It's kind of impressive how easy our fabulously wealthy tech overlords make it for us to dislike them.
Mark Zuckerberg is like an AI program brought to life, and he's created a company full of ninnies who freak out because an executive dared show support for a lifelong friend undergoing a horrendous crucible. Speaking of Silicon Valley's legendary intolerance, Jack Dorsey has empowered teams of censors to bar conservatives from Twitter in the course of creating a self-perpetuating rage machine that may well destroy American society. Elon Musk's wealth is predicated largely on government subsidies for sports cars for rich people produced under the guise of saving the world via eco-friendly cars.
And then there's the leadership at Google, which has spent the last decade mining our private electronic communications for data it then sells to other companies that in turn use that data to sell us stuff. Even for the Trump-skeptical like myself, there was something grotesque about the simpering show put on by Google employees and execs distraught that he pulled off the upset of the century in 2016. To say nothing of the fact that their motto "don't be evil" seems to mean "help the Chinese build a network that allows the government to censor searches all while shitting on the American military whose dominance allows the unfettered commerce that enriches every prat at Google who hates it."
You know who doesn't hate the military? Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
"If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble," Bezos said at the Wired 25 conference. "I like this country ... this country is a gem. And it's amazing. It's the best place in the world. It's the place where people want to come."
Now, look: I'd have loved Bezos even if he didn't donate millions to military charities and feel the need to stick up for our armed forces in the face of tech-bro aggression. Amazon has made my life as a consumer better in every conceivable way: anything I want, I can have, and in a minimum of time at a reasonable cost. Amazon delivers happiness one brown box at a time and anyone who denies this is a filthy communist. But Bezos stands out because he manages to improve the world without being forced to by do-gooder lawmakers.
While the left is busy trying to tax businesses out of existence in San Francisco to take care of the homelessness problem the city itself has created by kowtowing to NIMBYs over and over again, Bezos promptly shut similar nonsense down in Seattle. Then he created a $2 billion fund in Seattle to help with homelessness and preschool, knowing that government bureaucrats are the worst possible people to be given a dump truck full of money to spend.
You want a $15 minimum wage, like liberals have been trying to force on every industry regardless of whether or not they can afford it in markets that may or may not need a $15 minimum wage? Amazon does that!
Now, sure, I'm slightly biased since (full disclosure) I write for the Washington Post and Bezos owns the Post. But there is, objectively, no reason not to love Jeff Bezos. He loves the military. He stifles busybody city governments trying to steal his money. He doesn't want to abolish ICE. He fights homelessness. He provides good jobs at a fair wage. He feeds my consumerism in defiance of the scolds who tell me that I'm killing the planet by buying so much awesome stuff.
He does all this while building a hugely profitable company and partaking in very little of his industry's nonsense. Jeff Bezos is Silicon Valley's retaining wall, his even keel and keen business savvy stopping the rest of the tech world's nonsense from flooding over us. He's the king of the tech lords—and, luckily for us, he's a benevolent one.
Update: Added the bit about ICE because the Bezos highlights keep coming, even in my sleep.