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This remark invited the comparison and I did reflect upon it. Be careful what you wish for: a moral comparison of “gargantuan hedge fund profits” to “Twitter clown” comes out initially worse for Renaissance, since hedge funds, especially the very effective ones, are extracting wealth from the inefficiencies of markets; this creates no economic value, it merely reallocates it to entities with pre-existing wealth and knowledge capital, and in particular siphons wealth from less developed economies. This action has a high potential to reinforce global inequity, which degrades opportunity and thereby slows the rate of human progress. Whatever one may think of the persona, Musk’s companies supply products and services for which many lines can be directly drawn to improved quality of life for everyday consumers. That is, simply, many (millions to billions) of people value electric cars, nation-scale grid batteries, underground transport systems, and the myriad of services they receive from orbital platforms. Very, very few individuals experience the benefits of hedge fund returns, directly or otherwise. The saving grace for Jim Simons is the subsequent philanthropy, which makes his hedge fund, in part, a private tax on inefficient market players that feeds forward into education and research, but without which the fund would be just another Gini multiplier. |
Do they? I see them more as "more of the same crap, but with a techy gloss", for people who don't really need any of it, and whose marginal life improvement bu buying them will be close to zero.