how 5 stale pale male billionaires profoundly impact the world

I like reading about tech enterpeneurs. I was reading about how Mark Zuckerberg (who is unfireable owing to his controlling stake in Meta) and his plans to fire 10,000 more employees in the year of efficiency (after blowing $36bn).

Interestingly enough it seems that Meta has, on the sly, cancelled, it’s Residency AI program in an extremely haphazard and unprofessional manner.

Indeed, Facebook’s rebrand as Meta seems to signal Mark Zuckerberg’s conviction that reality as a whole is going to fall out of favor. The metaverse wasn’t his idea — the name comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash — but his company has reportedly spent some $36 billion developing it. In Zuckerberg’s vision, the metaverse will be nothing less than the internet’s next iteration, one for which he will control both the hardware (Facebook bought headset maker Oculus in 2014) and the software (Meta has been snapping up companies even tangentially related to VR).

I’ve always decidedly had mixed feelings about Mark Zuckerberg, he always seemed to project a desperate rapacity to me. I find that a nice antidote to him is Ryan Reynolds, who seems to have the Midas Touch with his sale of Mint Mobile.

I would recommend reading this great article on Steve Jobs’s homily to would-be entrepreneurs.

And finally no post on billionaires can be written without a nod to the scariest one of them all. Here’s a little clue, his company is planning to take over the Gaming Industry FOREVER (to the chagrin of Sony Playstation).

Why Microsoft’s purchase of Call of Duty developer Activision is such a big deal – and why PlayStation doesn’t want it

Yes you may have guessed it, it’s good ole Bill. Microsoft is trying to buy the CoD Franchise (Call of Duty for the non-gamers like me out there).

If Microsoft pushes through with this acquisition it could be the death knell to Playstation, Xbox’s main rival, since the COD gaming complex (incidentally a lead designer is an Iranian American) is:

Of course, huge deals have happened in the past. But Sony argues that Activision is a special case because of Call of Duty: as the best-selling game in nine of the past ten years, and with a major multiplayer element that will help keep players coming to it, it could be enough to lure people over to different consoles.

So Bill Gates is on his way to best Mark Zuckerberg and capturing the Metaverse. Sometimes Old Hands can truly best the young bucks. Bill has seen the future and it is AI.

Finally no post on billionaires can be made without mentioning the looniest one of them. Elon himself; for what it’s worth, I’m a fan. I find it instructive that he dramatically shrank Twitter’s cost base by a third and that it was projecting to finally become cash flow postive towards the end of the year.

I find it interesting to see the billionaire make up of the world:

The owners and founders of Walmart; the Walton family, had a net worth of around US$240.6 billion, which would make them the richest family in the world. They would top out Bernard Arnault’s wealth of ~$210 billion.