Just one of those random thoughts – What if one had been invited to Jeff Bezos’ $20 Million wedding extravaganza in Europe?
What would be the appropriate wedding gift to send?
The groom has the resources to have already bought everything he might ever have wanted, and the bride is getting the groom. They certainly don’t need a set of silver cake forks!
If one was in the near-Bezos wealth category and wanted to make sure one would not be invited to his next wedding, there would be options like … maybe his & hers tickets for a SpaceX ride? For the rest of us, what to do?
In the interests of full disclosure, my invite to the wedding got lost in the mail. Whew! Possible major breach of etiquette avoided.
On a smaller scale, it’s the same kinda conundrum when a couple who have been living together for a few years gets married. Wedding gifts were originally meant to help the newlyweds establish a household, but in such cases: done that! So they wrack their brains thinking up luxury items they really don’t need. I’m attending a wedding next month where the couple didn’t even bother with that, just said anybody who’d like to can contribute to their honeymoon fund…well, okay, but since they both make lotsa money, idk, $500 or so seems like both too much and too little.
Bezos is an INTJ, and INTJs have a weak spot in extraverted sensing:
Extraverted Sensing (Se) is the function that engages directly with the external, physical world—what’s real, tangible, and happening right now. For types with inferior or underdeveloped Se (like INTJ, INFJ), the function tends to operate unconsciously or immaturely, which can create specific pitfalls.
When INTJs are severely stressed, Se can erupt in unhealthy, uncontrolled ways:
I suppose I could dig out my space studies institute senior associate certificate that was numbered one after Ronald Reagan’s which was 400 mine was 401. I got it while I was SSI’s Miami local support team leader promoting Gerard O’Neil’s ideas to the community there. I don’t know maybe some kid in high school heard about that.
It’s kind of ironic that I tested out the Plato network’s group note facility that operated between the Cyber nodes worldwide a few years before Usenet took off, by creating a space industrialization group. That was part of the reason the Miami herald and AT&T joint venture got me down to Miami to architect the nationwide roll out. But then I discovered when I was down there that they didn’t want people talking directly to each other because that would be unmoderated. So I left probably before Jeffy and I ever met.
“honeymoon” – there is another concept that has gone south. I recall reading about not-so-long-ago marriages in an Italian village, where the groom would proudly wave the blood-stained sheet off the bed out of the window so that the wedding revelers in the street below would know that the bride had been a virgin.
I think you’re probably right about that. Just out of curiosity: Were you thinking more of his early IBM DOS years, or later on when he took a lot of inspiration from Apple, or something else?
It is quite long and I would never guess I would watch something that long, but it is kind of mesmerizing. I don’t think he gave one honest straightforward answer.
If I remember the most egregious parts correctly. He tries to maintain that he did not receive a memo from an executive that worked directly for him.
The exchange goes something like this:
Govenrment: Did you receive a memo from XYZ?
Gates: No
Government: Here is a copy of the memo you were copied on.
Gates: Some response using technical jargon talking about how email is created, sent and received.
Government: Did you receive this memo via email?
Gates: Some technical jargon trying to say it is not an email. But never clearly saying the obvious.
It turns out the memo is an attachment to an email and Gates does his best not to answer the question of whether he received the information in the memo attachment to the email by trying to make it into a technical discussion about email. He often does this to an absurd degree. It was like he was both trying to run out the clock by never answering a simple question and trying to portray everything as a technical discussion.
The other memorable exchange is when he tries to say that Internet Explorer is part of the operating system. The government is obviously trying to get information on bundling which I think it is obvious that is what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer.
It would be like a company that sells safety helmets and saying they were not bundling safety glasses because the glasses were part of the helmet because they used a headband to attach the safety glasses to the helmet.
Along the way you get a good understanding of how Microsoft was obviously anticompetitive in various ways including threatening computer manufacturing companies.
I consider the Microsoft antitrust as a key turning point in replacing capitalism with crony capitalism. Within less than 20 years Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are blatantly violating antitrust. Apple with its online store. Google, Facebook and Microsoft by buying up competitors. Amazon is blatantly violating IP law by selling products they know are infringing on patents.
No doubt Microsoft and the others are guilty of stifling competition. The more important question is were are they hurting or reducing consumer welfare?
edit:
from copilot…
Here’s a recap of Robert Bork’s antitrust philosophy and the consumer welfare standard he championed:
Bork’s Core Thesis
Argued that antitrust law should solely aim to protect consumer welfare, which he defined as economic efficiency.
Criticized prior enforcement for shielding inefficient competitors and conflating “big” with “bad.”
The Antitrust Paradox (1978)
Claimed many antitrust rulings harmed consumers by penalizing efficient business practices.
Favored bright-line rules over nuanced competitive effect analyses.
Influenced by Chicago School economics — especially Oliver Williamson’s trade-off model between market power and production efficiencies.
Legal Legacy
Supreme Court cases like Reiter v. Sonotone echoed Bork’s definition, calling the Sherman Act a “consumer welfare prescription.”
His ideas helped shape merger reviews, monopoly cases, and competition policy during the Reagan era and beyond.
Pushback & Reappraisal
Critics argue Bork misread congressional intent, which prioritized checking concentrated economic and political power — not just consumer prices.
His version of “consumer welfare” often resembles total welfare, which can favor producers and shareholders.
The tech era reignited antimonopoly debates, with the left pushing for broader competition goals like fairness, innovation, and democratic resilience.
Key Points from Bork’s Microsoft Analysis
Microsoft had monopoly power with over 97% market share in PC operating systems.
It used exclusionary contracts and bundling tactics (e.g., tying Internet Explorer to Windows) to suppress rivals like Netscape.
Bork argued these actions lacked efficiency justifications, making them predatory and illegal under antitrust law.
Interestingly, Bork was hired by Netscape — Microsoft’s rival — to support this position. Critics questioned whether this contradicted his earlier views, but Bork insisted his stance was consistent with The Antitrust Paradox. He maintained that predatory conduct, not mere size or success, was the issue.
Bork argued that Microsoft’s conduct reduced consumer welfare, despite its dominance and innovation.
In his 1998 white paper supporting the DOJ’s antitrust case, Bork claimed Microsoft’s tactics — like bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and using exclusionary contracts — were predatory and lacked efficiency justifications. He believed these actions violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by suppressing competition without benefiting consumers.
What’s especially notable is that Bork didn’t abandon his consumer welfare framework. Instead, he applied it rigorously:
Microsoft had monopoly power (over 97% market share in PC operating systems).
Its behavior excluded rivals like Netscape, not through superior products, but through strategic coercion.
Bork argued this harmed consumers by reducing choice and innovation — classic antitrust injury under his own standard.
I don’t think any monopoly can ever be good for consumers outside of the short term.
The fundamental reason is that competition drives improvement.
There are those that say ATT was a good monopoly and that Bell Labs is proof of the ability to continue to innovate. I highly doubt anything like the IPhone would have existed by 2004 had ATT been allowed to remain a monopoly.
Companies like ATT have a huge amount of momentum that continues to make it appear they are not decelerating.
All you are saying is that the Harvard grads with their fancy law degrees did an extremely poor job of what they had been charged with in the breakup of AT&T – which was improving the level of competition.
But then, they were Harvard grads … and lawyers. What else could anyone have expected?
When anyone comes up with a new product or service, he has a temporary monopoly. That allows him to make higher-than-normal profits, which encourages other people to enter the market. Eventually competition drives the profit level down to the lowest sustainable level. At least, that is the tale in Econ class.
Example – Apple introduces the smart phone, giving Apple a temporary monopoly and associated remarkably high profit margins. Then the South Koreans and Chinese pile into the market, and now we have a situation where the public can buy better-than-Apple smart phones at much-less-than-Apple prices. The next stage in the process is obvious.
Monopoly is a problem only where competitors are prevented from entering the market – which is sometimes driven by technical factors, and more often driven by corrupt politicians & bureaucrats.
Most monopolies* like Standard Oil get to be monopolies because they have the best product for the consumer based on quality, price or service.
This is why in the short term monopolies can be very beneficial but the reason isn’t because of the monopoly. It is because they have just went through a period of competition that they won by providing the overwhelmingly best product.
One probably could argue that Standard Oil used monopolistic practices in order to achieve the monopoly.
My point isn’t whether the way they achieved a monopoly is necessarily bad. It is once the monopoly has formed, the clock starts ticking. Initially there is this momentum because the people that faced the competition are mostly still in the company, but over time they retire or leave and take their competitive spirit with them.
My other point would be that once a monopoly is formed, then it is important to prevent monopolistic practices to prevent competition.
Laissez-faire free market folks will say eventually, if the monopoly is harming consumers, it will face competition. I think this is true because monopolies will continuously deteriorate from lack of competition until they are so dumb and lazy that they will lose.
The real problem with this theory is that the competition may not arrive in a realistic timeframe. Markets have to work within a reasonable amount of time and there is no reason to accept a corporations trying to prevent competition.
The other problem in todays world is that the competition is likely to come from a foreign nation if free market competition is stifled.
*One exception is probably Microsoft. They really didn’t win because the customer picked their product because it was the best product. They kind of fell into it.
Bork’s Core Thesis
The Antitrust Paradox (1978)
Legal Legacy
Pushback & Reappraisal
Key Points from Bork’s Microsoft Analysis