Letter to Sundar Pichai from TCI Fund Management [pdf]

Corporate activism isn’t about having the biggest stake, its about rallying other shareholders around your cause.

All else equal a bigger stake gives you more leverage, but its still possible to influence company decision making with a smaller stake by getting other shareholders on your side

0.5% sounds like a huge chunk of Google to me! Does anyone have anything describing the levels of influence of a large company that come with a % stake? For example, this is what you get with 0.1%, this is what you get with 0.5%, 2%, 10%, and so on?

I think a big component of this sort of activism (where the ability for actual shareholder control is minimal) is driven by the desire for visibility of the Fund itself as well as for personal visibility of the fund manager.

Here we are discussing TCI and last week we were discussing Ross Gerber calling for board seats on Tesla - who was trolling to get free advertising for the Gerber-Kawaski fund.

It is basically brand hacking/building 101 - Social Media/Legacy Media Engine Optimization. Pick a Goliath and start attacking and assume that Goliath's brand name will drive tweets and news articles and increase engagement for your David brand.

The "any press is good press" approach has been used to win political elections. Rinse repeat enough times and maybe it could be a way to win the presidential election.

> They own 0.5% which is nothing compared to other investors

But it is still a signal to manipulate the job market. If many tech companies agree openly to fire employees that will have consequences, if many tech companies just happen to get the same signals from some investors about firing people then is not that just a happy coincidence that may depress the market and lower salary without any manipulation to be blamed for?

When I read your comment, I assumed he actually had a 365 million salary, which would be amazing. He'd be paying 50% tax on the majority of that. I'd actually give him some respect for that, actually paying tax "fairly" and not optimizing.

But no, it's not his salary, it's dividends.

At least he said directly what everyone knew and what every CEO hid behind "I take the full responsibility": the current layoffs are a maneuvre to lower the compensation of the employees. These companies know they can rehire these people at any point in the future, so they are doing this to keep the wages in check.

I find it funny that there are economists who still use the argument of class warfare for wealth taxation, indeed we're living a class warfare, but now we know that it's the working class that's being assaulted.

Any companies come to mind? I could certainly use a change of pace

Doubt, those companies are in an even worse position - all the money that rushed in to fund them just got turned off.

The ones that will do well for the coming economic cycle are the ones that are the IBM/Oracle/Cisco tier.

Microsoft and Amazon have never had operating losses, not ever.

Google and Facebook did. But they are the product of a very blue ocean for their respective markets. The first people who did it will were going to absolutely clean up, and both of their current strategies are focused on finding the next market that works that way and get there first.

That business model isn't plausible in a high rate environment.

> when the company is taken over by MBAs and activist investors

I really get tired of this sentiment because it’s become a lazy stereotype.

Activist investors come around because of bad management. Bad management is irrespective of the MBA.

Satya Nadella of Microsoft is a much better CEO than Sundar Pichai, and both happen to have an MBA.

For reference, over the last 5 years, Microsoft stock has grown over 150% (not counting dividends) while Google has grown about 70%.

Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, has a degree in Math with a concentration in CS, but no MBA and has only grown the stock by about 12% before dividends.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, studied CS at Harvard, but Never graduated. He has lost about 25% for investors over the past 5 years.

I choose stock returns because they are what fund most people’s retirement accounts (usually via a mutual fund owning them). The companies are all significant tech companies of roughly $200 billion or greater.

We are just going forward for funding. Obviously this is a somewhat useless comment as we are in stealth right now, which means no one reading this will have the info to remotely guess if we will be a failure or a success, that is not my point though. I am commenting more to outline that we have the premise that we build during lean times, benefit from all the talent becoming available, and be scaled and ready to widely sell to the market during a hopeful pickup next year (this is the gamble). The idea is to be a camel more than a unicorn.

Definitely, the stiffness of a large enterprise is always killing talent.

The future according to Musk.

"Due to supply chain issues, oxygen prices are at a decades-long peak. Consider mixing up to 30% CO2; also tout your commitment to combating climate change."

"I lost a lot of money I put on Google stocks, someone else must pay for the consequences of my actions!"

Note that this sentence does not apear in the pdf. Using quotes to post it here is confusing.

What recession?

we’re not in a recession

Why though? It’s not like they need the money in the short term. They have almost $200 billion in cash. For the majority of Google’s departments the need for employees isn’t tied to demand.

Google desperately needs to find another money printer, and ostensibly they staffed up to help them do it. That hasn’t changed, and Google‘s workload won’t drop noticeably in a recession outside of a few departments.

And even in the those departments, they have so much still growing cash on hand, that they’d probably be better off to weather the storm the lay off only to rehire in a year.

While we're not in a recession, I agree with your point. It sucks for the people it happened to, but the big tech layoffs so far have been minor compared the headcount growth the last couple of years. Economy wide, unemployment is at record lows. Step outside big tech and companies are still struggling to find talent.

There's also an argument that big tech keeping a bunch of people on payroll when they don't need to slows down overall growth in the industry as it makes it harder for startups to find talent.

Why is recession relevant when the company is raking it in?

Is the management of google so incompetent they cannot find a profitable application to a large part of their workforce?

2% improvement in opex. Demonstrating ability to trim staff without affecting revenue. Both matter to investors.

My salary is 100, I have to spend 99 on food monthly, leaving me with 1 money as profit. If I can eat only 98 money, I double my profit.

I am not saying that is the case here, but reducing a small percentage of cost could matter if your margin is small. And in the case of those big corps, you can think of them as multiple companies internally, it’s likely they are doing layoff on departments/ divisions that have thin margin or unprofitable (ie. if you are in ads, very few were probably laid off)

Times are good now. $3.6 billion is $36 billion in a decade. One day, Google may need that money to survive. Also, Google’s 2022 profit was $67 billion (down significantly from 2021) so they just increased profits by more than 5%.

Would you give me 2% of your salary if I asked you to? This isn’t intended to fix every problem, right away. This is a single measure. By the way, the fine you referenced is also calculated using a percentage of revenue: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust_en

I think 12k is just the start. The overall number will higher.

The median is probably much much lower than average, but perhaps not by enough to change your point, and odds are those fired are around the median not in the stratosphere.

is that really true tho? A lot of people have no faith in Google to create anything new. They just bin it after a few years.

The author of the letter details how salary contraction would work: "Alphabet should limit stock-based compensation given the depressed share price."

So, cut back on RSU grants.

Perhaps, but I haven't seen any real evidence of a causal relationship between high compensation and market dominance. An alternative hypothesis is that their market dominance is due to the founders' initial disruptive innovation of the Pagerank algorithm plus the later acquisition of the DoubleClick advertising network, and employee compensation was largely irrelevant. Prove me wrong.

From what I've heard talking to people who work at Google, most employees generate zero business value. The same as any other large enterprise.

Google achieved market dominance in large part due to its decision to hire very talented people in coordination with the other members of their wage-suppression cartel. How do you reconcile that with "compensate very well"?

> that would risk Google losing its lustre for talented programmers.

I suspect that ship has already sailed, any of the postdocs or senior software engineers I know wouldn't touch Google with a 10-foot pole these days. There's a feeling I suspect that they've become too corporate, and that they could fire you pretty much anytime and the first thing you'd know about it would be your access card suddendly not working.

Google achieved market dominance for its excellent search product that was superior to competitors well before it grew huge and started hiring in large numbers.

A decade or two ago, sure. I saw Google as a spiritual successor to Bell Labs, even.

Today that seems to have been highly neutered. It's a giant corp with an old money printing machine and not a lot of future direction, IMO.

I'm not sure it's fair to blame them, I think it's just the nature of companies growing too large.

Creating market dominance and sustaining market dominance are completely different beasts.

> but that would risk Google losing its lustre for talented programmers

Already has. Google is not "hot" anymore. Probably hasn't been for a while now.

> hopefully this letter is fake

The letter is published on TCI's own website[0].

He is salty about his winning streak ending[1]:

> Billionaire Chris Hohn’s 13-Year Winning Streak at TCI Ends With Fund Slumping 18%. Sell off in equities hurt bets such as Alphabet and Microsoft. Last year’s loss was the second since the fund started in 2004.

He moaned about cost reduction to Sundar Pichai in Nov 2022 too[2]. I wonder whether these sentiments were echo'd by other such investors too and how much all that contributed to Google's recent layoffs[3].

His fund has done activist moves in the past too so this sort of advocating isn't new to them[4]:

> In 2008 the US railroad company CSX won a court case against the Children’s Investment Fund and 3G Capital Partners, another hedge fund, after the funds announced that they had acquired about 20% of CSX’s stock.[9] TCI succeeded in electing four of its five directors to the CSX board, but CSX shares declined by about 50 percent after the meeting. TCI declared defeat and sold its shares, taking its directors off the board. Chris Hohn, the founder of TCI vowed to abandon shareholder activism as an investing strategy.

Apparently he hasn't exactly abandoned it.

[0]: https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-20/hedge-fun...

[2]: https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

[3]: https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Investment_Fu...

I mean when you take on a big investor, they get their say on how the company is run.

The headcount in tech recently grew way faster than the rest of the economy, and faster than the companies growth as well. As you get bigger headcount shouldn’t necessarily rise by more than the company is growing, which is what happened.

In a full blown recession going back to the headcount of 2 years ago isn’t exactly some Gordon gecko capitalist evil. It’s pretty reasonable.

Especially as it seems most tech companies are culling admin and hr staff, which is not where value is being created.

Ask Elon :)

> wow. the hubris and inhumanity

It's a business, not a charity. They have absolutely no obligation to keep tens of thousands of overpaid people on their payroll. It's not like we're talking about abused minimum-wage workers with no alternatives here either. And they're getting some pretty big severance packages, too.

I feel bad for the people on work visas, but that's a problem with the American immigration system, not Alphabet, and would apply anyone working at any company that needs to lay off people.

I find it either so naive or just to be a self-relaxing attempt to blame the gamer instead the game itself. Attacking and blaming those individuals or those patciular campanies which play the game as the rules are set, have always been easier than criticising corny capitalism we are living in. Virtue signaling over individuals or particular companies like this have always been a comfortable spot to be rather than trying go for the real reasons such as crony capitalism indeed is incentivizing everyone in the game to drop everything else but just what's written in the law related to morals or anything about being a human and just focus on the profit. In most of the times those individuals know all the rules they are given so good that they even calculate the penalties if they break them and they do so if breaking them is more profitable than paying for them. Yet we the people working under this rule feeling so accomplished pointing at fingers to those while all we do is distracting ourselves and everyone else from the real reasons not realizing doing so is just the same thing as sending "thought and prayers" to the ones who lost their jobs and mostly lost about their future, at least for a while.

Reminds me of the Fifth Element scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg

This letter from November says they have over $6 billion worth of shares. I think that's less than half a percent of Google shares.

Alphabet - TCI Fund Management https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/...

Which is to say, it's entirely fair to blame Larry and Sergey for these layoffs. Running things day to day or not, the company is still controlled by them and works more or less the way they want it to. Every time someone claims Google was different when Larry and Sergey ran it absolutely perplexes me... they still run it.

Do investors come to Alphabet for money or passion?

There are wider examples were people get hired in certain geos to provide political leverage. e.g. in Ireland google employs between 5000 & 9000 people.

Mostly well paid too but the purpose is twofold. "high tech" employment with well paying jobs is well protected by politicians in a country that until the late 90s/2000s had limited opportunities.

This in turn "buys" political protection via Ireland's government's EU veto rights. [if you don't know in the EU single market you currently only have to recognise revenue in whichever member state you claim to be based]. It in turn ensured highly profitable exceptional tax deals, as should be Ireland's sovereign right to negotiate.

Same story at Amazon. have kindle, fire stick, prime subscription, and alexa echo puck.

prime shopping worse today than 5 years ago. many item take longer than 2 day promise. too many scam items, like shopping at some flea market. reviews unreliable.

me kindle same thing as what I purchase in 2017 or 2016. in past two year they update some screen so feel more like android style but its otherwise exact same product.

alexa is timer and alarm clock. sometime use for weather but it always say “by the way” and try to sell something stupid.

ok now we discuss aws. “hey we give like nothing to open source community but let us take you open source project, create our own fork, and sell your hard work as managed service.”

ok but what aws really even do that big in past 5 year? s3..lambda.. ecs decent. redshift basically eat hole in your wallet. but all this stuff available 5 years ago. no significant disruption or amazing feature.

ok AWS at least make money. rest of they business is low or no margin. massive grift from amazon friends brag about rest and vest.

I think they should kick the Chrome and Android teams (and other assorted empire defense trash) into the Pacific ocean. The world and google will be a better place.

Once you become one of the most valuable companies in the world, with virtually all revenue derived from ads, you give up the ability to recruit for passion.

> Median salary is $300,000. Average is higher.

Cry me a river. This is coming from someone paying himself 6 times this yearly salary... PER DAY!!! As much as 2400 Googlers make. I guess he is THAT special.

https://fortune.com/2023/01/23/christopher-hohn-rishi-sunak-...

> But an investor might see this and feel people come to Google for money, not passion.

Pretty hypocritical. I doubt the investor has put their money into Google because of "passion". Why should an employee join for passion, then?

> that the headcount and salaries must go down

Maybe upper management should feel those decreases just like the rest of everyone else. But yeah, right, like that'll happen. Whenever anyone advocates lowering salaries, upper management never takes a cut.

Giving the salary as a median is a good call, that is honestly way too high, or Google/Alphabet is extremely top heavy. Both would be a problem.

My initial reaction was that investors really shouldn't interfere like that, they can sell their shares if they are unhappy with how the company is run, or vote for a different board next time. In this case I think they have a point. 150.000 is a lot to lay off, but it's also a lot of people to hire within a single year.

You could defend the hiring though. Unless I'm completely off, it does seem like profit are still going up. Ideally their profits should be going down, as they onboard large numbers of support staff to increase their customer service, but those aren't $300.000 a year kinda jobs.

> Let me take a stab at this with a viewpoint that's not "stingy rich f$*k wants to take away worker's money".

It is literally exactly that. You can say that "they just wan to optimize the system" but you are giving them a lot of credit.

> But an investor might see this and feel people come to Google for money, not passion.

Yes, that is called a job. Otherwise it would be a hobby.

Why workers trying to make money is bad meanwhile rich investors trying to rent-seek for even more money is good? That seems that would lead to a non-functional society were adding value is not rewarded but just owning thing is.

> But an investor might see this and feel people come to Google for money, not passion.

Bad news for investors; people are generally pretty concerned with salary when taking a job. Few people are sufficiently passionate about Google to work for it if were sufficiently below market and they could get jobs at market. What they seem to be suggesting here is managed decline.

Does google employee people because they are passionate about having workers? Or not charge advertisers because of they are passionate about ad tech?

Also why be concerned about the people making $300,000? Why not the ones making 50,000,000? It is always the obscenely rich complaining about everyone else making too much.

> The funny thing is his whole investment in google is just a tiny tiny fraction

but still big enough to get the CEO on the phone.

I understand your unpopular opinion. But here is another unpopular opinion.

Behind every for-profit business, and a out-of-touch with reality hedge-fund billionaire -- are the people who actually get shit done. And those people, who get shit done - are humans. And while layoffs suck, and it's inevitable they will happen, the distinction will always be between humane approach and greedy-billionaire approach.

This letter, if it's real, is written from a very very very high tree, by someone who belongs to 1% (or even less) of society in terms of the amount of money he makes. And this out-of-touch with reality, hedge-fund billionaire - is not longer seeing anything humane in humans. For him, humans, are an expense in his ledger. The same way as let's say groceries.

</unpopular-opinion>

And while I’m at it let me add another unpopular opinion: I don’t think anyone should be mad at said investor, Christopher Hohn.

It’s very easy to hate billionaires. But he invested a lot of money in Google (which allowed it to pay its employees among other things) and he wants to see his investment pay off.

He’s doing his job. I just think he’s not particularly good at it. This is where Google execs need to step in and tell him to fuck off.

What you have just said is the harsh truth and the reality that needs to be heard rather than ignored. Good.

> And let’s not kid ourselves, there’s plenty of fat at Google, more than 10% even. So if you understand the reality of Google only caring about the bottom line (which is great, in my opinion) and if you recognize that there’s some fat to trim, then you accept that layoffs are perfectly rational and even welcomed.

The layoffs had to happen someday and it wasn't sustainable anyway and I said this before that no company is safe and neither is it a day-care. As long as there are institutional investors, VCs etc in the company or the board, you accept the risk of relinquishing control even if it means that layoffs have to be done for the company to remain profitable for the next few years to shift focus on another higher priority product.

> Google doesn’t owe you shit. Google is not your friend or family, it’s your employer. You have a contract, and Google is allowed to terminate that contract if they see fit (and guess what, so can you!).

Exactly well said. Until many realize this, the better. Enough of the 'We're a family!' bullshit or useless DEI initiatives going on at many companies. Another product of the free money and zero interest rates era that needs to go.

> Do investors like this at all consider the impact of firing 12K humans (abruptly, and apparently at random) has on things like morale? This has actual, real world, financial consequences. Awful productivity. Awful employee retention. Awful ability to hire new talent. Awful PR.

I don't think they care, as long as Google is making money for shareholders and investors, but your points are also valid

Its interesting that the idea that a company's sole purpose is 'to make money' is completely accepted as being ok, regardless of what it takes to achieve it. There is no opposition to this at all. There used to be this idea of the social contract, wherein the legitimacy of wealth, power, and authority is tied to a responsibility for the people from whom that wealth is extracted and over whom that power is wielded.

I think your first point is important for workers to remember: never feel more loyal to the company than they are to you. That doesn’t mean you don’t work hard but you shouldn’t assume more compensation than you have a legally-binding arrangement for because the C-suite is always hearing from people like this.

This really ties into the first point about profitability: there’s always room for disagreement about the best path, especially over a longer time frame, and that means you want to have some idea of where your upper management stands. It doesn’t help you personally to be working on some long-term project if they’re focused on answering somebody like this.

>from Google execs I would have expected more

Reminds me of the saying "everyone's a genius in a bull market." I suspect that the 10 year roaring bull run in tech has added a strong randomizing effect in executive promotions, such that the people in charge today aren't the best that the company could've produced; they were just in charge of projects that succeeded "with the tide" even if executed poorly.

Sure explains a lot of Google (and big tech) behavior recently - the massive overhiring during COVID, cancelling projects left and right, now the timid and pointless layoffs that probably do more harm than good.

If American Airlines fired their heavy maintenance and aircraft purchasing divisions the planes wouldn’t just fall out of the sky.

You don't have the headcount to keep the service(s) running. You have the headcount to develop new features and services. It still remains to be seen how the reduction will effect Twitter in the long term.

I used to run Clara.io. It was a SaaS-based 3D editor. We shifted priorities back in 2015 but we were able to keep Clara.io running until December 2022 with less than one person investment per year. Details: http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/12/clara-io-is-closing-down/

Keeping a well designed website running isn't a major investment. Evolving a product though is.

I think the jury is out whether Twitter is going to continue to being a going concern. It could very well a major success.

But the fact that it didn't just crash and burn isn't that surprising.

I mean, if all mechanics and car designers and the entire auto industry were Thanos-snapped, my car would keep running for probably 6 months. There wouldn't be any new cars, though?

> Twitter laying off 75% and still running fine is the elephant in the room here...

Only for people who don't know how software works.

That depends on how you define "running fine". It wasn't running fine for 3rd party app developers and now they are cut off completely. DMs and like counts have been screwy ever since the layoff. There have been major outages, whole days where nobody could log in, other days where people were forced logged out. It's only "running fine" I'm the sense of how Twitter ran 10 years ago.

Twitter also lost more than half its revenue in past due to those cuts. Not sure I’d call that running fine

I have sold my kidney I am still running fine. How could lenders and banks see this and not agitate for confiscating kidney as part of bancrupcy?

> still running fine is the elephant in the room here

No, it is not. Twitter had more down times in the last weeks than ever before. Regularly the timeline is not loading and since a few days the viewer count is broken.

Very weird to assume that Google is still a growth company. Advertising is slowing down and it’s only real business is ads. GCP might eventually make money but that doesn’t require a huge speculative investment. It should be treated like a utility.

I guess it's more about sending the message to squeeze the rest.

> I really don’t get the purpose of such a small layoff.

Possibly just one of layoff waves.

Have a brief look on TikTok to see those showing their "work day" that's just goofing off.

Thanks for the link. Simply disgusting.

In another time that same greedy investor would be hounding the CEOs of big tech companies about how they can't hire talented software engineers, if they didn't offer stratospheric compensation, and how competing for talent is the most important thing in the world.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to also find letters from these assholes to Silicon Valley city councils complaining about how the councils insisting on spending valuable real estate for affordable housing is hurting the region, because that's poor use of capital and they should instead build office buildings for tech companies.

I think he meant reduce headcount to 150K, which would be approx 20% reduction. I hope this guy sleeps well at night.

to 150k

not by 150k

Reduction to 150k. So around 38k reduction (so roughly 25k in addition to the already announced 12k)

Reduction to 150,000.

Which is about 20% versus the 10% announced.

Why did Alphabet acquired 30k employees in 2022? Why 100k over last 5 years? What do those people do?

What marvels Google is working on?

What do you do these days?

US FAANG IT salaries are insane, well beyond normal, especially compared to european ones. I know these companies made an insane amount of money, but still they were outrageous.

The basic problem of supply and demand for skilled labor doesn’t go away.

This may make talent at the top end more tolerant of risks and willing to dive in and try and disrupt a company facing the inevitable morale and operational challenges that come after layoffs

I mean, this is a standard class warfare tactic: Billionaires get thousandaires to fight millionaires as if they're the problem.

How is it "rent seeking" to state the fact that Alphabet has too many employees, and is overpaying them.

It's been a continuing meme on hacker news for the last decade, that Google/alphabet hoover up all the talent in the market and pay them "f*ck you money" with golden handcuff stock vesting schedules, in order to keep them off the job market and out of competitor's hands. that's been the understanding of the situation for 10 years.

Alphabet has hoovered up some 180+ small businesses that threaten their monopolies over the last decade, only to throw away all the IP and bench the employees, just to keep their markets intact.

Those are things to be upset about, and much more serious and manipulative business practices. Don't be upset that an investor has just pointed out Alphabet's bullshit and wants them to course correct, now that the free money has dried up, and you can no longer afford to feed an army of useless rest'n'vest employees.

And the Overton window has absolutely nothing to do with this conversation.

What is interesting is that value creation isn’t discussed at all in the letter or comments. That would be a far more interesting cross section of Google to discuss.

He's worth 8b.

That's $80,000 for each of those 100,000 people. For one person.

Sickening.

> We should decide whether we like free market capitalism or not.

Nothing should be treated as absolute. The man considered as one of the fathers of free market capitalism, Adam Smith, directly appeals to humanity and sympathy in his other popular book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Yet for some it's like, either we have full on free market, with child labour, capital having all the power and all, or a command economy.

How about a middle ground with a free* market with regulations restricting the worst abuses of the greedy human nature? That's what already exists btw, it just needs more tuning. With more regulations to stop newly found abuses - today it's not child labour, it's pollution of all sorts, or disregard for (near-)slave labour, or optimising for short term profits at any cost.

People’s reactions suggest they too believe themselves to be overpaid. The harm to the laid off Googlers is they will not be able to find a job paying anywhere near as much because they are not each adding $300K plus benefits to the value of the company annually.

>> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

This would be a Show HN only when billionaire investor Chirstopher Hohn [0] himself posts this. If not, this perhaps is a Tell HN.

[0] https://archive.is/8oghg

Ah sorry!

Why would it be illegal to express an opinion?

Yes, sadly, there is nothing illegal about being a giant pile of <moderators will ban me for continuing this sentence>.

Instead of suing, unionize and take a bit of the power we all ceded to the hedge fund managers back. It won't make things perfect, but at least you'll have federal protections and Weingarten rights and the like and the ability to push back and have the tiniest bit of power in your work place.

That's why the super-rich have ranches in New Zealand now. When the revolution comes, they'll flee to safety far, far away, and let their pet politicians go up against the wall all alone.

Communism isn't better; you replace elites with another set elites who control power and those who can produce goods and value have zero incentive to produce. Communism has been tried regardless if people come up with hypothetical governments and assert, without evidence, that these controls would lead to better outcomes for the average person. In fact, tried communism has led to the deaths of millions as there's zero controls to regulate the government when its the only system that contains power.

> The broken system will come to an end when more and more people get replaced by robots and AI.

Automation increases employment, it doesn't decrease it.

How? Google’s never paid a dividend.

Ignoring the fact that Google doesn't pay dividends, how much money you are making isn't directly related to whether you should fire employees or not.