Him and his company is pure evil. Sadly some EU government do business with them (Germany, Denmark) whilst what should happen, if the world was sane, is EU wide sanctions on Palantir and life-time entry bans on all employees, and if any details of EU citizens are in their system, arrest and criminal prosecution if he ever sets foot in Schengen.
Would you mind elaborating on why you'd call Palantir 'evil' in particular? I wouldn't exactly hold the company up a a role model of good corporate citizenship, but I also wouldn't put them down as particularly more 'evil' than your average multinational. Say, on a level with -- to pull an example not-quite-entirely out of thin air -- Airbus.
Most Americans I’ve interacted with think money is a reflection of your intelligence, so unfortunately as long as this guy has a net worth of billions he will be powerful.
The thing is that people like Thiel are actually quite smart. The problem is that people really overrate “smartness”. Smart people are often dumb as hell.
The thing is, people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos are undoubtedly intelligent, they were all lucky of course but I would argue that no one with below average IQ can use their initial luck to create additional opportunities and generate millions of dollars worth of wealth.
That being said, I feel like we need to be more nuanced when we discuss "intelligence", because I think that it can have a multifaceted definition and people have a wide array of skillets.
So I perhaps a better question would be something along the lines of "Intelligent in what way?"
I don't think the problem with Thiel is a lack of intelligence. Stupid people don't usually become a menace on a national (or indeed now, global) scale. May terrorize their household or maybe close neighbours, but don't have lots of reach beyond that.
At least one of them worked as a hostel cleaner until she was elected, and at least one of them was a temp worker who did odd jobs and gig work in parallel to his political action with 'La Jeune Garde'
"Most" might be a bit of a reach, but there has been a deliberate perversion of one of the American Founding Mythos: The "Protestant Work Ethic".
God rewards those who are good, and punishes those who are bad. Therefore, if you're rich, its God rewarding you for being good, and if you're poor, God is punishing you. Therefore, we should help the rich, because they're good, and not help the poor, because they're bad.
It's not spelled out this explicitly, but this has very much become the philosophy of the right-wing Evangelicals, and a big part of why they love Trump. He's rich, so anything he does is good, and he's really punishing those wicked poor people.
I agree that people are taught we have meritocracy that is not real, but the problem is that the billions are able to buy power, not what people think of his intelligence, to be clear.
That's not the most severe things that can happen for ignoring politics. Some people are unfortunate enough to ignore it to the point they sit in a frozen trench while IR-enabled drone is looking for them
I know, what is it about shrill people insisting on looking up lately? Dial down on the fear factor, baby! It's like they say on Russian TV: what do you decide, anyway? The higher-ups aren't fools, they know what they're doing.
I understand not wanting to live in fear but if SHTF what are you gonna do? You’ll be less informed than the “scared” ones and you’ll be screwed. I wouldn’t say I live in fear. I still enjoy day to day life but I also stay informed and ready to scram if need be..
Drone warfare as we see in Ukraine is new default. Any poor schmuck ragtag group can muster hundreds of them, with basic grenades or 30/40mm AP grenades. Enough power to kill anything on wheels or tracks apart from modern main battle tank, that one would be just more or less crippled. Bigger drones can and do kill everything, some drop literal 152/155mm shells.
You may say - but we have good EW! Which is pointless for optic cable drones, can't affect them like that. Those are a bit more expensive and sophisticated but not that much.
If US decided to do their invasion to Iraq or Afghanistan these days things would be very different re US casualties and expensive material loss.
I know they are portrayed as a cabal of woke leftists, but a third of them are veterans and they probably broadly reflect American professional demographics.
You could argue that many of the people voting Trump are also simultaneously ignoring a big chunk of politics and reality more generally I suppose, but it's not the standard meaning of ignoring politics.
It is an option, just not the preference for most people. The guy had an alright life, married a woman from a nearby island in a different country, had a daughter and still tend to his garden. In a way, that’s how humans have lived for most of their existence except the last 100 years or so.
> In a way, that’s how humans have lived for most of their existence except the last 100 years or so.
Sure. They would also die whenever there was a famine, some disease ran rampant, Mongols or crusaders pillaged everything, some recent council decreed they were all heretics, etc.
>Or you can pay attention to it, in which case it will ignore you.
That doesn't make any sense. The small minority of people who are involved in politics affect politicians completely disproportionately to their number, and this is completely unrelated to whether they actually know what they're talking about or have reasonable concerns.
That's right! And on average, the impact of mass protests in recent years, towards the causes they support, is somewhere between "zero" and "massively negative". Care all you want and politics will just ignore you or get angry at you for caring.
See e.g. throwing oil on famous paintings, or everything re Palestine in the past couple of years.
Protesting effectively is a skill which the present generation lacks. They don't even realize it's a skill issue. "Surely if we just care harder somebody will do something..!", they think, over and over. Doesn't make it so.
France Yellow jackets, China anti-lockdown protests are well known failure with 0 impact.
I will also tell the friends I made/lived with in NDDL that our action had no impact and that the airport is being built (given that a couple of them bought a house where the airport was supposed to be, they might not all believe me).
I remember an Adam Curtis documentary called The Power of Nightmares, in it, there are examples of making people scared, threats and anxiety to achieve political ends. Neoconservatives believed that making people scared about threats not only helps in actions against the perceived threat but helps increase social cohesion. They wanted people to come together in their worry, to form new social bonds shared by being scared about a common enemy.
The documentary gives the examples of Neocons's hyping up the threat about Islamic terrorism and Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's really rather good.
I'm always wary of earnest calls for people to be scared. Scared people are scary.
It's fine to be wary. It's dumb, naive, or reckless not to do the work and analyze whether or not the fear is warranted in a specific case. Adam Curtis did the work in a specific case and found the fear unwarranted for that specific case. Parading that example has no fucking relevance for this specific case except to say that someone always has an incentive to lie about something.
The people abiding by the principle "strive for peace, prepare for war" are not "scary scared people" despite being very afraid of war on some level.
I'd say the masterpiece of the Wolfowitz doctrine was Ukraine. The best mental picture I can paint is seeing the longing, looking-for-acceptance look on the face of the little old hippie lady that sold me my Patagonia marching in a pro-Ukraine rally. Watching the Democrats and liberal media press themselves into mobilization for Neocon theory was truly like appreciating a work of art. Big, bad, scary Russia. Nuland and her husband, right there, the high court of Neoconservatism!
> I think there’s actual reason for people to be afraid of Peter Thiel.
> That said, it’s not productive to be afraid.
Chalk this one up to clickbait to sell a book I guess?
Personally I feel like the false aura around wealthy people like Peter Thiel works to their favor and advantage. We all think they are these powerful scary incredibly smart people when they are actually slightly above average people who got lucky, and sometimes only got lucky once.
Peter Thiel would be a nobody if PayPal or Facebook failed, and there was always a high chance for those things to happen. He could just be the nobody guy who seeded $500,000 into Friendster instead of Facebook.
He earned $55 million from the PayPal sale and $1 billion from his Facebook sale. If you stick your money in an index fund it will double in value every 7 years (before adjusting for inflation). Do that for $55 million at the PayPal sale and you get $880 million, do that for his Facebook stock in 2012 and you end up with $4 billion.
So around $5 billion of his net worth can be attributed to hypothetical passive investment of his original windfalls, attributed to being at the right place at the right time with just two companies, and he would not have been able to invest in the second on without winning the lottery at the first. In other words, with 100% disposable income that could be gambled on moonshots (unlike our 401ks), he only beat the market by 15% per year.
Any idiot with a wealth manager and tolerance for risk can do that.
And we, the people, have lots of power over people like this if we exert it.
I think there are people who take big unlikely risks. Statistically some of them succeed. Now they are big risk takers with survivorship bias and illusions of self importance, AND lots power/money. And that can be scary.
It’s easy to take unlikely risks when you already have a “never need to work again” windfall.
I can’t risk my retirement nest egg.
If Peter Thiel ended PayPal with $55 million that means he could set aside ~$5-10 to live the rest of his life and risk the rest.
So really I would argue that having a risk-adjacent personality isn’t related to skill. Thiel was willing to throw half a million dollars at random tech startups done by college dropouts and he also had a social network of his own thanks to doing the same with PayPal.
So it’s about networking, capital, and timing more than skill.
Thiel would be a nobody if he was born 10 years later. Where is the PayPal-like opportunity in today’s tech landscape? The modern startup is wildly capital heavy and loses money for possibly decades (e.g., Lyft just made its first profit EVER in 2024).
SpaceX and, for a time, Tesla. PayPal was already a success when he conned his way in. What other successes has he had?
Twitter imploded when he took over, Boring company was never real, FSD at Tesla will never be real. And SpaceX is succeeding because they have a team dedicated to keeping him away from decision making.
What he's had is an army of internet bots pumping up his supposed credentials (visible even in the voting patterns here on YN)
Maybe for Peter (I don't know) but not for Musk. He did X/PayPal, but then blew everyone away with Tesla, crushed it with SpaceX, succeeds with Starlink...
Some people really do have something that is more than just getting lucky once.
He would not have the money to do so if PayPal failed.
Musk has gotten wildly lucky many times, like when he was "gifted" a factory by the federal government in the wake of the 2008 automotive crisis. If the 2008 financial crisis never happened Tesla would not be a mass market manufacturer today. In an alternate timeline GM/Toyota would still be building the Pontiac Vibe and Corolla Matrix in Fremont.
Musk has been hitching his businesses to government money ever since (SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Starlink) and I say that's a direct result of his astonishing success in getting cheap/free money for Tesla.
And you don't convince the government to buy your products so easily unless you have a success story like Tesla's government investment under your belt.
When you think about it this way his infiltration into the executive branch is a logical conclusion of his "genius" strategy. Now he can just tell the government to buy his products. It's the exact kind of thing that a middling manager with mediocre products would do rather than compete on quality and value.
> He didn't start Tesla, he joined as an investor.
Yeah, and then he took it over, and transformed it from a fledgling garage based company with near 0 market penetration into a serious competitor in the international automobile market, defying all the odds, keeping it alive when it should have gone bankrupt many times. I don't think a typical person who happens to have money is going to take on Ford, GM, Toyota and win the early EV game.
I don't doubt that he has gotten wildly lucky many times, but I do doubt that there isn't something special there. I could get lucky many times...I'm not taking over industries beating Toyota, beating NASA, no matter how lucky I am. I don't have the vision, I don't have the drive, I don't have the obsessive focus that is sometimes necessary, I don't have the capital allocation skill, etc.
My point here is that the limiting factor wasn’t who was in charge, it was whether the company could acquire a large scale factory and have enough capital to start scaling. Tesla didn’t make any particular moves that required complexity of foresight or spectacular management wisdom.
If the US government didn’t enable Tesla in the way it did, it would still be a garage company regardless of how good of a manager Elon was.
I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager by the metrics of his own quarterly reports. Did he get hit in the head sometime recently? Does he have long covid? Why are Tesla sales declining by double digits when other brands and the EV market as a whole is growing rapidly? Why is Twitter’s advertising revenue and active user count (allegedly, it’s a private company) in rapid decline when neither was true before it was taken private? Has the Boring company delivered any successful projects? Why is xAI behind all of its competitors? Why is Starlink losing its 100 million dollar contract with Canada? Why did Elon invite 100% tariffs on his vehicles to Canada? If I were an investor I would be furious. The questions are piling up.
My hypothesis is that his companies are not doing so well as of late because he was never a particularly gifted leader, and he’s letting his own hubris cloud his judgment.
A most basically informed manager who just graduated with an MBA from a low-tier public university would know not to take public political stances that alienate their main customer base. Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.
LeBron James isn’t the greatest basketball player of all time because he was good for a few years. He’s the greatest player of all time because he’s consistently good. If you had to pick one draft pick that you were stuck with for the next 10+ years he would be the unanimous pick.
If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.
> If the US government didn’t enable Tesla in the way it did, it would still be a garage company
And if GM didn't receive a massive 50+ billion dollar bailout in 2008 it wouldn't exist now (new legal entity or not). Plenty of companies get government assistance. I don't think it diminishes Elon compared to say, the multiple GM CEOs around the time of the crash.
> I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager ... why ... why ... why
His priorities seem to have shifted from company to politics. I think he's letting his own hubris cloud his judgment as well. And he is into something else now. He definitely doesn't seem to be as focused on company performance anymore.
> Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.
That's a pretty direct insult to the primary customer base. What exactly are you talking about here? Did Elon say Teslas are not green and that people who buy Teslas are virtue signalling sycophants?
> If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.
We're talking 15 years since he took Tesla public and it took him over a year to get it there. It peaked late last year. And isn't Grok 3 competitive against GPT-4.5? Anyway, I don't think you get lucky for 15 years across multiple industries. I think what's more likely is maybe you start to go through something and it hurts your performance. Elon seems to have lost his way. But if he were to decide to take on some other industry and seems really motivated (and steps away from politics), I wouldn't bet against him.
All your GM example proves is that mediocre and below-average leadership gets propped up all the time, which reinforces my point rather than detracts from it. The hard part for Musk wasn’t to be innovative or be a great manager, the hard part was getting money from the government the first time. And that wasn’t anywhere near difficult in 2008 when the US government was throwing cash at automotive startups left and right via the ATVM program.
While ATVM was known for other automotive startup failures it also led to the Nissan Leaf thanks to the battery plant in Tennessee, and it led to Ford’s EV and hybrid programs along with a turnaround. Most of the more established recipients of funding came out with positive results, and that includes Tesla, which was much further along than other smaller startups who received the loans. They got to develop the Model S on the cheap.
I disagree that success in multiple industries is meaningful. My 401k is successful in every industry. Big whoop. Again, Elon’s companies with few exceptions all have a commonality of government contracts/assistance which all stems from Tesla’s unexpected success giving him a positive relationship with the government. Networking and capital, not strength of management. Survivorship bias, not excellence in management.
He has never proved himself at turning around struggling companies like so many storied managers that I read about in business school, e.g., Steve Jobs. His most recent “turnaround story” is Twitter, buying a company and making it smaller while building the conditions for competitors to pick up marketshare (Threads, BlueSky, Reddit’s IPO and traffic explosion, and up next is Digg).
Grok isn’t competitive with OpenAI because their revenue and customer list is a fraction of the size. They are squarely behind Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
There is something to it. As someone, who shorted Tesla based on fundamentals ( it was back when I foolishly thought fundamentals matter more than emotion ), I can't help but wonder if he was less of who is and how he operates, under any other CEO, this would have been a clear case of Tesla going into bankruptcy. There is luck and there is this weird mix of skills that keep you going all the time.
He's smart enough to fool the masses that he's a genius scientist, but, as a scientist myself, he looks to me like a gifted manager and maybe a genius at hiring.
Read up on your history, X* failed miserably, it was so bad he was basically ousted from his own company. Later success came in spite of him. Same story for his previous and first venture, Zip2.
He did not found Tesla, and arguably the company took a downturn since his takeover. Cars became unreliable and ugly (cybertruck...), and now that people are starting to associate the brand with Musk's terrible public image, sales are going down fast. The only positive was this irrationally inflated stock due to his cult following in the investor class.
SpaceX is cool but received a lot of money from tax payers in the form of government contracts. And let's not mention The Boring Company, Hyperloop, Neuralink...
That's the odd things with odds, with this many people on Earth, one of them was bound to get to the very top. And you don't get to the very top by working 100000x more, you get there by starting a millionaire and taking insane risks, then getting insanely lucky many times.
* The first one, not Twitter. Although there's a story here too.
You might be missing the point. They can be all of those things you say (and I very much agree with you) but they can still be very dangerous. In fact, perhaps their banality is a key part of what makes them so dangerous.
The most annoying thing is society's (especially American society) admiration for Billionaires and the belief that their IQ is in the four digits or some crap like that. More than intelligence, it takes ruthlessness, narcissism and questionable ethics (or no ethics at all) to amass hundreds of billions of dollars in a couple of decades.
I feel sorry for anyone who worships people like Musk or Theil. Sure Theil was supposedly a talented chess player in his youth, did well in school etc. But so do millions of other kids. These dudes don't have so much money because they are intelligent, they have so much money because they are willing to do damn near anything to get it - including trampling over people that helped them in the first place
Where I realised he's just a dipshit. He's obviously reads about history, but the reek of 4chan level "media conspiracy" overpowers it. The constant littering of references to vaguely related historical words is pointless, and I'm not sure who its meant to impress.
This drowns out some of the big points he's trying to get across in the piece.
The biggest red herring is the assumption that "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex" is a thing separate from society, run by shadowy cabals.
Its really not, its just society. That's how humans organise. You have a shared narrative and so long as you're within a certain percentage of it, you'll not get ostracised.
Its cute that he still appears to think, with all his business experience that a shadowy cabal can be that well organised, effective and powerful without leaking. Just look at white house now, the exec is leaking like a fucking sieve.
Joe Lonsdale was on CNBC talking his book (long Palantir) the other day in the context of DoD cuts. He was confident that DoD would buy more from Palantir and other new contractors (e.g. Anduril), and DOGE would continue to cut the fat.
All of that may or may not be true, but the wrinkle not addressed is the vibes between Musk and Thiel.
I saw someone point out that DOGE has so far been masterful at making its detractors point for them — DOGE has shown that there's surprisingly less waste an inefficiency than anyone might have thought before.
Federal agencies pay over $65 billion to consultants each year. 98% of Booz Allen's revenues (~$11 billion) is from government consulting. I don't know what the threshold for "extreme waste" for you is, but that is a hell of a lot of money that consulting firms have been able to siphon from American taxpayers.
None of what you laid out actually explains why it is waste. Doing things costs money. The $65 billion spent on consultants could be providing $650 billion in value.
I’m unable to read the full article linked but from the first two paragraphs it was not setting itself up for explaining why it’s waste either.
These people hear a big number going to a person they are told to hate and automatically think it's fraud and waste. Simply put, anything I don't agree with is bad and needs to be cut. That's the whole philosophy.
1) I agree that it’d be a good idea to increase the federal workforce so we don’t rely on contractors so much.
2) Presumably not all of that was waste? Like screw consulting firms but presumably at least more-than-$0 of that is non-waste, and probably a fair amount of it.
3) Other sources make it clear some amount of the $65 billion is spread over multiple years (unclear exactly how it breaks down)
4) That’s the spending with the top-10 consulting firms across a large set of agencies? I’d have guessed it was higher.
If anything this is an argument for not outsourcing things to the private sector. If anything, we should grow the public sector and things become more efficient.
Which, to me, intuitively makes sense. More hops is more complexity is more friction is less efficiency.
Read through this and it certainly paints a picture of our government spending a lot of money on a legacy tool that was less efficient. The army was trying to convert a system from 1991 to be “as easy to use as an iPad”. And the biggest complaint about palantir as a competitor is that is was “not sufficiently funded” to support a broader role.
Take a step back and I just don’t see how the Army can be expected to bring the UX of an iPad to the battlefield. That would be like asking Apple to send their SWEs to the trenches.
Consider the type of person who can acquire clearance so high that he’s trusted to program the war games. Personality-wise, this is not a lavish, profligate spender.
It's also possible that some contracts and contractors are more wasteful than others. Perhaps Palantir delivers a lot of value, and insiders know there are much more effective places to make cuts.
My takeaway is that billionaires are dangerous. Un-checked power is dangerous.
I remember the first time I heard someone say they thought there shouldn't be Billionaires, we shouldn't even allow there to be Billionaires my Capitalist mind reeled, "Say wut?"
And then I started watching the world careen further out of control and could see that in fact the problem might just be wielding of financial power that really is the root of the problem.
Yup. It’s hard to live in a democracy with billionaires. It’s going to be basically impossible with trillionaires.
We waited until the ultra-wealthy figured out how to weaponize their power against us. It may be too late. But we have to reduce the wealth gap as a priority step to fixing democracy.
Governments, which, in representative democracies are led by elected officials still have power over billionaires. If the US government wants Peter Thiel assets, including his life, it can just take them, and if Peter Thiel is unhappy, the US government has an army, Peter Thiel doesn't.
It doesn't happen because the elected government doesn't want to. In the USSR, it would have happened, but such politics didn't work well in the end. The current system that allows billionaires is not perfect, but unless shown otherwise, it is the least bad.
> If the US government wants Peter Thiel assets, including his life, it can just take them...
Billionaires go radically apoplectic and turn into propagandistic freaks when the US government is simply not reducing their taxes fast enough. I actually think most people don't want this massive wealth gap, but we're reaching the point where it's impossible for the will of the people to find expression in our government, especially now that the billionaires are literally running the joint.
Those aren't are only two options. We could raise billionaire taxes to take a larger portion of their assets. We could adjust anti-trust law to limit the power of their companies. We could adjust campaign finance law to limit their influence on politics. We could better fund a free press to better inform people on their actions. The question is how should the power of governments and the ultra wealthy be balanced.
Whats wrong with how ie Switzerland works? Capitalism is everywhere, work ethics stellar, personal freedom is top notch, people have guns yet they don't shoot nobody, crime is low, education is free, healthcare cca too and all is top notch. Obviously economy then follows and so does population happiness.
We have billionaires but not because we desperately try to lure such piece of scheize like thiel, they come or don't leave because they want all it offers and know when to shut up and respect rules just like effin' everybody else. And they are well taxed btw, wealth tax is here, pretty real albeit not crushing and not something introduced recently.
Things can be done, well within framework of typical western democracy, people just need to get down from their hyped egos that 'their way' is the best way bar none. Emotional discussions vs rational ones.
> It doesn't happen because the elected government doesn't want to.
You're skipping over the point of why they don't want to seize the billionaire his assets: because a billionaire is a valuable ally to a politician seeking to stay in power. In fact, a billionaire is more valuable to a politician than his actual constituents. And that's how we get oligarchs.
I'm totally with you, but to pull the tent up even further: you don't even need to be scared of billionaires to be scared of Thiel -- I would trade a thousand Buffets for a single Thiel.
It starts with typical SV hype, but by the end he espouses Samuel Huntington's theory that the world will soon fall into a vicious race war, and that the White ("western") World--the US, the white-majority Commonwealth states, and Western & Central Europe--should strike first to assure its dominance. Our enemies in this war will supposedly be primarily 2) team Every-Muslim-Country ("civilizational conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims") and 3) team China+Korea, but there's also six other races ("civilizations") in the mix: 4) Latin America, 5) Sub-Saharan Africa (minus South Africa), 6) Russia+West Asia+Eastern Europe, 7) Southeast Asia, 8) Japan, and 9) India.
I know it sounds like I'm being absurdly hyperbolic, but... well, lets just say I'm afraid of Peter Thiel:
As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” He continued: “Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
First of all, that letter is from Karp, not Thiel.
And your reading of this letter, and Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations, is absurdly alarmist and misleading. I'm not saying Huntington was correct but he's not some fringe far-right nutjob hoping for a "vicious race war".
In software engineering divide and conquer is considered a key pattern. In business, it is widely considered that large monolithic entities are the most efficient at delivering results.
My point of view is that these large entities seem and have the power to pretend that they are efficient. In the long run, as with all monolithic structures (think large cities, geographically large countries, large monolithic software projects), the inefficiencies start tearing them at the seams, each in different ways.
Ultimately, if large megastructures were the most efficient, then humanity should strive for a single country (or a corporation) to run the whole humanity but that's never the case - never was, never will be.
And that's tightly related to your argument that billionaires should not exist. As another commenter pointed out, it's difficult to calculate the wealth of a person. Therefore, we should make it easy. Is your cash and your assets worth over X amount? If so, choose which ones to transfer to public national escrow during the upcoming fiscal year. It's not perfect, and I am sure clever lawmakers could come up with more nuanced and fair approaches, but it's better than the current state.
The wealth of billionaires is mostly in things like company ownership. Imagine for a minute that Musk could somehow made be worth only $1M. He's still where he is, he just doesn't have billions worth of shares to sell.
Does that solve any problems?
I don't think that it solves much, no. He might not have billions' worth himself anymore, but he's still in control of huge companies. So rather than giving millions as direct political donations he could do things like hiring people as a favor or promising to build a factory here or there. His ability to wield political influence wouldn't change much it'd just take a bit more work.
So I think "no billionaires" isn't nearly enough, you need to somehow transition to some system where there can't be a person (or just a few) on top of a multi-billion company.
I don't have a problem with billionaires per se, but I do have a problem with them being able to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence politics and undermine our very system of government.
Congratulations. You have discovered the fundamental problem with democracy - it is simply just not that hard to throw around a little power, money and influence and lull people into voting for you.
It is actually quite difficult, which is one of the best things about democracy, but if you spend enough money over enough decades and infiltrate or destroy enough institutions, social norms etc. anything is possible.
Also, at least in the US, it's the side that spent a lot less money that won. Just like in 2016.
Besides, having money is only one form of influence. One might also have influence from a massive federal bureaucracy, legacy media, Hollywood, academia, workers' unions, and other places.
While money is just one form of influence, it’s the most flexible. Those other forms of influence can be bought, just as everything can be bought.
We may instate rules to prevent such buying. No problem, undo the rules because undoing rules can be bought because everything can be bought.
Look at something like Citizens United. Does anyone want that outcome? Not really. A few, very rich, people want that outcome. And so it is made. How we got there is unclear. What is clear, in my mind, is that the benefactors made it happen.
It didn't used to be until Citizens United. Before that point donation to a Political Action Committee was indistinguishable from donation to a campaign, and that decision created a distinction that the rich then ruthlessly exploited to fund campaign ads and paid speakers and paid writers on social media.
I do have a problem with most billionaires as their wealth largely comes from exploiting others (e.g. underpaying their workers, exploiting market anomalies etc).
That was a major point in Bernie's response to the State of the Union last night.
> [Americans] want us to end a corrupt campaign finance system, which allows a handful of billionaires to buy elections. It is beyond crazy that someone like Elon Musk can contribute over $270 million to help get Trump elected and then gets to run the government.
> It is absurd that any Member of Congress who stands up to Netanyahu’s brutal war in Gaza can expect to be opposed by millions of dollars in campaign contributions from AIPAC.
> [Americans] want us to end the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move to the public funding of elections. Democracy is supposed to be about one person, one vote – not billionaires buying the political candidates of their choice.
Very much agree. No worries, I'm open to criticism, and I think politicians should be too! I don't quite agree with all of Bernie's points here, but the campaign financing in particular stood out to me.
The idea that democracy is broken is a convenient piece of propaganda, promulgated by people who have something to gain by weakening the American government, whether that's financial or geopolitical.
The central tenet of techno-fascism / the hard alt-Right / the Dark Enlightenment, is that democracy itself is incompatible with "freedom" (as techno-fascists understand it).
Answer to sibling about Romania
Elections were nulled because of illegal campaign funding.
Russia literally bankrolled the campaign and it wasn't reported as part of the campaign funding.
You mean countries like Romania, who had their election forcibly cancelled because the EU is scared of Russian social media posts, and Germany, who thinks that a man giving a speech and promoting a certain party is election interference?
Leon has tons of influence unfortunately all over, so yes it’s tantamount to interference. South African citizen shouldn’t have any say in politics outside of South Africa.
Turns out people are still extremely rich but in their own little governments - what we call corporations.
This may seem like an improvement. But these people aren’t elected, so we’re back at square one minus the democracy part.
We had less regulation, less rules, less taxation. People were poor. They were sick. They died when they shouldn’t have. They were illiterate. They were easily influenced. The economy suffered. Markets crashed. People lost their jobs. People starved.
So we decided, “hm maybe that doesn’t work like we thought it did”. Pretty much everyone was on board.
The government has many faults, yes, but many powers too. Power is distributed, and even you yourself hold some power. Having 20,000 people making decisions across 300 agencies sounds awful at first - but is having 10 people making decisions behind closed doors in a boardroom better?
Comparing the present to the past depends entirely on where you set the point to compare against though.
Go back further and we didn't really have corporations and most people worked for themselves and individuals that were much more independent. That was for both good and bad, like everything else.
To compare where we are today only against a point in the past where we had massive corporations and little to no workers' rights feels like cherry picking. We have more options than massive government or massive, unregulated corporations.
If you minimize the government that means you minimize regulations. That's an oxymoron - you want companies regulated, but nobody to regulate them?
There are other options - a communist utopia, a zero-state solution. Somehow, I doubt that's what you're referring to.
I admit, it is cherry-picking. But at least it's historically backed. You're also cherry-picking, but you're doing it on some hypothetical future that you're just imagining. I have zero reason to believe a smaller government makes things better. In fact, everyone has zero reason to believe that. So why try? Burning things done is lazy. Maintaining existing systems and improving them is both tedious and difficult, yes. But we have some baseline assurances down that path.
> There are other options - a communist utopia, a zero-state solution. Somehow, I doubt that's what you're referring to.
Communism, and utopias, aren't really an option. Communism has never been tried, no one seems to get past the phase where a strongman in charges takes control of everything. Regardless of whether that's even what I wanted (it isn't) that doesn't work.
> You're also cherry-picking, but you're doing it on some hypothetical future that you're just imagining.
You're jumping timelines here though. I also cherry picked a point in the past that makes a better example for me, but I never talked about the future.
I assume both of us have an expectation that our model could work in the future, but that's not really what we were talking about.
For what its worth, I consider the future you prefer with an ever growing government attempting to create more and more regulation is just as unlikely as you think it is for us to be able to shrink the government.
I don’t think it’s unlikable at all for the government to shrink - in fact, I see it as very likely. But not for the reasons you think. I think it’s likely because the most powerful people in our society would become more powerful.
Certainly, a return to few laws on labor and education would be extremely advantageous to the ruling class. Certainly, they desire children to work. Certainly, they desire pseudo-slavery. It’s a no-brainer for them to attempt to push things in that direction.
All I know is, our quality of life has gone up significantly since regulations have increased. I think it’s plainly undeniable.
You might claim it’s just correlation, and it would’ve happened anyway. But when you can trace specific lifestyle improvements, like being able to read, to specific pieces of legislation, I think that argument is lazy.
You’re correct, we can’t know for sure. But for me, I consider the evidence strong enough.
> But when you can trace specific lifestyle improvements, like being able to read, to specific pieces of legislation, I think that argument is lazy.
What legislation are you talking about here?
In general I'm all for regulations and laws that protect our rights from being taken from us and wary of laws that stop us from doing what we want (as long as what we want doesn't block others' rights).
I've heard that distinction made before as additive versus subtractive laws. Now I can't remember which is which and I don't want to say it backwards, but the distinction of laws that preserve rights rather than impede free will is really important.
There's a huge gap between a single wealthy person and what we have today.
Surely there's a middle ground. I have to assume the government currently had authority that most people wouldn't actually want it to have, and that the budget has a long list of even just low hanging fruit where money is being wasted on things tax payers wouldn't want it spent on is wouldn't agree with how its done.
I'm really not. The government consists of many people with a range of ideologies and ethics. Are there problems? Of course. But, the government has checks and balances, well, HAD checks and balances, separation of powers, and a Constitution that limited those powers. I'm more afraid of the corruption of the SCOTUS with dark money and a religio-fascist movement of persuasion and influence toward members of the SCOTUS, Congress, Judiciary and the Executive. It is a handful of billionaires who are driving this race toward authoritarianism.
Big countries are in a position to abuse their power. E.g., they start wars. Your worries are partially addressed by the separation of powers. The trillionaire government is split in three branches which helps curtail its power. It is not the task of a government to be efficient, it is the task of a government to be correct. I.e., have somewhat just laws that are executed somewhat correctly. I am saying 'somewhat' twice because one should not expect miracles but one can hope for livable and perhaps even prosperous conditions. The threatening collapse of this separation is one big current thing to worry about in the US. A government that respects the separation of powers is less threatening than a company of a tenth or a hundreth its size because the company can act out the will of a single individual. Generally it is true that if an individual/organization gets too much power he/she/it will find a way to abuse it. But government is also necessary to ensure that another, most likely much more intrusive government, comes in by force and starts reigning over you. And also to ensure that big companies and rich people do not abuse their power too much. What is needed in general is that the natural tendency of power to concentrate is kept in check by other powers. In the US this system was thrown out of whack mostly because of the enormous amounts of money needed to fund campaigns in combination with a two party system. It was way too easy to just buy both parties until one of the parties decided to go rogue and become the billionaire interest group, as if billionaires need an interest group. Over time enough damage, mostly in the form of large uncertainty and/or poverty for the average citizen, was done to society so the discontentment over this enabled the fascist leader to rise. Only the future can tell what the result of that will be but it is not impossible that a billion dead bodies will need to be buried because of this. Compared to that your 'ever increasing creep over all aspects of your life' seems a bit of a minor and/or theoretical concern.
The alternative of no or tightly-limited government is potentially worse. It's an economic form of the paradox of tolerance.
One can imagine all kinds of exotic forms of government that don't resemble a traditional large and centrally organized state, which still accomplish summer all of the goals that we might want a state to accomplish. But so far we have never seen that put into effect at any scale above a commune. So we are kind of stuck with the binary choice for the time being.
The problem, of course, is that the way humanity is set up, only billionaires can do some important things.
Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
SpaceX can exist solely because of the way our system is set up to reward founders with large amounts of capital. The same goes for large portions of our economy- the same parts that have kept the US financially afloat vs the rest of the world and provide massive funding to states like California to support their progressive policies.
Imagine California without Silicon Valley and you imagine it without billionaires.
Statistical extremes exist in any sufficiently large population (eg people). Extreme wealth concentration is a mathematical certainty if there are no regulations opposing it.
While there is probably correlation to things like intelligence and effort, it is guaranteed to be weak at the extreme tails of the distribution. Perhaps you are much more likely to be intelligent if you are ultra wealthy, but not significantly more than intelligent people of average income. Perhaps you put in more effort than an average person, but there are physical and temporal limitations than place a hard upper bound.
Success is much more correlated with what situation you are born into, what advantages you have, who your personal connections are, timing and ultimately luck.
It’s not all that unlike an investor who has repeated success, writes a book, becomes famous for being a “good investor” only to find out they can’t repeat their success. It’s just statistics to a point.
Historical counterfactual suggests that if a company like SpaceX, competition pressures would likely have driven similar innovation. Blue Origin might be a more dominant player, for instance.
I’m sure this is all very hard to believe if you are a person of great success.
Nothing stopped NASA from doing what SpaceX did. Or New York City. Its not like they started with billions and billions. In fact, many claims that it was all funded by the government. Well, why didn't they just built it themselves?
The state keeps the billionaires afloat though. Tesla, SpaceX, all of Musk's companies wouldn't exist without government welfare. Other big monopolies benefit from government protection and subsidy.
Billionaires are not a fact of nature, they exist because the rules we have created allows them to exist. Different rules could make them not exist, and society would benefit hugely.
> Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
Weird to think of everything in the view of great power competition. Like, you can't have healthcare cause spaceX needs to beat China? There are many options.
Silicon Valley existed before billionaires and plenty of university/government funding flowed in. Silicon Valley doesn’t require billionaires but billionaires require Silicon Valley.
Yeah Silicon Valley got started through government-funded research into applied materials science. The inventor of the transistor worked at a university before he struck out on his own to build a company, and his research started at that university on a grant-funded project.
I would wager most of what you take for granted out of "Silicon Valley" started as fundamental or applied research funded by a government. The current generation of AI hype certainly did.
Yes, famously no expeditions were mounted to the new world. Oh wait, that's why we have corporations.
How many Silicon Valley made billionaires required Silicon Valley billionaires to come into existence? I remember a valley where billionaires really didn't make themselves known other Ellison being and asshole and flying into SJO past sound restriction and things like the Monterey Aquarium.
It's almost like, in some way, he's part of a shadowy cabal of people who are making these things happen by spending money through Super-PACs and influencers to spread ideas.
With this interpretation, he'd have to be funding the problems and then presenting his ideas as the solutions. I think a lot the political problems which make Thiel's ideas appealing arose during the Biden era and given that Thiel supported Trump since his first run, it's hard to see how he would have had much influence under Biden. There are other billionaires who seem to be much more aligned with Biden and have been funding NGOs for decades and who don't seem to be aligned with Thiel. Maybe he served as controlled opposition, but IDK, controlled opposition is a kind of social over-engineering. Controlled opposition can easily turn into real opposition if the conditions arise.
I think 'controlled opposition' is one of the ideas that conspiracy theorists tend to go overboard with. I sometimes wonder if maybe it is itself a narrative which exists to try to discredit any potential real opposition to make them seem fake and keep people down. We get deep into the tangled weeds of uncertainty here.
These extremist billionaire libertarians are such cowards because they're not really libertarians. They're all for fascist, authoritarian regimes in which they are in control, have power, and make all the money. They are for freedom and liberty only in the sense that they just want the U.S. government and its regulations and laws to get out of the way so that they can do their bidding.
It's about power and control to them. They are actively against freedom and liberty.
These billionaires and corporations have long been a threat to the U.S. China actually recognizes this and does not allow billionaires and corporations to dictate.
Right it just allows unelected officials answerable to no one pull all the strings indefinitely then puts you into a labor camp if you practice religion.
They're libertarians in the sense that believe everyone is entitled to as much liberty as they can secure with their own resources.
They want a kind of feudalism where everyone is "free" to choose whichever Lord to serve, exchanging their life for whatever liberty and resources the Lord deems them worthy of.
Don't like Lord Musk's policy of prima nocta? You are free to pack up all your shit and travel (with proper papers, of course) to the court of Lord Bezos... assuming they are not currently in conflict, otherwise you could be turned away as a traitor or otherwise made an example of.
It's important to note, that in their ideal future, you would also have the freedom to move to (or found) NoBillionaireLand, where, as the title suggests, no billionaires are allowed, and you are free to implement as many taxes and social programs as you like. And with smart contracts powered by the blockchain, there would be no such thing as tax evasion, and wealth distribution can occur automatically and algorithmically every time taxes are collected. Doesn't it sound great?
You are conflating democracy and classical liberalism. Democracy is a decision making mechanism that can produce any decisions - democratic cannibals might vote on who to eat.
Most people think, and I tentatively agree, that democracy was the best way to achieve liberal outcomes. However, overall they are in tension. You can see it in the endless 1st amendment cases over the centuries - people really, really want to limit all kinds of speech by the power of the majority, but there's an absolutist undemocratic rule usually preventing them from doing so.
I think on the net classical liberalism (esp. free speech and markets) are more important than democracy. I don't think there's enough tension between them to ditch democracy completely, I guess thiel disagrees. But he's not a coward or a hypocrite, he said so explicitly and openly.
I think some people may be misreading what you wrote to mean China is freer than the US, but I think you are saying that China does not allow billionaires to threaten its government, which is probably accurate.
> They are for freedom and liberty only in the sense that they just want the U.S. government and its regulations and laws to get out of the way so that they can do their bidding.
Pretty sure that is where Libertarianism always ends up. I think you want Utopianism.
I honestly think there is a violent revolution waiting to happen here. Look at Trumpism - what happens if people realise they don't need the orange idiot in order to make changes?
I think parents is referring to us - regular people. It is unproductive for people like us. For people, who want to induce fear for one reason or another, clearly it nearly a goal unto itself.
A different take on this - authorities are most powerful when they can keep the people in fear. When the people lose the fear a revolution of some kind usually follows (peaceful or otherwise).
This techno-fascist trend can best be understood through the lens of a cognitive bias called 'elite projection': where the rich and powerful believe that everyone shares their preferences and plans accordingly.
'Freedom' from the likes of Peter Thiel is best understood as "I should be allowed to do what I want". On the surface, it's silly and lame: Adam Something, a vlogger, did a great video demonstrating how Elon's driverless pod concept could never work in the real world. So it's easy to dismiss as rich people being stupid, but what we're seeing emerge here, is something much darker and far more sinister.
Money amplifies speech, reach and political power, and so one's freedom is commensurate with their wealth. Combine that with how big business and private equity have switched to basically strip-mining the middle class through rent-seeking, and we are looking at a future of fascist billionaire feral elites ruling over everyone else as serfs.
Peter Thiel is a key supporter of the 'Dark Enlightenment' intellectual movement: a metastasis of the alt-Right into an overly White-supremacist, elitist neo-reactionary movement, and they are getting serious traction everywhere.
Yes, but is it really a cognitive bias though? A lot of voters went against their own interests in the last election, in favor of techno-fascism. I can't remember who wrote that "in a capitalist society, the bourgeoisie's ideology is necessarily the dominant one".
„But the idea that companies should basically be able to do whatever they want, that democracy isn’t the most important value, these things are reflected in the decisions and actions that many Silicon Valley companies are making, even Silicon Valley companies that are run by ostensibly liberal progressives.“
Why aren’t people afraid of Bill Gates? Why is it only the libertarians that scare people? Bill Gates does some extremely scary things — not to mention some morally repugnant things that apparently even Melinda Gates couldn’t take anymore.
And speaking of billionaires, why no complaints about Soros? The intellectual dishonestly is astounding. Soros has literally bought scores of radio stations, bought off district attorneys around the U.S., and Gates is doing vaccine experiments in ultra poor countries where oversight is minimal to non-existent. Pfizer did the same thing with drug trials in places where people can’t sue.
Gates even wants to release genetically modified mosquitos — without the consent of the people who live in the proposed areas. How about Laurene Jobs’s ownership of The Atlantic and the influence she has attempted to buy with her billions? What about the Clinton Foundation’s malfeasance in Haiti (among other places?)
But sure, let’s have another article complaining about Theil and by extension, Musk.
> (talking about gates and Epstein) …This is extremely significant because it substantially increases the amount of specific, known meetings between the two, and shows that they were meeting on specific dates late into 2014—after, in fact, the relationship had caused conflict between Gates and his then wife, Melinda French Gates, which would ultimately end in their divorce.
> Why aren’t people afraid of Bill Gates? Why is it only the libertarians that scare people?
Good PR and philanthropy goes a long way.
For why, unfortunately most people see the philanthropy model as a generous fixing of problems instead of what it actually is: admitting our systems are so flawed that they must be propped up by these "kind" acts of "giving back."
If you want to take issue with Technocracy, fine. Call out the entire liberal order and Karp's marxism in the same breath. Pretending it is just Thiel is so willfully ignorant. It is so nauseating how much people need to project and play favorites as if Thiel isn't chatting right now with people you adore as your champions. I'm not saying this in appreciation of Peter (as we call him in my circle of people you love) only to call out the pointless and meaningless divisiveness of this line of thinking. We can't both have nearly unlimited knowledge working tools and this kind of nonsense favoritism and boogeymen unless you actively choose to be ignorant. Be the change you want to see.
> Thiel’s pretty unique in that he was involved in this elaborate and secretive litigation campaign that resulted in the destruction of a pretty substantial media outlet when he secretly funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker Media.
Nick Denton is a terrible person in my opinion; a gossip columnist and the things he often published were pure trash. Anti-semantic drivel, outing people against their will, and other salacious click-farming nonsense. Let’s not forget that Gawker lost a jury trial and the verdict bankrupted him. That Peter helped fund the case doesn’t change that the jury found Gawker liable. Gawker’s actions caused their demise. If you want to play with gossip and attempt to destroy people, you have to be prepared to suffer the legal consequences when the targets seek legal recourse. Blaming Peter for the destruction of Gawker is ridiculous — Gawker did the thing and the thing had consequences.
As far as the article claiming that Peter Theil’s philosophy borders on fascism — that’s complete nonsense. Libertarianism is the opposite of fascism. Suppressing free speech, forcing businesses to close — all of the Biden era Covid policies — that’s fascism. Remember the days when we couldn’t talk about vaccine injuries? Or the times when scientific journals scrubbed articles that contradicted the prevailing directives on masks? Specifically articles published with flu studies that showed surgical masks as ineffective. One day, the articles were there, the next day, those articles seemingly disappeared aside from within the print versions which are harder to scrub for obvious reasons. Remember the social media bans for even expressing skepticism about mRNA covid shots? How about sharing opinions on the lab leak theory? What about the Santa Monica surfer who was arrested for surfing in the ocean with nobody within a half mile of him? That’s faciscm.
Fauci was unelected yet wielded incredible power, Sara Cody in Santa Clara county — also unelected yet had the sweeping power to shut down everything in her county during Covid. I never voted for her. Yet she had the singular, unaccountable power to destroy businesses and destroy children’s education. Covid-America was almost pure fascism, yet nobody on the left wants to have that conversation. People complain about Elon being “unelected,” while forgetting that Sara Cody shut down an entire region — including private businesses and schools.
Reducing the size and scope of government is not fascism. Using lawfare to go after political enemies is fascism. People are attempting to redefine words such as fascism in order to make their political opponents look scary, but ironically the real fascists are the ones calling everyone else fascist.
In much the same way as communism is the opposite of fascism and nazism. Yet their methods and outcomes are remarkably similar.
However I would say that anarcho-capitalism (i.e. what people like Thiel actually mean by “libertarianism”) is not that dissimilar from fascism.
> Reducing the size and scope of government is not fascism
It’s not. Replacing it with unaccountable mega-corporations controlled by megalomaniacal oligarchs. Well, that’s something else.
Anyway IMHO arguing about semantics i.e. are Musc & co. actually literally “fascists” or only figuratively is counter-productive. We should focus more on their goals and the tools they are using to achieve them.
> Fauci was unelected
> Elon being “unelected,”
That justifies Musk/DOGE in what way exactly? I really don’t get this perspective, “the other was dishonest and/or made major mistakes so we get to lie through our teeth as well”? Fauci was a dishonest liar (or whatever) so we can use extreme falsehoods to justify our actions too? Really?
How more hypocritical can you get? I mean I do get that you might have valid and justifiable views but is dishonest demagoguery really the vehicle you want to use to share them? Why?
> to have that conversation
Perhaps. Doubling down on “fascism” (literal or figurative) does not seem like the best solution?
Just saying the left worships Fauci and hates Musk. The intellectual dishonesty is profound. Nobody on the left was criticizing Fauci and he had a far greater impact on freedom than Musk has. I don’t care that Musk or Fauci weren’t elected, I’m calling out the hypocrisy of complaining about unelected Musk whilst ignoring unelected Fauci.
And words have meaning. If people don’t mean fascism, then they should say what they mean, but fascism is a convenient term because it invokes Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler in ways to imply that Theil is an aspiring Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler. Which is complete nonsense.
What I keep not understanding - from this side of the Atlantic where the debate over COVID restrictions appears to have been a lot less charged - is why 'the right' in the US seem to lose sight of the fact that these restrictions were put in place because of a global pandemic whose ultimate trajectory was unknown at the time. They were not put in place because of some social ideology - though I would accept there was overcaution on the science front. I don't think the left worships Fauci, he just came to represent 'scientism' - as opposed to gargling with bleach - and was blindly defended just as Musk and Thiel have come to represent anarcho-capitalism, whether this is a fair representation of their views.
Are you also complaining about the existence of unelected supreme court justices? Cabinet members? Any political appointees? Civil servants? Cause I don’t see how makes sense otherwise..
Fauci was a civil servant and also an appointed official advisor to the president.
It has been completely standard for presidential advisors to wield significant political power for decades just think of Kissinger, Brzezibski, Scowcroft, Rice, Rove etc. (for better or for worse, my point is just that Fauci wasn’t somehow particularly unique or special).
These are official positions in the Executive Office of the President.
Musk is just some random guy who is seemingly allowed to do whatever he wants. I won’t comment on what impact Fauci’s recommendations might have had. However as far as we can tell he had significantly less direct power than Musk has currently (despite not holding any office, he’s basically a private consultant..)
> If people don’t mean fascism, then they should say what they mean
Perhaps. Being only partially accurate is arguably still much better than continuously and obviously lying all the time and misrepresenting objective facts (like Musk or Trump).
