I'm going to free write this because I had such an overwhelming reaction to this video that a waterfall of thoughts came to my head after watching it, and amazingly, none of the thoughts really had anything to do with Jensen or NVIDIA.. at all.
So to briefly summarise the video, it's the CEO of NVIDIA trying to be cute, probably bored out of his mind like the better half of the world, making a little troll video on "what's cooking" at NVIDIA.
The more observant tech enthusiasts will understand this to be a sort of hint drop at the recent leaks of the next gen consumer NVIDIA graphics card to replace the RTX 20 series currently on the shelves. This itself really bothers me because unlike the mobile phone industry, the graphics and CPU industry is much less predictable in terms of release schedules and consumers are frequently kept out of the loop of next generation chip releases right up until the products are on the shelves and magically announced.
As you can imagine, a lot of people will be buying what they assume to be future proof hardware, only to find something new is released the next month, and all the stuff you just bought could have been procured for substantially cheaper.
Pet peeve aside, what really caught my eye was this guys house. And what a house it is. Look at those spiralling staircases, lovely high ceilings, aesthetic fence railings at the stairwell. Heck, look at the porcelain style cooking stove with Greek classical motif.
My first thought was: damn this guy has got a pretty awesome house. He must be loaded. But even loaded people are just normal people.. but are they? Mr. Jensen here, as the CEO of NVIDIA has amassed a net worth of well over $5 billion dollars, a sum that is in our day and age, scoffed at when compared with the likes of Buffet, Gates and Bezos, but take nothing away from this guy, he is a multi-billionaire.
I am not someone that holds disdain for rich people, not at all. In-fact, I believe that it is only through entrepreneurship and the risk taking of people like Jensen, Gates, Bezos et. al, that the world can benefit from better qualities of life. After-all, for every dollar that someone likes Bezos makes, he has brought at least as much value to someone else in the world. A 100 billion fortune as sizely as it sounds, means that Bezos has brought at least as much value to the world.
The "money" of these obscenely rich businessmen are all tied up in non-liquid assets, mostly stocks. Investment is a crucial ingredient to wealth creation. It is the delayed consumption that allows the capital to be deployed elsewhere that does need more immediate consumption which can lead to more output, lower prices, and higher wages.
But arguing for wealth creation has it's negatives too. And it occurred to me, that with all the wealth that has been created in the world, the improvements in quality of life, the mass consumerism, and genuine increase of wealth, this guy is living in a house literally most people could only dream of, and yet it only represents but a tiny fraction of his wealth. Meanwhile, even those who are considered average or slightly better, might spend their whole lives tied down to work just to afford a reasonably sized house. Is shelter and a place to live something that got skipped over when the world decided to drastically reduce the cost of just about every consumer product and therefore improve people's lives, because that is one very crucial essential possession that affects a person's well being directly that hasn't become easier to reach as a result of all our progress.
In relative affordability, just about everything has gotten cheaper (inflation adjusted) but houses have continued to sky rocket in value. When we talk of hard assets, it becomes clearer which assets people ultimately care about. Here's a clue, it's not USD. It seems like real estate is at the top of the chain, because it literally determines whether you're an indentured slave for the rest of your life or not. Powerful people don't need any more money than they already have, it's a meaningless metric. What really empowers them is people bending the knee to their will, and getting as many people as they can to do the dirty work for them. USD is the unit of account, but the real money shot is what's obtained with that USD. Make what is sought after, increasingly difficult to obtain, and you wield power over those that yearn for true freedom.
In the next 100 years, I can do without a brand new phone model every year. I don't need yet another luxury brand item. Just give me the damn opportunity (like my parents and grandparents had) to buy a reasonable place to live and not be indebted to the system for the rest of my life.
So what's cooking? Another churned out graphics card that no body really needs but you and your corporatist cronies will inevitably convince the world that you do. What's cooking is yet another consumer good to distract you from the fact that saving up to be in indentured servitude for the rest of your life just so you can have somewhere to live for the rest of your life. That's what's cooking.
