> Silicon Valley was full of founders who genuinely wanted to use technology to make the world a better place
No, it wasn't, it was full of people who said they wanted to use technology to make the world a better place because saying you would use technology to make the world a better place was viewed as the path to investment and success.
Now, as soon as feigned empathy is no longer required for $$$, the mask comes off. It was never about anything other than profit.
To be fair DOGE was the ultimate SV neo-libertarian power fantasy. Just get a bunch of hackers together, screw the rules, get root on the government and start deleting shit. Doubly so after a "leftist" administration.
> He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
No, it wasn't, it was full of people who said they wanted to use technology to make the world a better place because saying you would use technology to make the world a better place was viewed as the path to investment and success.
Now, as soon as feigned empathy is no longer required for $$$, the mask comes off. It was never about anything other than profit.