The scary part is how little that amount is, compared to what Musk could spend if he really wanted to.
Musk has to be funneling big cash into Trumpworld or Trump wouldn’t put up with him hogging the spotlight. How else do you explain how Elon is being referred to as President Musk on TV and Trump is not losing his mind over it?
It has always been shockingly cheap to buy votes in Congress in comparison to the size of the budget they control, and Bill Clinton demonstrated how easy it was to purchase executive influence even if you are a foreign national who should absolutely not be allowed to influence domestic policy, but Musk just showed how he could buy an election outright and get the control of a major political party by giving Donald Trump a big cash enema. I bet Dick Cheney is kicking himself over how much effort he went to in order to control the George W Bush presidency when he could have purchased it outright by cashing in a few stock options and buying Dubya that Mickey Mantle card he’s always wanted.
Here is to hoping that Musk and Trump, two of the most malignant narcissists on a public stage full of them, soon have a clash of egos which can be metaphorically compared to the RMS Titanic Vs. Iceberg, both for the epic nature of disaster and not burning down the rest of the world in the process.
Stranger
At long last, people still think this is a thing that can happen?
Stranger
The really scary part is Elon Musk is meddling in politics not just in usa but in UK too. He (from what I’ve read and heard on BBC) is openly supporting Nigel Farage and Reform UK and is apparently thinking of donating 100M dollars through X.uk (unheard of sum as a political donation in UK).
Both Labour and Tory MP’s are literally quivering in their boots thinking of how to stop this and what could the potential effects be if the said donation goes through.
Nigel Farage flew all the way to Usa and met Elon at Maralago just a couple of days back and confirmed that they did talk of a potential donation and were looking at ways how to make it legal as per UK laws.
Elon Musk literally saying “Shut the government down till Jan 20”
The initial post had only a few thousand views but after Elon engaged with his “Yes” it has 9.8 million views. I guess this is how he puts pressure.
At least the congresscritters won’t be getting that pay raise. Gotta find the slim silver lining.
Well, that is interesting; X.uk is a “brand” (effectively ‘doing business as’) of a company called British PLC, which bills itself as “a provider of artificial intelligence consultancy services to firms working within the insurance and risk management industries” but actually just appears to be a long enduring dormant shell company of the sort used to shuffle money and property around to obscure its origins and owners, currently headed by a passel of Burgesses (Simon Lance, Alexander William, and Julia Rebecca) about whom there is little public information other than Simon repping for a shady domain brokerage. So, basically corruption in almost plain view.
And a bunch of servile Republican toerags genuflecting and murmuring, “Yessss, master!”
This is certainly not an HBO level conspiracy thriller. This script is getting more badly written by the day with cartoon villains, one dimensional henchmen, pathetically weak opposition, and a plot that wouldn’t have passed muster on a ‘Ninties USA Network Original show.
Stranger
I wonder if it’ll be “legal” as per uk law to donate through X.uk
Elon now tweeting about bioweapon labs in the bill. Someone paraphrased it, though you can find it on X. Elon says the US is funding bioweapons labs.
They are disguised as Bio containment Research Labs in the Bill.
Politico: “Elon Musk fueled backlash to spending plan with false and misleading claims”
What a fucking anti-science, anti-democracy, anti-human troll. He’s a fascist truckler with grandiose delusions of self-glorification; anyone still defending him or advocating his facile notions of colonizing Mars or transferring consciousness to a computer should be ashamed of how thoroughly they have been duped by such a conspicuous huckster.
Stranger
I wonder if he has a split personality.
I am totally against his politics but I do acknowledge he is a manufacturing wizard/genius, a great innovator and someone who led the effort to make reusable rockets which no one else did till now, and doing the neuralink thing to help paraplegics apart from electric cars, solar energy, starlink satellite internet and other things he and his companies do.
Yes I acknowledge all those admirable things but otoh I wonder how he is clueless, adamant, arrogant and threatening in the political arena…ripping apart well established parliamentary procedures.
Edit…I have a close relative, a us citizen, working in his space company and he has glowing things to say about Musk, the technologist. I asked him point blank if he is as technologically savvy as his fanboys say he is. And I was told yes he is unbelievably knowledgeable in multiple fields…hardware and software and even minute parts of the rockets they make which a ceo level guy would not normally know.
And yes my relative works very long hours…sometimes 12-14 hours a day as per him.
I am frustrated, getting cranky and feeling very let down. I guess I have to stop reading/seeing american politics for some time.
Jeff Bezos bends the knee to Trump now.
Yep. Let’s do it. Rip off the bandaid. The majority of Americans voted for this, and as H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
The Dems will cave again and this nonsense will continue, probably forever from this point. If they let the government shut down the MAGA era will be over as soon as the Social Security checks dry up.
I’ve been wondering for a while now if what Trump really admires about Putin and Russia is the Oligarchy. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but I wonder if that’s his actual goal: To create a billionaire group that actually controls everything in the economy. Because I suspect that if a cadre gets enough economic control then the political levers fall into place.
I am, however, struggling to reconcile the enormous positive response to the killing of Thompson with the relative “meh” response to Trump’s billionaire club he’s putting into power.
No, he’s not. He’s a “hype man” who convinces investors (mostly wealthy SiVal venture capitalists who are in the inner circle of Peter Thiel extreme libertarian/anarcho-survivalist/transhuman cultus) to pour money into his schemes. Although he’s made various claims of being intimately involved with and primarily responsible for the technological innovations, including claiming to have designed the ‘Starship’ and all systems of the Tesla Model 3, as soon as he starts talking about the technical details of rocket propulsion, electrical power systems, neurological interfaces, artificial intelligence models, planetary colonization, et cetera it is evident to people actually knowledgable in these areas that he is just parroting things other people have said to him with copious mangling and a lack of any depth.
SpaceX has been successful in space launch because of the work of talented and hardworking engineers under the leadership of a devoted management suite which worked hard to ameliorate Musk’s mercurial nature, lack of technical depth, and tendency to throw temper tantrums and fire people over minor infractions or imagined offenses. Musk nearly sank Tesla in his insistence of implementing absurd levels of unworkable automation, flat lies about production rates and quality issues, and the neverending carousel of C-suite executives while promoting a hostile work environment and folding his failing SolarCity venture into it. Neurolink, The Boring Company, and X.AI have been money pits covered by the absurd overvaluation of Tesla (currently valued at more than all other production automakers combined on the thesis that it is not a carmaker but a ‘technology company’ despite the fact that its key technology—the automated piloting system of “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving”—has consistently failed to meet promised deadlines and performance metrics, is demonstrably unsafe, and which many autonomous piloting experts think will never achieve Level 5 autonomy in anything like its current form).
Musk’s grand innovations like Hyperloop and farming domes on Mars are largely warmed over ‘50s era sci-fi concepts with obvious flaws, and even those which actually work (by dint of the smart people doing the work for which he takes credit), such as high performance battery electric vehicles and the Starlink LEO satellite internet have ‘externalities’ and hazards that are glossed over even as people with expertise in these area warn about the potential problems such as depletion of accessible lithium (and the environmental costs of mining it), how electric vehicles are not going to mitigate atmospheric carbon-induced climate change, and the real potential for a Kessler Syndrome condition which could render large azimuths of orbital space unusable.
Musk is not a brilliant original thinker; he’s the world’s oldest pubescent Internet edgelord who has acquired enormous wealth and enough political clout among a party that has already been veering toward autocracy for the past thirty-five years to do real harm. He didn’t found Tesla, and in fact pushed out and fucked over the actual founders; he wasn’t the first to either think of or even successfully attempt landing a rocket; and he knows fuck-all about the details of space exploration, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, or even the logistics of boring tunnels in the ground. The less said about his notions of ‘free speech’ and ‘wokeness’ the better except to observe that they are at diametrical opposition to democratic governance and basic human decency, and he’s now discovered that openly lying and spreading baseless conspiracy theories will get him what he wants as long as he uses the pulpit granted to him by his legions of credulous fanboys and a tech media that “wants to believe” more that X-Files’ Fox Mulder wants to find aliens.
Please, for the love of all that is decent, stop promulgating the false notion that Elon Musk is “a manufacturing wizard/genius”, “a great innovator”, is doing things to save humanity, et cetera because it is this kind of undeserved hero worship which garnered him the cultish devotion and public adulation which has allowed him such influence; not to mention being offensive to all of the people who have actually made workable enterprises of some of his mostly hair-brained schemes. He’s a hype promoter with barely warmed over ideas of others and a pervasive lack of self-awareness or empathy combined with a pathological degree of narcissism.
Stranger
I read an article recently about how Tesla owners are putting bumper stickers on their cars saying things like “we bought this before we found out Elon was crazy”.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91227963/anti-elon-tesla-bumper-stickers-amazon-best-seller
Just wanted to try this out here. As far as I know I’m the first, but maybe not:
President-Effect Musk