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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

I've been beating this drum for a while and I'm going to keep doing it. If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor. I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029, but any assumption that the current federal government will treat you fairly without taking their side in political battles is a grave strategic error.

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> I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029

That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.

This.

I mean billionaires don't even go to prison for engaging in pedophilia. Which is just about the worst crime you can commit. If anyone thinks liberals or conservatives will put them in prison for bribery, they're being a little naive.

This nation is owned by the billionaires. In all honesty, they don't even need to be in alignment with the government. There's next to nothing the government can do to rein in giant banks. If anything, the government has to be certain to make sure the banks are appeased.

You could say "moneyed interests". There is a distinction - there are both huge companies and billionaires, and a lot of the companies are owned in part or in whole by the billionaires. But together, they increasingly determine how our political system is run.

It all seems to entrenched and at the same time escalating, it feels like it's inevitable it'll all fall apart. I'm surprised we're not seeing more moneyed interests colluding to establish equilibrium which is sustainable.

Well, early supporters of fascism do tend to end up in prison, because fascism needs purges. So in a monkey paw way, I wouldn't bet against the current crop of CEOs falling from graces very hard.

That's not quite how facism works.

There are the purges. But it's normally not the corporate or moneyed puppetmasters getting purged, rather it's the political allies of the fascists that get purged. Military and law enforcement leaders who start off as allies have a particularly dismal survival record in these kinds of governments, since they don't have even the ephemeral protection of democratic legitimacy.

The companies that you could accuse of outright bribery are Meta, Twitter, Paramount, and Disney who all gave money that benefited the President directly.

Cook kissing ass and giving the President a meaningless trinket, doesn’t quite arise to that level.

I've seen values estimated at between $150,000 to $200,000 for that trinket. That's actually a pretty solid bribe for most politicians and that's just what's been visible to the public.

For comparison, in AZ we had legislators caught in a sting operation that were selling individual votes for gambling legislation for between $660 to $60,000 in the 1990s.

We should not normalize this. That was a outright bribe even if it wasn't as big as what others gave. I wouldn't get off the hook for murder just because I argued that Ted Bundy killed waaaaaaay more people than me.

Too late “we” as a country already have. This country left caring about ethics and morals in 2016.

The fancy glass engraved with Trump's name is a meaningless trinket, but the solid 24karat gold base is about as obvious a tribute payment as you can imagine.

It may take longer, but they will, eventually. Maybe not Tim Cook.

Or vote in 2028

Trying to give something more power because you think it likes power is generally considered risky

https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1849951974944313590?lang...

The exception, of course, is if you expect to co-benefit - Intel sent their CEO to kiss the ring and now they might be getting free investment money out of the deal. But it's definitely a risky strategy.

That is not an exception, it's exactly what the Tweet is talking about

It's not. The Intel CEO wasn't obeying "in advance", he went to the White House after Trump announced (with absolutely no explanation) that Intel must fire him.

It was literally less than 48 hours where the president went from fully negative to fully positive on the intel ceo. I don’t think the ring is all the ceo kissed. That’s the president’s plan for every ceo.

I doubt anyone will care about this in four years. Society grows accustomed to daily life, as with the Vichy. The job market will be in tatters, similar to what South Africa has now with 40% unemployment. Every time a homeless person steals copper wire from a street lamp in LA, they make $50 from illegal recyclers and it costs taxpayers $10k to fix. $20 million per year, $100 million since 2020. 2029 there will be crime drones swarming LA recording crimes and seeking overly tanned people in real time on YouTube. LA took out a $1 billion loan this year to keep the lights on, and now Denver wants to do the same with zero economic prospects, which is a weird sales pitch.

> in 2029

Nope, King of America is a lifetime position.

Hamberders don't obey even a king's demands, they are a fickle master

>If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor.

This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.

> "unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029"

I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Getty... ("Donald Trump speaks behind an engraved glass disc gifted to him by Apple CEO Tim Cook during an event in the Oval Office of the White House")

When the reckoning finally arrives the aristocrats will forgive themselves in the spirit of reconciliation and moving on, just like they did after WWII. Plenty of American companies like IBM made tons of money helping the Nazis and then after Berlin fell it turned out they were actually always on the side of freedom and there is absolutely no need to expand the war crimes trials to include collaborators.

Billionaires (in good graces) won't go to prison for the foreseeable future, but small fish will. Furthermore, the absurdly rich will exploit their newly-expanded corruption via patronage options with executive, legislative, and judicial branches to harm their competitors and enemies. This is why Tim Cook gave 47 a gold award. The system is coming apart at the seams for ordinary people and they're losing faith in the legitimacy of the legal and economic systems. This is how communism and civil wars start.

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