United States Politics: ∆τ_i*ε*φ*m_i<0 where ε=4 and φ=0.25

[benji]

I never understood why the Democrats didn't exploit this rift prior to the election because it was already boiling at the RNC.

How would they exploit it? Especially when they considered Elon the bigger threat and he's closer to their position.

Elon Musk is like all of Silicon Valley. They're smart but not really that much smarter or better than the rest of us, they just have access to a lot of resources and cheap credit and are more willing to take bigger risks.

I mean, no, while this is true for the bulk of the workers there, it's really not true for the "founder" class. To which I will even include Elon. Nor is it that they're smarter, it's that they're more imaginative about certain fields. You think they take bigger risks because of that, when they don't. In fact, even from your own explanation they aren't taking any risks at all.

And when we talk about Silicon Valley I would also include things like Microsoft and Amazon in this not solely companies purely based there.

Where Silicon Valley thrives in a way that looks comparatively magical to everyone else is because everywhere else despises entrepreneurs for rocking the boat. The Valley's culture prized this until it became established and has started to turn in the same direction. The older fortunes, the Oracles, but even people like Elon, didn't get "cheap credit" and "access to lots of resources" versus identifying gaps to be filled before they became obvious. Of course, this would increasingly limit as the tech economy built out. You can only found Google once.

One of the reasons Elon was feted for so long is that he hadn't had any visible failures. People didn't know PayPal wasn't his, they let SpaceX convince them he was creating Tesla too. Most of the most famous techbros are people who only did one thing, Elon kept doing them which was different. But the other PayPal Mafia? The people behind all other kinds of giants? Once they left their original company they typically didn't start up new ones and new ones after that, they turned into the investor class. At the other end you had guys like Zuck and Bezos who kept to their original company for decades, something also unique in the Valley, they didn't cash out!

Elon's also unique in another regard, his riches date back to the dotcom era. That's what allowed him to get into Tesla which is what has inflated his wealth beyond comparison. But Elon's old Valley money, not even a post-Facebook Valley wealth guy. Elon's brilliance at PayPal was that he sold somebody else's company from minor investment, the original X.com was not even Elon's first startup, he had already sold one for like 2000% gains. Elon probably could have gotten even richer off PayPal if he hadn't tried to run the place, it was Thiel's product that won that battle. (I have to assume that Tesla's success is tied to this lesson, just compare how it operates to how he's tried to run Twitter personally.)

The Valley culture and typical "process" dates back to the Fairchild Traitorous Eight, they all stayed in the Valley because that's where they had comparative advantage. If they had done the typical thing and rolled their money into Wall Street management they would have given that up. It's this very simple idea, invest in what you know, that birthed the Valley. Outside money would never know as much as the actual people in it. A lot of the "risks" that Valley people were taking that turned into successes, like Apple, weren't big risks from the comparative perspective of the Valley. They were from Wall Street's perspective. This never changed through to the PayPal Mafia and Facebook. The dotcom bust had burned typical investors so much that "second window" opened up until the Great Recession. The VC flood since then has been because where else are you supposed to put money? The problem was assuming a built out, established tech economy would operate like the endlessly growing one of the later 20th Century. Especially when so much talent and money is tied up in decades old industry giants. Is it any surprise that things like Uber and WeWork halt at their very first idea rather than endlessly generating new ones? That's how every other established industry works.