But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly. (IANAL, but I suspect there are legal impediments as well). Taking a political stand, or providing support for one side, might force big tech companies to resolve the ambiguity as to whether they're media companies or not.

EDIT: Actually maybe there is nothing stopping tech companies from choosing a side; apparently media companies do make political contribitions: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/news-corps-million-...

EDIT 2: I can see I've accidentally opened a can of worms about biased coverage and editorials; but my usage of "support" was intended as overt and consistent involvement in political campaigning, generally through donations. And to my surprise, that does occur.

It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

Put your stuff out, set your price, handle your own publicity, Bandcamp takes their cut. That's it.

Sure you can. Tech companies are constantly losing money at the margins, by paying out more than they take in for a wide variety of things.

It's sustainable as long as tech companies can find financing, or fund one part of their business from another part, which seems fairly long-term.

EDIT: I know I'm gonna lose karma on this, but I'm right. There's no shortage of tech companies with negative revenue, or negative revenue in certain business units, and that money isn't disappearing, it's being paid to counterparties in business deals.

In this case they'd be getting stuck with a pretty big bandwidth hit.

How does the bank make money doing this? Routing the sale of this bond through the "anonymous arb firm" doesn't do anything to the price. If the bank's competitor is selling their bond at 1.00, the bank could directly offer their bond at 0.99 without getting "anonymous arb firm" involved. If the bank routes the trade through the "anonymous arb firm"... what difference does that make? If it shows up on the market at 1.01, the bank still has to give the client the 1.00 bond first, and if it shows up on the market at 0.99, the bank could have just done that itself.

EDIT: Maybe you mean that they didn't try to make a larger bet after they got in trouble? But whether they needed to make a bigger bet or whether their existing bet was already too big, it's still the same issue; the only way to avoid liquidation is to expand the use of credit, which hits a limit at some point.

Anyone making bets will eventually win big if there is no limit on credit, just by betting bigger and bigger until they catch a break.

But there's always a limit.

EDIT: I'm not sure why I took your false dichotomy at face value in the first place. A burnt-down courthouse and an informal military occupation aren't the only two options; but even if they were, the former is preferable.

Savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency, but not savvy enough to not buy cryptocurrency.

That sounds more like a hypothesis than an opinion.

In the less testable world of opinions (over, say, business strategy) it isn't always possible to settle things by experiment, making it more difficult to let those opinions go.