And tangential to that kind of behavior, Apple recently was paying a weekly 5 million Euro fine in the Netherlands rather than comply with an order from regulators.
When the consequences of a law violation are trivial, it’s no longer serving as a deterrent. So I think we need to find a way to deter everyone, kind of on a sliding scale or something?
Likewise, there needs to be real consequences for corporations which take advantage of paying fines as a cost of doing business. One violation can be a mistake, but it sure as heck better give you a solid reason to never do it again.
This should have been obvious by now. Cash rules everything around me.
Serious question: Are you in the US? Any Western European country?
There's a tendency for people in corrupt areas to assume the whole world works like that.
We all know monarchy is tyranny, but in that category there is quite a difference between a cult ruler with a bag of shrunken heads who is getting his orders from God vs. a stable, well managed, system in which the institutions basically function, including to some extent for the poor, and yet in which which the ruling class still basically dominate and exploit everything and everyone in order to enrich themselves and maintain their power.
The latter is a social malady, the former is completely chaotic. I think people are concerned that the US is resembling the latter less and less, and resembling the former more and more.
There’s a tendency for sheltered and privileged people to be aloof to the corruption all around them.
In high school, everyone knew exactly who to call if you got a DUI. 10k was the going price to get a certain lawyer who gets the case in front of a certain judge and however that worked, the charge was dropped to a moving violation. Kinda sick how the system works.
Yep, it's kinda sick but also kinda true.
The United States of America
> There's a tendency for people in corrupt areas to assume the whole world works like that.
Exactly. I live in a corrupt area and start with the assumption that most of the world is corrupt.
They will set their lawyers at it and come to a settlement. The super rich know better than to be at each others throats, that sort of behavior is for the poor...
I mean, if a street sweeper thinks he is King, you might convince or compel him to get treated when he comes in to contact with the system. But when the King thinks he is King... that is a much more difficult problem to deal with.. usually the kingdom joins in with his madness so as to keep him happy.
I'm overall a fan of Musk, but this is too far. There simply must be rule of law for the United States to remain a dynamic society.
Does he? I don't remember any resolution to that, but I thought they "temporarily" suspended it pending an investigation and then never completed the investigation.
that's the theme of this entire thread : rich person has a slap on the wrist announced publicly but then the punishment is never successfully fulfilled.
MS antitrust style.
I might be wrong that they suspended his clearance or that the investigation wasn't done, but that would be a different point tag. What you're making.
And doing it publicly...that pretty well nerfs the old "give us the secrets, or we'll reveal the fact that you smoked week" spy gambit.
Martha Stewart went to jail for 5 months for a meager case of insider trading. Musk manipulated Tesla stock in front of, literally, the whole world and got a slap in the wrist (i.e. a fine that comes to about 0.1% of its net worth). A citizen would to go jail forever for a similar thing.
I believe she went to prison for lying to investigators. The insider trading they couldn’t make stick. So in the end, maybe the cases aren’t so different?
I have no idea what will happen here. Musk is clearly in the wrong both legally and ethically, but I suspect he will weasel out of resbonsibility for the damage he's caused. That alone will be bad enough, but the much larger risk is that it opens the floodgates for slightly less powerful scumbags to flout the law.
US law and democracy are shakier than I've seen in my lifetime, and Musk is actively taking a sledgehammer to a piece of that foundation for his own greed and whim.
The Delaware court isn't some magical place run by elves. It's a court in the US. You know what's a lot cheaper than $34 billion dollars, or heck even $1 billion dollars? $200k for 3-4 judges.
The Supreme Court just changed the law of the land based on a right-wing political campaign. You think a billionare, let alone the richest billionare is going to be subject to any serious consequences? It's absurd to even entertain this.
You know who has the authority to overturn that decision? Our democratically elected legislature.
> executive position who has preposterously lost the popular vote
What does the popular vote have to do with the presidency? Neither party strategizes to win the popular vote because the popular vote is meaningless. Therefore, the outcome if the popular vote has no value in determining who would win a popular vote should that be the metric by which the president is elected.
This stuff goes both ways. Yes Elon has a lot of money. But twitter is worth XX billions of dollars.
Twitter is willing to spend a lot of those billions of dollars, in order to get Elon to pay the agreed upon price that he committed too.
This is not the case of a nobody vs a billionaire. This is instead multiple billion dollar entities fighting each other.