Big loss due to nonsense political correctness!

You must have noticed the historical event of this week: the very first IPO of a crypto stock: one of the well established and best run crypto exchanges, Coinbase (COIN).✌For anyone in the crypto market, this is indeed an existing day as a brand new era has just opened up. Not sure if anyone has bought any shares of Coinbase on this historical day. I did, even though I couldn't believe I'd have done so! As you may know, I'm a FOMO phobia guy, or crowd aversion kind of person and I have never bought any IPOs before. My wife is still kidding me now how stupid I am that I missed the Google IPO, even though she was suggesting I should buy some on that day😭. But I still generally avoid chasing any IPOs regardless how attractive they may be. Not this one, of course. For two reasons:

• I have been using Coinbase for at least 5 years as it is my cradle that empowers me to learn and grow in the crypto world. My very first Bitcoin and Ether were bought in Coinbase, which have turned my initial crypto investment into a 100+ bagger. So even though I very well know I may lose some money by buying COIN at IPO, it is a drop in the bucket. It is more important for me to be part of the historical day!
• I like the CEO of Coinbase. You can see the story below. He is a truly a wise businessman, dares to openly challenge the stupid and nonsense political correctness! Rarely you will see such kind of shrewd CEOs with backbone as nowadays most of them are just spineless villains  (见风使舵的小人), politically speaking! 

Interestingly, 60 employees of his company took the severance package and left the company as they wanted to be politically correct. I'm pretty sure they are now really sad and sorry 😰for their nonsense action as it has cost them dearly for nothing. If they had stayed, their employee stock incentives would have been a huge return with the company's value having increased so much in the past year!! It is great for the company to not waste any money on such brainless folks😎

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We've described the phenomenon before: By co-opting the social justice warriors, the American oligarchy — Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the health care cartel, the military-industrial complex — cements its grip on power. "Social justice" is a brilliant distraction from how the crony-capitalist power structure really works.

Here, for example, is an Instagram post from Visa days after George Floyd's death — with a twist on its "It's everywhere you want to be" slogan.

And of course, we can't forget the absurd image of JPMorgan Chase's CEO "taking a knee" the same day as Visa's meme…

Going into this morning, the cryptocurrency trading platform had an estimated valuation of $65 billion — on par with the New York Stock Exchange's parent firm, go figure. As we go to virtual press, trading has opened at $381 a share — boosting the market cap to $99 billion.Set in this context, the Coinbase IPO today is a remarkable event.

But you can read about the IPO anywhere. Of way more interest to us this morning is how Coinbase eschewed woke doctrine — indeed, any sort of political doctrine — and somehow got away with it.

On a company blogpost last year, CEO Brian Armstrong declared Coinbase would not follow the Silicon Valley herd. Instead it would adopt a politically neutral stance, staying "mission-focused" and sticking to its crypto knitting.

"The reason," he wrote, "is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division."

Simple, sensible, reasonable. Not surprisingly, Armstrong and Coinbase got roasted by the mainstream for taking this position.

As Glenn Greenwald writes on his Substack site, "the notoriously censorious and politicized 'tech reporters' of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry."

Amazingly, Armstrong stood his ground. He offered severance packages of up to six months' pay for employees who objected to the policy.

"Life is too short to work at a company that you aren't excited about," he wrote in an internal email. "Hopefully this package helps create a win-win outcome for those who choose to opt out." Roughly 60 people, or 5% of the workforce, took him up on the deal.

That was about six months ago. As far as we can tell, that was the end of it. A web search for "Coinbase social justice" turns up nothing since then.