Ian Bremmer on How Putin, Xi, and Elon Musk Are Alike | Hacker News Reader

Ian Bremmer on How Putin, Xi, and Elon Musk Are Alike

nymag.com

The starlink geofence was sold as $400m required (or some $amount) and then he reversed. I think there was probably a lot more underneath it, 420 aside something was said or done which motivated Musk to react, and then some other things motivated him to unreact.

Arguably, that makes him less like a country. Well, less like a powerful country. Muskland must be caught between some heinous trade wars.

sounds like musk and / or starlink stranded ukrainian soldiers in russian-held territory and got a bunch of them killed:

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  Ian Bremmer: One thing that was really problematic is, after all of this good work that was being done with Starlink, suddenly you had Ukrainians in the front lines, in the occupied territories, trying to take their land back, and suddenly Starlink didn’t work. The Ukrainians didn’t know why. They thought it was a tech problem. The Americans didn’t know why. Ukrainians were getting killed. They had to pull back from some of those territories. And it’s because, after the Russians annexed them, Elon decided that Starlink needed to be —

  Kara Swisher: Geofenced.

  Ian Bremmer: Yeah, it needed to be geofenced, and that never should have been a decision that was being made. I mean, you can’t be in a situation where the only countries that are recognizing Russian annexation are the North Koreans, the Syrians, and Elon. Like, that’s not okay. Right.

  I mean, Elon’s business model — on the one hand, you’ve got SpaceX, which is a U.S. national champion that gets contracts from the Pentagon and NASA. You’ve got Tesla, which finds China to be its most important future market, does AI development there, needs access to that data, all the rest. And then you’ve got Twitter, which is “free speech for everyone,” at least in the countries that we have some influence over. Like, it’s pretty clear that, geopolitically, those things do not work together.
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in a different interview, bremmer went on about the national security risks posed by our oligarchs:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-titans-risk-democracy-ia...

  "The fact is that those people, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, also at the same time have literally no interest or conception in their role as stewards for civil society and American democracy," Bremmer said.

Bremmer worried about the same thing that Adam Smith did so long ago - the often-non-existent 'invisible hand' (home bias) by the 'masters of mankind' (our oligarchs) when doing their business.

i've read Bremmer's stuff over the years, but can't take it -- he always attributes benign intentions to America. in the case of these oligarchs he mentions, he says, effectively, "they don't _want_ dictatorship -- it just so happens that most of what they do is helping to achieve that end."

i have a less generous view of our owners.

p.s. Bremmer called Elon a country. :-D funny. but also, not.

You've quoted the paragraphs I read and responded to.

is that good or bad?

Well.. good I guess, it means the context is clear and what I said , my interpretation aligned with the interview?

good? ha. i'm confused.

anyways, post is FLAGGED.

i guess ian bremmer has been censored.

...and/or kara swisher?

Enough this political bandwagon. Last 5 year we read several articles about zuckerberg and now musk. I know some people have to write for living. But not like that. People love to shoot their words where they told to shoot easily. Show some intellectual effort.

The age of the tech bro man-child can't end too soon. Women dominate the university graduating cohort. Y'all are about to wake up in a New World.

I think Putin, Xi, and Ian Bremmer are alike.

All three seem to be very talented at profiting from their own fearmongering.

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