I'm going to miss Lina Khan. It is unfortunate that a government contractor with a dumb grudge is going to be allowed to decide her fate. As far as I can tell she's been doing great work over there.
It doesn't matter at all what Matt Gaetz wants.
They are all in support of Lina Khan's position on anti-trust, as it aligns closely with the vision of LTSE (YC S17) plus their grudge/annoyance at the fact that late stage acquisitions don't benefit early stage investors as much as an IPO or SPAC, plus their annoyance at how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
This has been a major fissure in the tech industry for almost a decade at this point.
To be fair, Horowitz (the Z in A16Z) donated to Harris's campaign to lobby for the same thing as well.
One of the biggest donor yes, but not enough to move the needle.
Also, the presidency is not enough to move the needle - you need down ballot support from both houses of Congress as well, which is a relationship Musk did not build unlike other donors.
Elon has a huge amount of influence over khan's future and the ftc's ability to continue in its recent push to actually protect the American consumers.
DOGE is a presidential task force. They are impotent like any other task force.
If you want something to worry about with the new administration, worry about the shitshow that Senate confirmation will be for much of 2025 as Senate Leadership and the Executive will clash
> the ftc's ability
The Khan style vision of antitrust (which I strongly oppose as well btw) will continue under Trump as it did under Biden.
It has bipartisan support because of bipartisan donor relations.
Oren Cass, Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, and Rohit Chopra are all cut from the same cloth.
Can they just get people on the Acting title and not worry about senate confirmation?
No.
The people who get "Acting" titles only have a lifespan of a couple months AND they need to be existing members of the bureaucracy who are 1 level below the senate appointed role.
The US is not a parliamentary system like India, UK, Canada, or Australia where the executive has power over cabinet nomination.
The US's system was explicitly built so that the president is hemmed in this manner.
How do you know that?
Because it requires Senate confirmation.
The US has one of the weakest presidencies globally for that reason.
Other than foreign policy, presidents are largely hemmed by that fact.
I've heard this repeated multiple times, but I wonder how the FTC's policies can influence this?
> how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
Could you explain this? By IPO pop do you mean the difference between what the bank underwrites and what the initial . By early vs late stage investors do you mean seed vs series G, or pre-IPO vs post-IPO? I've thought that seed vs series G investors get the same class of stock? Or is there some restriction encoded into the paperwork associated with the investment?
By de-incentivizing M&A, and checking larger competitors to VC darlings by hanging the Damcoles sword of antitrust.
A decade ago Marc Andressen was lobbying Obama to work on this [0][1]
In Andressen's and much of his peer's eyes, most mid-late stage startups should be IPOing sooner than they actually are. And to a certain extent he isn't wrong.
Personally, I don't buy Andressen's argument - there is a reason we added added checks and balances in the IPO process.
> Could you explain this
To go public (just like any other fundraising stage), early stage ownership stakes tend to be diluted in order to attract later investors.
IPOs are a fundraising technique like any other, but the benefits tends to bias towards funds that target late stage or roadshow investors at the expense of early investors.
In the eyes of Andressen and his peers the IPO process needs to be simplified in order to make it easier for mid-stage startups to go public AND the incentive structures need to be changed so early stage investors (read VCs like A16Z) get outsized benefit.
For most funds, this really doesn't matter, but for the mega funds like A16Z, YC, Founders Fund, etc this is a make-or-break policy as most of their portfolio are mid-late stage startups that have been pushing off IPOs because they are too small for the current market, and taking acquisitions at what a number of early stage investors view as a suboptimal price - doesn't matter to the founder because they have cash, but it does to large early stage investors.
A direct listing or SPAC would be the ideal "IPO" method envisioned, but that has been cracked down on as well (and rightfully so tbh)
[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2013/07/11/andreessen-talks-tech-boom-b...
[1] - https://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-...
And how you are disadvantaged by two robot vacuum cleaner manufacturers not merging? Would you feel differently if you worked for one of them?
You've cherry picked two examples. This is mud slinging and not genuine analysis.
I'm not familiar, but isn't the parent comment saying the sale was blocked?
https://nbcmontana.com/amp/news/nation-world/calls-federal-i...
Spam via SMS and calls hasn’t been conquered at all and it’s 18 years since the “donotcall” registry went live.
[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
[2]: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-395670A1.pdf
Nice...
Either way, a human is not a robot. Ignoring the do not call list would be up to the FTC to police. https://www.donotcall.gov/report.html
A personal trick of mine was to answer those calls, ask them to hold, and leave them waiting indefinitely. I started a leaderboard with my friends back in the day, and the winner was ~40min.
No, I don't mind her going after anti-trust targets. I do mind her agency doing this in the final days of this presidency. This is all for brownie points and nothing else. Nadella will have a nice sit-down with Trump and this investigation will fly to the winds.
She started the job in the middle of 2021 and in 2022 the FTC blocked Nvidia/ARM merger and sued Facebook, Twitter, and Frontier Communications. This information isn't hard to find.
Meanwhile Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard and made OpenAI its "marketing bitch" (as Musk puts it). Somehow Microsoft always escaped the chains.