Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.
On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail.
There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.
That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it.
Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
Evil is boring because it is so usual. With the small power I’m given I choose not to recycle, I jaywalk, I say the “R” word in private conversation. If I were a line manager I would play favorites and skip mentorship opportunities if I were tired or busy. As a middle manager I might forget the names of some of my indirect reports and unwittingly pit teams against each other. As my power increases, the fallout of my human actions has larger and more “evil” sounding consequences.
Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.
"estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%." [0]
You do most of humanity a disservice by lumping them in with that cohort that may or may not identify themselves as evil (I have no idea) but are certainly capable of deliberately and with calculation behaving in ways that most of us would label with the "E" word.
Sometimes being judgmental is ok.
It's the transparent subtext. Like, blindingly transparent.
GGP's comment is talking about how CEOs are special or different than we are. That is, that they're not just evil, but that they're evil geniuses. It's just Great Man Theory with a Snidely Whiplash costume.
"Mental Retardation" used to be a common term signed into law and documents but was removed in ~2010. Since then, it has become more of a slur than a description.
Nah, I think it is more common of a cultural thing in individualistic societies. I know plenty of people who are worried about the future outlook of others they have never met. For example what phones and social media is doing to our children, or the state of the economy for young people.
> Religious out groups, ethnic out groups, cultural out groups.
Yeah, unfortunately seen this on all corners of the political spectrum, hidden or not.
Of course this is a process, so especially with younger populations, you are going to meet a lot of people worrying about random issues big and small, because it takes time to process it and learn the coping strategies.
That person is either some level of naive, some level of evil, but certainly not an evil genius.
You should treat people empathetically. You should treat the failure to do so by people as something noteworthy and concerning. The fact we as a society seek to optimize for elevating psychopaths for personal gain is part of the problem we've created for ourselves, and to be quite frank, was probably hijacked as early as the founding of the United States into a really problematic, if value creating cornerstone of society that could probably use a good deal of sunlight being shone on it for disinfection and rot clearing purposes.
Maybe. But I suspect that we tend to view those people that way because they play the I Am A Special Human game in public, especially around those they want to impress / are afraid of, and they really aren't very different from the rest of us at any time. We do the same shit when we're around people we want to impress / are afraid of.
I do agree that the situations such people are in will influence them. They'll have to get used to making decisions that make a big impact on a lot of people's lives, and they'll start thinking that such things are more normal than you and I ever will. I just don't think it changes them all that much.
> Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Okay. But I would do the same, and I'm farther from being a CEO than anyone I know. I can afford to care. If I were thrust into such a position, I would have to squash that caring in order to not cause a great deal of harm to those people I care about. Don't let a doctor operate on his/her own children.
But get me and the CEO sitting in comfy chairs and shooting the shit after work, and I don't think there'll be much of a difference between us. My jokes will be a little funnier, and he'll be more confident and less awkward. But that's just me, not blue CEO blood.
Tell you what. Give me a billion or two dollars and I'll go to a billionaire's hangout. I bet they'll make the same stupid wisecracks, talk about basically the same crap the rest of us do, and get indigestion from eating the too-rich food.
I don't exactly disagree with you. Power changes people. It is tempting and easier to become amoral and accustomed to some pretty messed up stuff. It just doesn't change everything about them. In particular, they have the same dysfunctional thought patterns, they make the same sort of cognitive errors, they struggle with the same shit.
> Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
I can.
Perhaps it's not that I have a higher opinion of the CEO/billionaire class, it's that I have a lower opinion of all of us. Nazis were not uniquely evil. I think that's become even more obviously true of late. (Did I just invoke Godwin's Law? So be it.)
Whould you give a physician making life-or-death decisions and opsi-budget before you walk away? No. Then where do you draw the line until this irresponsible behavior becomes evil? Evil is defined here not by the individuals intentions but by the outcome.
Would you agree with me, that all the decision makers and elites sabotaging renewable energies and sustainability are evil? Keep in mind, they all might have their clumsy excuses.
Of course everybody eventually has to take a shit and has dumb jokes.
You're just ignoring some very real differences in how folks relate because of their circumstances and declaring that those of us who understand those differences are dumb.
You're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Having hung out with them, their concerns really are very different than say, the line cooks and journyman HVAC electricians.
While it's tautologically correct that the billionaires also have to have lunch at some point in the day, the specifics of it are vastly different. But more importantly, the ways in which they make their basic livings are fundamentally different in ways that lead them act differently.
That's the difference that folks are point out, and ignoring it just makes you look ignorant of some basic facts about the world.
Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high. Tbh same is truth for any management job - a lot of competent people prefer calmer life.
Obviously for the very top compensation is bonkers and there's fair share of frauds that ended in the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.
I may not be _that_ competent, but the calmer life is worth sacrificing a fair few dollars for. For each job I've changed, I've gone to a lower paying position, such that I'm currently still on $10k (around 8%) less than I was earning... 5 years ago, two jobs ago, which was probably about the same as the job I left 6 years before that. All previous jobs were worth leaving.
Parenting, maintaining a long-term relationship, playing (two, kinda) sport(s), home-labbing, keeping up with the state of the world, all take time and I enjoy all of them. It allows me to enjoy the work I do too, to not resent it for all the other things I could have been doing.
I'm in a position of privilege to say any of this, but I've also been careful and relatively well planned with my finances in order to reach this point. I'd be kinda f'd if I was out of work for longer than 6 months, but I'm sure I could re-plan and re-organise priorities and spending to minimise the damage (but we'd definitely be f'd if we both were out of work...).
https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/21109798/boeing...
It's fucking gross. If a person can live with it, they don't deserve to.
Most job levels fail downwards, but once you get to a certain level, for whatever reason, nearly everyone fails upwards. I think "director at a FAANG" and "VP at a medium sized company" are about the level where roles start defaulting to failing upward.
He was slowly climbing through the ranks of huge organization over the span of almost 30 years. Given later revelations I certainly wouldn't call it easy or calm - likely even morally challenging sometimes (not admiring anything here - simply any position of power comes with this kind of issues - no matter you're playing for good or bad guys).
Taste of Boeing shareholders for execs is whole other discussion, but I really don't think there's huge crowd of people both willing and capable of filling those shoes.
I don't believe that. The average CEO is going to have perhaps ten direct reports. I'm willing to bet nearly every one of those is capable and up for the job.
In my past I got high enough to barely touch the ceiling of a multi-billion dollar public company. I routinely had 1:1s with directs to the CEO. Not one of them would be willing or able to take that CEO job.
Just the amount of public facing interviews on CNBC would disqualify half and the other half wouldn't want to do it. They were already being paid very well.
CFO or CTO or CISO gets compensated, and they have significant challenges and stress.
But lot of compensation is just magic money out of air that is stock valuations so the stock holder just gives slice of what they think they made. So as long as they financialised system exist so will extreme compensations.
From 'Curb your enthusiasm', I've learnt that that's actually the only thing they ever do.
We kinda know how something works, but if we had to draw it out, we’re stumped. The classic example is drawing a bicycle or explaining how a flush works. (You might be able to draw it, or explain it, but that doesn’t obviate the point)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth
But that's just, like, such a 19th century communistic view on things.
We may all be in the same storm but we're not all in the same boats.
> watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight
Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.
>There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…
Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you.
As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend!
I give it a C+/B- for effort.
on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.
but yes, including this snark seems unnecessary
In general, Napoleon did not think the russians would use scorched earth tactics, meaning burning their own land, villages, food to deny the french army any supplies (and the russian peasants did not agree to this, but they were not asked).
Too bad the capital was Saint Petersburg at that time.
density of population is not equal to land mass, you know
OK, Napoleon is right and he's "conquered" Russia in a month. Are all of those troops being sent home before winter?
they chose scorched earth retreat, and history proved them right.
This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.
My incentive structure is nowhere near to theirs. It took a lot of mental effort and empathy for me to grasp what kind of environment they navigate in life to steal my bike I bought for $200.
So I also lack understanding of being a millionaire or a billionaire but I definitely lack empathy for those people.
Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other.
And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.
>It is clear that the risks of severe punishment for corrupt behavior are slight. A dishonest policeman knows that, even if he is caught and convicted, he will probably receive a court reprimand or, at most, a fairly short jail sentence. Considering the vast sums to be made in some plainclothes squads or in narcotics enforcement, the gains from corruption seem far to outweigh the risks. Both William Phillips and Edward Droge said that they assessed the risk of meaningful punishment and determined that they had little to fear.
I've read enough reports of this nature and experienced enough regulators to be really convinced that where you see apparent stupidity you are also likely to see a table like the one on page 250 showing virtually no prosecutions prior to the Commission.
Neither Drodge nor Phillips were wrong in their calculation. I hate to say, your estimate of a 10% chance of getting caught was way too optimistic. Going by the data, it was much much lower than that.
(My axe to grind is not with the police in particular, reports on police corruption just happen to be the most available and easily understandable).
In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!"
But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!"
And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating.
For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move.
Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows.
It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.
Except.. his ai lab is not popular. It has zero value and people only use it because it's on Twitter and they don't pay for it.
The fact that he had to merge it with a successful unrelated company tells you all you need to know.
Fun fact: I have not a single repository on my GitHub.
I think the position was about creating training data and realistic coding scenarios or something.
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
It looks like he succeeded wildly at that.
When he bought it, right wing publications all over world got excited because twitter was the global / official communications channel for alot of entities and largely considered left leaning. When your plan is to disrupt that bubble and amplify right leaning narratives (he helped trump1 getting elected with it), you better cover your tracks and make that purchase look like an accident.
The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino.
The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did.
The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle.
I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down.
> There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value
I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.
I believe that in every major war of the 1800s, more soldiers died from disease than from combat.
Consider the War of 1812. "fully three-quarters of the war deaths resulted from disease, most commonly typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, smallpox and diarrhea" - https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm
Consider the Crimean War. "death by disease exceeded the sum of "killed in action" or "died of wounds"" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
Consider the US Civil War. "Of the nearly 700,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, nearly two thirds or 467,000 died from sickness and disease." - https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-tra...
Oh, hey - in the Franco-Prussian War more soldiers died of combat than from disease (for the Germans, 28,000 battle deaths vs 12,000 by disease, and for the French, 77,000 battle deaths vs 45,000 by disease) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War , so I was wrong! Though those numbers exclude "162,000 German[ civilian deaths] in a smallpox epidemic spread by French POWs" and "450,000 French civilians dead from war-related famine and disease".
Starvation became a major problem later as supply chains broke down, and exposure became a major problem on the retreat. Though the retreat from Moscow included only about 100,000 people.
Perhaps the Siege of Baghdad, or some other Mongolian campaign? Or Hannibal's route to Italy?
I can't think of a comparable from the 1800s.
> “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said.
Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."
Most haven’t touched Google Calendar in a decade. They can’t call anyone without their assistant typing in the number first.
It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime.
Nobody is infallible.
Most here won't want to hear it, but the average person does not want to lead. They want to be told everything will be alright.
Leading + consequences is difficult and stressful. Heck, just leading your own household is stressful, try doing it for someone else or 1000s.
Mismanaging a company which you didn’t build won’t ruin your livelihood. It might of the employees. It may weight heavy on your conscience but we’ve heard enough of those “I take full responsibility” phrases that we know how heavy is that.
As the article presents, Napoleon is considered one of the great military commanders in history. But he also did some pretty dumb shit leading the many deaths.
I mean, surely it depends on the exact nature of the two things. Also, contrasting good with dumb strikes me as odd. Something can be good and dumb, or bad and smart.
Someone can be smart and still be rotten. Someone can make money and still be a fraud morally.
But here, the myth of him as some singular genius falls apart the moment you look at how much of his reputation is built on other people’s work, lucky timing, and high-stakes gambling dressed up as vision.
The dumb stuff he does, but mostly the dumb stuff he says, does a good job of nullifying the 'smart' stuff.
So you’re romanticising a rich exploitative gambler who wouldn’t hesitate to sneer at 'ordinary' people, like us, as sheep.
he is more of an extremely driven and singularly lucky workaholic asshole with sufficient capacity to cram a lot of technical details (or drugs) into his head, which impressed and motivated technical staff (and investors), who then morphed into this Nazi creep as he got more populare he simply began to ignore negative feedback more and more (and obviously got addicted to the far-right echochamber)
Oh yeah, I also don't run a breeding cult. Or beg notorious sex criminals to party on their private island.
Via Edward Tufte
"Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."
At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs.
When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty.
So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real.
So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit
And the more you leverage, the more you get.
A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize.
Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).
I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
2. Rich/successful people have a bias for big bets because big bets are how they got this far.
3. People get less sharp as they get older but are more confident because of the successes of their youth.
Moscow was neither "ancient capital" nor current capital of Russia in 1812.
I actually went and found the passage that confused me: https://literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-1228.html
Thank you for correcting me! Tolstoy meant it philosophically/culturally, not literally.
Powerful people operate on unchecked egos and surround themselves with sycophants.
The "trick" is that cunning powerful people fail forward, so they keep on doing dumb shit with even more impact.
The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “balance the narrative” by showing the other side.
In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.:
I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen.
I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world.
I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine.
The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s"
There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences.
And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.
Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure?
Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals".
The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.
It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again. The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later.
How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear. But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.
Lie in every press conference? Sure.
Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.
I think you're right, but it isn't as advanced as Joe Biden's was, by the end of his term.
It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do
We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real.
At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her.
And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense.
Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.
- The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024.
- As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans.
- The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war.
- Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked.
- Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks.
- Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan.
The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU.
The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters.
That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.
Your premise is that Orban is an "ally". He was an ally in the culture war distractions (anti-woke).
Hegseth told the EU to take over and pay for the Ukraine war in 2025. $90 billion supersede culture war issues. Vance already made a clown of himself by pivoting from Trump is a "moral disaster" and an "idiot" in 2016 to running with him in 2024.
Your post is a great example of sinking a post without any coherent arguments. It is impossible to discern what you even mean by the second "Iran" arguments. There are no premises and there is no logic.
Twitter valuation aside, there must be some intangible benefits to the purchase. Lots of influential people use Twitter, he has amplified his reach, and the purchase seems to have moved the overton window in favor of his agenda.
SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it.
xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either.
Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions. It found a niche with obnoxious right-wing assholes instead of obnoxious left-wing assholes. Twitter does seem to be less excited about getting people fired for wrongthink than before which is a societal improvement. It did succeed in buying Musk influence at the highest levels, but he threw it away. Mixed success.
I know Musk gets a lot of hatred on here for his behavior and beliefs, including from myself, but that doesn't imply that his businesses are all scams. Hugo Boss was a Nazi too and his business is doing fine.
He has given up on that, he has abandoned the Mars goal, and he is sacrificing the company to the whims of the public markets, just so he can have a payday.
xAi raised $45 billion and Grok loses benchmarks to Chinese(GPU sanctioned) open weight models.
I'm overall positive about the Twitter acquisition, I mean it was terrible financially, and Elon has made a lot of unforced errors in it's management, but yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.
You don't seriously believe that was because of the Twitter purchase and not due to a coinciding social shift, do you?
Social media is an amplifier: most of the users are passive consumers or retweeters, and only a smaller minority drive the conversation.
Traditional media also loves to get stories from social media in order to "get the pulse" of society and because journalists are lazy and desperate for narratives. A relatively small social movement can therefore use social media to catapult its message onto traditional media and thus onto society at large.
By isolating themselves from the amplifier, the identity politics ultras were no longer able to push their political message (and witch hunts) to such a large audience, the message stayed confined in spaces that were basically invisible to the average person, and the message faded away.
Yes it wasn't just because of the Musk purchase, but it was definitely a factor.
I guess congrats you bought Twitter and then spent half a billion dollars just so you could temporarily dismantle the regulators who were preventing you from committing open fraud?
Or, you know, if you did manage to permanently dismantle the regulators it means you’ve destroyed your primary source of revenue.
Nothing in my lifetime of experience in the US so far, or in the demeanor of the "opposition" party suggests he'll face real consequences for this.
If the best you can do with $44B is break even after 4 years that is a piss poor investment.