The Unholy Trinity

Jeff Bezos found a niche market in online retailing when he started Amazon to make it easier for people wishing to buy certain books to go to his site and he would send the book to a customer in a few days, as opposed to the long wait one might encounter in ordering a particular title at Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore.   Then he began offering records and videos for sale, followed by everything else.  Today you can get anything you want or need at Amazon if your local store doesn't have what you're looking for - and usually doesn't.  He used his riches to buy the esteemed Washington Post to put the paper on a sound footing.  People who found that obscure classic novel their library systems don't have, that album from a British classic-rock band that never made it in America, or that compact Windows 11 laptop that the local Best Buy can't be bothered to stock owe a debt of gratitude to Jeff Bezos.

Elon Musk invested in a startup electric-car company in California called Tesla and got to work expanding its offerings from a single roadster to sedans and crossovers.  In doing so, he not only popularized electric vehicles as the effects of climate change caused in part by internal-combustion-engine vehicles became more apparent, he made Tesla the first successful American automaker to be started since Walter Chrysler founded his namesake company (now part of the Franco-Italian conglomerate Stellantis) in 1925 and give the Big Three its first domestic competition since American Motors bit the dust in 1987.  Musk reopened the old GM-Toyota factory in Fremont, California to make his cars, giving people in the area jobs.  Teslas became legendary for their stellar performance - yours truly can attest to this, having test-driven one in 2015.  He went on to produce space rockets at his company SpaceX, reigniting intertest in space exploration, even as Tesla inspired GM, Ford, and, after the diesel-emissions scandal, Volkswagen to enter the EV market, as well as encouraging new EV startups like Lucid and Rivian.  People with Teslas owe a debt of gratitude to Elon Musk.

Mark Zuckerberg started a Web site where Harvard students could connect with each other online when they couldn't do so in person.  Eventually, the network spread to other colleges and universities, and then the rest of the world.  Facebook then became a method for relatives and longtime friends separated by moves to different cities and towns to connect with each other again after years apart, and it allowed people to make new friends online that they wouldn't have otherwise made.  People who reconnected with their high school buddies or college chums, Cousin Jim, Uncle Fred and Aunt Julie and people who connected with new friends - including those of us who established connections with fashion models of the 1980s that we had severe crushes on back in high school - owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

And yet, these three men are the worst people on the planet after Donald Trump.

The products and services Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg provided to the world earned them fortunes measured in billions of dollars, but instead of using their billions to make the world in general and America in particular a better place, they've used it to stifle competition, crush small businesses, and impose their underhanded business practices on the people of the world against their will so they, unsatisfied with the billions they've made, can make billions and billions of dollars more.  Bezos has put countless booksellers out of business, and if you're still old-school and listen to CDs without even considering streaming, Amazon is practically the only place to go for them.  Musk, the Henry Ford of the twenty-first century (not a compliment; Henry Ford was a horrible person too!), bought Twitter and renamed it X, which was not a sound business decision and left people scratching their heads until it became apparent that Musk bought it to have a platform to broadcast his racist, plutocratic and conspiratorial views and attracted like-minded people to join in on the bashing and slashing.  Zuckerberg built a social-media empire, Meta, by buying platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp to ensure that people have fewer real choices in social-media sites, and he has encouraged users to hurl insults and bitter diatribes against each other to keep them on his site long enough to keep his business going and growing at the expense of civility.  And the algorithms he uses ensure that you could be hooked on scrolling through Facebook or his other platforms until you lose track of time and never consider once the negative impact of all of that nasty back-and-forth with people you hardly even know.

This trio's tech-related business activities and their influence in media in general have led them to make Donald Trump their best friend.  Bezos wants to expand Amazon, but with reporters at his paper giving Trump agita with their investigative stories about him, he can't have them continuing their exposés or let the editorial desk endorse any of his political opponents, else Trump will raise postal rates on the sorts of packages Amazon sends out from its fulfillment centers.  Now Bezos can rest easy by stifling his reporters at the Washington Post without Trump having to do it for him.  Musk, whose money helped elect Trump to another term, now has the upper hand in the EV market with Trump having ended the EV mandate, and he's secured his lucrative government contracts.  And by eliminating fact-checking at Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg is allowing pro-Trump propaganda and conspiracy theories.  And by rigging the algorithms on Meta platforms, Zuckerberg has insured that no one who knows the truth can call out factually erroneous posts . . . because people who care about the truth will never see them.

I can only close with the famous quote from Matthew 12:26: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?"