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Comment on Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

America’s darling Jeff Bezos exploited a flaw in his book suppliers policies to gain an unfair edge on competitors in the early days of Amazon. Best business man ever: give him the key to the city and a dick-shaped rocket ship.

He also got rich daddy and rich friend money to get money for his totally original and non-derivative idea of “selling things online”. Maybe that’s where this guy went wrong? No rich daddy?

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prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They wouldn’t be real capitalists (and boomers) if they didn’t pull the ladder up behind them.

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NeptuneOrbit@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is hard to verify on Google. What did he do?

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- andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [W]e found a loophole. Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn’t have to receive 10 books, you only had to order 10 books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, “Sorry, but we’re out of the lichen book.” One of these days we’re going to get all those lichen books dumped onto our front lawn.
  
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futatorius@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The “selling things online” idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That’s not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it’s often the case that it’s not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it’s executed.

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- Ruxias@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  Umm… eBay was around before amazon and was largely successful. So no, he isn’t a ground-breaker, nor am I suggesting eBay was either. And yeah you can talk about differences between their platforms but my point still stands.
  
  All of these types “stand on the shoulders of giants” as they say. Except the giant is the taxpayer money that created the fertile ground that allowed their wealth in the first place. (E.g. the internet) And when they’re sufficiently successful, they love pulling up that ladder you and I and everyone else paid for.
  
  Private profits, public losses. Same as it ever was.
  
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- Cataphract@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I believe in a well-regulated market he wouldn’t have found success like he did. Running for 8 years off of parents and VC/stock influx of millions of dollars screams anti-competitive to me. At the very least if we had decent privacy protection laws then the early data harvesting and business application probably would’ve been looked into at the start and shutdown, or else the company broken up from a monopoly once it started strangling whole sectors.
  
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