I enjoyed that call exactly once, when I left Comcast for RCN.

“I’m calling to cancel my service.”

“Why?”

“RCN offers twice the download speeds for half what you charge. Can you beat that?”

“…I’ll switch you to cancellations.”

Maybe they will have an upgraded version with a large rubber nose and a moustache.

I’m more worried about billionaires who have literal armies like Erik Prince.

Owning land is not the same as governing land.

If you are running in the Olympics, it doesn’t matter if the 2nd place guy is 5 seconds or 10 seconds behind you. You still get the gold.

My point is that he didn’t lose a significant amount of money.

Even with all the losses, he is still the richest man in the world by more than $50 billion. Musk dumped more than half of his Tesla stock and is focusing more on SpaceX now.

Musk could easily buy himself a governorship or a senatorial position and work up from there. That’s not his goal. He wants to be the next Thomas Edison. He wants to be admired and remembered.

Dictator’s opulent displays of wealth are to stoke their egos. They don’t care about the money they spend because they just took it, they didn’t earn it. They care about how much control they have over the people around them. They don’t care if people like them ,only that they fear them.

Starlink launched in Africa in 2023, so that covers a few oppressive governments.

Are you saying he is trying to take over the country by buying all the land? Seems like he’s just using land as an investment.

I think there is a difference in mentality between people who chase power and people who chase money. Bull Gates certainly chases money, but he’s not trying to take over a country somewhere.

They have monopolies because we let them. I say nationalize all communication infrastructure.

Dictators do things like build and use rape rooms or throw people they don’t like out of helicopters.

Because the orange Cheeto wants to cut his taxes so he gets more money. Dictators want power, not money. That’s why they are famous for blowing it on such exorbitant things. It’s just a means to an end. To billionaires the money is the end.

A billionaire chases what gets them the most money. The public can manipulate them by making them lose money. A dictator wants power, which really can only be countered with mass violence.

That’s better than a dictator who only wants to protect his own power. At least a billionaire can be bought.

Dictatorships don’t answer to the people. It’s absolutely a problem that billionaires are controlling the flow of information, but it’s much worse for a dictator to do it.

That’s the thing, they is no profit motive to block wide swaths of public viewpoint because that will cost them customers. They will quickly lose business to a competitor who doesn’t do that. (Local monopolies aside, which is an entirely different problem).

Governments tend to block things like facts about genocides they have committed and opposing political opinions. I would hope things like child exploitation could be managed at the host level.

That is the catch. Ideally they wouldn’t automatically cooperate with the dictators on the ground, but that hasn’t been the case.