Didn't go well for South America in the 60s and 70s but perhaps, as economists are prone to saying, "this time will be different".
The fact that a handful of individuals have half a trillion dollars to throw at something that may or may not work while working people can pay the price of a decent used car each year, every year to their health insurance company only to have claims denied is insane.
This money is managed by small amounts of people but it is aggregated from millions of investors, most of these are public companies. The US spends over 10x that amount on healthcare each year.
Musk cannot ban Chinese autos from the US market, but the government can. Same goes for Tiktok, Zuck cannot force Americans not to use it. AI is the next battlefield and further bans will be coming down the line to make sure the investment is protected.
i agree that our protectionist policies are bad and autarkic in nature
The "free movement of capital" only ever seems to move the capital one direction: up to the people who needed the labor of others to reach such wealth.
Keeping BYD out won't help if all the other car makers also catch up. If BYD pulls far enough ahead they could just create a US division and make cars here like Toyota and Nissan do. Nissan is on the ropes, so maybe BYD could just buy them and make that their US brand and get all their factories and supply chains.
If Tesla kept iterating on the Model 3, released the Model E, and Musk stayed out of divisive politics that alienate customers, Tesla had a chance to own the mainstream of the US auto market for the next 50 years. I'd say that's gone now.
I am sorry that you feel you are downwardly mobile, but you should not assume your experience generalizes.
This is, in fact, a generalized experience: [0]
[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/14/millenn...
This is disputed [1]. In reality, a handful of individuals have the capital to seed a half-a-trillion dollar megaproject, which then entails the project to raise capital from more people.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/musk-pours-cold-water-on-trump-back...
There are lots of problems with our current approach to healthcare, but insurers aren’t charging you way more than the cost to counterparty on that contract should be.
Your article is from 2019. We're now "wealthier than previous generations were at [our] age" [1].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-fi...
i think if you gave people a legitimate choice to go back to 1980 (and take their friends let’s say), we would see the revealed preference. certainly if you did it for a year and then gave them the option to come back
au·tar·ky /ˈôˌtärkē/ noun economic independence or self-sufficiency. "rural community autarchy is a Utopian dream" a country, state, or society which is economically independent. plural noun: autarkies; plural noun: autarchies
There is nothing saying a socialist country can't produce goods and services, and sell them.
That's certainly not a thing that's ever happened before. /s
It's divided by whether you own real estate or equities.
Immigrant homeownership is starkly lower than native-born Americans' [1].
We're probably going to see a surge in that disparity, now, given the immigrant workforce that builds and renovates houses is in the process of being gutted. That increases the value of existing stock.
[1] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/research/fi...
That being said, it seems to reference property owners. Hell, if I'd had the money to buy a house prior to the pandemic, I would have. I didn't because of constant reorgs at my employer at the time, which resulted in hiring freezes and reduced raises. The goal behind these was to make the company attractive to buyers. Eventually, they did find one: Oracle. They've since gutted what was a major employer for my region.
Since the pandemic housing has skyrocketed and pay hasn't kept up. It's been stagnant for 40 years while economic output has risen, along with COL [0].
Where'd all of the value go?
(that's a rhetorical question)
[0]https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/comparing-the-costs-...
Yes. Millenials own property at the highest rate, age adjusted, in generations. (Anecdote: am Millenial. Own a home. Most of my friends do, too. Yes, it's a bubble, but it's a big one.)
> Where'd all of the value go?...(that's a rhetorical question)
No, it's not. It went to the people who bought houses. Including between 2019 and 2024.
Which generation's mode reached home-buying age in that interval, an interval also generously sprinkled with massive stimulus, a stock-market boom and forced consumption-reduction through stay-at-home orders? (That is a rhetorical question.)
Success is dangerous.
South America didn't have a mix of domestic and foreign investors deploying massive quantities of private money into capital assets in the 60s and 70s. They had governments borrowing to fund their citizens' consumption. Massive difference on multiple levels.
Income, not wealth. Particularly not after inheritances transfer.
I'm not saying "this time will be different". I'm saying this is business as usual.
It's not only Trump. Before leaving Biden already ordered the DoE and the DoD to lease sites for data centers and energy generation. The only reason we don't see a "Department of AI" or a "National AI Agency" is due to how the military industrial complex works, and a lot of lobbying I'm sure.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3295662/beijing-mee...
[2] https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/01/20/biden-administra...
[3] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/biden-doe-dod-lease-sites-a...
[4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/21/1110269/there-ca...
One of the broken parts of the American system is permitting. Trump can sidestep that by letting this be built on federal land. That, in turn, unlocks investment.
Beyond that, DoD and DoE are massive buyers of compute. Seeding the venture with purchase agreements from them de-risks the project further.
Finally, by Trump putting his name to it he assigns it his bully pulpit's prestige. (Though that doesn't appear to have carried over to Musk, who's already taking pot shots at it.)
A graph of the stocks for UnitedHealth, Elevance (formerly Anthem) and Cigna shows that they're all on the growth track for the last five years.
If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a retirement fund, they are charging too much.
Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
This is first-mover industrial development being funded by private actors looking out for a return on their investments. South America saw nothing similar--it was duplicating others' industrialisation with state capital (often borrowed from overseas) while spending massively on handouts.
Age-adjusted?
So if you take out the fact that it took up more of the one resource that matters more than anything else to become property owners, then, yes, Millennials have more of it.
Which is kind of proving my point.
Zuckerberg lost $30bn or more trying to create a VR amusement park. Scale that up to $500bn and see how much waste and dead-weight losses are created.
Ask before assuming.
Age adjusted means taking each generation when they were the same age, how wealthy were they? A Boomer today is wealthier than a Millenial because they've had more time to accumulate. But when a Boomer was Millenial-aged, she had on average less wealth than a Millenial today.
"Up to $500bn" is business as usual for Silicon Valley post-2021.
2. There is no commitment to spend in a single year
3. There is no actual contractual commit here, this is a press release (i.e. Marketing)
4. There is not actually a $500B pile of gold being spent. This is more of a "this is how big we think this industry will be and how much we may spend to get exposure to that industry"
[1] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
my dad was basically expected to work the farms his entire life and school ended at the 3rd grade where he grew up, he moved to the US and became a chess master & went to one of the best colleges in the country. impossible where he was from and really shows how stupid and zero-sum-minded old world elites are compared to the US/anglo culture.
As Elon said, they don't the money.
Talk is cheap.
$500B is not.
Stock price ! profitability, but you're still correct. UnitedHealth's operations have churned out cash each of the last four years [1], as have Cigna [2] and Elevance [3]. Underwriting gains across the industry have been strong for years [4]. The only story I can think of where American health insurers lost money was Aetna with its underpriced ACA plans [5].
That said, whimsicalism is also partly right in that insurers aren't the cause of the unaffordability of American healthcare. They by and large pay out most of their premiums. (With some variance.)
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UNH/cash-flow/
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CI/cash-flow/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ELV/cash-flow/
[4] https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2021-Annual-Hea...
[5] https://spia.princeton.edu/news/why-private-health-insurers-...
Also the guy disputing it is trying to regain control of an entity that he was too distracted to hold to its original mission, is on record as agreeing with the statement that Jewish people are the enemies of white people, takes copious amounts of mind-altering substances daily, has lost billions of dollars on purchasing a company that had a path to (modest) profitability, and did what could easily be seen as a Roman salute at an inauguration speech. Maybe he's not a great source of statements on objective reality, even within the AI industry.
With regard to the monetary amount, understand, once you reach a certain point, the amount of capital held by the quantity of individuals we're talking about is immaterial. Any capital they raise is usually derived from the labor of others and they operate a racket to prevent any real competition for how that capital is distributed by the labor or the customers who are the source of their actual wealth. The average Oracle employee (I know a few), for example, probably has a few more immediate things they want the surplus value of their labor to be spent on than Larry's moonshot. However, he ultimately controls the direction of that value through a shareholder system that he can manipulate more-or-less at-will through splits, buybacks, and other practices.
His customers would probably also like to pay less for what are usually barely Web 2.0 database applications. Of course, he has the capital to corner markets and shove competition out of the space.
All of this is to say when you reach this amount of money in the hands of one individual, they're more likely to regularly harm people than beat the odds on their next bet in a way that actually uplifts society, at least in a way that could beat the way just disbursing that capital among those who created it could.
> If a subscriber pays them what they do, and they don't have money to pay a claim declared medically necessary by a medical doctor, but do have the money to forward to a retirement fund, they are charging too much.
If it is only legal to lose money on providing insurance, nobody would do it.
> Most of the rest of the industrialized world seems to grasp this concept, and their people live longer.
I agree that there are problems with cost/performance in our healthcare market. I think it is largely due to overutilization & misallocation, combined with some poor genetic/cultural luck around opioids and obesity.
0: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/industry-analys...
You'd think the healthy working population wouldn't be that much of a burden to care for as well, but they have to go out of pocket and get insurance to provide for themselves after providing for everyone else.
There is a lot of graft going on for this to be the case. It may not be the fault of insurance companies but someone is stealing a great deal of money from the American people.
Now here's the million dollar question; are you aware of this obvious fact? Have you ever heard someone frame the socialized medicine debate in this way: "If we could be as efficient as the UK we could give you free healthcare AND cut your taxes!". If not, why not?
[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
This is a valid conflict of interest. That means we should closely scrutinize his claims. From what I can tell, he's added up correctly in respect of the named backers' wealth and liquidity.
> a paper that is literally named after a place where the vast majority of people have never had to do any real labor in their lives
Yes, we should ignore bankers when it comes to questions about money...
Do you have an actual claim? Or is it all ad hominem?
> capital they raise is usually derived from the labor of others and they operate a racket to prevent any real competition for how that capital is distributed by the labor or the customers who are the source of their actual wealth
They're capitalists, herego they can raise unlimited wealth?
If you have more wealth, you can theoretically purchase more goods and services than if you had less.
The exception to this, of course, is if the goods and services cost more, and for things that you need to exist in American society (healthcare, education, transportation, housing, food), those things generally cost several times more for younger people than they did, "age-adjusted", when their parents were the same age, often with a difference that is more than that in wealth. That's why wages have been flat.
There's also the question of how that wealth is distributed among the generations and how it's stored. If the property-owning Millennial owns a few rental properties that their peers have to pay to live in, the "average" properties owned by the group can be the same (or even higher) but the number of people those properties are spread among is lower.
There's also the fact that lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock markets as people need to participate in those markets with their 401(k)s to be able to retire some day. You can't sleep in a stock certificate, but if you want to have any savings, it's easier to enter the equities market than it is to get into real estate from a startup cost perspective. People are having to compromise the "stability" of their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more abstract definitions of wealth.
[0]https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
The problem here being that it was money spent that was never earned back, and money that eventually had to be paid back, right?
This can also happen with private capital. 2008 was a bust caused by private banks, for example. AI hasn't proven to be profitable yet [1], and I'm not sure it'll makes a difference, for the success of projects like this, wether the money is coming from government or not.
In fact, if the 2008 bank bail-out, auto industry bail-out, the Silicon Valley bank prop-up, and other such actions by the US government are considered [2], if this turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up fronting the bill.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ai-generative-business-mone...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...
Which is why these figures have been inflation adjusted.
> lots of wealth is held in the casin... er... stock markets
Pretty sure Boomers hold more stocks than Millenials. This is an argument for Millenials being even better off than the statistics show.
> People are having to compromise the "stability" of their fundamental needs (like housing) in order to grow more abstract definitions of wealth
Yes. But that doesn't broadly describe Millenials, and it describes more people in older generations when they were present Millenials' ages.
You're trying to argue against facts with philosophy.
well not every other nation, but i know what you mean.
other nations are much better at managing overutilization by denying care where it is not needed. the US insurance system shields people from cost and encourages overutilization due to a number of stupid policy choices (aka refusal to have 'death panels' like in Canada/UK but also refusal to do away with massive publicly subsidy for health expenditure).
for a personal story, my parents basically get free MRIs from the state for little reason whereas people I know have to pay an arm and a leg for MRIs because their insurance is worse. at minimum, we could at least also make my parents have to pay an arm and leg for useless MRIs and doctors would stop encouraging them or lose patients.
In part. It was money borrowed by the state. That means when it can't be paid back, it's automatically a systemic issue. And it was money borrowed to fund consumption. There was no good reason to ever expect it to be paid back because it wasn't funding productive activity.
> if this turns out to be a bubble it will be taxpayers who end up fronting the bill
Very possibly, particularly if part of the package are e.g. federally-subsidised loans. Before that, however, private parties will almost certainly lose tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. That cushion, together with those parties being spread between domestic and foreign sources, is what makes this less risky to the United States than similar relative-magnitude projects in South America. (Plus the fact that this is a capital asset versus consumption.)
[0]https://www.vox.com/2014/9/4/6104533/the-125-percent-solutio...
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summ...
[2]https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-spenders-phar...
But even the smartest people still get it wrong on occasion.
edit: Bezos doesn't own the WSJ. I'm wrong.
Haven’t all three examples you note (2008 crash, auto bailout, and SV prop up) resulted in a net return/gain for the taxpayer?
It's like when people claim that other countries have worse medical systems because they have to wait, as if my friend didn't just wait 2 months for a simple injection recently, and my mom isn't waiting 2 weeks for an MRI after a stroke.
The vast majority of people who insist we have the greatest healthcare don't even go to the doctor's regularly. Because they were raised in a system where going to the doctor is something you have to weigh the cost of! We have worse medical outcomes simply because people wait until a cheap situation turns into a shitty and painful and expensive situation.
Economies of scale should make them cheaper. An MRI machine and technician that sits there unused half the day has to charge more per visit than one used all day long. Have too many customers? Get more machines and techs, now the MRI manufacturer is making more units, offering volume discounts...
Rationing of care doesn't explain why the individual units of care are themselves much more expensive. Compare inhaler prices in Canada vs the US, $10 in Canada $100 here[0], that isn't because too many of them are given out. It's theft.
Addendum: Further, the young and healthy ration their care quite a bit under the current system, they are taxed too heavily (to pay for the care of the elderly) to afford it for themselves so they go without.
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
Since when does "private capital" speak in such honeyed tones to state powers?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank-t...
Groupthink capital, directed by mostly 2 "thought leaders".
Economies don't like Groupthink Capital, regardless of it being private, public or a combination of the 2
Of course the US economy as a whole is huge so even billions can be absorbed, once you start talking about half a trillion though...
The demand for more AI compute is already here and is less risky of an investment.
"Centralized planning" was effective under Bell Labs
you need someone willing shop and pick the cheaper options for competition to bring down prices. You also need someone willing to say "that's too expensive, I wont buy it" and walk away. Same is true for the inhalers. If someone will pay $100 before switching to the generic, that is what they get charged. In Canada, the state is only willing to pay $10, so that is the price. This is the demand side of the problem.
There is also a supply problem, where the state provides medical company monopolies through "certification of need". It is basically illegal to open an MRI clinic that would compete with an existing one in many jurisdictions.
https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/medical-imaging/magneti...
- there is a shortage of housing
- predatory loans for higher education
- chronic health crisis due to terrible government health policy and guidelines
- globalization has led to an international labor market
The last point may be bad for many Americans but an unequivocal good for the world. Global poverty has seen an incredible drop in the past 70 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty#/media/File:Wo...
It's private money. CEOs will say whatever they need to say to achieve goals (here, favorable conditions for AI work), look at what the actual money flows say.
$500B is a lot - no matter how you slice it.
It's a lot easier to talk pie in the sky than to actually get $500B to spend.
It is a fact that wages have remained stagnant for four decades.
It's also a fact that the wealth gap is growing between rich and poor, and that's what's distorting the figures you're citing. That's the only way, mathematically, you see wages remain flat while seeing wealth rise.
Look deeper at your facts, instead of letting them be tainted by your philosophy.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-drug-becoming-problem-...
First is sort of correct for a very specific slice of America, those just above the welfare cut off. (For whom real wages have been flat to negative, assuming we scale up housing preferences and add in costs that didn’t make sense before, e.g. internet and cell-phone bills.) The second—about rising inequality—is true throughout.
Neither advances your argument, however—one can better off while others are much better off, and most in a population can be better off while some are worse off. (Observe the median Millenial and the statistics stand. Millenials are rich, in part because we’re going to stick Gen Alpha with the bill.)
I would put that more on a failure of culture to value healthy living and activity. I wouldn't call that the responsibility of the government. Perhaps lack of clarity on ownership is related to the crisis itself.
You think consumers wouldn't do that if they were able to do so? You call the facility and everyone says the price is "it depends". They decide what they are going to charge you after you have left. Is any other industry allowed to do that? Hire someone to paint your house and he comes up with the price after he is done?
> There is also a supply problem, where the state provides medical company monopolies through "certification of need"
I'm well aware of this. Isn't it interesting that the people who give some of the largest campaign contributions have these sort of laws carved out for them? Charge whatever you want, decide the price in a opaque manner after the fact, competitors aren't allowed to establish themselves without their permission, importing drugs from other countries is forbidden. The list goes on and on.
Then you would think, if there is this much rampant and obvious corruption the fourth estate would step in right? Oh, they receive billions a year to advertise prescription drugs. Advertisement that can't be that effective, sometimes for pretty rare conditions, things your doctor should be made aware of but really odd to tell people about in a massive ad campaign.
The mainstream media and both parties are paid handsomely to allow this to continue. The problem isn't people are fat, or death panels or any of the distractions. The debate isn't about socialized medicine vs private. It's not about "keeping your doctor". There is just massive corruption to the tune of trillions of dollars in the past decade. There needs to be criminal investigations.
I agree that no matter if we go to a more private or socialized system, a whole system of broken regulation needs to be removed, and this will be the main point of resistance from those who benefit from the status quo.
human intensive things like medical care are characterized by diseconomies to scale when viewed from the whole industry perspective and baumol cost disease. overutilization makes the problem much worse
Given that all of the capital and implementation is private anyways, I am not even sure why this was announced with Trump on stage. To me it seemed like a spectacle to help Trump in return for maybe favorable regulation on things like antitrust or copyright or AI regulation or whatever.
