billionaire celebrities that would make good candidates?

[Measure_for_Measure]

Claverhouse: also quite frankly while Excel is a fine product, MS’s other offerings have been wanting and have relied heavily on network effects.

As a CEO though, Gates did have an unusual ability to spot his mistakes and address them. I’m thinking of the memo he would pen once per year. Too many business leaders get attached to their ideas and thereby drive their companies into oblivion or at least a sea of red ink.

But it is silly to think about Gates running for President without any political experience, and frankly I strongly suspect that he has sufficient common sense to know this. Senator? Sure. Representative? Why not? Ambassador? Of course. Cabinet member? Interesting, though it would require some adaptation. But Gates has also adapted to the nonprofit world, so he probably has it in him. I don’t hear stories of talented team members leaving in a huff.

[foolsguinea]

Let me reiterate that while Elon Musk is a great guy, he’d most likely make a lousy and incompetent head of government. Herbert Hoover was a great guy, but he had a ridiculously hard time with the ship of state and is badly remembered.

Musk is probably where he needs to be now, now.

[Fuzzy_wuzzy]

Musk would not make a good candidate imo. As well as his own birther problem as mentioned above his company receives billion in taxpayers subsidies. There is definitely a conflict of interest there that any competent politician running against him will exploit.

[astorian]

@It_s_Not_Rocket_Surgery

We could do worse than Warren Buffett. Of course, he’s 84 so don’t get your hopes up.

That’s who I would have said. He’s a liberal by nature, but comes across as a folksy, pragmatic, commonsensical Midwesterner. He could have don well if he’d run earlier.

[astorian]

@Measure_for_Measure

Mark Krikorian is a foe of illegal immigration, so you might think he would be a fan of Trump. Think otherwise: “Trump is like your Uncle George at Thanksgiving dinner, saying he knows how to solve all the problems. It’s not that he’s always wrong. It’s just that he’s an auto mechanic, not a policy guy.” You really should be a policy guy at least a little to be President, GW Bush notwithstanding.

Excellent summary.

And, like Uncle George, Trump is forever making bold. loud pronouncements that completely contradict what he was boldly, loudly pronouncing at LAST year’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Ten years ago, Unc was saying, “We need to nuke these towelheads back to the Stone Age,” and now it’s, “That war was a stupid mistake. I TOLD them that at the time, but did they listen to me?”

Four years ago, Trump was saying, “Romney blew it by being mean to the Mexicans” and now he’s yelling “Build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it.”

No acknowledgement that either was ever wrong in the first place- just forget about that and yell your new beliefs all the louder.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Claverhouse

The $5 billion paid through the courts and in outside settlements for the first 25 years of swindling was not composed of sanctions from the 1995 Anti-Trust case. See the Wiki link above.
The judge ordered Microsoft to split into different companies: the judge was so replaced by a judge more sympathetic to Microsoft for bias against Microsoft after listening to Microsoft executives *, and then the new Bush administration basically dropped the charges in return for Microsoft sharing it’s APIs with others ( so the latter could make compatible products ) for 5 years.
Microsoft which had monopoly power in the consumer OS market was in the habit of breaking the working of competitors’ products on it’s system.

United States v Microsoft
The Sun court battle against Microsoft ( in any case jealous of Java as a product being invented ) for including a bastardised Java machine with ‘Windows Extensions’ to make it non-compatible with others was entirely separate ( although noted by the judge in the government case. ) Larry Ellison did not own Sun at that period.

In the end, Microsoft paid $1.6 billion to Sun in 2004.

“I think there’s nothing in this – nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing – that will do anything other than delight customers,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, displaying his typically emphatic style. “I don’t think there’s any downside.”

Seattle PI

So the Anti-Trust case neither got money nor concessions from Microsoft, to the government nor in any of the other 1000s of cases — some serious, some frivolous — people brought against Microsoft.

• Microsoft executives had, according to him, “proved, time and time again, to be inaccurate, misleading, evasive, and transparently false. … Microsoft is a company with an institutional disdain for both the truth and for rules of law that lesser entities must respect. It is also a company whose senior management is not averse to offering specious testimony to support spurious defenses to claims of its wrongdoing.” Judge Jackson

This sounds a lot like the criticisms I hear about Uber today. Can I buy Uber stock?

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

In general billionaires shouldn’t be politicians.

[Boyo_Jim]

In general, billionaires are virtually ALWAYS politicians, because they negotiate deals. You may be right about them not being good as elected officials though.

[OneCentStamp]

I heard on the radio today that Jimmy Buffett is creeping up on a billion dollars in net worth. I’d be all in favor of James Buffett (D-Margaritaville) making a run.