Russia is no longer the large funding source they were during the days in which a young Facebook was hoovering up their money. There's an actor ~50 times larger than Russia - and even worse on human rights - when it comes to venture capital.
Where's the push-back against Chinese funding? That money is sloshing all over the valley right now, nobody cares in the least. There are no protests, no outrage, no fake performances by politicians and business persons. They've routinely disappeared journalists, human rights workers, etc. over the last decade.
Most of the world is absolutely terrified to push back against China on anything at any time. There isn't a single major player in Silicon Valley with the nerve to stand up to China these days.
Saudi Arabia is a convenient target (and not in any manner undeserving of the negative response they're getting), that's all that is going on. The aggressively selective outrage, magically showing up now, is how you know it's shooting at something larger.
To give the readers a sense of proportionality, Russia has about the same GDP as Italy (About 2 trillion USD). Saudi Arabia is about 10% less at 1.8 trillion USD (PPP 2017 numbers), but an estimated oil reserve of 35 trillion USD, which is approximately thrice as much as what is available in Russia.
One question: Why are you quoting the estimed oil reserve in USD? Wouldn't that number fluctuate a lot due to changes in oil price during the years of extraction? Wouldn't it make more sense to quote it in barrels?
Morals are flexible when they're offering you $100 million or more. Mine would be. And it's not directly doing something immoral, just turning a blind eye to an investor's government's actions - like one would when working with a US based investor.
I don't think it's quite equivalent to compare a US investor to a Chinese investor. The Chinese government has proven to be quite involved in the actions of its citizens and has been making moves to nationalize their tech sector (They also have a long history of nationalizing other sectors).
While the US has meddled from time to time in private business, the rights of citizens to avoid such action are pretty well laid out. Can you imagine a Chinese company taking their government to court to refuse revealing customer data to the government like apple and other us companies have?
So I think you can easily ignore the actions of the US government while taking investor money. But taking Chinese money is essentially like taking money directly from the Chinese government.
Where's the push-back against Chinese funding? That money is sloshing all over the valley right now, nobody cares in the least. There are no protests, no outrage, no fake performances by politicians and business persons. They've routinely disappeared journalists, human rights workers, etc. over the last decade.
Most of the world is absolutely terrified to push back against China on anything at any time. There isn't a single major player in Silicon Valley with the nerve to stand up to China these days.
Saudi Arabia is a convenient target (and not in any manner undeserving of the negative response they're getting), that's all that is going on. The aggressively selective outrage, magically showing up now, is how you know it's shooting at something larger.