2022 In Review

2022 is over. Not soon enough a lot of us will say. Let us see what made this year quite a roller coaster that left us exhausted and not quite ready for what 2023 has in store.

Let us start with the ugly (in no particular order of ugliness).

Ukraine, Iran, Afghanistan, wars, famine, hurricanes, forest fires, etc etc. The usual ugliness of our world, year after year (except that a war in Europe, for someone like me raised during the cold war, is very scary). Can we do something about all of these ugly things (some of them quite preventable like malnutrition in some poor country)?

Yes, we could. Of course, we could. Except we are busy with a bunch of other things. And it brings us to the Silly / Come on, man! / Are you serious!? list of stuff that happened in 2022.?

Musk and Twitter. The Elon concocted a $44B LBO of Twitter (including an additional $13B of debt) in "defense of free speech” [and proceeded to ban some journalists from Twitter some weeks later]. Yo! Elon, if I was going to spend $44B in “defense of free speech”, buying Twitter would not even make my Z list. How about you start with not associating with members of the Saudi Royal family who have a bad habit of cutting into pieces journalists that are critical of their human right “practices”? How about supporting dissidents in China, Russia, and other oppressive regimes. What do you say? Oh I see, you are not interested in THAT free speech…OK. Got you!

Fintech crash. It’s kind of funny how things go. For a few years, some folks tried to convince the entire universe that there were new and improved way to do banking, payment, etc. With the help of a LOT of investors’ money, they set up shops that advertise stuff like BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later). Well, I have done a lot of BNPL in my life. As a matter of fact, every time I used a credit card I BNPL. Trouble is, to acquire market share, these “fine tech fintech” lost money on every single transaction, generating humongous losses which they had to patch with more investors’ money. Sorry but if you can’t make a buck loaning money, you should not be in business! And there won’t be as many fine fintech in 2023 and beyond.

Fed interest raise on steroids. Talking about money. Covid had been a disaster for the global supply chain. But the war in Ukraine, rising energy prices and labor shortage contributed to a healthy dose of inflation. Not good. The central banks around the western world, after injecting insane amounts of liquidity in the market, woke up in a panic and decided to “fix the inflation problem”. By doing what? raising interest rates at a pace that had not been seen in decades.

The Chairman of the US Feds was clear: this is going to be very painful. As in “expect everything based on credit to be much more expensive” and “expect people to lose their jobs”. Sounds great.

Asked if he believe that raising interest rates would directly address the core reasons for inflation, he was honest enough to say “NO”. Remember, nobody elected these folks, and they are accountable to no one.

“Tech” crashed. The NASDAQ lost 30% of its value in 2022. That is called a crash. This crash affected just about every company from Apple to “companies that pretend to be in tech but are not, they just like the multiples”. Same happened to private companies but we know how the valuation of this bunch is “calculated”, right? All of a sudden, investors, analysts and the press started to realize that some business models did not make much sense and clearly did not deserve the hoard of cash that was thrown at them. Byrd anybody? Pizza/food/drug/etc/etc deliveries that saw their valuation explode during the pandemic because their business models was based on the pandemic lasting forever and everybody working from home. Really!?

A crash is usually accompanied by lay offs. This one is not any different. Thus would-be “entrepreneurs extraordinaire” sent memos to their staff saying three things: 1) we screwed up and 2) you just lost your job, 3) sorry ?. I wonder what the Board of Directors of these companies are doing because the first thing that should have happened was to fire those would-be “entrepreneurs extraordinaire”.

Paraphrasing the quote of a VC confronted with this carnage: “We got too optimistic, and we need to get back to fund real businesses”. I never realized that the mission of VCs or financiers was to fund “unreal” businesses. Yes, VCs as in Venture Cs have always funded innovative, if not visionary, businesses where the chances of success are in the less than 2 digits percentage. That being said, it is an altogether matter to finance to the tune of 10s of $B the likes of Byrd, WeWork, Doordash, etc etc…whose business propositions are based on: 1) cash to cover our losses will always be available and 2) we can lose money on every sale and 3) people don’t really need what we sell so we will give it away. ?

British PM revolving door. Meanwhile back in Brexit land the 10 Downing Street was operated by AirBnB while a succession of not-so Prime Ministers entered and quickly vacated the premises. There are rumors that a lot (may be a majority) of UK citizens have 2nd thought about Brexit…and would be opened to a Breenter (Warning: I have just copyrighted the term ??) given that their decision to leave the EU has inflicted a lot of pain on the British Islands. Mates, you voted yourself off the continent…too late!

The Queen is dead. If that was not enough, their queen died. I wrote “queen” on purpose. I never understood the spelling “Queen” as if we had to acknowledge her status in the Milky Way. For someone like myself who is pure product of French republican education, there is no such thing as “the Queen”…the last one we had was beheaded. Now, they do whatever they want in the UK…Not sure about Breenter though…you folks made a decision, you live with it…

8 billion and counting. The world’s population reached 8 billion. And it is all too clear that we have far exceeded our capacity to exploit Earth’s resources in a responsible way. Hundreds of species disappear every year. Our oceans are a junk pool. And 10 years from now, nobody will be able to see a glacier. Meanwhile, the king of Mars (EMusk) wants more babies….come on, man!

Metaverse and other avatars. At the same time, another Master of the Universe, Mark Zuckerberg, want an altogether “solution” to our over population issues: create virtual universes, also called metaverses. In order to voyage to one of these “metawhatever”, (because there are more than one), you need to equip yourself with a several hundred $ apparatus that will (in most than half of the cases) get you sick within 15 minutes. There you can buy meta-property, eat meta-burger, take meta-rides in a meta-Disneyworld. And oh, by the way, the first meta-sexual harassment lawsuits have already been filed (no joke). Last but not least: you get to pay for all this non-sense. In addition, when you do all this metastuff, MZ will collect more and more and more information from you and will be able to pitch you more and more stuff you don’t need. Oh, LEGS ARE DIFFICULT! (One of the most infamous quotes of 2022).

COVID? What in the world is that? Yep, after spending two ? years confined, the world simply forgot that there was something called COVID. Meanwhile, in China, they realized that zero-covid makes their people really mad and start challenging the established order…in the streets. So, in a wild swing of the pendulum, all restrictions measures have been lifted…which of course saw an explosion of the numbers of cases, hospitalization and deaths (since China had not spend that much effort vaccinating its 1.5B people). That is totalitarian bureaucracy at its pinnacle of stupidity.

Tik Tok is the new Manchurian candidate. Tik Tok shall not be loaded on any US government device. That’s it. Besides why would government employee ridicule themselves by posting dance videos? Answer that!

Amazon realized Alexa is useless. After investing $B in Alexa, it seems that Amazon finally realized that their “smart assistant” was only used for a couple of things: 1) time of day and 2) “play that song”. Add to that the rumors that Alexa was “listening” to people’s conversations, and you have another victim of what I call the “Segway syndrome”.

ChatGPT does not know how smart it is. Speaking of getting the time of day, that’s something the AI-wonder new “kid” on the block can’t do. It also does not know how smart it is. Still, the capabilities are very impressive. So impressive that, as always, the first who are trying to make practical use of it are criminals. Which brings me this thought: if you want to check if your technology has a future, ask criminals. If they are not interested, ask yourself some questions ??

NFTs. Well, apparently, some folks believe that owning “unique digital items” is worth the millions of $ they spend on them. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

A?non-fungible token?(NFT) is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a?blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership.[1]?The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchain and can be transferred by the owner, allowing NFTs to be sold and traded. NFTs can be created by anybody, and require few or no coding skills to create.[2]?NFTs typically contain references to?digital files?such as photos, videos, and audio. Because NFTs are uniquely identifiable assets, they differ from?cryptocurrencies, which are?fungible.

That’s a hell of a word soup. Here is what it really means:

Someone paid for owning the unique right to “this”. Come on, man!

Uber still cannot make a buck! I am talking about real buck, not an adjusted EBITDA! After investments of over $10B, the company that gave its name to “uberisation of everything” cannot make money and has never made money!

Are you serious!

FTX & crypto imploded in a scandal rivaling B. Madoff scam. What did I tell you earlier: if there is a technology that can benefit criminals and scammers, they will rush to use it. What do you know? Crypto (whatever that means) was to be the liberating financial instrument from government oversight and large banks domination. A crypto currency was a “receptacle of value”. Entirely speculative that is. Imagine a soap bubble. It is a “receptacle of air” only until it bursts which is a relatively frequent event. And so, “crypto”, and its poster child FTX, blew up. In the process, it became clear that this entire scheme, and most of those like it, are simply scams designed by scammers to scam the na?ve and the greedy (check out the list of those who invested in FTX and you tell me what you think…the GOAT Tom Brady…Yo, Tom, not too smart, are you!).

The sad thing is that the entire “thing” (not even sure what to call it) should have been regulated by the SEC years ago. It wasn’t. And now we are left dealing with another “2008 event”….I really wonder when people will learn that if something is too good to be true, it surely is…

SPACs blew up. You have to give it to the Wall Street boys, they always come up with new ways to make incredible amounts of money (do you all know that the financial industry represents 21% of the US GDP….double what it was in the 1950s). At any rate, SPACs have been known under other names but what made them all the rage in 2021 is that you could take a company public without the “paperwork”. The “paperwork” is primarily the prospectus you have to put together and provide to anybody who wishes to buy shares in a public offering. As it turns out, said prospectus is the subject of incredible scrutiny (I went thru one as the CEO of a company that did an IPO). If you say you have 33 customers, you need to make sure it is not 32 or 34 but 33. Period. Obviously it is a very complex (and expensive process) but at least, if you read a prospectus (and discard the marketing fluff), all the numbers have been audited and you can’t lie.

Well a SPACs is simply an empty shell with some cash in it that you can list with a very reduced due diligence (it has no operations). Then you reverse takeover a “real” company and raise some money at the same time. But, hey hey, you do not need to write a prospectus. In the meantime, the SPACs sponsors can cut themselves a very sweet deal and sell shares when the “qualified transaction” (and the fund-raising takes place). A whole bunch of famous people jumped into this scheme because you could make money real fast (given the liquidity in the financial markets) with no hassle and relatively no risk. Except that most “qualified transactions” ended up being qualified crap and now those who put real money in it are left with their eyes to cry and not much else. By the way, a lot of the same groups + people who rushed to crypto…

Ain’t that a shame!

NASA “historic” flight to the moon. For some reason, NASA has decided to “return to the moon”. OK, they have no real reason to do that other than to do it [when I worked at California Space Institute we gave them a whole list of things that could be done on the moon to serve the Earth…that was in the late 1980s. They did nothing with the list].

So in November they launched a rocket to the moon with a capsule with a bunch of dummies on board. And we witnessed a “historical splash down” of said capsule on December 11th.

I had to look at the calendar. Yep, 2022. As it turns out, we went to the moon and back in the 60s. Check it out: Neil Armstong set foot on the moon on July 21st 1969. That is 53 years ago. And if you study the schedule of the Apollo program, you will realize how daring it was. Each flight pushed the envelop. As a matter of fact, there was a 50/50 chance that Armstrong and Aldrin would make it back safely to earth. I watched the first steps on the moon live on TV. It was a defining moment of my life. “If we can do this, there is nothing that we cannot do” [I was very young then and I learned better since then].

NASA, having forgotten its glorious past, is now calling “historic” the process of sending a capsule with a couple of dummies to the moon and back.

And that is a shame!

Climate is changing. Real fast and getting nastier and nastier. Other than the fact that some are still denying it, the pathetic truth is that nothing of substance is being done. You’ve got the COPxx and COPyy which are nothing more than exercises in futility when you know the extend of the problem and the extend of the destruction that takes place on a yearly basis (check out what happened to the Amazon over the past 4 years). COVID was able to shut down the entire planet in a few weeks. You tell me what it will take so we start doing something serious and urgent about a process that is accelerating and making our planet less and less habitable every year.

That is tragic.

This is not a complete rundown of all the 2022 events that would deserve an award in the “silly / come on, man! / are you serious!?” category but you get the gist.

We live in a wonderful world. Onto 2023

Yours truly. Philippe