Friend of mine has worked for Palantir since like 2009.
When they IPO'd he told me that it needed to hit about $15/share to make him a millionaire. He actually spent about 3 years living in near austerity to be able to afford all of the capital gains taxes on his options that he had yet to purchase without selling shares to cover it.
I happened to be hanging out with him back in early May when they had their earnings call and it dipped. At one point he and another friend were having a minor dispute, during which I was able to say to the other friend, "hey, give him a break. He lost a a million dollars today."
Makes me wish I'd gone all in, but oh well. I'll live with my paltry 600 shares.
Apple has been a marketing and fashion company disguised as a tech company since at least the '90s. Every single one of their "innovations" since the iPod was a copy of existing tech with an Apple logo on it.
Hell, even the original colorful iMac ads were basically a knock-off of the redesigned VW Bug commercials.
No, he's very good at what he does. He's extremely intelligent, which is why I still consider him a friend and haven't just completely written him off.
He's just stuck in the mainstream media and mainstream institutional narrative.
That's the worst thing -- he's not even an unhealthy eater. Doesn't do soda, doesn't drink much, likes to cook and bake so makes most of his own food.
But he went to a doctor, they did his routine blood screening, his blood sugar came back borderline, they prescribed him Ozempic, and he just said, "ok, well I guess I'll do what the doctor says."
And my friend with a PhD in microbiology is still getting every covid booster because he's pre-diabetic, for which he's taking Ozempic, so he considers himself to be an "at-risk" person, even though he's otherwise healthy and not overweight.
And if I try to talk to him about any of it, I'm just a layman conspiracy theorist who couldn't possibly understand any of this stuff.
I suppose, but wouldn't they already be "in the system" from having sent remittances before? And if it's like a sales tax, there's no "system" to get into...? It's just an anonymous transaction fee that the business pays to the government.
You reap what you sow.