1/ It's also the case that @jeffbezos forgot to thank the people bidding up the price of Amazon's stock. Everyone seems to ignore that his wealth comes from Amazon stock sales, not from his personal share of Amazon's profits.

https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1417544393297436679

2/ Bezos doesn't personally get to keep Amazon's profits, and if he did, he'd be worth only about $6 billion, not the $200+ billion he has today.

1/ This @HudsonInstitute report about the failure of military budgeting and procurement to keep up with the pace of technology illustrates why most corporate and government innovation initiatives fail so badly. s3.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.o… 2/ You can't get to new outcomes without changing the processes that you use to achieve them. New technology is not independent of culture, business processes, and the skills of the people you ask to implement it. And maybe even more importantly, how it is funded.

Eye-opening. Japan as a beacon of true free market capitalism. Bad for financial markets, but not for consumers: "In Japan, the top four companies in each industry control approximately 11% of their industry’s revenues. This is true across all industries” japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/0… "In the U.S., a comparable analysis suggests approximately 35 percent of each market is locked up by the top four players ... All said, Japan’s markets and industries are about three times more competitive than those of America."

I’m totally on board with many of the principal observations of this article. In fact, they echo arguments from my article on Blitzscaling in Quartz back in February. But I’m not sure the economic analysis is correct. More in followup comments.

https://twitter.com/pomeranian99/status/1136652947075547137

First off, here is my piece on Uber as an example of what’s wrong with blitzscaling, in case you haven’t read it, to make sure you understand that I’m entirely on board with much of the criticism in the American Affairs piece. bit.ly/2TMBerU

I really enjoy the @NYTimes Daily podcast, but their episode on Medicare for All ended with a very shallow economic analysis, saying something like “the plan would cost $30 trillion, and how are we going to pay for it?”

nyti.ms/2HlJY1s @nytimes Here are some of my objections:

1. They left out that that is a ten year number.

2. It appears to have been calculated simply by multiplying the entire US healthcare spend (about $3T per year) by ten.

(More)

An interesting deep dive history of the phrase “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer, you’re the product,” which today is used of Facebook, but far predates it. I was surprised to learn that I played a role in popularizing the phrase slate.me/2Kkmrw5 There’s a lot more than the history of the phrase in this piece, though. Here’s one tidbit: "If anything, Facebook’s mistake in the Cambridge Analytica case was that it failed to treat users’ data as a valuable product."