Jeff Bezos, a Ski Resort, and the Coronavirus Epicenter in Idaho
It’s not even like Jeff Bezos hangs out in Sun Valley often, so he must not have been the one to bring the coronavirus into town. Bezos comes to central Idaho for business every July, but other than that, probably not much — he has four luxurious properties across the country to keep him occupied.
When Bezos does come, he stays close to the Sun Valley Resort. It’s the jewel of the Wood River Valley region and is one of the most popular ski resorts in the country. Things are not as busy in the summer, but when the snow melts, Sun Valley offers a great selection of golf, tennis, and hiking.
Blaine County, the area encompassing Sun Valley, has attracted numerous celebrities over the years, and now it’s ushered in over 458 cases of coronavirus. Given a population of 22,000, the area has the country’s highest infection rate outside of New York City.
To put it in perspective, if you live in Ketchum or Hailey, the two main metro areas adjacent to the Sun Valley resort and airport, your odds of getting the coronavirus are 20 times higher than people who live in Los Angeles.
So what does Jeff Bezos have to do with Sun Valley and its outbreak?
Enter Jay Gould. For behavior, think post-Civil War era “Donald Trump” of the railroad industry. For economic power, think Bezos.
Known as a robber baron, a term for aggressively greedy 19th Century businessmen, Gould connected Sun Valley to the rest of the country via railroad during the Idaho gold rush in the 1880’s.
When gold showed up in the Wood River Valley, Gould created a mine near Hailey and leveraged his Union Pacific Railroad as the area’s pipeline. The area turned more than business for the railroad tycoon, as Gould enjoyed recreating at the town’s hot spring hotels.
Gould, a New York native, was somewhat of a marvel. At his height, with Union Pacific, Gould owned 10,000 miles of railroad, effectively 15 percent of the arteries that connected Americans cities, transported goods, and moved people.
In line with his name, Gould infamously schemed a stock market conspiracy to corner the gold market in 1869. It was a simple plan. The United States had been selling gold frequently to help pay off Civil War debt. Gould bribed an official in the U.S. Treasury Department to oblige him at what time gold was going to be sold. This inside information quietly allowed Gould to purchase mass quantities, waiting for an opportunity to manipulate the U.S. Government into cutting off its gold sales, thus giving him monopoly power.
When the time came, Gould planted a fake memo to convince President Ulysses Grant to freeze the government’s gold sales. The market closed for three weeks, but the ploy backfired when Grant caught wind of Gould’s scheme and flooded the market with gold on September 24th, 1869. The price of gold plummeted resulting in a stock market crash known as Black Friday.
It was one of the biggest scandals of the 19th Century, and it devastated the U.S. economy for months. The price of wheat and corn fell 45 and 28 percent, respectively. Considering 50 percent of the American labor force worked in farming, most Americans experienced negative consequences as a result of Gould’s actions.
Gould and his partners were known villains to the American public, and although there was a congressional investigation, they avoided jail time. Many people believe he used his political pull to lobby for a favorable result.
Years later, Gould would make waves again when he gained control of the leading telegraph company, Western Union, in 1881. Integrating his power onto telecommunications, Gould’s collection of corporations was nothing short of one person owning FedEx, United Airlines, and Verizon Wireless today.
It feels like two years ago, but back in February, Jeff Bezos donated $10 billion to combat climate change. There is no belittling Bezos’s act of generosity. It is certainly significant.
However, when Bezos and his ex-wife Mackenzie Bezos divorced in 2019, Mackenzie pledged to donate half of her wealth to charity. At the time, the amount Mackenzie pledged equaled $15 billion more than the mere $2.5 billion estimate of Jeff’s donations over the course of his career. As of now, Jeff Bezos is the only person in the world’s top-five richest people to not pledge to give away half of his wealth.
Taking Bezos’s wealth into account, $138 billion, and the 2020 climate change donation, his philanthropy efforts equal to about nine percent of his wealth.
Bezos definitely likes his money, and he flouts it. Just one week before the climate change donation, Bezos coughed up $165 million for the most expensive home ever sold in California.
Four years ago, Bezos purchased the biggest house in Washington D.C. for $23 million. He promptly began a $12 million renovation, and had his house welcoming party in January. Despite his spats with Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were in attendance. The higher-ups at Amazon refer to the building as the Amazon embassy.
Before the coronavirus checked-in, the Sun Valley Resort was entering the home stretch of its winter season. The skiing season starts around Thanksgiving and goes until mid-April. In closing operations on March 16th, the resort lost about a month of in-season business.
The shutdown was complicated in that Sun Valley houses many of its workers on property. Some are foreign college students on a J1 visa, and within 10 days of closing, the workers were sent letters saying they were no longer eligible for employee housing. Without addressing the letter, the resort later clarified that employees with no housing alternatives would be allowed to stay.
These employees perform a variety of jobs, all service-related. They are servers, bartenders, cooks, maids, booth workers, snow makers, and concierges. The workers represent a whole subset of the population that is threatened by the coronavirus.
For the workers that are foreign, they are likely paid less than the American workers, and they work 15-hour days because the wages are significantly better than their home country. These kinds of schedules are also common on cruise ships along with the low pay-rates. Globally, people that earn $32,400 annually are in the top one percent of income earners on the planet. Considering this, it’s no wonder college students from other parts of the world work 15-hour shifts overseas for nine dollars per hour.
By no means is the resort and its employees the only Wood River Valley residents suffering. Many locals and those with small businesses rely on the Sun Valley Resort traffic. Restaurants, fashion stores, and recreation gear stores are missing big money. Individual workers that rely on face-to-face service such as ski trainers, hair stylists, and massage therapists are losing prime opportunities that will not return until the fall. Come autumn, if people are hesitant to travel during a pandemic, they may never return.
In a seasonal resort town, the locals live and die with the tourists.
After Jay Gould’s death in 1890, Central Idaho kind of died too. The region’s mining industry fell flat and many mining centers became ghost towns by the 1900's. This almost happened to Ketchum as the town dwindled down to 100 residents.
During this time, Ketchum transitioned into a major sheep port due to its vast space and railroad connectors. The only place in the world that facilitated more sheep was Sydney, Australia. Unlike the ghost towns, Ketchum was able to reinvent itself, proving that, when you’re on the railroad, in the death of one industry, another one can develop.
Years later, during the Great Depression, another opportunity for a New York native presented itself in Sun Valley. Averell Harriman, a new generation of railroad tycoon, controlled Jay Gould’s former company and was looking for a way to increase passenger traffic.
The United States had hosted its first Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York in 1932, and winter sports such as skiing were in the midst of their own gold rush. By 1935, Harriman funded a successful search for a North American location for a prized ski resort to rival the ones found in central Europe. The Wood River Valley region was picked as the Sun Valley Lodge opened in 1936 along with the world’s first chair lift, courtesy of Union Pacific Railroad.
Like his predecessor Jay Gould, Harriman was motivated for power. Unlike Gould’s era, 20th Century business was much more regulated because of the passing of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The law was designed to promote competition for the benefit of the American consumer by putting rules on how much power one company can have.
With the power of politics trumping business due to strict regulation, Harriman undertook a lengthy political career including positions under four different Presidential administrations.
Harriman served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce during the United State’s financial effort to rebuild Europe after the war, and U.S. Secretary of State of Political Fairs when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Harriman would run for the 1952 Democratic Presidential Nominee, losing in a brokered convention, the most recent of its kind. Harriman had another unsuccessful run in 1956. In spite of his powerful political career, Harriman would only win an elected office once, as a one-term Governor of New York from 1955 to 1958.
Harriman had his advances in the private sector — he had many financial stakes in banks, owned part of Polaroid, and co-founded Today magazine, a publication that would merge with Newsweek in 1937. Even with all the off-mountain success, Harriman’s legacy arguably shines brightest in Sun Valley.
During the summer off-season, Allen and Company, a private investing firm out of New York, holds a secluded annual conference in Sun Valley every July. The Allen and Company Sun Valley Conference has been a staple since its beginning in 1983, and attracts the who’s who of many of the world’s dominant industries. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are just some of the regular top-tier attendees of past conferences. Sports figures have played at part over the years with attendances by LeBron James, Robert Kraft, Rob Manfred, and Bill Cowher. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, turned heads with their 2017 attendance during the Trump-Russia investigation.
The conference is jokingly called the summer camp for billionaires as you have to be invited by name to be able to attend. Record business deals have been made at the conference including Disney’s acquisition of ABC for $19 billion in 1995.
The deal proved crucial as it introduced ABC’s President and future Disney CEO Bob Iger to the children’s media powerhouse. Iger served as Disney CEO for 15 years before retiring in February, but this week announced he would be returning to his role for the time being to lead Disney through the crisis. An ironic side-note, Disney almost bought the Sun Valley Resort when it was put up for sale in the late 1970’s.
Some of the deals at Allen and Company have been better than others, but they have all proven influential. In one of the greatest tech deals of all-time, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion at the 2006 conference. The 2011 Comcast-NBC Universal merger stemmed from talks at the conference. The $164 billion merger between AOL and Time Warner was put into motion at the 1999 conference, widely believed to be one of the worst business transactions of all-time.
A few weeks before things started shutting down, the National Brotherhood of Skiers held its annual Black Summit in Sun Valley. Of the 600 attendees, over 20 have tested positive for the coronavirus and over 100 said they were experiencing symptoms. Some have died thus exemplifying the lethal-power and transmission rate of the virus.
Other ski resorts have played notable roles in the pandemic. In Austria, one ski resort was linked to hundreds of cases across Europe. Some of the first cases in Mexico were wealthy skiers that had made a recent trip to Vail, Colorado.
An indulgence, skiing was first a luxury hobby of the wealthy, the winter equivalent to golf. In both sports, one needs an ideal situation to be able to get into the activity, and even more of an edge to become proficient. Equipment can be expensive, time spent practicing is a cost too, and in skiing’s case, it’s not always cheap to travel to where the mountains are.
Over time though, skiing has been made more affordable. For instance, it seemed improbable when Sun Valley opened, that 85 years later, hundreds of African-Americans would be holding a giant ski outing. Sadly, the 2020 Black Summit will be marked with harsh memories from a coronavirus outbreak.
Let’s just hope the National Brotherhood of Skiers does not make 2020 their last party.
In the quaint Ketchum Cemetery, one gravestone lies blanketed with wine bottles and coins. It’s a quiet scene, but the man in the grave, Ernest Hemingway, gives visitors chills with his larger than life legacy.
He was not from Sun Valley and he did not officially call it home until two years predating his death, but Hemingway became one of the area’s most visible recreators throughout his adult life. In his first visit, Hemingway finished For Whom The Bell Tolls while staying in suite 206 at the Sun Valley Lodge. Tragically, 22 years later, Hemingway shot himself at his Ketchum residence in one of the most famous suicides in American history.
Since Hemingway, Sun Valley has attracted numerous celebrities including Tom Hanks, Ed Helms, and Oprah. Of all the A-listers, none have moved more mountains in Sun Valley than action-film star Bruce Willis.
During the 1990’s, Willis along with wife and star Demi Moore pumped money into Hailey through night-clubs, theatres, and a diner. The couple had pure intentions of raising their family away from the Hollywood craze, but in the process made the small town their own playground.
Willis was known for being a rigid boss, sometimes having outbursts and firing people on a whim. When Willis entered a local industry, he was a disruptor. After he gained ownership of a local diner, the traffic spike to the diner because of his fame caused two other diners to go out of business. At one point, Willis owned the area’s main real estate company, employing 10 percent of Hailey’s working population, approximately 250 people.
The Hailey locals have mixed feelings on Willis prompting a resident during the 1990’s to say, “A lot of people like Bruce Willis until you have to deal with him”.
Once Moore and Willis separated in 1998, a second divorce between Willis and the town ensued. Willis pulled investments and started to shut-down places without warning, firing all the staff in the process.
Hailey’s Mayor Brad Siemer summed it up best in a 1998 newspaper interview. “The good thing is that we’ve had somebody like Mr. Willis make a major contribution to the benefit of our city. The downside could be an ‘all-our-eggs-in-one-basket’ scenario and any ramifications from that.”
Things got weird for Willis in Hailey. In 1999 it was making its way to the press that things were starting to dissolve. Reporters started showing up and in many instances they were followed by people being paid by Willis.
Willis would stick around for a few years after closing most of his businesses. In 2018, he sold his local house after a long seven years on the market, and a lot of price slashing.
He’s created more buzz about 40 miles outside of Hailey where he is in the process of building a private airport. Construction has been on-and-off due to local residents pushing a lawsuit on the county for authorizing the project in 2017.
Jeff Bezos played it cool when announcing his $10 billion donation to fight climate change on February 17th. He posted it on his Instagram page and most media outlets covered it with praise. What was not covered as much was a new piece of film on Bezos that debuted on February 18th, the day after the biggest donation of the Amazon mogul’s life.
PBS of all places, released a two-hour documentary episode from its investigative series Frontline. Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos can be watched for free on YouTube.
In the documentary, PBS details that in Amazon’s infancy during the mid-1990's, when the retailer was just selling books, Bezos already had a vision for the website to become a marketplace where consumers could get anything in the universe.
As a former employee puts it, “Jeff’s idea was in the near-distant future you could buy a kayak from Amazon. And after you bought the kayak, you figure out good places to kayak and buy travel services from Amazon.”
Bezos’s dedication to consumers is clear. In numerous clips he is shown prioritizing the customer experience above all else. Early on, Bezos even made a rule for an empty chair to be present at company meetings to remind Amazon of the customer. With that being said, it’s undeniable that Amazon has lowered prices for customer, provided first-class service, and transformed consumerism.
To do this, Bezos did the unimaginable. He would forgo profits for years with the intent on accumulating market share instead. Then, down the road, Amazon could start to raise prices once it had an established customer base. Bezos detailed his plan to potential shareholders when the company went public in 1997.
It took Amazon seven years to finish a quarter with a profit. Now, the amount of money the company makes in one quarter is more than Amazon made in its first 14 years as a company. Insane.
In the old days, by taking advantage of the internet wild west, Bezos grew his online book store thanks to a generous loophole — Amazon did not have to charge the sales tax that brick and mortar stores did.
He eventually entered the CDs and electronics market, and then began allowing third-parties to sell on Amazon. Jason Boyce, one of the early sellers on Amazon describes Amazon’s power like that of the main employer in a small town.
“He owns the Main Street. Not just one building on the corner, the entire Main Street.” Boyce says in the documentary.
Despite the stereotypes, not all Sun Valley residents prosper in wealth as the surrounding Blaine County has its struggles with poverty. By 2002, Ketchum was dealing with an influx of celebrities and wealth that was pricing locals out of their own housing market.
Two years ago, Hailey ranked ninth in the nation for worst income inequality and half of Blaine County’s school students qualified for free or discounted lunches.
In an area, that’s seen dramatic changes over the last 40 years, many have hit local residents hard.
Currently, the Blaine County school district is trying to finish the school year online. Despite the median Blaine County house being over $575,000, 25 percent of the county’s students live in homes without internet, making distance learning a difficult challenge. Many parents that lost jobs from the shutdown have been forced to cut expenses, and the cable-internet bill can be the first to go.
Another challenge is generational differences in the home. Hispanic students make up 48 percent of the county’s students, and many of them are living in homes with parents that have limited English skills, making it harder for teachers to establish distant learning in non-internet homes for students who are first generation Americans.
With the tourism industry being at a standstill, long-time locals in Ketchum and Hailey are in for a long economic hardship. This week Allen and Company cancelled its July conference, meaning a slow-summer season will be further crippled without the billionaire bonus. It’s important to note though, in a respected gesture, Allen and Company donated $1 million to the help the area’s efforts against coronavirus.
Jeff Bezos has been a fixture at the Allen and Company Sun Valley conference over the years, making his first significant splash in 2013 when he bought the Washington Post for $250 million.
In a Sun Valley side note, by extension in buying the newspaper, Bezos almost bought a hand-me-down from Sun Valley Resort founder, Averell Harriman. Newsweek, the publication that merged with Harriman’s Today in 1937, was owned by the Washington Post for nearly 50 years before being sold in 2010, three years before Bezos’s takeover.
So far, Bezos has performed exceptionally with his control of the newspaper. Three years after the sale, the Washington Post started turning a profit. Bezos didn’t pursue the newspaper, the owner approached Bezos initially, to which Bezos declined.
Bezos then thought about it, and changed his mind. Bezos took on the project, saying year later, “When I’m 90, it’s going to be one of the things I’m most proud of, that I took on the Washington Post and helped them through a very rough transition.”
Potentially Bezos is not all guns blazing, and if Amazon is an evil company, I like to think we would not be supporting them with all of our Amazon Prime accounts. But in this pandemic, Amazon takes on a new meaning. It is a lifeline, a way for people to stay in their homes and buy products they need online. That’s great, but the problem is Amazon just isn’t the online market place.
In case you did not know, here are some of the other entities that Jeff Bezos owns:
· Amazon Web Services — IT service company
· Amazon Robotics — automation company
· Blue Origin — a private rocket company
· Whole Foods — grocery store
· IMDb — the worldwide database for movie and film information
· Alexa — the worldwide database for internet traffic and analytics
· Goodreads — the world’s largest book review website
· Twitch — popular game streaming service
· Audible — a company that sells digital audio-books
· Ring — a doorbell video camera company
Bezos is a trailblazer, and in a previous time, raw materials like oil and gold were the most sought after. In 2020, the pinnacle attraction is a different type of a raw resource — data — and Amazon is winning.
In 2014, Amazon began transforming its Washington D.C. presence with a $600 million cloud deal with the CIA. Amazon’s lobbyist count jumped from 11 to 28 from 2015 to 2018. One of the company’s senior vice presidents, Jay Carney, was Barack Obama’s press secretary.
In October, Amazon was hoping to strike a $10 billion deal with the Department of Defense. Instead of Bezos, the DoD chose Microsoft, and now Amazon is suing for $43 million.
Amazon thinks President Trump influenced the DoD’s decision. Trump has tweeted in the past about his displeasure for Bezos, to which Bezos responded with a joke about sending Trump to outer space. The dispute was just heating up in mid-February when a judge ordered development between Microsoft and Department of Defense to cease operations while the Amazon suit is pending. These events were all pre-pandemic, but now the stakes will be much higher in a post-pandemic world.
Just 13 years after the moon landing, as valedictorian at his high school graduation in 1982, Jeff Bezos declared in a commencement speech that humanity would pioneer outer space one day. He’s had a longstanding theory that eventually, all humans will move to outer space and the earth will be like a national park for people to visit. I should mention he grew up a big Star Trek fan.
At the 2018 edition of Allen and Company Sun Valley, Bezos spoke of his high school dream. He wanted to be a space entrepreneur. With that dream in mind, 20 years ago, Bezos founded Blue Origin, a company dedicated to space exploration.
In the short-term, Blue Origin is attempting to mine water from the moon. In the long-term, Bezos envisions future generations creating these huge artificial ecosystems for living that look like time capsules. These massive capsules with huge windows will float in space with green environments, perfect weather, and a capacity of one million people. These structures will be paradises and can be themed or modeled after earth’s cities. Some of these could even represent a certain time period people may want to travel or vacation in.
Bezos believes there will be one trillion people living in space one day. Doing the math, that would mean one million of these ecosystems would need to be developed. If Bezos is right and starts an outer space frontier before he dies, he will live on as a 21st Century Christopher Columbus, Galileo, and Walt Disney all rolled into one.
Ironically, Bezos says he wants to make space exploration cheaper, so more people can innovate in the field. Like the dot-com boom, with less barriers to entry, more people will be able to participate.
Perhaps Bezos speculates that maybe someone out there can do it better than him. He may be looking for people to take his desires to the next level after he is gone. However, when push comes to shove, Bezos will be in prime position to buy any new innovators out. And if the innovator disagrees, Bezos will likely have the power to black-ball him. It’s a dangerous slope, and all potential situations should be considered before we let Bezos into the wild outer space.
The world economy is likely to fall into a depression and it could take years to crawl out. Many businesses will shutter their doors and there has been talk about Amazon possibly saving the struggling United States Postal Service. It’s endearing, but we should proceed with caution in regard to what is likely to happen during this economic downturn.
The companies that have no debt, and see increased sales such as grocery stores and online merchants are due to make big gains. As other companies struggle to stay afloat, this can create a market for super companies like Amazon to invest in smaller failing companies to gain more market control.
For instance, there will be an airline or two, most likely that will go out of business. Like the postal service speculation, would Amazon further integrate its service to air passenger travel? It is possible. Take Sun Country Airlines, a small regional airline based in Minnesota. Four months ago, Sun Country and Amazon announced a cargo deal. Sun Country is just the type of airline to that may struggle in the economic climate, and it could present Amazon a segue into passenger service.
There may be other things that go out of business that Amazon can prop up to keep its place in the market. Restaurants, cruise ships, and energy companies are things Amazon could potentially buy up.
When the world burns, it’s like a trip to the dollar store for Jeff Bezos.
One possible buy is Subway. The company has closed over 3,000 restaurants since 2015. Lots of Subways are franchised and the economic crisis is only going to accelerate the company’s demise.
It’s reasonable to believe that Amazon could buy Subway with the attention of re-purposing the restaurants for take-out food distribution centers. Instead of having any customers eat at the restaurant, these stores would mostly operate as kitchens with delivery — the current coronavirus restaurant model.
Bezos intentions seem well-mannered, and the effect Amazon has had on the country is thought to be a plus. Of course, the obsessive consumption Amazon encourages is a positive or negative depending on your point-of-view, and Bezos’s attempt to go to outer space could save the human race if you can imagine it. He’s a smart guy, and in his case, there might not be a limit.
At one point in PBS’s Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos Amazon is compared to the railroad operators of the late 19th Century. Like the railroad leaders control of commerce, Bezos’s empire has an absurd internet market share — about 50 percent of all ecommerce in the United States. The company is not showing any signs of slowing down, posting their highest stock ever while the rest of the world is in disarray.
Another matter covered in the PBS documentary is a current anti-trust investigation by the House of Representatives into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. This is ongoing while in the last 10 years, Amazon has spent $80 million on lobbying.
The chairman of the house committee investigating big tech, Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline , had donations from five Amazon executives two months before Amazon’s hearing last year. The donations were before the hearing was announced, which at that point in time Cicilline said he would not be accepting any donations from those involved in the big tech companies under investigation.
In some potential good news for Bezos from an unlikely figure, Donald Trump declared an executive order on April 6th saying the United States does not need permission from any other countries to be able to mine the moon.
Trump’s executive order cannot be underrated — it may be one of the most important in history. Oddly, Bezos and Trump both prioritize getting to the moon. Originally, Trump mandated to put astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2028, but has since moved the date to 2024. Six months ago, Bezos announced a partnership with three other companies to help NASA and the Trump Administration establish a presence on the moon.
Tourism is going to face some challenges over the next two years. In a booming industry pre-pandemic, the lost jobs are going to be paramount, and a swift comeback is unlikely. While the Sun Valley Resort faces some uncertainty, the locals trying to make ends meet are spiraling downward while the coronavirus seeps deep in the community.
It’s no coincidence Sun Valley has the highest infection rate in the country.
The area started with Jay Gould’s railroad. Averell Harriman build the resort. Ernest Hemmingway promoted it. And Bruce Willis bought it. Now, people like Jeff Bezos come every July. They play in it, and then they run the world in it.
For lack of better terms, the country’s blood runs through Sun Valley.
In 150 years, the Wood River Valley region has seen drastic changes. From mining, to shepherding, to skiing, the area’s resume is impressive. However, the coronavirus pandemic is uncharted territory. If Sun Valley can weather the pandemic and maintain its community, things might be okay. And if things are okay in Sun Valley, you can probably say the same for the country.
But what was going on in Sun Valley before the pandemic? The rich were running rampant on the poor, making them feel like outsiders in their hometown. Now a few may do some good getting involved in a business or two, but as Hailey saw with Bruce Willis. When one man runs a town, there’s no telling what he’ll do.
Power corrupts, and in regard to Bezos, we must recognize the double-edge sword he holds for society. Amazon has changed the world for the better, as far as we can tell, but that does not mean we should not watch Bezos with caution.
Even if Bezos is the most reasonable human being equipped to run the world’s most powerful company, what happens when he dies? Or does Bezos have a plan to use science to escape death?
All it takes is for one obscure leader to slip through the cracks and humanity can be in big trouble. Like when Jay Gould put the entire economy into a recession. Or how this coronavirus started with one bat transmitting the disease to one human. Do not underestimate the power of one.
