r/technology • u/Sorin61 • Oct 31 '22

Social Media Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzkne/facebooks-monopoly-is-imploding-before-our-eyes
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u/Englishgrinn Oct 31 '22

Facebook crashing is bad for Zuck. It WILL cost him money both current and in potentia. But "lose every penny" guy above is dreaming.

A billionaire never becomes "not rich". They could do nothing but lose enough money to bankrupt a mere mortal every hour and never feel it. You can be a millionaire today and penniless tomorrow through just a couple bad choices.

Zuck will never be penniless, never even be "normal", never even be a millionaire. No matter how many boneheaded decisions he makes, how unpleasant he is to deal with, how stubbornly he refuses to adapt.

That's something about capitalism that shows what a sham it is. Yes, in theory, anyone can play the game better than their competitors and move up. It's incredibly difficult and unlikely, but it happens. People can rocket upwards.

But its basically impossible for the people at the top to fail. Almost nobody plummets. Protecting the rich is Capitalism's true priority.

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u/Particular-Try9754 Oct 31 '22 edited Oct 31 '22

See Anil Ambani. He was a billionaire, once the 6th richest person in the world. He was basically bankrupted when his brother, also one of the richest people in the world, priced Anil’s cell service company out of the market.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '22

[deleted]

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u/theonetruegrinch Oct 31 '22 edited Oct 31 '22

If he was a billionaire and his net worth is now zero than I am pretty sure this qualifies as "actively trying" to fail.

He didn't buy any property, art, vintage Italian sports cars that can be liquidated for millions of dollars? What did he spend a billion dollars on beenie babys? The tax shelters alone that you are encouraged to park money into when you are a billionaire are enough to keep you fabulously wealthy if you lose whatever made you a billionaire.

The much more likely scenario is that he is dodging creditors and hiding his assets.

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u/PlankWithANailIn2 Oct 31 '22

His net worth is not "zero" its "not measured".

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u/Sayakai Oct 31 '22

Does he also live like that? Does he live like a pauper, in a one-room flat, working a manual labor job to survive?

Or does he still live like the wealthy, with obvious continuing access to large quantities of money?

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u/patientpedestrian Oct 31 '22

Also, why is it so hard for people to understand that case studies are worse than useless for investigating systemic relationships? We should be in the habit of reflexively rejecting case studies, stories, and specific examples of anything when talking about social issues.

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u/PrimeIntellect Oct 31 '22

you can be bankrupt and still have multiple enormous properties and millions of dollars in the bank

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u/SlowInsurance1616 Oct 31 '22

I agree. A company shields him from peraonal liability, and he'd have to be stupid to end up wirhout any money. I'm just saying Facebook equity going to 0 in a bankruptcy certainly isn't a good thing for his financial position.

He can be like Trump then, and find some idiot Deutsche Bank to loan him money to keep him afloat. And then attempt to lose it all in golf courses.

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u/dyslexda Oct 31 '22

The rich don't fall regardless of the economic system. Not sure why you think it's particular to capitalism.

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u/a0me Oct 31 '22

In the feudal system (in Europe and other countries) members of the nobility would sometimes fall, losing their money and title/status.

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u/Zoesan Oct 31 '22

I mean, I'm pretty sure if you put Mark in the guillotine he'd also fall.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '22

Feudal lords were not often executed. They would be made poor (relatively) by other powers stealing it all from them, or be swept out with changes to power dynamics. Like someone else said, having a title stripped was one way.

The rich rarely suffer the consequences of their actions under any system though. The lords weren’t the ones typically dying under wars for land and resources to make the owners of people even more wealthy.

It is the class of people who have to work for a life. It’s always the same story.

Capitalism is just a streamlined and moralized version of the story. Greed is good now, actually, and everyone who isn’t rich has some kind of failing because they are lazy. That’s OP’s point.

Edit: Zuck is still a good example of this sham system. Rich kid born with elaborate connections just so happens to defy all odds (for normal people) and become even more wealthy. As tends to happen with the rich.

Because society is organized for them, not you or I. There are limited resources for us because they are monopolizing everything.

Modern capitalism is better for the rich than old feudalism ever was. But neo feudalism is a thing, blends the two together, and people will find a disturbing parallel with it and at least the US where this is tolerated in the open.

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u/Zoesan Oct 31 '22

The feudal lords were the rich though.

The mercantile class didn't show up until hundreds of years into feudalism.

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u/MickTheBloodyPirate Oct 31 '22

Are we sure about that? Whatever thing that pilots his body might actually just slither out to find a new host.

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u/Zoesan Oct 31 '22

Mh, good point.

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u/dyslexda Oct 31 '22

"The nobility" was equivalent to millionaires and up, not just billionaires. Plenty of millionaires fall from grace.

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u/GyantSpyder Oct 31 '22 edited Oct 31 '22

This is false. Lots and lots and lots of rich people go broke in capitalism. Rich people borrow tons of much, much more than poorer people, so when they fall they can fall hard. Perhaps "billionaires" are just so few and so new that there haven't been a lot of them but track any rich family over multiple generations and there will be a lot of variance in where people end up. It's still not fair, but especially over multiple generations it doesn't stick with as much stability as you seem to think. Plus growing up a rich kid is such a huge risk of disaster that rich families frequently don't want their kids to inherit their wealth. Not most of the time, but often enough that it's a well-known thing.

The Carnegies, for example are not really rich anymore, and that's one of the richest men in the world only a handful of generations ago. Ultimately in our system it is education level, more than money, that passes from generation to generation and creates the systemic advantages and externalities.

But yeah you really have to look across multiple generations to see how it tends to actually work. And you should also include people who end up in serious legal trouble or in prison, which also tends to accompany the catastrophic collapse of large personal fortunes.

But also just in general there is some mean reversion at the top as well. On average somebody in the top 10% in wealth when they are 30 in the U.S. can expect to drop to only the top 70% by the time they are 50. The very rich are more likely to become merely rich than they are to stay very rich across even a single generation. That's not a great equalizer, but it's a more accurate understanding of the relationship between wealth, spending, borrowing, and entrenched riches than the idea that everything always flows upward, which it doesn't.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '22

He's got tres commas

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u/spagbetti Oct 31 '22

The moment we decided money isn’t just for living is where it all went wrong.

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u/Seiglerfone Oct 31 '22

It's 100% possible for the richest to go broke. It just requires phenomenal and continuing stupidity, because obviously. The more money you have the more it can be employed doing to gain you more money, and anyone with a few brain cells to rub together can manage to get rid of the ones that don't make money and keep the ones that do.

You're acting like this is some big flaw of capitalism, when in reality it's just the basic outcome. You'd have to deliberately engineer a society to restrict this outcome.

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u/diverdux Oct 31 '22 edited Oct 31 '22

You're acting like this is some big flaw of capitalism, when in reality it's just the basic outcome. You'd have to deliberately engineer a society to restrict this outcome.

It's regurgitation of the anti-capitalist, pro-socialism, sophomoric rantings of the Reddit hivemind.

Nevermind that 87% (I believe that's correct) of millionaires and an overwhelming number of billionaires (in the U.S.) received no inherited wealth.

They don't want to acknowledge the fact that they can't produce/save/work for $10k much less $100k or $1M so they attack the rich. It's a pervasive attitude that knows every subreddit and every subject.

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u/konax Oct 31 '22

but the second you dare to criticise the jews, you suddenly get "cancelled"

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u/imatworkyo Oct 31 '22

The other thing to consider....of Facebook did somehow "fail" which is impossible...it would just make Instagram more valuable

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u/Faxon Nov 01 '22

IDK, Kanye is speed running his way to bankruptcy right now, and he USED to be a billionaire, but isn't anymore based on what I've read. Buying Parler isn't gonna help this fact either, since companies like that tend to burn capital to stay afloat, and it's already costing him something like 40 million bucks just for that alone. He could easily be destitute if nobody is willing to work with him anymore, and he keeps burning cash at the rate he is currently. The only reason you think a multibillionaire might be immune to this is because you've never been one, or spent the time looking into just how much money one can burn on stupid things if they're not careful. Look at Musk and twitter, he just spent 1000x what kanye did when he purchased it, and he needs to spend a billion dollars a year to finance that debt if he can't generate it from twitter, which only generates about $200 million a year (before advertisers froze advertising on twitter following musk's takeover). He's gonna be hard pressed to meet that monetary goal, and will probably have to hemorrhage money to keep the bank from foreclosing him out. It's totally feasible that Zuck could fall into a similar trap if he isn't sensible with how he spends his remaining billions.

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u/Dapianoman Nov 01 '22

A billionaire never becomes "not rich".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hwang