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Comment by klmadfejno | Hacker News Reader

> We in America are much too obsessed with "one great man" theories of history. I also think we are inclined to underestimate the competency of Chinese governmental figures, which is structured very differently from the West.

Eh... Do I think Bezos is a visionary responsible for all of Amazon's success? No. But culture comes from the top. There's a lot of ways to run a company poorly, especially if it's doing something novel and not just churning out mundane products. The big ones involve bureaucracy and short term profits. If Jeff Bezos died, I'm sure Amazon would be just fine. Tesla maybe not. How mature is Alibaba and Ant?

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I think the problem with the “great man” theory is the thinking that if Bezos/Musk hadn’t done their thing nothing would have happened. I am pretty sure that in a free society one or many others would have achieved similar things. For example the computer industry would have been fine without Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Or it may have been even better off without them overshadowing others? Same for eCommerce. Maybe things would be better without Amazon domination. Who knows?

Yeah. Less so the rarity of the great person, but the rarity of the opportunity. But both are required for teh magicks

People thought the same thing about apple when Jobs died but it's up 900% in the 9 years since his death

Stock price isn't especially meaningful in the context of the current economic times. I'd say Jobs dying is more or less along the lines of what my worldview expectations are. Apple is fine. But its product offerings tend to be a lot shittier and generic.

Jobs rescued Apple from the brink of bankruptcy.. There would be no Apple to be up 900%.

Stock prices being up is a function of zero / near-zero percent interest rates and the injection of enormous amounts of capital into the system from the Fed just printing, literally, trillions of dollars.

Capital has very few "good" places to be allocated at the moment - really for the past decade or so - and COVID-19 put everything into hyperdrive for the tech sector.

Economics Explained on YouTube has a good video about this.

Apple's relative stock price has increased, so the general increase of equity prices doesn't explain this.

Low interest rates means that people will search for yields elsewhere, it doesn't intrinsically mean they would settle on Apple outside of solid management.

Doesn't mean anything besides people want to buy Apple stock, for a myriad number of reasons.

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