The TWTR hearing and FANG resilience

I should have made more notes during the $FB hearing, beside general shock, but now watching the $TWTR show I have to go off a little because its so entwined with the macro thesis.

A blueprint for senate hearings:

Senator: I'm going to be very tough on you, here is a softball question with no technical specifics in it.
CEO: First of all thank you all so much for inviting me. We have a lot of work to do together and we know we can do better.
Senator: What was the result of (some glaring free speech, antitrust, insane revenue, privacy/data issue), can you explain what happened there?
CEO: Thank you so much for your question.  I don't have all the specifics of that right now but I'll will get back to my team so we can get that to you.
Chair: The gentleman's time has expired. Thank you again for coming to speak with us. Can I get a selfie with you after lunch?

You can probably go back in the last few years to the Wells Fargo, joint airline, FB, and TWTR hearings, and I'm forgetting several others that were all like this.  Maybe 1 senator pretended to act tough, but usually with a completely unrelated question.  Additionally you have the half of the room who are giving gushing support and have even further unrelated questions/comments.

The real point of this is that there is no aftermath.  Every company can go back to business as usual, which is what short VIX is- business as usual is flat or decreasing risk premium.  More importantly, the longer there is no aftermath, and this precedent is more and more established, then it makes it easier for CEOs to follow the above script and wait for the issue to blow over, til the next school shooting grabs the Senate's attention like a cat with 2 different laser pointers.

Going more specifically to TWTR today and FB recently, it was clear that the Senate and congress have literally no idea what is going on with the scope of how FANG runs the country and planet.  Senators were asking if they were embedding notifications that a closed account was Russian, while meanwhile every big data/social media analysis is showing the addictive design of these services, which is arguably rewiring how kids(the next generation) think.
For "freedom of speech/hate speech" issues they go directly to "what are you doing to block X" without any mention of even understanding the point of freedom of speech.
Some notes from today's TWTR hearing:

• I was almost sure that a month or so ago Twitter was denying any kind of shadow ban/ throttling users, and today Dorsey was proudly saying how they greatly hide/throttle content/users they don't like.
• Senator Harris vs Sandberg asking about a specific .004% revenue figure for the ads linked to russian posts, almost presses her on saying how they have no metrics/no idea on how to list this despite having a number to 3 decimal places, then just drops it. (the above script of "thank you our time has expired") 
• Senator King vs Sandberg asking about user rating/credibility rating attached to accounts, probably missing the fact that they will be crying against China's version of a social credit score in some upcoming hearing.  This tied in with Dorsey questioning the importance of likes/followers as the primary incentive metric.  This was a really telling point as the people with the data internally are trying to show how warping these incentives actually are, yet it was lost on every senator who just went down their index cards.

Getting at more the financial structure/backdrop of these companies, again it seems like the Senate is not even mentally equipped to get at the scope of how vertically integrated and dominant Amazon et al. are.  I would love a poll of congress and senate to see how many of them are even aware of what Amazon Web Services is and the the scope of hosting.  The more the Senate hearings are mired in 'what is free speech' and smaller concepts that they still can't wrap their head around, the longer the underlying vertical structures can grow unfettered, so by they time they have the Amazon hearing, you will probably have all of the government's data on AWS.

Comically, the closest 'discussion' to the Amazon scope is from liberals who are only discussing the tangential issue of worker wages/subsidies
and are missing the point that little band aid type bills don't address the core issue that if Amazon is that big, and government has to come to them for data, it is basically entwined with government in a way on top of the normal lobbyist structure.  I've posted before that separation of corporation and state is this century's "church and state", and from hearings like this its clear that lawmakers arn't even aware of the corp/gov overlap.

So what does this have to do with short VIX?

I think every one of these incompetent hearings is bullish for FANG and thus short VIX. (note here in the short premium sense, "bullish" is just that it will hold up or be within a st dev on the downside so that selling puts or vix call spreads is the best strat. I'm not looking to reach for 10x trades)
The end state of capitalism is one company, so hearings like this that don't speed bump that set the seeds for the continuing snowball/network effect into these services and thus global  investment into these companies.

Any questions?