reactiveinertia's comments

Capitalism is cut-throat, there is no other capitalism in the West or the East. The only reason capitalism works a little better is because there is meant to be competitors in times of surplus. Evidently, no one has surplus of water to compete against price gouging and Amazon's logistical operations are unable to handle certain edge cases such as these.

Their current CEO is not very stellar at all and is displaying characteristics of Apple envy. Maybe they imagine themselves as the better Jobs.

That's jabber to evade political nuance. Opoid and drug abuse is obviously heavily prevalent in American society, and is part of their mainstream culture and media. The Americans spent hundreds billions of dollars just in their media push to make drug abuse a part of everyday American life.

Opoid abuse has been _observed_ in other civilizations as leading to a collapse in labor throughput. The Middle Eastern empires, the Chinese Empires, etc... have all recorded _correlated_ evidence of opoid abuse to a collapse in economic throughput, but never "_proven_" it under the "rigor of Western Science".

The real question isn't so much as to _what_ caused the drop in labor force. It is obviously not only drug abuse, where drug abuse is understood to be a symptom of the problem(s). The question that the scientist cannot or will not answer is why the Americans did this to themselves.

A company that is similar in practice is the giant Samsung. They make electronics, military equipment, ships, missiles, medical equipment, etc... they even make some basic technology for space rockets and cruise missiles. The only thing they don't or can't make is the stage 1 launch system which the US prohibits them from developing and they instead purchase it from Russia.

The Samsung family are geniuses at running complex operations, but their basic operations are heavily assisted by other companies and people from other nations.

Musk on the otherhand is kind of like the Trump of America's advanced technology industry with the illusion of a heavy liberal bent. His focus is on more of a "white" company, being South American and having escaped from the abolition of Apartheid, he fits in well with what the majority of Americans are looking for. However, the expectation of him being a "white US" friendly operation prevents him from adequately recruiting the needed personnel to run a conglomerate.

edit: I understand that some of you are finding it difficult to process how Musk can run companies that appear so attractive, yet ignore its cultural and political structure. It doesn't matter economically. Economically, all that matters is what you perceive of his image and thereby the company(s) whose image you believe-in from what you think you understand of Musk.

What works in the US and Europe is to develop a latent "white supremacist" image with a strong undertone, without any direct overtures. The only difference between Western liberalism/democracy/etc... and Western Fascism/Racism/Consveratism etc... is how the basis and execution of this idea of supremacy is viewed and communicated.