My 1999

Hanhua, Teal Fund, and Paulson Fund all held parties to thank LPs, and PY made a wave of transactions.

Soon, these LPs who controlled the upper-class resources in the United States demonstrated their power.

The voices in the market that slandered and condemned the big short sellers on Wall Street gradually disappeared.

Even if there are some discussions in private, they are limited to a small circle and at most people would curse "son of a bitch Paulson", which is insignificant.

In order to restore his public image, Paulson took the lead in donating a huge sum of money - $15 million - to a research institute called the Center for Responsible Lending to provide legal assistance to families who are unable to pay their mortgages.

This move more or less saved Paulson's bad public image, but many people also felt it was hypocritical. He made $3.7 billion and only donated $15 million. He might have spent more than that on the lawsuit for his mother.

Following Paulson, the Thiel Fund also donated $10 million to a social organization that cares about the homeless. In Peter Thiel's words, it is not a good idea to steal the limelight from Paulson, the number one hedge fund manager.

No matter how the American people curse him, old man Greenspan has already taken office happily. When interviewed, he said that the Paulson Fund is the world's leading hedge fund and he also praised Paulson personally.

…

"This is the physical examination report of the Ryan sisters. The babies in their bellies are very healthy." Helen said.

Xu Liang took it, looked at it twice and put it aside.

The last time he came to the United States, he had planned to let the Ryan sisters go.

Anyway, there are plenty of young and beautiful girls.

Unexpectedly, after a month of happiness, the two sisters and Helen all became pregnant.

Now that you have a child, you can no longer just chase him or her away like you did before.

"You keep a close eye on them. If they behave themselves, I will give them everything they deserve. If they don't know what's good for them, just leave the children to them and let them go." Xu Liang said directly.

Helen is the legal wife of the American branch of the Xu family, and Xu Liang also respects her power to manage his harem.

"Don't worry, I will take responsibility for this matter."

Helen, who came from a wealthy American family, knew very well how to manage these things.

“What’s going on with Facebook Telecom?”

"We have invested $2 billion to purchase a large amount of dark fiber from telecom companies such as Verizon and Comcast, and have initially built a fiber optic network that can cover the west coast of the United States and provide 5Mbps broadband."

Throughout the PC era, there has been a great opportunity to invest in dark fiber.

During the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s (before the dot-com bubble of 2000), the United States installed a lot of "excess" fiber.

After the dot-com crash, this excess capacity became known as “dark fiber.”

These unused dark fibers are in contrast to conventional communications cables and provide opportunities for customized services.

The main cost of installing fiber optic cables is in the civil engineering work required, with about 80% of the cost being labor and only 10% being the fiber.

Considering this, since planning and installation are so expensive, it makes sense to deploy more fiber at once to allow for future expansion and to provide network redundancy in the event of communication failures.

Some fiber network owners, such as railway companies and power companies, use more fiber and also lease it to other operators.

During the dot-com bubble, many carrier companies built fiber optic networks. Each company had a huge business plan, wanting to provide or take over all traffic in the entire optical network service area, thereby monopolizing the telecommunications market.

The disadvantages of this kind of "lack of planning" are often seen only after the fact.

All of this is based on the operators' (or investors') "ideal" predictions for the future - that data services will continue to grow exponentially.

Just at this time, a technology that could change the entire industry emerged - wavelength division multiplexing.

Its appearance directly increased the capacity of a single optical fiber by nearly a hundred times, thus greatly reducing the demand for optical fiber.

The result of the sudden drop in demand for fiber optic cables was a collapse in prices.

Many companies have filed for bankruptcy protection.

For example, WorldCom, the second largest communications company in the United States, was once famous.

And Enron, which has a large investment in the fiber optic field, etc.

Similar to the “railroad mania,” where misfortune in one market became opportunity in another, this overcapacity created new telecommunications opportunities.

Google saw this opportunity and took the opportunity to purchase a large amount of "dark fiber" from major telecom operators at low prices.

With the help of these fiber optic resources, Google has signed bandwidth exchange agreements with other ISPs, which means that other network access providers can try Google's fiber optic network for free. This is why YouTube dares to claim that the traditional bandwidth pricing model does not apply to itself.

Through this operation, Google's bandwidth costs are almost zero, and most of the expenses are just the depreciation of fiber optic cables and routers.

This counter-cyclical operation brought Google huge dividends in the first decade of this century.

Now the operation has a competitor.

“Is there any action from Google?”

"Eric Schmidt called me and asked us to respect each other and not make a malicious bid, and I agreed."

"If it is a win-win situation, we should agree to it."

Glancing at Xu Liang's expression, Helen continued, "Should the investment in dark fiber continue?"

“Is there anyone in the company who objects?”

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“Yes. Especially the representatives of investment institutions, they think that the current Internet traffic price is not high, so there is no need to invest heavily in dark fiber.

Moreover, the speed of fiber optic networks doubles every nine months, which will result in a large amount of hardware expenses.

This will slow down the company’s growth.”

"Helen, do you think telecom companies will continue to maintain their honeymoon period with Internet companies?"

"I can't see that far." Helen shook her head.

“I don’t think so.

Net neutrality only exists during the honeymoon period.

When Internet companies make huge profits and telecom companies pay huge amounts of traffic but cannot get the income they are satisfied with, conflicts will break out.

No, it should be said that conflicts will definitely break out, because greed knows no boundaries.”

Xu Liang is very clear about the future development trends.

In the future, telecommunications facilities will be pipelined and become infrastructure.

If it were in China, with supervision from above, everyone could still barely maintain peace.

But it is absolutely impossible in the West.

In particular, excluding the Chinese market, in the mobile Internet era, six companies, namely Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, generated more than 56% of global network traffic.

And the traffic they generated in 2021 exceeds that of all other Internet companies combined.

As the concentration of the Internet industry continues to increase, telecom operators are transmitting more traffic than ever before, but the absolute number of Internet manufacturers is decreasing.

For telecom operators, a decrease in the number of customers obviously means a decrease in revenue, and even pipelined telecom operators find such a situation difficult to tolerate.

The contradiction is inevitably intensified.

Verizon abolished the "net neutrality" principle in late 2017, giving operators a reason to differentiate their charges.

In the European market, the CEOs of 11 European telecom operators including Telefonica, France Telecom, KPN, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone also jointly issued a statement.

They hope to charge content providers based on network traffic data, and require Internet giants that consume more traffic to bear a fair share of network costs.

So, even though you can still make a profit now, you will definitely have to pay the price in the future.

However, Xu Liang's investment in dark fiber is not just to reduce costs.

"Facebook owns Netflix, and in the future I will split YouTube into two parts: the U.S. and international. Facebook will be responsible for the U.S. part.

A large amount of video will bring huge traffic demand, and dark fiber will save us a lot of costs.

This is one of them.

Second, technology will develop faster and faster. Pan-entertainment and social networks, which seem to have great potential now, will eventually reach their peak.

So we need to keep looking for new revenue growth points, preferably before everyone else.”