Infinite Liquidity 2
Killing them Soft(ly)
It had been a rough couple years for the legendary investor Maryo Musume. One tends to find it a bit odd that the person spewing cash raised from sources only God would be aware of got a reputation for identifying innovation without actually, you know, creating any of the products, but the money speaks for itself, right? Except Maryo was famous not only for spending gargantuan sums, but also losing gargantuan sums, though he always remained in the societal winner's circle that we call "billionaires". It was like watching a "venture capital" Jesse Livermore if he had the last name Rockefeller instead. It was about as interesting as being a fan of other people’s trust funds, or a shoddily assembled, min-maxxed NBA super team.
Maryo thought back to the roots of venture capital when literal ventures were funded, whether they were Ahab-esque whaling expeditions or 17,000-feet-deep holes in the ground searching for oil. The risk/reward was the ultimate game of life or death where you’d either live like a king or go totally broke, unlike the modern landscape. With the amount of money you could raise and how cheap the debt was, the only real risk in the modern "VC" regime was whether or not the public would bite on another lipsticked pig ticker being punted off into the markets to gamble on. He shook his head. Things just weren't the same anymore.
It had been a while since Maryo had thought about what innovation actually was. Was it payment processors or black boxes with nebulous value solving problems that had, in a sense, already been solved? Were they even solving problems or just shifting around what we see as the issue? He thought about his contemporaries who had either built the quintessential hardware of the modern world, the zombifying software of the ad-tech hellhole we all currently lived in, or the lifestyle brand that happened to build rockets and cars and shoot them into space. It was all too much to bear, as he began weeping. What did he have? An office space company for a population that didn't want to work? A hotel company when people did not want to talk to others with differing beliefs, let alone travel and expand their purview? He had spent gobsmacking amounts to try and coerce people to change their habits, to trust in his innovative view that working, breathing, and living together truly would push humanity forward. He didn't think he was wrong - the scale was simply too large. Steve Jobs solved the problem of empty spare time, but pushing past that - solving life itself - was the ambition of someone who hadn't ever read Tolstoy. And, as reality contained a Tolstoy-esque bias, Maryo would have to suffer for what he had done - knowing he was right, but unable to do anything about it on such a grandiose scale was a pain that nobody should suffer.
So what was innovation? To Maryo, this was nothing short of changing the entire world in his own vision, a kind of investment-fueled imperialism. After all, how much had the smartphone bent the world to reform around its conveniences? His most successful investments had captured some of that world, albeit one that someone else had created. Now he wanted his own West Nippon (or should I say Nippon West Saudi Arabia?) Company controlling 80% of the world. It would never come. The cash could no longer change people's opinions. The debt regime that had enabled him to force his products into the day to day lives of peons by selling a dollar for 30 cents had crushed him, as the regime had concurrently made the target individual so flush with meaningless cash that they did not care about a good deal on HardFund's dime anymore - a good deal that they noticed was getting worse and worse as the dollar was sold for 50 cents, and then 70 cents as the quality of the offerings dwindled. It was simply a matter of time before the house Maryo had built collapsed. Thankfully, the house Yoshi had built would be fine.
Dejected, Maryo went out to his garage. Now that he thought about it, he hadn't driven a car himself in decades. How was he supposed to know what the ordinary man who drove his own car to work every day thought if he didn't even know how to drive? He started the car - that, at least, he knew how to do - and rolled up the passenger side window just low enough to give him enough time to think. The garage stayed closed as Maryo sat and pondered.
A couple hours later, Maryo woke with a start, totally flummoxed. Apparently he had forgotten his car was electric.