I'm not an expert on this, but from what I gather this all leads back to a power struggle between Jack Ma and Xi Jinping. Ma was ready to go public with AliPay and in the build up to it made a speech that criticised the government regulation as being out of date. This was viewed as a challenge to the governments power. Over the next few months the government moved to tighten regulations on companies like AliPay and disappeared Jack Ma. The government since then has basically completely taken over his entire empire, and sliced it up into pieces. This is basically Xi sending the message that private business in China will always defer to the government. All of this has natural absolutely tanked the value of China's tech sector. So people are hoping that now the worst of it is done and they no longer have enormous tech giants, but a series of smaller companies, that the government will return to being more hands off and in turn those smaller companies can return to more natural valuations.
Also, one of Ma’s last public appearances was at an American conference, maybe TechCrunch but I’m not sure, where he said in an on stage interview something to the effect of, “I’m not afraid of the CCP”, in relation to recent revelations he was a CCP member. Then he got disappeared shortly after. He was really clueless about what kind of org he was dealing with.
One doesn't need to be clueless in order to lose a power struggle. He might have been betrayed, he might have overestimated the resources he could fully count on, he might have simply been backing a faction in the party that ended up losing. Xi Jinping went as far as kicking out of the public congress a previous president, which was unprecedented; who knows what else he's capable of.
But that’s the problem - the risk of losing a power struggle in a democracy with rule of law, separation of powers, an independent court system, and regular elections is vastly different from the risks of losing a power struggle in the CCP, which controls all branches of government, law enforcement, and the military and is accountable to no one.
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.
I always figured that's why high-level power struggles were so constant and severely fought in totalitarian regimes.
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.
I have that impression too. Without having directly experienced it myself, it seems like a hellish system. Though it does at least seem like getting “purged” isn’t always final, and that execution is the last choice.
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.
For anybody looking to get some understanding of Xi Jinping's life and ascension to power, I'd recommend listening to "The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping" from the Economist: https://www.economist.com/theprincepod
As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely?
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.
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.
>Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.
No, you just get arrested by the authorities, and later committed suicide before the trial.
Missing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer.
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.
Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".
It’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.
He suspended ADSBExchange and Elonjet. Accounts sharing open source and public data that he didn’t like. He went so far as to specifically ban the use of the link to his jet on Twitter.
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 doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)
From what I’ve both read and experienced on a brief trip to Shanghai, it seems there are two main factions - the Beijing faction and Shanghai faction. The latter is more capitalist and chill, the former more authoritarian. It’s probably more complicated though, with multiple sub factions around different leaders in the CCP. Maybe someone with deeper knowledge can elaborate.
> One doesn't need to be clueless in order to lose a power struggle.
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.
In the “single person handling all power” sense, I'd say so at least for most of Mao's reign.
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.
That is my exact point. I don't think it is reasonable to assume he wasn't aware that it was a risk.
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.
Ma is no idiot, and he knows how the system works or Alibaba would never have become a titan, but I think when you get to a certain level of power / money I it warps your perception of what's risky and you overestimate how much you can get away with because of your own sense of invincibility. Musk is a pretty good example of this.
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.
When it comes to Ma or Musk, I think it easy to backseat, and project how we would have acted to get the outcome we would want. This ignores the reality that we don't actually know what their motivations and priorities are.
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.
Given China's, (and to some extent, Asia's), obsession with face, his actions do all seem pretty clueless. I wonder, could it all be part of some performance?
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.
It's only a cliche, because westerners are often just as obsessed with face, though having a foot in two cultures there are a few big places where the difference is noticable:
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.
Yea I remember an HN post from a US pilot trainer explaining the same culture problem in Korea in the aftermath of the Asiana airlines crash at SFO. But I see that as more of a hierarchy problem rather than saving face.
Jack Ma is part of the evidence -- there are others who have said the same thing. There are many examples of less notoriety of people saying bad things about CCP and then "disappearing" (many government officials).
We don't need to resort to cultural tropes like "face" to explain this.
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.
Jack Ma truly is clueless in general. There was a talk involving him and Elon Musk and it somehow was Elon coming out as the eloquent one in that conversation.
I don't think very highly of Jack Ma, but eloquence for non-native speakers should be judged very differently, especially for someone coming from a language very far away linguistically.
Exactly, Ma was kinda struggling to get a train of thought across linguistically and half the time when Musk interrupted him he was rather making fun of some poor choice of words and being like "lol whatever" than trying to actually engage in a conversation.
And I guess now with the Twitter shitshow Musk doesn't exactly look like a genius either.
Well it increases revenue, so certainly. The open sourcing increases its ethicality; I guess you could say it's not direct value.
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).
I always do wonder about the reverence shown to billionaires around here, given the quite frankly ludicrous purchase of Twitter ($44bn!!!) and what has happened afterwards I really am not convinced they aren’t just as able as the rest of us.
Americans tend to equate wealth with ability and set aside luck, everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.
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.
> 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.
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.
> he hit it big several times, that’s not just luck.
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.
Musk is not a rocket. There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of. Whether that company would be successfully putting rockets into space with someone else at the helm is unknown, but I strongly suspect that his own contribution is not as great as would seem.
> There is a company that successfully puts rockets into space that he happens to be CEO of.
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.
> I think Musk is a bad person, but I don't carry any particular resentment or anger towards him.
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.
As an external observer, I don't square the two different conclusions in your first statement: "equate wealth with ability", "everybody is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
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.
People thought he had some engineering skills, until he took over Twitter and started talking about all the idiotic engineering decisions he was making.
Musk could simultaneously be a numpty at Twitter and a superb engineer at SpaceX.
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.
Not the kind of engineering numpty he's shown himself to be. All engineering absolutely requires humility for situations outside the realm of your expertise.
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.
Like management, engineering is a discipline of means divorced from ends. There are certain vital skills that are shared amongst engineers regardless of their particular domain, and those are the skills most important for an engineering manager to have.
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.
I seriously doubt his engineering abilities, but I'll ignore that.
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.
Based on what exactly? Are you sure you aren't confusing EQ with agreeableness, they are orthogonal. Hitler had extremely high EQ, but low agreeability
The Twitter purchase really just shows how rich and apathetic Elon Musk is. A Ferrari is a difficult to impossible purchase for almost all of us, but rappers buy them for no reason and then trash them all the time. Twitter is that on a much larger scale, and Musk is treating it the same way because he doesn’t care.
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
Don't know why you went to rappers. When Musk first got rich, he bought a $million car and immediately destroyed it, uninsured, nearly killing himself and Peter Thiel. Imagine if he succeeded.
Both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt multiple times, we could just as easily be talking about an Elon Musk who had every advantage (government contracts, huge tax breaks and a fantastically wealthy family) and still failed. Maybe this is a case of fortune favoring the bold and I admire his perseverance/grit/marketing ability a lot. I've never heard him explain anything technical in any interview he's ever given and instead just starts behaving autistic if he's asked any detail about things. When he does stray into technical subjects like Twitter code he seems to talk nonsense that any engineer who has worked at a Twitter scale company would laugh at.
He's really good at selling an image, which is what pushed Tesla ahead of other car makers. His whole 'Tony Stark' image is basically cat nip to tech bros and made Tesla cool and desirable.
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.
Yeah, it's informal but it used mostly for when a government illegally detains someone, often incommunicado --though historically in Latin American countries "disappearances" were a euphemism for government paramilitary forces (or revolutionary forces) taking someone behind the shed and extrajudicially executing them or in lesser cases locking them up in secret prisons. The choice of word probably stems from the stereotypical middle of the night night unwitnessed arrest. (so and so was supposed to come home at 8 but never came back)
In Argentina, one of the countries (along with Chile) where the term "desaparecido" (disappeared) was coined in the 70s, it means specifically:
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".
nice try to pin the blame on the USA - of course USA is guilty, but also, who chooses this path.. You cannot say that the people who do this themselves, to their own, are not responsible.
So you basically understand the US is guilty, but somehow assumed I was saying the people on Latin America who used this training to murder their own people are innocent?
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?".
We (The USA) are incredibly guilty of a lot of poor actions and choices in South America. Including active funding & training of multiple regime leaders over decades.
It's hard to choose a good path if a major world power is making sure all the good ones get shut down.
agree fully - that is why it is crucial that we have checks and balances on uniformed services, public process and the ability to speak out here. There were long and serious protests about the School of the Americas by US citizens in public. Here in this international discussion, it is not complete or wholly accurate IMHO to say "the USA did it" without knowing some context.
> it is not complete or wholly accurate IMHO to say "the USA did it" without knowing some context
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".
To be even more specific the phrase is most associated with the dirty war and Argentina’s military dictatorship and their habit of taking people they didn’t like up in helicopters and pushing them out a few miles off shore into the ocean. They just vanished without a trace.
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?
Presumably because Alibaba - the challenger that started this crackdown - is now slain.
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.
Must be nice for international companies to know that Chinese companies will always be restrained from becoming too large. It’s like they have to fight with one arm tied behind their back - get too big and your own government will cut you up.
xi jinping has been criticised for this but he's in his "my legacy lives on forever" phase of life.
another decade and he's done - just consolidating power for his family at this point.
Well, the problem was that Jack Ma was getting so powerful by being in charge of a massive tech empire he was threatening the CCP's power. The remaining split up companies are no where near as big or powerful, are staffed largely by people who have been put in by the CCP, and now know what happens to people who criticise the government. They've made their point, so the question is... why not ease up a bit and let prosperity return. Look at the absurd hype around AI in the US right now, I'd imagine the CCP would be quite worried that they're going to lose a strategic position in this technology if they don't ease up.
Also, they've just got to ease up at some point right?
>>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
I think on some level people implicitly believe that the Chinese govt will choose prosperity over power because that's what they imagine they would do. I suspect that will never happen.
No, it's because that's what the previous generation of Chinese leaders did. Post-Mao, party elites have largely chosen wealth over power at critical junctures, maintaining an overall equilibrium. Xi Jinping broke that setup: there is no elite anymore, only himself; and he's made a point that wealth cannot be used as a shield from his power.
It’s interesting because the other contender for general secretary at the time, Bo Xilai, was even more outwardly Maoist. So I suppose something was bound to happen to that equilibrium.
And I suspect you are right as long as current leaders wield the power. Periodical purges in all ranks of power and society are a time-tested feature of communist regimes. Without them the party cadres grow stale and lose their revolutional vigor. I can imagine it's a bit similar to how the free market works, with companies going bankrupt or taken over all the time, only there it's the changing conditions and the 'invisible hand of the market', while in communist dictatorships it's always intentional and directed (and way more brutal), because the rigid system does not self-regulate, at least not the way the leaders would like.
Prosperity IS power, but the chinese have a bunch of evil morons (as do most governments) in place that are more concerned with personal wealth than long term prosperity -- however, ironically, they are succeeding in a long term plan to basically own manufacturing for the planet.
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.
Wasn't there also something about Alibaba specifically working on a money lending scheme which circumvented banking regulations and which regulators feared would create vast amounts of unsecured debt and destabilize the economy?
Yes, the original argument was essentially sparked because AliPay was doing a bunch of lending that wasn't really compliant with regulations and there was some discussion about whether the regulators would step in before the IPO. That's what caused Ma's speech about how the regulations were out of date. Whether that concerns was legitimate? Who knows.
