Venkatesh Rao: Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia. One of the things I got done was finishing Brad DeLong’s highly anticipated new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. I rarely review books on this newsletter, but this felt like a worthwhile exception. (more)

aka Palestine, see Israel-Palestine

John Carl Malone (born March 7, 1941) is an American billionaire businessman, landowner, and philanthropist. He was chief executive officer (CEO) of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), a cable-co and media giant, for twenty-four years from 1973 to 1996. Malone is now chairman and largest voting shareholder of Liberty Media, Liberty Global, and Qurate Retail Group (formerly known as Liberty Interactive), and also owns 7% of Lionsgate and Starz Inc.[1][2][3][4] He was interim CEO of Liberty Media, until succeeded by former Microsoft and Oracle CFO Greg Maffei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Malone

Mario Joseph Gabelli (born June 19, 1942) is an American stock investor, investment advisor, and financial analyst. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Gabelli Asset Management Company Investors (Gamco Investors), an investment firm headquartered in Rye, New York. Forbes Magazine listed him as #1712 in December 2022 on the list of Billionaires, with a net worth of $1.7 billion US dollars.[1] On January 10, 2000, Gabelli was inducted into the "Barron's All Century Team," their list of the most influential mutual fund industry portfolio managers... Gabelli put into practice the theory of value investing he had learned at Columbia. He rated companies not by earnings but cash flow, analyzing a firm in great detail to calculate what he called private-market value: not the share price at which a stock was selling on an exchange, but the price per share someone would be willing to pay in order to buy the whole company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Gabelli

Raymond Thomas Dalio (born August 8, 1949) is a billionaire American hedge fund manager and philanthropist who has served as co-chief investment officer of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, since 1985. He founded Bridgewater in 1975 in New York. Within ten years, it was infused with a US$5 million investment from the World Bank's retirement fund... Dalio is the author of the 2017 book Principles: Life & Work, about corporate management and investment philosophy. It was featured on The New York Times best seller list, where it was called a "gospel of radical transparency." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Dalio

Vicky Ward: I Tried to Warn You About Sleazy Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. It was the fall of 2002... whom I’d been assigned to write about by my then-boss Graydon Carter. (more)

book (Design Fiction?) by Adrian Hon ASIN:B00EX8QRPM http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/ (more)

David Wong: Zoey Is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (Zoey-Ashe 3) ISBN:1250285933 (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz On the Latest TikTok Bill. TikTok Might Get Banned Soon. This attempt is getting reasonably far rather quickly, passing the House with broad support. (more)

Billionaire's Secret Buyout Formula. Vista Equity Partners: The goal of the Austin, Texas-based firm, which is 18 years old, is to transform business-software companies into profit machines. Behind its approach is Mr. Robert Smith’s belief that certain aspects of the companies Vista buys are interchangeable. “Software companies taste like chicken,” he said at a conference in New York a few years ago. “They’re selling different products, but 80% of what they do is pretty much the same.” (see related (2024-01-23) Brown Dark Software) (more)

Systems Thinking 1975 book by John Gall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics (more)

Thom Hartmann: Are Our Oligarchs Going to Drag Us Into Civil War? The headline in this week’s Fortune reads: “Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war.” (more)

Inside tech billionaires’ push to reshape San Francisco politics: ‘a hostile takeover’. ..the political-influence machine that tech billionaires and venture capitalists have recently built in San Francisco stands out for its size and ambition (more)

His Billionaire Buddies’ Bribery Bails Out Donald Trump, Again and Again. The problem isn’t that the former president is broke but that he’s for sale. (more)

Inside The Remarkable New Book That Details The Koch Bros' Dirtiest Deeds (more)

Business titans privately urged NYC mayor to use police on Columbia protesters, chats show. A group of billionaires and business titans working to shape U.S. public opinion of the war in Gaza privately pressed New York City’s mayor last month to send police to disperse pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. (Israel-Palestine) (more)

Martina Lauchengco: Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (more)

Martin Cagan partner

At AEP the team built a nice little lite-CMS to allow staff to create/update chunks of text that would support form tooltips, user-help pages, and an FAQ. (more)

"10,000 hours of practice" rule from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers book about Talent. http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ (more)