RickLewis wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 5:28 pm
What takes place in the heads of tech billionaires and their acolytes isn't necessarily going to play out in reality.
This truism, like most others, will of course turn out to be true. However, the plan appears to be to create chaos, after which whoever has the most agile and posesses the keenest instincts will profit from that chaos. 20 years of running businesses with mottos such as
Move Fast And Break Things makes these guys feel pretty confident they have the moves for that game.
RickLewis wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 5:28 pm
What is reality is that some tech billionaires (obviously, Musk being the prime example) are very much embedded In the Trump administration for either ideological or commercial reasons, or both. And other tech billionaires are modifying their behaviour and that of their corporations to fit better with the Trump narratives, to avoid friction. So far, out of the mega-money-men, only Bill Gates seems to be conspicuously immune to that tendency. He's more focused on giving his billions away philanthropically these days so presumably sees no need to suck up to anyone.
As Tesla shares etc plummet, Musk may quite soon have to make a tough choice between his love of Trump and his love of his companies. What happens then? Trump will still be President, but Musk will be on the outside. Will there be a soft landing? Will Trump try to seize X? Will it play out like with the oligarchs in Russia in the 2000s? What do the Americans here predict?
When this has all played out, I believe you will change your views. The first Trump presidency was largely defined by internal conflict between the tantrum inclined president and the many many people who thought they could bring out some imagined "presidential" qualities by being the adult in the room. All of those people have since warned American voters not to bring him back.
A vacuum was created. It has been filled by a bunch of tech-bros who don't care about tantrums because they throw them too. They have an ideology and some half-smart people to
help them write it down. You'll be running some sort of special about Deneen, Yarvin and Girard one day.
This isn't really anything new, there's always a set of well-heeled blue sky thinker types to attempt a takeover whenever the drift of popular sentiment supports the possibility of radical change. That's why Brexit was a horrible marriage of two conflicting sets of values, with a rich collective of free-traders who dreamt of an unbound Britain striding the waves of Global Commerce, freed of dirty Euro-protectionism. The poor people that voted for Brexit mostly wanted more protectionism. The elitists completely failed to enact their laissez-faire agenda for incredibly obvious reasons, and the gammons that voted mainly to keep foreigners out have simply been further impoverished.
America's Brexit is headed for a Texas sized mess along similar lines caused by a similar mismatch of expectation. DOGE is applying the rule of 'Move Fast And Break Things' apparently with the breaking of things being the objective rather than a tolerable symptom of effecting good works at sufficiently rapid pace. There are some things which, once broken, will not be easily fixed. The illusion of checks and balances is now on that list.
Did very many of the 74 million MAGA voters actually vote for this? Sort of, but they only wanted it to happen to other people, and they didn't secure that promise in writing, same as the English idiots who did the same thing with Brexit.
PS. not sure if Henry is making a deliberate Mussolini reference when he calls Musk the Futurist, but I am going to award him 3 FlashDangerPoints.
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