They were always the regional hegemon next to Israel. US leaders just happen to love the canard of "they'll welcome us as liberators" because it's the only thing they can attempt to sell to the electorate.
All of these examples are Cold War era or before, when defense and aerospace was a much more collectivist venture with far less private sector involvement.
After the Cold War, McKinsey and big 4 consultancies are working in every part of government, ostensibly to make government as efficient as the private sector. The NSA's surveillance program wouldn't have seen the light of day had Booz Allen not had a contract with them.
A 5% stake in an overvalued private company without public financials and with an indeterminate timeline to profitability is a bailout. Shareholders cash out while the taxpayer is stuck with the bill.
95% of countries weren't formed by settling on somebody else's land and excluding the original inhabitants from citizenship for several hundred years. The American project is what it is because of millions of migrants who settled there for the perverse incentives of free land via the Homestead Act.
How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing.
When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
I think there will definitely be a point where code generators require a payment method to be registered before they can be used, and then generate code for paid products that it automatically subscribes you to.
WordPress and WooCommerce? Nah, here's how you set up a Squarespace Ecommerce site - if you hit publish, you'll be auto-subscribed to their $20/month plan.
There are only so many ad dollars to go around. ChatGPT getting traffic doesn't mean they can convince ad buyers that their dollar goes further than at established players like Google and Meta. AI search is a commodity at this point, even DuckDuckGo has it.
Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.
Apple soaked up all the good press about the PC-killer Macbook Neo's price point, waited until those articles seeded search results, influencer videos and AI queries, then jacked up the price by 17%.
Instead of listening to the critiques of actual Windows users? Jobs was an evangelist who couldn't see past his Nintendo-esque ecosystem zealotry, didn't use Windows and thereby couldn't understand why Windows won the enterprise and computer gaming market despite its flaws.
Facebook hired a bunch of people from Google's search ads division to basically replicate their real-time bidding system.
Their innovation isn't in ads, it's in creating a sticky app experience that downranks posts with external URLs to keep people on their site, one that's now fine-tuned to retain the lowest-common denominator of technology user (boomers). Ironically, a segment that the OG Facebook avoided like the plague is now their bread and butter.
People who don't understand nor care about how the system works are the ones most likely to click on targeted ads, share sensationalist slop and comment positively on AI videos of of Hegseth fighting Godzilla.
And even then, for ad buyers, the ROI is a complete crapshoot because of how purchase attribution works on every ads platform. Every ad platform puts their marketing pixel on your site, and they all try to take credit for every sale made on it.
Those companies aren't considered "tech" so their share prices observe the laws of gravity. A single tweet about xAI-powered nuclear drones launched from the moon or whatever would probably cause the stock to go up 50%. And pumping the stock is all that matters.
Both of those companies were essentially expendable in terms of keeping the economy running. AOL didn't own any cell towers and Yahoo didn't have any Pentagon contracts.