“Silicon Valley,” now in its third season, is one of the funniest shows on television; it is also the first ambitious satire of any form to shed much light on the current socio-cultural moment in Northern California.
.. “In the writer’s room, I talked a lot about how the founder of a company has a moral authority that no other C.E.O., no matter how accomplished, will ever have,” Costolo told me.
.. “That’s the first thing you notice,” Judge said. “It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”
.. “If someone is holding a document on the show, that document is written out, in full, the way that it would be in real life,” Dotan said. “We don’t think of it in terms of, ‘How little can we get away with showing on camera?’ It’s more, like, ‘Let’s go through the process of making the world as complete as possible and see if that process leads us to better stuff.’ Which it usually does.”
.. His answer was, ‘I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.’
.. “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
.. By satirizing them, you’re holding up a mirror. Some of these guys look in the mirror and go, ‘Fuck, we look silly.’ Others look in the mirror and go, ‘Wow, I am so fucking handsome.’”
.. “The more I meet these people and learn about them, the more I come away thinking that, despite all the bullshit and greed, there actually is something exciting and hopeful going on up there.”
.. “I think it’s a combination of the pretentiousness of the people involved and their total market penetration,” O’Keefe said. “It’s no longer necessary to tell you what the product is. Now the goal is just to make you feel better about using it.”
The Super Rich Start Saving Super Early
According to a new survey by Bank of America U.S. Trust, the bank’s private wealth management arm, many wealthy individuals in the U.S. start saving in their teenage years. The report, “Insights on Wealth and Worth,” surveys nearly 700 people and offers an inside look at the attitudes and behaviors of ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The survey’s respondents have at least $3 million in assets, and 30 percent have more than $10 million.
.. What is rare is the average age when these individuals started working and investing in stocks—15 and 25 years old, respectively.
.. On average, the survey’s respondents estimated that 52 percent of their wealth came from income, while 10 percent came from inheritance, and 32 percent from investments.
.. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis indicates that the national personal saving rate—the percent of a person’s disposable income that goes into savings—is currently 5.4 percent. However, for America’s wealthiest 1 percent, that rate is as high as 51 percent.
.. So why are the wealthy so good at saving money? It’s not just that they have ample funds to do so. Researchers who study the wealthy have long suspected that it might have something to do with the way wealthier parents teach their childrenabout money
The Mutual Dependence of Donald Trump and the News Media
But he is also taking advantage of a momentous and insecure time in American media.
News organizations old and new are jockeying for survival in a changing order, awash in information and content but absent the pillars they could always rely upon, like reliable advertising models, secure places on the cable dial or old-fashioned newsstand sales.
.. In that environment, Mr. Trump brings a welcome, if temporary, salve. He delivers ratings and clicks, and therefore revenue, which makes him the seller in a seller’s market. “I go on one of these shows and the ratings double, they triple,” Mr. Trump accurately told Time a few weeks ago. “And that gives you power.”
.. Fox News has its business challenges like anyone else. But it stands securely atop the news ratings, knows its mission, painstakingly maintains its special relationship with conservative audiences, and is therefore a revenue driver for its parent company, 21st Century Fox.
.. With CNN’s debates and heavy coverage of Mr. Trump, the network’s ratings have increased about 170 percent in prime time this year.
.. Understandably, Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN Worldwide, was beaming when I saw him at a lunch with other reporters last week. “These numbers are crazy — crazy,” he said, referring to the ratings. How crazy? Two-hundred-thousand-dollars-per-30-second-spot crazy on debate nights, 40 times what CNN makes on an average night, according to Advertising Age. That’s found money.
.. The New York Times’s Upshot team, using data from mediaQuant, reported last week that Mr. Trump had received nearly $1.9 billion worth of news coverage; his next closest Republican competitor, Ted Cruz, received a little more than $300 million. Hillary Clinton has received less than $750 million.
.. The imbalance in coverage has, though, led to spectacles like the one on March 8, when all of the cable news networks showed Mr. Trump’s 45-minute-long primary night news conference in full. While Mrs. Clinton’s victory speech went uncovered, Mr. Trump used the time to hawk Trump Steaks and Trump Wine.
.. Where Fox News refused Mr. Trump’s demand this year that it remove Ms. Kelly as a debate moderator, and lost his participation, ABC News appeared to accede to Mr. Trump’s request that it break its debate partnership with The New Hampshire Union Leader, which had harshly editorialized against him.
.. all of the shows went along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he “appear” by phone — all except one, “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace.”
.. On her show on Friday, Ms. Kelly made an oblique call for solidarity. “I’m the second-highest-rated show in all of cable news and I haven’t had Trump on in seven months,” she said. “It can be done without him too.”
Why China’s super-rich send their children abroad.
About a third of China’s wealth belongs to just one per cent of the population. While China’s poor still inhabit a developing-world economy, a recent report found that the country now has more dollar billionaires than the U.S. does. “What is happening in China constitutes one of the most rapid emergences of wealth stratification in human history,” Jeffrey Winters, a politics professor at Northwestern University, told me. Winters, the author of the book “Oligarchy,” pointed out that China is one of a small number of countries—Russia is the other notable example—where extreme wealth stratification was eliminated in a Communist revolution and then later reëmerged. As in Russia, the sudden formation of a new oligarchy in China means that there are many super-rich people who are unfamiliar with the ways in which more entrenched aristocracies quietly protect their wealth. “No matter the culture or age, old money knows from long experience that it is far safer to be secluded and less seen,” Winters said. But new money, as Thorstein Veblen theorized, asserts itself through conspicuous consumption.
.. A study by the Bank of China and the Hurun Report found that sixty per cent of the country’s rich people were either in the process of moving abroad or considering doing so.
.. But, for affluent Chinese, the most basic reason to move abroad is that fortunes in China are precarious. The concerns go deeper than anxiety about the country’s slowing growth and turbulent stock market; it is very difficult to progress above a certain level in business without cultivating, and sometimes buying, the support of government officials, who are often ousted in anti-corruption sweeps instigated by rivals.
.. “there’s always a fear that, if the officials to whom they’re tied are brought down in an anti-corruption campaign, it could bring trouble for them, too, and lead to the seizure of their assets. There’s also a concern that business rivals who may be better connected to people in the government could use their ties to the party-state to bring down their competitors.”
.. I asked him if the people he works with could be considered China’s one per cent. “I wouldn’t say that they are the one per cent,” Oei replied. “More like between the one and two per cent.” His clients tend to have prospered in regional manufacturing cities, whereas the very wealthiest people are from Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. “The tippy top of the pyramid have political backing or connections,” he said. “They don’t need to export the wealth.”
.. The home buyer, typically the husband, lives and works in Asia, where cash can be made fast, while establishing his family members in Canada in order to move the money to a place of social and political stability. Yan has coined the term “hedge city” for places like Vancouver: they are a hedge against volatility at home.
.. He has recommended raising the tax on vacant investment properties and called for “far better tracking” of international investment and absentee owners. But it seems unlikely that such measures will be implemented. As prices have risen, ordinary Canadians have found that their homes represent more and more of their net worth. Many people in the federal government, including the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, have advocated caution when it comes to steps that would depress property values. Besides, rich international buyers mean higher tax revenues. “The state is addicted to the revenue,” Eby told me.
.. Westerners are all about being straightforward and direct. But, when you negotiate a deal in China, it’s all about what’s unsaid, simultaneously hiding and hinting at what you really want.
.. It’s like this: when I am driving here and need to make a turn, I turn on my signal light and do it. It’s the most normal thing in the world. When I first drove in Asia, I flashed my signal and immediately people, instead of slowing down, all sped up to cut me off. It was so maddening, and then, after a little while, I became like everyone else. I never signal when I turn in Asia. I just do it. You don’t have a choice.”