We’ve noted in weeks past that Silicon Valley has lost roughly $1 trillion in market cap over the past year. These losses haven’t just whacked Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth. Tens of millions of working-class Americans have lost money in lifetime savings and 401k plans because of the big tech blood bath in 2022.
Tens of thousands more have lost their jobs.
Meanwhile here are the layoff numbers for big tech in recent months:
Big Tech Layoffs
Amazon 18,000
Google 12,000
Facebook 11,000
Microsoft 10,000
Salesforce 8,000
Cisco 4,000
Twitter 3,000
That the mighty have fallen is seen as a good thing by the rowdy “breakup big tech” crowd. That includes Biden’s antitrust warriors and some of our conservative friends who fear big tech’s leftwing bias. The market is punishing firms like Google and Facebook/Meta for alienating half their audience far more effectively than big government is.
But the sharp drop in the market value of the FAANG stocks isn’t helping boost the next generation of tech superstars. It’s having the opposite effect – by spooking investors away from the kinds of innovative start-ups that could someday knock Apple and Amazon from their pedestals.
We want Silicon Valley to stop discriminating against conservative voices and values, but the government’s war against big tech is a dangerous assault on U.S. economic supremacy. No other nation in the world intentionally kneecaps its most profitable companies.
More evidence of the blue state meltdown comes from the latest annual U-Haul report ranking states on the number of net in-bound rentals.
For regular readers of the HOTLINE, no big surprises. Nine of the 10 destination spots are red states and eight of the 10 states where people are moseying out of are blue states and cities. So much for the left’s promise of creating blue-state worker paradises.
One slight surprise is that Texas topped Florida again in 2022 as the two southern states vie back and forth for the prize of Top Destination State.
California and Illinois continue to see the greatest exodus ranking #50 and #49, respectively, for the past two years. California has ranked 48th or lower every year since 2016.
Oh, there was one other surprise in the U-Hail data which deserves a special mention. No state improved its attractiveness based on the moving vans in 2022 more than Virginia. Virginia moved from 31st to 5th in the state rankings in Youngkin’s first year in office. That sound you’re hearing is the presidential buzz swirling around Youngkin.
4) Biden’s New White House Chief Of Staff Perfect For The Job – He Got Everything Wrong On COVID
Just over a year ago, Jeffrey Zients ratcheted up COVID panic to a level unseen since the earliest says of the pandemic:
He also engineered Biden's vaccine mandates on healthcare workers, government employees, contractors, the military – and nearly all private sector employees. Only the Supreme Court kept the last from taking effect.
The ban on unvaccinated foreign travelers Zients championed (with an express exemption for "asylum-seekers, of course) is still in effect and has the United States on a tiny list of crackpot countries that still bar entry to billions of people.
The Zient's approach of fear and mandates bitterly divided the country and turned Operation Warp Speed from a deregulatory success into an authoritarian failure.
For this sterling performance, Biden promoted Zients to the White House Chief of Staff job.
5) The Other Sound You’re Hearing Is Those Recession Alarm Bells Ringing
We still are hopeful that the economy won’t slip underwater in 2023 – but the Index of Leading Indicators just fell plunged into the danger zone at the start of the year. The economy needs some growth hormone injections – but don’t expect those to be coming anytime soon from this White House.
