Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, and The Google Empire
Questioning Elon Musk's absence in the developing world.
Whenever I try to research technology in places that aren’t North America, Europe, or Asia, for some reason I come across technology services provided by Jack Dorsey, or Google. But whenever I search for any of Elon’s companies in the same location, there is no trace of his existence.
Forgive me for making an essay on Jack Dorsey and Google about Elon, but I believe that if you are the wealthiest man in the world, you should have footprints everywhere. And if there’s one place you specifically avoid, it’s bound to raise questions, or worse give your enemies room for attack.
Old Soldiers Never Die
Since the early days of PayPal, it has been obvious that Elon’s definite chief aim was to create a one-stop app for payments globally, a goal second only to becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. And although his entrepreneurship skills were great, he had much to learn before he was ready to take on the world.
A few decades since his finance technology plans were thrown to dust, he seems ready to go at it again, and this time he has no plans to spare anyone.
I am no geography expert but a cursory glance at Elon’s financial success will reveal that a disproportionate amount of his wealth in certain ventures tends to come from specific geographical areas. For example, Tesla reached record-breaking numbers from Canada alone, where Elon first lived after he left South Africa.
Space X’s success is owed largely to a defense contract given by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a United States organization to Elon and his team to build and launch reusable rockets.
Elon’s battle for free speech with X was solidified by venturing into several third-world countries whose governments denied its citizens access to platforms that endorse moderated freedom of speech like India and Brazil.
But unlike the countries in which Elon definitively explored, Africa (which is the continent where Elon was born) seems to have little to no place in Elon’s ambitions. I am no geo-political expert but if my analysis has any glimmer of correctness, it may reveal opportunities for future success for Elon or failure if left unexplored since there are many others unashamed by the risk of exploring that area.
So, to truly understand what Elon Stands to lose by leaving out Africa, let us explore what those who have done so have gained. Like Bill Gates with Microsoft, Larry Page and Sergey Brin with Google and Jack Dorsey and JayZ with Block Inc.; which is a holding company for Cash App, Square (both financial services), and Tidal, the music streaming service popularized by JayZ now owned by Block Inc.
McAfee’s Playbook
John McAfee, the cybersecurity technology billionaire is popular not only for his unorthodox approach to life and relationships but also for his business methods and political ideas. He never fit into the average person’s idea of what a tech entrepreneur might look like. He was abrasive, reckless, and never too far from the next scandal.
Aside from his other antics, one of his widely known acts is his use of free computers to gain access to the emails of Hillary Clinton’s office in 2013 just before she ran for president in 2016, although he never took sides with any political candidate in the 2016 election, Clinton would eventually lose the Presidential election.
Nothing is ever free.
Free stuff comes like trojan horses. The receiver never suspects that what he has to give in return is often more than what he is receiving, because he is always thinking short-term. The giver, thinking 5-10 moves ahead, already sees the receiver’s head on his plate.
The same playbook I believe has been used by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Jack Dorsey in places where the language of money is less spoken. And if you observe closely, you will notice a few common themes in the time these companies have spent in the darker part of the world.
Scale first, profit second: Google and Microsoft respectively have reached the ends of the earth with their products and services by first leaving out profit in places not too marked by wealth to access them (and their data). While they figure out how to monetize the newfound population, endless data is collected from the free services provided and more customers are acquired.
Still about the long term: Although it is a common trope that only startups plan long-term, established companies like Google, Microsoft, and Twitter (under Jack Dorsey) still prioritized reach and the scale at which they could service the population when they came to Africa since their financial foundations were already well established.
Sell impact, buy people: When selling a product or service to people who cannot afford it, you risk alienating potential customers by discriminating them with your prices. So what Google and Microsoft have done is rather than sell the product, they sell the impact the product can have on the lives of people in far-reaching countries, targeting their people, schools, small businesses, and small governments.
Understand the value of platforms: In an interview with Semil Shah about Facebook's platform, Chamath Paliapatiyah, an early senior executive at the company, made a quote that he attributes to Bill Gates. He says:
"I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates...and Gates said something along the lines of, 'That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.'"
By focusing on building platforms that would house millions of people for an extended period, these companies can capture the lifetime value of their customers through several earning cycles. In a few years, they can recoup their initial costs, make profits, and re-invest in new (potential) customers.
The Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Twitter (under Jack Dorsey) are a few ways companies were used to successfully penetrate the third world.
By Bill Gates’s definition, the platform Elon currently owns (X.com) is probably the most valuable asset in the world, because the value of the people using it all over the world exceeds the value of the company itself, Elon knows this. But it is also because no two individuals on the platform have more value than everyone else.
What happens when two or more entities have more value than all other entities on a platform is similar to when a company like Netflix hypothetically makes more use of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) servers than say companies like Spotify, Snapchat, and Uber combined. Amazon is more likely to take down Netflix from its servers than it is to make extra servers to keep Netflix on its platform. If Amazon chooses to make adjustments for Netflix, no matter how noble the intention, it overtly admits to Netflix being a superior force. And it gives Netflix a chance to make a rival server that has the potential to steal business from other companies with smaller server requirements.
Do you understand? This is why Google and Microsoft’s presence in the third world has remained unchallenged for decades. No third-world billionaire, corporation, or even two combined can challenge the value of all the other individuals on their platforms.
Enter Jack Dorsey
In the last few posts of this publication, we have covered the lives of various entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Peter Theil and Warren Buffet and although Jack Dorsey may not strike you as someone of similar caliber to them, he is someone to look out for. Particularly because since the start of his career in Silicon Valley, he has occupied a rather small but uncontested space in the industry. He always finds a way to make something work despite always starting with little in the form of knowledge and capital.
How do you go from being born in a small catholic family in St. Louis Missouri with dreams of becoming a fashion designer to becoming a billionaire co-founder of one of the most impactful social networks in the last two decades and founder of an e-commerce and a person-to-person payments app?
You simply become Jack Dorsey.
But unlike other founders whose companies appear to be a series of confident bets on themselves, Jack’s ventures are more of side projects hedged at the right time which turned into accidental success.
Twitter, a startup he co-founded after his first startup on dispatching failed, became a massive success after the feature of instant messaging (SMS) gained validation by users on Verizon and Cingular, which was the first time you could cross carriers in 2006. But despite the platform’s success, Jack faced numerous struggles in his roles at Twitter, particularly as regards control of the company which is what many would agree to be the primary role of a CEO. If you liken it to the struggle Elon faced at PayPal, you would not be wrong.
After stepping down as CEO to join the Board of Directors of Twitter in 2008, Jack’s role became more political as he joined several state department delegations, including a trip to Iraq in April 2009. Since then, the value of the platform skyrocketed as Twitter became a tool for the control of public discourse in the United States and around the world, the only problem was; again Jack Dorsey was not the one in control.
Fast forward to the moments leading up to the 2016 US elections and the platform had become hell. Presidential candidates were now making use of the platform to further their political views and ambitions to the users who would listen. One political candidate took it to the extreme personally targeting his opponents publicly and calling them funny names to spite them. This candidate popularly known as Donald J Trump, gained widespread popularity with his antics and almost doubled his following on the platform from 3m followers to 5.7m shortly after announcing his candidacy for the 2016 elections.
Going by our previous example, Trump had become Netflix. His influence on the platform had become so huge he had to be banned a few years later for violating laws that you could say were made specifically for him. What would have been a sound business decision in the case of Netflix was now seen as a decision that compromised the integrity of Twitter.
Side note: This is one of the reasons why I recommend you continue to read this newsletter. The grey area between decisions like this could mean life or death for your company or startup. Being aware of information like this would put you in a position to make better decisions than you would have without access to this information.
It took Elon buying the platform at a price so high the fundamentals of the platform had to be restored par Bill Gates’s definition. Elon set the bird free.
But what happens next?
Will he expand his influence to the rest of the world, building on the economic value of the individuals and companies that make use of the platform or will he stick to going to Mars with just half of civilization?
The Missing Link.
Before the age of the internet, Gates’s Microsoft penetrated Africa with personal computers, something Apple couldn’t do despite it being a better product. Since the invention of the mobile phone, Google has maintained a dominant presence in the third world, by not just popularizing its Android phones amongst their population, but also teaching them how to use their devices.
But more than these devices, a far more important factor, dare I say the most important catalyst for the penetration of the third world is the invention of the internet, which removed the hands of the government from stopping companies from being able to access many parts of the world.
The invention of the internet was like gas that was spread worldwide and would burn thousands of information to anyone who could afford a match stick and material (internet accessible device) that would burn long enough.
So after a few decades of operation, Google has come to understand that anywhere the internet becomes accessible, devices grow in demand (cheap internet specifically). So the key to successfully penetrating Africa and the rest of the third world was fast and affordable internet access, something Elon has already made possible with the invention of Starlink; a subsidiary of the American Aerospace company SpaceX that makes use of satellites that orbit the earth to provide internet access to tiny humans on earth.
Anon: So Starlink is the missing link?
Nero: You bet!
The good news is, that Elon doesn’t have to make any devices. All he has to do is to get Starlink to places like India and South Africa and then we can expand to other areas making use of his platform X to gain access to these locations.
It doesn’t end there, still.
The economic constraints surrounding businesses that desire to expand beyond developed countries are many but one that stands out the most is Africa’s inability to transact with the rest of the world on a balanced financial scale. A problem Jack Dorsey explored with JayZ with a Bitcoin education program called The Bitcoin Academy and CashApp.
CashApp is a peer-to-peer payment software that supports the sending and receiving of funds between users. But unlike major financial services applications/institutions, it doesn’t let you receive the money you earn from your job (W-2), or another platform directly. This is something Elon’s X can solve with XCreators and XPay (unreleased). If creators around the world can earn money on X and get paid directly on X I believe this would be key to X’s and Elon’s global expansion and subsequent domination of the financial services space.
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