Joe). Jeff Bezos made the top ten list in 2018, 24 years after founding Amazon. The name Walton is the family who founded another retailer with a reputation for cheaper goods, Walmart. Elon Musk made the top ten list just last year, and now leads it.

How did Aldi and Walmart make their founders rich by selling cheaper goods? Millions of people in the world took that offer of cheaper goods (and became their customers) because it helped them get more of the food and products they wanted for a lower price, to improve their lives.

from "World's Top Ten Billionaires" (where there's a better looking chart)

Forbes 400

Forbes creates a list every year of the four hundred richest Americans. The minimum net worth to be one of the 400 is $2.1 billion. Ernie Garcia III (yesterday's post) is the youngest of those who are on the list for the first time.

photo

Wealth like that raises the big question: how did they get so rich? In 2014, Forbes started rating each one with a "self made" score of one to ten. One means their money came from someone else, inherited or given, and they had no part in earning it. Ten means that they started out poor or low middle class and raised their own fortune.

Jeff Bezos is #1 on the Forbes 400, with a fortune of over one hundred billion dollars. His ex-wife is on the list for the first time, after receiving a divorce settlement of one-quarter of Jeff's Amazon stock.

Surprising fact: a total of 221 American billionaires failed to make the list.

from The Forbes 400

Old media

Legacy media has been around for many years and includes some well-known names such as Washington Post and New York Times along with television broadcast news programs. Owned by huge corporations and billionaires, they carry huge political influence . . or did.

Jeff Bezos (photo), founder of Amazon, bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. This year he shocked its fans when he announced that the Post would not endorse a political candidate for president of the U.S., an end to its long tradition. 

 

Editors, writers and readers were angry that the newspaper would not take the side of the left wing party, as in the past. Two hundred thousand subscribers cancelled.

Why did he do it? The Post ran his explanation: "The Hard Truth: Americans Don't Trust the News Media."

In recent surveys, media and journalists are nearly at the bottom of the list of professions Americans trust, he says. "But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working."

(cont'd tomorrow)

Still SpaceX

Last April NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract for a lunar lander to SpaceX for practical reasons. Blue Origin and Dynetics lost that competition. 

But Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) didn't let it go. The two losing companies filed a challenge and complaint with NASA. No money could flow to help SpaceX develop its Starship until the challenge was answered and resolved.

NASA is done with its deliberations now, concluding that they decided fairly in April - based on the funds that Congress had given NASA to work with.

So . . it's still SpaceX.

Artemis is the name of the mission to land people on the moon again, many years after the last time. There will be more bumps in the road and politics will play a huge part in the outcome. Count me in with the American people who hope it can still be done.

Loss for Meta

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, continues to lose value as revenue goes down and they keep investing in virtual reality. Meta stock in 2016, at its peak, was worth about $362/share. This week a share was going for about $100. 

Mark Zuckerberg owns 350 million shares. About 13 months ago his net worth was $142 billion, and then Meta began its precipitous decline. Don't feel too sorry for him because he's still worth $38 billion, which will get him through the winter all right.

Bloomberg wealth index listed him at one time as 3rd richest, right after Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Now he's pegged as #23.

image

from Bloomberg

Old media 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Bezos wants to face reality, as he says, to "swallow" what he knows is a "bitter pill" to journalists, the fact that "Most people believe the media is biased." The only surprise to most of us in America is that it took so long for big corporate media to figure that out.

While their endorsements used to carry weight with American voters, now, he says, they carry no weight. Worst of all, they "create a perception of bias" (a true perception in my humble opinion.) "The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite."

Who does he think did influence voters in our election on November 5? 

"Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions."

"Misinformation" is what the left wing party calls news/opinion that doesn't come from them. The elite still are super confident that they are superior and deserve unquestioned status. 

from Washington Post

SN15 did it

SpaceX accomplished it at last, launching the new version of Starship (SN15) six miles up and returning it to the ground in a soft landing. All the previous prototypes ended in "rud" - rapid unplanned disassembly, i.e. explosion.

As you know, Starship is being developed by the private corporation SpaceX for NASA to use on its crewed mission to the moon, perhaps by 2024. SpaceX also plans to use this craft for its own commercial flights.

The two other companies that were considered by NASA for the job were Blue Origin and Dynetics. They lost the bid to SpaceX. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has filed a complaint with the government. So, for now, NASA is unable to give SpaceX any money for the job. If it isn't settled quickly, that moon mission goal may well be delayed. In fact, the 2024 goal is expected to slide under the current administration anyway.

from Space website

Blue Origin

Just fyi, SpaceX is not the only private company putting re-usable rockets into space. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, also founded Blue Origin for that purpose. In fact, their rocket booster was the first to ever go into space and return safely to earth (November 23, 2015).

"In March 2017, it was announced that Blue Origin acquired their first paying launch customer for orbital satellite launches."

Royal wealth 1

How many of us normal people can relate to the wealth of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos? They are at the top of the list of wealthy Americans. Probably, unlike the rest of us, they could buy any car or home or toy or luxury vacation either of them could want.

But the wealth of the royal family of Qatar surpasses both of them . . combined. It's pretty much unimaginable wealth. The small nation of Qatar is on the east side of the Saudi Arabian peninsula, circled on the map below.

image

Oil/gas is the source of their wealth, as you might guess from their Middle East location. Relatively tiny in size compared to some nations, Qatar holds about 10% of the world's reserves.

Their holdings have gone way beyond their own country. By some accounts, the royals of Qatar hold more property in London than the British monarchy.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Super rich 3

(cont'd from this post)

Sultan Bolkiah is far from the richest person on earth. In fact, according to the Forbes list of global billionaires, #10 on the list is three times richer. (But, of course, the sultan takes the prize for collecting luxury cars.)

The top four on the list made their fortunes in the American technology sector. After Elon Musk comes Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Larry Ellison (Oracle). The U.S. has the most billionaires, China is next, followed by India with its own ~200 billionaires.

A minority inherited the money, but about two thirds of them created their own fortunes. Factors like the value of their investments and businesses are considered when Forbes figures out their net worth, and one of the investigators explains it below.

from Forbes

Freer FB

"Destroyed trust." Head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, says that his former policies of content moderation and fact-checker censors have destroyed the public's trust. Maybe he was actually sincere last September when he seemed to regret the censorship that Facebook has practiced.

It sounds like the message that Jeff Bezos delivered to Washington Post. It could be a trend, a good one. Many Americans have had enough of media efforts to force their own views down our throats. As they both said, we don't trust them anymore.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is going to adopt something like X's community notes to function in place of fact-checkers.

Skeptical people think he's just kissing up to the new administration. Whether he is or not, Facebook will be a freer platform . . and that's a good thing.

Rivian

Amazon revealed its brand new line of electric delivery vans last week. Their fleet total is expected to reach 10,000 in 2022 and 100,000 by 2030. Alexa will be giving hands-free help with navigation and weather forecasts, of course. 

But the vans are not from Tesla (Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are famously not friends). Rivian is the company making them. They've taken a low public profile for about eleven years, but have big investors.

A round of investment last July included Amazon and T. Rowe Price and amounted to $2.5 billion. Ford itself chipped in $500 million and will eventually sell the Rivian.

from The Verge

Elon & Twitter 6

Follow-up to this post

Twitter is suing Elon Musk to force him to buy the company per his original (large) offer, and that case was supposed to go in front of a judge soon. But there's a surprising turn of events in this ongoing drama. Now he says okay, he will buy it!

When he first made the offer last spring, staff and board members let it be known that they didn't like it. Elon's issue was to turn Twitter toward more free speech and away from viewpoint censorship - but a surprising number of people defended censorship.

Now that the purchase seems to be going forward again, critics are resurfacing.

One of them is a former high government official and hypocrite, who tweeted: "When multi-billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy."

Comments poked fun at his vast insincerity . . because a man of his experience just has to know that our "vital platforms for communication" are already owned by billionaires! One of the comments: "[Y]ou weren’t worried about Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, or anyone else."  Let's add to that list Larry Ellison, Jack Dorsey, Sergei Brin.

The win for oligarchy that he mentions was achieved years ago when our billionaire social media giants used their influential power to censor speech they didn't like.

New media

Legacy media is in decline (see Jeff Bezos' opinion about his Washington Post). Since the election on November 5, both MSNBC and CNN have lost about half their audience. Newspapers in general speak to only half of the audience they had back in 2000.

Newsweek says "traditional media's institutional collapse" came from "a growing sense among Americans that the media cannot be trusted to tell them the news they believe is fair," plus a failing business model.

It's not just one side of the political landscape which doesn't trust big media. "It actually transcends party," says one pollster. "Young people in particular are very distrusting of the media."

So where do people, especially young people, go for their news? Podcasts are popular. Joe Rogan's conversation with the president-elect had 40 million views. And what does Joe say? "X is the most reliable and most popular news source in the world."

 

from Newsweek 

(cont'd tomorrow) 

What's important?

National Public Radio (NPR) proudly announced its new CEO last January. Katherine Maher is an experienced executive who has "tackled the issues around reliable and accessible information for all."

"Reliable" ? Well, not exactly . . not if you really need to know the reality about a situation. True information is not her goal in leading this news-gathering organization. She says:

"I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting things done."

So her goal for NPR is to get everybody to agree, presumably with their point of view. She probably has nothing against true information . . but only if it helps them get more important things done.

Americans don't trust news media, as Jeff Bezos said. This helps explain why.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Tech & defense

Google, enormously rich and influential tech company, will not work for the Department of Defense of the United States. It sounds like a decision based on the moral disapproval of several thousand employees, a judgment of an ethical nature.

But Google does similar work (relating to artificial intelligence) for the military of China. 

Is working to aid the Chinese military okay, but working for the American military is not?

Jeff Bezos has an opinion: big tech should not turn its back on America's defense.



(cont'd tomorrow)

Did it

SpaceX has accomplished one of their major goals - they safely landed a rocket back on earth yesterday after it had launched satellites while in space.

Blue Origin, too, accomplished the safe return of a rocket from space, about a month ago. Owner Jeff Bezos (he also owns Amazon) says, "“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts—a used rocket.”

According to Elon Musk (CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla), "That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.” 

Two obvious reasons for that . . human space explorers have to return to earth alive, and there's much more that can be done if the cost of sending up a rocket is cut by 90-1000%.