High tech CEOs pay the price for being liberal

The stock market uses FAANG to describe our wannabe computer overlords: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet (Google). Shares of their stocks were riding high.

Were.

Kevin Kelleher of Fortune reported, "Alphabet’s stock closed Monday at $1,020 a share, marking a 20% decline from its record high of $1,273.84 a share in late July. Apple’s stock is down 20.3% from its Oct. 3 high, while Amazon has lost 26.3% of its value since early September. Netflix has slid 36.1% since reaching a peak in late June, while Facebook’s stock has dropped 38.8% since late July."

This has helped drag the Standard and Poor 500 index down 7.2% in the last three months.

Bummer.

Eshe Nelson reported, "Traders have found plenty of things to worry about. Facebook is embroiled in another scandal about how it handles scandals, Apple CEO Tim Cook has said tech regulation is inevitable, shares in chipmakers are crashing on fears that global demand for smartphones is drying up (and Chinese officials are investigating anti-competitive behavior among the largest chipmakers), the US-China trade war turned even more frosty, there are signs of economic growth slowing around the world, and investors expect company earnings to weaken."

That does not tell the whole story.

Facebook has joined Google's You Tube, and Twitter in censoring conservative voices beginning on the fringes and working toward the center.

Apple is basically a Chinese manufacturer as the communists sell their people's labor to fat-cat capitalists.

Netflix gave big-salaried no-show jobs to the Obamas.

And of course, Amazon's CEO bought the Washington Post.

Irwin M. Stelzer of the Weekly Standard sees the problem as their misuse of the personal data they comb from your computer.

He wrote, "Gone are the days when then-chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, is said, whether in jest or seriously is uncertain, to have never needed Washington hotel reservations because the Obama White House Lincoln bedroom was his without-the-asking. And when Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Facebook, was idolized as the wunderkind who was knitting the world together, profit being only a secondary or tertiary goal of the enterprise.

"These companies have taken dead aim at their feet, and pulled the trigger."

Google forgot its motto: "Don't Be Evil." They all have. Power corrupts and the CEOs of these companies have succumbed.

Stelzer wrote, "But none have done as much to turn the political class against the Silicon Valley, and to lay the basis for regulation of their businesses, as Facebook, with what the New York Times calls its policy of 'Delay, Deny, Deflect.' The 40 percent plunge in the price of its shares since the end of July is due largely, according to Zuckerberg, to the bull**** published by the media."

Being the Weekly Standard, the next sentence took a shot at President Trump.

But Facebook is bringing regulation upon itself in Europe and likely the United States. The company went after conservatives so it could virtue signal. Liberalism is expensive, a luxury that even billionaires no longer can afford.

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