It’s always hard for me to understand the why when it comes to China’s government.
“Investors cheer the move as signalling the end of China’s tech crackdown”
If this is government action then why would this be the “end” of government involvement?
“Investors cheer the move as signalling the end of China’s tech crackdown”
If this is government action then why would this be the “end” of government involvement?
What is the basis of this hope?
On a political level, there are only so many Chinese companies with enough power to actually threaten the CCP, and Alibaba is probably enough of an example to keep them in line - further crackdowns are probably unnecessary.
The USA is different in that the political fabric is myopically focused on personal individual wealth growth in a very short sighted obsession with only being re-elected usch that they can insider graft/trade and expand personal/familial wealth.
The fact that we dont even openly talk about this problem... is the problem.
Nancy pelosi (and family, dont think for a second she doesnt share her insidere trading info with her close circle, including her son who has also grifting business in ukraine.) is a prime example.
Also, they've just got to ease up at some point right?
Nope. There is absolutely nothing (other than whatever good judgement they might have) that would prevent them from flying the entire craft straight into the ground.
Agree that the problem for Jack Ma was he was becoming a threat to CCP power. He may have been able to pull it off and make a new countervailing power, but he spoke up too soon and CCP/Xi figured out the threat and took action. Maybe another player will be smart enough to stay below the radar for much longer, but it'll be years if not decades
> Over the next few months the government [...] disappeared Jack Ma.
Huh, I've never seen "disappear" being used as a transitive verb. I kinda like it and I think I'll put it in my language toolbox.
Government forces (not revolutionaries) which use either their official militaries/police (often) or their secret police (less often) to detain individuals without recourse to the law, then take them to illegal detention centers where they are tortured and eventually killed (in Argentina, some detainees were simply drugged and dropped alive to the Río de la Plata river, where they drowned -- our so called "flights of death" -- and others sometimes simply shot). The key thing that sets "disappeared" people aside from other ways of execution is that there is no official acknowledgement of their fate, and their friends and family are never truly sure of how they died unless their mortal remains are ever found by chance.
If this sounds horrifying, always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government, in things like the School of the Americas [1], under the guise of "learning how to fight insurgency".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them.
PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.
To be clear: I do consider our dictators and murderers as worse people than those who trained them in the School of the Americas. Because, like you rightly put it, "who chooses this path?".
It's hard to choose a good path if a major world power is making sure all the good ones get shut down.
But this isn't what I said. I definitely didn't say "the USA did it". What I said was:
> always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government
Which is both fair and accurate. The US was definitely involved one way or the other in most Latin American dictatorships of that era, enabling atrocities under the guise of fighting communism and insurgencies in their "back yard".
> agree fully
.. The US was definitely involved one way ..
how are we not in agreement now?
They were called los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and for years once a week their mothers would silently carry photos of them and walk in circles at the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires.
Everyone loves Magical Trevor 'Cause the tricks that he does are ever so clever Look at him now, disappearin' the cow Where is the cow hidden right now?
Musk certainly used to have decent business accuumin - he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck. From all accounts he’s a half decent engineer too, which is rare in many CEO levels.
However his behaviour over the last 3 years has been very surprising. He seems to be less interested in the tech and more in the politics, which is a shame.
One thing he's demonstrated from the beginning is a stark undersupply of emotional intelligence. There are noises that come out of his mouth that my 15yr old would roll her eyes at for being too self-centered and immature.
The two are not the same.
It is like calling someone an idiot because they won't do what you want and ignoring what they want.
You have to admit that it may not be a priority for Elon to maintain his reputation with you in your 15 year old
I'm not interested in chatting with the Weird Nerd defending Elon Musk from Valid Criticism.
I am guessing this couldn't have been just luck either.
You imply that skills are context-free black or white - that is a terrible way to think about people or the world IMHO. And you can’t ignore changes over time either.
But, the fact that he so clearly doesn't know when he is out of his depth in the first place is the real tell.
A computer engineer without those skills is merely an amateur physicist. That's enough knowledge to light things on fire. A software engineer without those skills is merely a programmer. Ask a quant with no engineering background to put their ad-hoc scripts into production one day and let's see how that goes once other people start depending on it.
Musk might know some science, maybe he's written some scripts in his day, but none of that makes him an engineer. He's proven he doesn't know the first thing about keeping a lit boiler from exploding.
Once you have x dollars and own companies government is aware of it comes as no surprise
He's a narcissist. People used to worship him - and given just how hard Tesla kicked the butts of the ICE car industry or how SpaceX just completely obliterated Boeing/ULA, rightfully. But let's be honest, both are mainstream now and don't get as much attention as they once did... and then, his wife leaves him for Chelsea Manning and one of his children comes out as trans and sticks the finger to him.
A bad enough combination of events for normal people to handle (getting dumped by a partner is one of the chief causes that sends people into depression and other mental health disaster loops), but for a narcissist with no real support structure to fall back on and already on the edge? No surprise he blames everyone but himself and allies with those that are against those whom he feels "wronged" by: the far-right.
Note, this doesn't excuse any of his actions. He needs to come out of this rabbit hole either by himself or, when he finally hits rock bottom and commits something that he can't just buy himself out of prison, by the government.
The odds of any given entrepreneur getting lucky several times in a row is very small.
Given a large enough entrepreneurs, the odds of one of them getting lucky several times in a row gets very large. We just don't see all the ones who tried and failed, or succeeded once or twice and fizzled out.
I don't doubt that Musk has some skills and appropriate personality traits as well, but luck is likely the dominating factor.
That either seems extreme luck or there’s something else
What an hilarious amount of bad faith! What drives you to resent him that much? Envy? It's okay: he's achieved a lot, but maybe you can too if you work at it.
However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.
Then maybe you should scrutinize who you get your information from: intelligent people who have worked with Musk, or random journalists and forumers that repeat talking points such as "this immense success over several decades of active executive role is just pure luck".
> However, I think it's an unhelpful mindset for others to believe that Musk is some sort of model for entrepreneurial success.
What an interesting thing to think! The person with arguably the greatest track record of entrepeneurial success alive should, under no occasion, be taken as some sort of model for entrepreneurial success. If you have contenders for this position, I'm interested.
There is a far stronger underpinning to the American attitude to wealth: It's not "equate wealth with ability", it's more "equate wealth with virtue and morality" - that the owners of wealth "did something right" generally has nothing to do with ability. Even the founders of Hewlett-Packard aren't remembered for their technological advances but for the "HP Way", a marker of virtue rather than business acumen.
The absolute veneration of "hard work" as a marker of success over connections/which hoo-ha you accidentally fell out of is rarely raised, despite their being overwhelming evidence that to be successfull in the US, you have to be born on 3rd base.
When it comes down to it, it should be absolutely no surprise that these billionaires with feet of clay rarely live up to the image that is built for them by the fanboys. Musk's family had a history of bizarre, he has simply not fallen far from the tree.
You don’t build the first successful auto startup in 70 years and revitalize the space industry by being a moron. Everything Elon Musk has ever done with Twitter (including the 2018 SEC debacle) has been the dumbest shit possible, however
I think you are spot on. There are dozens of 'Elon Musks' out there we don't notice or talk about because they didn't win. Someone was going to win in the space, the government was heavily incentivizing electric car purchases. Musk was the best salesmen and here we are. That doesn't make him a tactical genius.
And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.
In terms of pure market cap, which I'm not sure how relevant it is, it seems that the current valuation (41 billion) is higher than when he offered to buy it (34 billion in April 2022).
Most startups of that era are.
Seems like the arch-enemy of communists
The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future https://archive.is/d9OsU
The former has a limited downside, the latter unlimited. Whatever the Central Committee decides happens to you is law with no recourse - execution, disappearing and re-education, etc. - and law enforcement and the courts are just there to justify it after the fact.
It’s clueless to publicly mouth off about the CCP if you’re a high-profile influential Chinese billionaire and therefore a potential threat to the current ruling faction, or some future ruling faction when there’s turnover. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor there.
If the downside is unlimited then you do whatever it takes to win, always.
And if there isn't currently a struggle then you prepare for the next one, constantly.
Or in other words, you only spend a small portion of your total ability and time on the job, because you have to constantly expend effort on protecting your back.
Xi Jinping himself got purged in his youth and spent that time living and working in the countryside and building his ‘man of the common people’ cred, then made it back into the CCP’s favor later. Though Xi was a princeling, his father was one of Mao’s inner circle, so he might have been untouchable and only at risk of exile and not actual execution for that reason, unlike most other CCP members and Chinese people.
And to be fair, US politicians spend most of their time fundraising for their next campaign, so in terms of total ability and time spent on the job it’s probably similar in both systems. But losing a power struggle in the US just means losing your election, and trying again in the next one. In the CCP there’s a wider range of consequences.
1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem worthwhile to him. Still, he miscalculated, but not out of sheer cluelessness.
2. You, HN commenter, understand Chinese politics and power better than Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese billionaire. He is clueless.
Doesn't 2 seem a little arrogant to you?
Though I would argue that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is not that Ma was being calculating and strategic, but that he just got cocky and said something dumb in the moment. He let all the global feting of his rise from schoolteacher to China's richest man go to his head, made an all-too-human mistake, and said something inadvisable.
He may even have been trying to defend the CCP in that moment, trying to communicate to US audiences that the CCP doesn't need to be feared because it's not scary, and thus he himself didn't fear it. But Xi and the powers that be interpreted it differently, and disappeared him. Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022.
Missing option (4). If you have billions, sacrificing a lot of wealth and power to do something you want is just another valid option.
See also, sacrificing 20% of your net worth to support "freedom of speech" is a reasonable choice, especially if you are left with an objective fortune.
FWIW I know it’s his right to do this as he owns the platform but it is relevant in the context of “but Elon didn’t do X”
It seems to be supporting Musk's freedom of speech just fine.
But one has to be clueless in order to start a power struggle with Xi. He's not like the old school CCP head at all (not even Mao), he's much more of an all-powerful tyrant like Stalin was. Starting a power struggle against such a ruthless despot is clueless.
Political struggles where commonplace during most of the Mao era, and it wasn't until the end of his reign (in 1969, amidst the cultural revolution) that Mao came to gain complete power over the central committee. (And by that time, he had done most of its harm already)
Two of the most historically important event of the period even happened after Mao lost a power struggle and was trying to get back on his foot: the great march and the cultural revolution.
The fact that they let Ali "voluntarily" restructure, and save face from having it be enforced, is interesting on it's own. I'm not really sure what to make of it.
US (and by extension NATO, doctrinally) military is very unconcerned with face in the small. For (real example) anyone on the bridge of a US ship can report to the captain of a ship that the ship is out of position (for an exercise). A buddy almost got walloped on the bridge of a ROK ship for doing that. They didn't because he was American and that's what exchanges are for.
some cultures in the west tend to value bluntness over face in the small.
This is about power and control. The Communist party does not want any other centers of power or control to emerge which might challenge the party. Jack Ma, and the tech industry in general, was emerging as such a power. Now that problem has been taken care of.
It could be as simple as he disagrees with the CCP policy.
For example, we don't typically look at human rights or anti-war protesters and call them Clueless, even when governments Crackdown on them
It takes a special kind of arrogance to conclude that people are idiots simply because you don't understand their actions after a moment of thought and with no information.
Doubly so when you have someone who grew up through the cultural revolution, lived in China for 60 years, and is a Communist Party member.
So yeah, I would retract what I said about him being clueless, more like careless and overconfident.
I can tell you that no one in China was surprised when Ma got smacked down; we've seen this same thing play out over the past decade.
The relevant question is if Ma was actually surprised with the smackdown, or realized it was a possible/likely outcome, and chose to proceed anyways. You seem to think Ma made a mistake, maybe so, but maybe he would make the same choice again given the same chances.
Both Ma and Musk have FU money. They have both made choices that cost them money, but we can only guess at if they actually see their choices as mistakes. They are both still multi-billionaires, so their mistakes haven't been bad enough to cost them their lives or fortunes.
If you had 20 or 200B in the bank, would you let financial risks govern every decision you make? What price tag would you put on speaking your mind or living the life you want to live? How many billion would you gamble on a long shot? Being insanely wealthy probably makes people overconfident, but it absolutely makes some people more willing to take financial risks.
Im not saying Musk or Ma are right all the time, but I don't think it is right to judge everything through a financial lens, with hindsight, and no insider information on motivation. I think that anyone who pretends to know what Ma was thinking is overestimating their knowledge and ability.
When we talk about anti-trust and tech industry policy in the US, we know by default that means that it's going to involve the FTC (M&A), SEC (Accounting/Financing Practices), and the House+Senate Judiciary Committee (review M&A, Financing, and Accounting Practices decided by FTC+SEC)
The Chinese tech industry in the 2010s had a number of competing regulators - China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Cyberspace Administration of China, State Administration for Market Regulation, People's Bank of China, etc.
Because there are so many regulators/agencies stepping on each others toes, there was a lot of intrigue and bad practices in the Chinese tech industry from 2000-2020 (eg. Crypto companies like FTX and Binance bribing PBOC officials and AntPay arguing that as a FinTech it should be regulated as a tech company/by the MIIT and not financial regulators)
During 2019-2022, there was a massive regulatory reform across the board that divvied up the roles of individual agencies and created the norms that startups and companies needed to follow.
The resolution of Ant Group's whole saga is basically setting precedent on which agencies/regulators within the PRC do what, and now investors have an easier time understanding how to vet investment risks in the tech sector.
Anyone putting money into a Chinese company is betting that Xi and the CCP will allow said company to do things that make them money, and won't sacrifice said company for political gain. Good luck with that! The beatings will continue until regulation stops US investment in China altogether, and then the Investors will whine about it to no end.
They prefer individual businesses not to get to big, monopolistic or dominant across multiple sectors, as this would give the business undue influence over politics? And of course they're operating on the idea that the political sphere governs the market and not that the biggest businesses should be the most powerful lobbiests.
So this is an end to it because it effectively neuters the one super company by making it into several more easily regulated companies?
It's about power. From the article:
> Communist authorities dislike the idea of anything, let alone a large private business, outshining the party. And the country’s leaders bristled at the high profile of Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese enterprise who every now and again dared question their decisions.
So it is a little more complex than that.
So, there's no uncertainity regarding who will be picked next and why.
It is the investor you should be questioning. And if you are cynical, ( Comparatively speaking, in US terms ), Wall Street will use anything as an excuses to get the results they want.
To western eyes suddenly Alibaba seems to be kind of hero standing up to authoritarian government but from what I read what really got Alibaba in govt crosshairs was its predatory finance business. I don't think any country would have liked this type of business but many would've tolerated because "free enterprise / follow the law" thinking.
So the way I see this is "law taking its course" Chinese way and proactively taking action against business which could be socially bad in future.
Upon settling in the countryside, I saw firsthand the power of dripping water drilling through rock. That image, which captured the spirit of persistence, has stayed with me all these years. It has become a well-worn source for contemplating life and movement.
Rock and water are two opposing elements that are used to symbolize dogged stubbornness and gentle fluidity. Yet despite being “gentle,” water will drill through “solid” rock over time.
As a metaphor for people, this is the embodiment of a certain moral character: it is the willingness to rise to fight each time one falls and the courage to sacrifice oneself. A single drop of water is small and insubstantial. It will die a cruel “death” in any battle with a rock. Yet in that brief moment of “sacrifice,” even though it cannot see its own value and achievement, it is embodied within the countless drops of water that have already fallen, and the triumph of finally drilling through the rock. From the perspective of history or development of an economically disadvantaged area, we should not seek personal success and fame. Instead, we should strive to make steady progress one small step at a time and be willing to lay the groundwork for overall success. When everyone doing our work models themselves on a droplet that is ready to sacrifice for the greater good, we need not worry that our work is not important enough to make lasting change!
As a metaphor for things, dripping water is a demonstration of dialectical principles that use softness to overcome hardness, and the weak to control the strong. I believe in the invaluable spirit of that drop of water, which bravely goes into the breach with no thought of retreat. Those of us who are involved in economic development will inevitably encounter complications in our work. We can either rise to the challenge or flinch and run away. It all depends on whether we have the courage to adhere to philosophical materialism. If we allow ourselves to be filled with trepidation, the kind of fear that comes from standing at the edge of an abyss or treading on thin ice, we will lack the courage to do anything. We will accomplish nothing. Nevertheless, courage alone is not enough.
When dripping water takes aim at a rock, each droplet zeroes in on the same target and stays the course until its mission is complete. The drops of water fall day after day, year after year. This is the magic that enables dripping water to drill through rock! How can it be that our economic development work is any different? Just look at areas where the economy is lagging. Historical, environmental, and geographical factors have all played a part in holding back development. There are no shortcuts. Nothing can change overnight. Instead, we need to focus on the long haul by turning quantitative changes into qualitative changes. We need to be the dripping water that drills through rock. When talking about reform and opening up, we cannot assume that help will be coming from left and right, nor can we afford to wait until conditions are perfect enough to ensure success. Instead of building palaces in the air, we need to square our shoulders and get down to work. When talking about economic development, we cannot simply race to build high-rises and open up big factories, nor can we focus on dramatic results at the expense of necessary infrastructure. Otherwise, success will be elusive, and opportunities will be easily missed.
Instead of daydreaming about overly ambitious or flashy projects, we need to have a firm footing in reality as we take concrete steps to reach long-term goals. Instead of “setting three fires” in the hope they will succeed, we need to work steadily and make solid progress. Our work calls for the tenacity to keep chipping away. Working by fits and starts will not get us anywhere.
When I describe my awe upon seeing the power of droplets drilling through rock, I am praising those who have the willingness to rise each time one falls, and the moral character to sacrifice for overall success. I am expressing my admiration for those who develop a solid plan and then have the tenacity to see it through to the end.
It's important to note that the Chinese government is not monolithic, and different factions within it may have different goals and priorities. The recent actions that have been perceived as positive by investors may reflect a shift in priorities or strategy by certain government officials or agencies.
Maybe the past. The factions have long been consolidated and eliminated.