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Comment by moduspol | Hacker News Reader

More interesting to me is that this is the third tech billionaire to take a decidedly different stance than he did previously. Musk is quite active, but even Zuckerberg took a much more neutral stance for 2024.

Honestly I'm more surprised that Bezos even bothered. Does he really think the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board is so significant that it's worth intervening? That seems implausible.

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Given he was the one who made the call, what other conclusion would you draw?

Well I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests.

On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.

No need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple.

> In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.

Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.

All the more reason to endorse his opponent!

It's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.

Like what?

You know all the stuff Musk has been doing with Twitter since buying it? That.

Or, just to throw out a few ideas: insist on more conservative people on their editorial board. Insist on endorsing Trump (rather than simply not endorsing). Insist that more pro-Trump stories be covered, and fewer pro-Harris ones.

Or, if all of that is too far, just sell the paper and get out of the way.

Any of these makes more sense than simply waiting until the last minute to enforce the withholding of an endorsement if the genuine goal is to avoid being targeted in the event Trump wins.

I think this is a last-minute hedge: a lot of people did not expect the Republicans to shield Trump from prosecution as effectively as they did (including the SCOTUS majority being willing to invent an unprecedented reversal of U.S. legal precedent) and weren’t expecting him to actually win again.

Now there’s a roughly even chance that he’ll do so and that’s causing some hard calculations: if Harris wins, they won’t face retribution because Democratic administrations don’t do that. If Trump wins, Bezos and Soon-Shiong can go to him saying that they got rid of the liberals at their companies in a very public display of support.

Trump is an authoritarian at heart: he doesn’t care if you like him, he cares if you support his power. Vance used to be a harsh critic but got the VP position by publicly recanting and displaying obeisance. It really looks like they’re thinking along the same lines: either it won’t matter or he’ll be satisfied with their acceptance of his power since he really wants to attack other people who aren’t fellow rich men.

Jumping up and down like a lunatic.

I would say Zuck went as far right as reasonably possible, and his timing was good. Kind of cowardly, but also impressive foresight on his part.

That's absurd. His political donations are very blue.

It's almost as if coming out in favor of taxing unrealized capital gains right before the election wasn't the stroke of political brilliance that Harris thought it was.

"Hmm, I'm facing a close election. Hey, wait, I know! I'll make enemies of people who buy ink by the trainload and bandwidth by the petabyte-second."

I really wish somebody could have talked her out of that idea, or at least convinced her to wait another couple of months before putting it on the table. It was an incredible faux pas, maybe a history-changing one, whose consequences were trivially foreseeable.

Bezos cares because his businesses have billions of dollars in revenue from the federal government. Trump has already claimed to personally review those contracts and was reported as trying to kill the $10B JEDI contract:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/26/trump-mattis-screw-amazo...

By all accounts, he’s prepared to be more authoritarian and less bound by the law if re-elected and he’s already threatening journalists with rape and talking about yanking broadcast licenses for channels which don’t kowtow to him.

Probably the opposite. He doesn’t think it’s significant, but the risk of petty retaliation IS significant.

of course it is. endorsements by major entities such as major newspapers… endorsements by celebrities and all these other points form the constellation of how a candidate is perceived. a huge chunk of people will not just vote blindly for whoever seems to be more broadly supported but actually deeply like whoever is put in front of them. and they will also believe it if a bunch of newspapers release the same story at the same time… even if there is no evidence offered to support the main assertion. or even if its obviously false. creation of the appearance of a consensus is an extremely powerful tool

All signs point to this being an extraordinarily tight election. 5 or 10k votes in the right state could swing the whole thing.

I'd be incredibly surprised if there are even 100 people who:

- Don't know who The Washington Post editorial board would endorse

- Would change who they are voting for based on this lack of endorsement

But I could be wrong.

We’re in. Situation wheee one of the candidates routinely criticizes us and praises our enemies, and still pulls at about 42%. Rationality is not in evidence.

If this race is right, then whatever I thought about people was wrong.

Then again, I always wonder what the hell actually went through peoples minds in Nazi Germany.

The reason is pretty damned simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." The Democrats used to understand this but now they don't and that's why they are struggling.

Looks like you’re getting a firsthand view now.

All elections ultiamtely come down to undecided swing voters. It's silly every-time, but you need to vastly lower your expectations for that kind of crowd. Yes, a cheesy dance number endorsing a candidate can be all that is needed to swing an entire election.

This is an issue with first past the post, but that's a much larger thing to tackle.

Thats because of the calculation:

- Endorse Harris and Trump wins, Trump will seek revenge on Bezos and Amazon (he tried this in the first term)

- Endorse Trump and Harris wins, Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official

This is capitulation to the perceived threats of a Trump presidency and is very bad.

> Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official

California has even blocked SpaceX because they don't like the politics of Musk (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...) so I would say is risky to expect any of the two (or its followers) not seeking revenge.

The California Coastal Commission is rather (in)famously powerful. This is kind of a special case.

Presumably you have to draw a line somewhere, though? There is not liking someone's political views and there is not liking someone's attempts to undermine the whole country by (possibly purposefully) selling it to Russia etc.

This sounds like "obeying in advance", a phenomenon that Timothy Snyder wrote about in On Tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th Century.

https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

Helpfully, the relevant quote I was thinking of is directly on the books website:

> Do not obey in advance.

> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

(The quote on the website goes on with several pages of examples.)

Musk is a true believer, but Zuck and Bezos probably fear retribution from Trump if he wins and they endorsed Harris.

Isn’t this like Russia’s oligarchy?

I’m not enamored with Democrats, but Trump doesn’t share Constitutional values and I’m very much for independent journalism.

This is bad.

If this is true, it’s beyond bad. It may be the beginning of the end of the free world.

This is such a weird take. People can't conceptualize a world of many discrete important actions and reduce it to one event. It's a failure of imagination.

This is an ironic take.

It’s a distinct lack of imagination and historical knowledge that stops at one event, and refuses to ponder the long term consequences.

Zuckerberg has never been not right wing though.

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