So, I know I am late to this discussion by a week (the coding rarely stops, and I often miss big developments), but, I was at Joyent when it was acquired by Samsung, and their interest was very similar to most Joyent customers: to find a way to shrink their tumorous, ever-growing AWS bill[0]. By acquiring Joyent, they did not have to build their own cloud-software from scratch, and they did not have to Ship-of-Theseus their internal legacy infrastructure. More importantly, they also got a team that knew how to maintain and improve that software stack.

While I practically never agree with the guy, Thiel did say that "every startup is a conspiracy". Which is just another way of saying that every business is a conspiracy. The Oxide "conspiracy"[1] is to divert a chunk of the enormous economic surplus that is being captured by Amazon (and Broadcom, and others), and in the process, put some meaningful amount of that surplus in the pocket of the customer (otherwise, there is no reason to switch).

This is an incredibly ambitious goal, that cannot be achieved without upfront capital. Part of it is certainly hardware (which is getting more expensive, rapidly, and so it might make sense to buy years-worth of it), but another part is the _switching cost_ (which the _challenger/conspirator_ usually has to cover for the customer). That cost can easily be measured in the millions of dollars (Dropbox, famously, migrated off of AWS, via a client-side reupload, because moving the data from AWS to their own DCs was prohibitively expensive[2]).

Also, WW3 is slowly unfolding. The only reason energy prices are not in "brownout territory" is because (IIUC) the world's largest oil consumer is importing half as much oil from the mid-east as it used to. A few of the things that I buy, have _not_ gotten more expensive in euros, but they have gotten more expensive in dollars (by around 5% last I checked). If you need to use dollars to stockpile input-goods, now is the best time to do that, if you anticipate that the dollar will lose value over the next year.

A similar logic applies to selling a company. Amazon, in 2016, was already on the path to _massively_ improving the performance of its VMs and cloud services (via using more SSDs, building custom hardware, etc), and bare-metal performance was one of the Joyent selling points. With the resources of a company like Samsung, Joyent could also (potentially) use faster hardware, etc.

However, even under the aegis of Samsung, some (let's call them) _political asymmetries_ could not be avoided. I cannot talk about _internal_ asymmetries, but _external_ ones are already public knowledge. In particular, in 2017 or 2018, spectre and meltdown CPU-exploits hit the industry. All the major cloud providers had advance knowledge of this (and were able to mitigate via KPTI), except for Joyent (who had to work with the OpenBSD community for a few months to fix this). In those few months, if customers wanted to be completely safe, they would have had to move their instances to a different cloud. It is unclear (to me, because I am an engineer and not an accountant or account manager) if Joyent could have survived that without being part of Samsung.

And by the way, this would not have been as urgent of a problem, if Joyent was selling physical machines (like Oxide is, right now), instead of renting them out to multiple tenants. Imagine if an adversary could just spin up a VM right next to yours on the same exact machine. Even without spectre and meltdown, they could probably impact the performance and latency of your VMs indirectly, if they were willing to spend enough money. I once did this by accident (because I, foolishly, overestimated Google) on GCP, via their lambda-equivalent, and found out when they told us that those workloads were moved to a different DC. So if this is a problem for _Google_, it's a problem for everyone.

For at least the last decade, HN has consistently (but, thankfully, not exclusively) been attacking Joyent (and now Oxide), for various perceived misbehaviors[3], while frequently letting much less ambitious projects off the hook. Engineering any meaningfully new or disruptive technology is a very challenging marathon, and doing so, in business circumstances (which can only be characterized as: circumstances where the other runners are armed and always out to get you, while sometimes, the universe itself decides to send a few lightning bolts and storms in your direction) is almost impossible, without either (1) a monopoly, like MSFT and GOOG and AMZN enjoy, or (2) massive amounts of investment-cash that can only come from a very smart and very keen sugar daddy[4].

[0]: I can't recall who said this, but someone at the time said, they were tired of buying Bezos a BMW every month (via their AWS bill). Sometimes, it wasn't even an issue with the size of the bill: Amazon competes with many, many companies out there.

[1]: Based on various public statements. So basically, the Joyent conspiracy, but this time on-prem (so maybe Joyent + Fishworks = Oxide), and with fewer faulty drives (IIRC, there was a batch of drives, worth a huge amount of money, that had bad firmware, which caused their throughput to drop sporadically -- the exact details escape me, but you can see why there is a distrust of firmware written by others (also worth noting, is that this HDD vendor did not even offer to replace the faulty drives, but instead offered a marginal discount on the next order)).

[2]: Not because of any real, physical cost, but because Amazon bills you for every byte that leaves their datacenter (but not for any byte that enters).

[3]: I think it started when Joyent did not honor the "lifetime storage" promise that it made to its customers from the 2000s.

[4]: If anyone knows any wealthy heiresses that are looking to get married (or for a concubine), in exchange for financing my ambition to build an invention that is simultaneously (1) the last invention humanity will ever need, and (2) the invention that humanity needs most urgently, please hit me up. I have a sense of humor and am hung AF.