Truly amazing that someone like Musk complains about the lack of motivated talent, and yet is at the top, the public face of, a tech industry where companies refuse to invest in developing that talent. In 30 years in tech, I've had one single employer send me to one single training course because I named it as a condition of my employment and subsequently badgered them for a year until they relented. I've never had any employer offer any type of training, education, certification, professional development, or anything of the sort. I've had most employers pigeonhole me into a specific job for years at a stretch and never offer advancement (and rarely even a cost-of-living raise) or an opportunity to gain experience through promotion or even a lateral move. All of my certifications and training have come at my time and expense. All of my increased earnings have come from grinding through the interview and hiring process yet another time. I know I don't come off well on social media, but please believe me, in person I'm an intelligent, responsible, qualified adult man with three decades' experience and literally 10 pages of accomplishments to my resume, and it gets sent to the same HR black hole as anyone else. As I get older, over 50, I dread what may become of my career in tech. Things are going well for me now, but can easily turn bad. To read anyone telling me that Americans lack motivation and talent is infuriating as I, and others, desperately attempt to get the attention of companies hiring for jobs we're very clearly qualified for and are purposely ignored, told we don't exist, and need to be replaced with street shitters. I know what the billionaires' goals are, I understand the situation. I also know that the longer it continues, the less any man is invested in the American economic zone. What I don't know is how this ends.

I'm down for a White male-lead IT services company, all-in. I previously was one of the owners of an IT services company for a decade, and our biggest problem *wasn't* attracting technical talent, especially White males. Getting tech things done and done right was never an issue. The biggest hurdle we faced was finding *sales* talent. In 10 years we never had anyone who could effectively sell our services. IT service companies can't survive on a customer base of small to medium businesses. Those customers expect the world for $7.95 a month and are slow to pay, and sometimes don't pay at all. They're break-even at best. Also, you're always being compared to bigger service companies that can usually do more with less because they can do volume business with small to medium businesses, because they have large contracts to back that up. And that was our core issue, we struggled because we didn't have the connections and clout to land a competent sales guy who had the connections and clout to land us large contracts. This meant we were shifting focus and priorities as needed to keep things afloat, which in turn created confusion among customers and even employees about what exactly we did. In the middle of last year my business partners decided once again they wanted to shift focus to something I wasn't interested in, so I sold my share. Exactly one month later I landed a job doing Linux server stuff making 2.5x my previous self-employed salary. So, if you want to start an IT services business, you have to base it around someone's sales capabilities. Until you have that, you don't really have a business.