How close is the US to crony capitalism?

Free slope towards cronyism Capital from the leading free market in the world to the leading example of crony capitalism.

We're kind of looking at sort of billionaire wealth, as in that kind of looking at more kind of cronyistic sectors and less cronyistic sectors and comparing how those, those different ranks look.

Often that means things like kind of proximity to the states. Do you have access to land? You have Access to licenses, resources. And are you able to kind of limit competition either kind of, you know, directly or by lobbying the government to step in for you?

At that point, if you look somewhere like Russia, which was kind of right at the top of our ranking there, then the billionaires were mostly making their money in those kind of classically cronyistic sectors.

No. And I mean, I think all of those companies you listed, I mean, absolutely. It'd be very hard to say that the money they came to initially kind of came from close knit relationships with the government. Jeff Bezos started getting richer in the 90s. I think few people would say that him and Bill Clinton were really kind of best of friends. It was that reason that Amazon did really well. I mean, that's sort of a ludicrous thing to say. Now, whether that could be true of the US forward looking. And then also, of course, as people kind of have already become billionaires, we now look at the relationships with a lot of the tech companies, let's say, and the political system in America. You can certainly see reasons for concern. You can see the fact that a lot of the tech titans felt such an obligation to kind of declare themselves to be kind of simpatico, at least to a degree, with the ideological program of the President. You've seen things like, for instance, the intervention in intel or, you know, the lengths Apple had to go to in order to avoid getting hit with some of the very heavy tariffs. Again, those are all the sorts of things that would raise more concern that the business is feeling a need to get close to politics in order to stay ahead of their competitors.

I want to thank you for setting the tone.

No, exactly. I mean, there's always been lobbying in the U.S. there's always been some sense businesses will have what they'll sometimes euphemistically call government affairs offices or things like that that try to make sure that they're on the right side of regulation, and if there are particular things they're keen on, that they push for those on Hill. That's been true forever in the US Is true in every democracy. The degree to which that's now both focused on kind of personalistically staying on the right side of Donald Trump as a person rather than engaging with a broad, amorphous political process, and also the sense in which that the stakes of doing so become so, so much higher. I mean, the tariff regime can either be incredibly damaging or incredibly accommodating to your company. Which one of those two worlds we live in is mostly at the win with the president. And in a context where we want companies to win and fail based on whether they do well in the marketplace, whether people like the things they produce, that's a pretty worrying place to be.

notion that you have executive orders issued that explicitly, then get chipped away at and carved out in order to favor particular companies. So we've seen that with the tariffs.

What's really distinct about this presidency is the notion that kind of in almost every bit of economic policy, if there's a deal to be made, the president is willing and happy and excited to make that deal. And so as a company, there's the notion of can we give Donald Trump something he wants, and can we extract a better deal for our particular company and carve out an exemption? And that sort of dynamic is quite novel to this presidency is substantially worse, I'd argue, than what we've seen before and is pretty worrying.