Silicon Valley's Saudi Arabia Problem (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Somewhere in the United States, someone is getting into an Uber en route to a WeWork co-working space. Their dog is with a walker whom they hired through the app Wag. They will eat a lunch delivered by DoorDash, while participating in several chat conversations on Slack. And, for all of it, they have an unlikely benefactor to thank: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Long before the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi vanished, the kingdom has sought influence in the West -- perhaps intended, in part, to make us forget what it is. A medieval theocracy that still beheads by sword, doubling as a modern nation with malls (including a planned mall offering indoor skiing), Saudi Arabia has been called "an ISIS that made it." Remarkably, the country has avoided pariah status in the United States thanks to our thirst for oil, Riyadh's carefully cultivated ties with Washington, its big arms purchases, and the two countries' shared interest in counterterrorism. But lately the Saudis have been growing their circle of American enablers, pouring billions into Silicon Valley technology companies.

While an earlier generation of Saudi leaders, like Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, invested billions of dollars in blue-chip companies in the United States, the kingdom's new crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has shifted Saudi Arabia's investment attention from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest swinging checkbooks, working mostly through a $100 billion fund raised by SoftBank (a Japanese company), which has swashbuckled its way through the technology industry, often taking multibillion-dollar stakes in promising companies. The Public Investment Fund put $45 billion into SoftBank's first Vision Fund, and Bloomberg recently reported that the Saudi fund would invest another $45 billion into SoftBank's second Vision Fund. SoftBank, with the help of that Saudi money, is now said to be the largest shareholder in Uber. It has also put significant money into a long list of start-ups that includes Wag, DoorDash, WeWork, Plenty, Cruise, Katerra, Nvidia and Slack. As the world fills up car tanks with gas and climate change worsens, Saudi Arabia reaps enormous profits -- and some of that money shows up in the bank accounts of fast-growing companies that love to talk about "making the world a better place."

Comments

Re:There's no "problem"

[gweihir]

And that is the actual problem: Greed and no sense of responsibility to the rest of the species.

Re:There's no "problem"

[DNS-and-BIND]

Oh-so-responsible Google (who call themselves "the Good Censor") is about to create a panopticon search engine for China. Yes, tell us about how Saudi Arabia is the problem here. Google has tons of experience censoring search results in English and is taking that expertise abroad.

Re: Who murders more of its own?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Juries are easily swayed by expensive lawyers.

Perhaps even more frequently by crooked prosecutors?

No but that's still whataboutism

[rsilvergun]

And the US at least has pockets of sanity. Our constitution makes theocracy explicitly illegal (though I'm aware of growing movement to institute one, our current VP is a Dominionist for example...). There's several states that have abolished the death penalty (though we haven't had the strength of character to do it nationally).

Yeah, we've got our share of problems, but that doesn't make anything the Saudis do any better. If you want to find a fault in us it's that we continue to sell them weapons and help them bomb schools in Yemen...

I keep asking this on these kind of threads

[rsilvergun]

but is this gonna change how anyone votes? Donald Trump just said the quiet part out loud. He walked it back because it made him look weak, not because it was a morally reprehensible thing.

This keeps happening too. Paul Ryan has repeatedly called to privatize Medicare for anyone under 55 (being careful not to risk votes of current seniors). Net Neutrality is dead. There's a serious challenge to the Affordable Care Acts protection of pre-existing conditions which I know many /.ers depend on (we're an aging demographic, so we got pre-existing issues alright). So far none of this has budged polls. There might be a bit of a shake up in the mid terms, but only because voters traditionally hand the other side the house just to balance things out. And even then those voters are voting for the more conservative candidates out of the other side, so it's all much the muchness.

So is anyone going to drastically change who their vote for, or start voting consistently when they didn't bother in the past? Is this or anything else above enough to change voting behavior?