When they write the history of this era, one of the strangest chapters will be devoted to Uber, a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals.

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From the start, Uber's "blitzscaling" strategy involved breaking local taxi laws (incurring potentially unlimited civil liability) while losing (lots of) money on every ride. They flushed billions and billions and billions of dollars down the drain.

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But they had billions to burn. Mohammed bin Salman, the murdering Crown Prince of the Saudi royal family, funded Softbank - a Japanese pump-and-dump investment scheme behind Wework and other grifts - with $80B as part of his "Vision 2030"

Vision 2030 is a scheme to diversify Saudi wealth away from hydrocarbons by attempting to establish monopolies that will allow the family to control entire sectors of the global economy.

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These schemes are longshots, and the fallback position is to unload failed monopolies - with staggering debt-overhangs - on investors who've been suckered with the promise that really big piles of shit surely have a pony buried underneath them somewhere.

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Today we have three major record labels, the meanest, most voracious gobblers-up of the competition, companies that clawed their way to global dominance through absolute ruthlessness, particularly to the musicians who did the work that brought in the money.

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For example: the Beatles earned $0.01/record.

Split four ways.

But 15% of that was creamed off by the label to account for "promotional copies" that they later admitted they sold at full price without giving the Beatles their ONE PENNY of royalties.

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When Napster and other digital distribution platforms appeared, many musicians were angry about them, but many were hopeful: was this - finally - a way to be free of the labels?

It was!

For a while.

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The subsequent record industry lawsuits combined with runaway mergers and acquisitions in BOTH tech (5 giants) AND entertainment (4 studios, 4ish publishers, 3 labels) killed the dream of a pluralistic, fair alternative to the content oligarchy.

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This was confirmed when Youtube launched its music service in the early part of the past decade. After hammering out a deal with the Big Four (now three) labels, YT told all the independent artists and labels that this would be their deal too - or they could leave Youtube.

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