Remember: it's not just trump and musk to blame, the entire Republican party is responsible for supporting all this.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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If you want to do a bit of Both-Sides-ism, big chunks of the Dem Establishment have also been very friendly with Elon. FFS, he didn't have any trouble landing contracts under the Biden Admin. And he led Gavin Newsom around by the nose with his Hyperloop promises for nearly a decade.
But I'd say the more pervasive concern is how heavily leveraged Elon's businesses are with respect to his Saudi creditors. And that's the real snarl at the end of this problem. The US has made the Saudi Royal Family such an enormous nexus of dollar inputs and outputs that Aramco might as well be a second Federal Reserve.
Our addiction to fossil fuels is driving significant chunks of our bad policy, both domestic and foreign. And while you can wax poetic about Americans "not voting for this", there's a deep socio-economic bond between American industry and cheap oil. Americans "vote" for the Saudis with their labor hours and their consumer spending on a daily basis.
We don't have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale. Without any new coordination mechanism, getting off oil will have to be a top-down change.
Big oil has convinced us to cut down our own "carbon footprint" to encourage purity testing and exhaustion instead of collective action. They know it's an externalities problem... do we?
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The American people too, don't forget about them
For the second time
Never let Mitch McConnell off the hook, despite how he now says he doesn't like what Trump his doing. Since this all started, he has done nothing but enable him and has done as much as anyone to put the guy in power. Same to be said of Graham. When this all goes terribly wrong(er), none of us should, for a second, allow them a pass on any future backtracking or apologizing that they might do.
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Nobody voted for Musk, but they did vote for Trump. They voted for a GOP controlled senate and a GOP controlled house. They voted for this administration despite the Project 2025 roadmap making it clear what Trump and the GOP were going to do if they were put in charge. And now, they're doing it.
In the past they haven't protested as more and more power has been given to presidents, both D and R. So now Trump is using all that power and delegating it to someone of his choosing. This isn't a coup. A coup is an unlawful seizure of power. The power was handed to Trump and the GOP lawfully, and Trump is just delegating.
This is a real Leopards Eating People's Faces moment for the USA. This is the result of decades of the American people expressing their will, or at least not objecting strenuously. This is the country that voted Carter out of office and enthusiastically voted in Reagan. It's a country where most of the democrats celebrate Bill Clinton, despite his policies of deregulation and deindustrialization. Compare that to Germany where the mere fact that the slightly right-wing government was willing to work with two far-right AfD members has been enough to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the street, protesting.
yeah but also people voted for the guy after Elon said he's officially buying him and jumped around like a reanimated troglodyte to celebrate his purchase.
anyone with a second brain cell could tell that he would be in charge even if he weren't doing it so publicly.
It’s amazing that destruction of his reputation is going to go down in history as surpassing his destruction of the Twitter brand.
He's buying the means to determine how history books are written.
History books are written at a state level actually, you can thank the lost-causers for that one.
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You have to have a good reputation in order for it to go down. He was always perceived as capitalist scum
No, I remember the time when people went all "he's like the next Steve Jobs!" and meant that in a good way
I'll be the first to admit I liked Elon when I first heard about him. I was uninformed and now that I've been informed I can't tolerate him or his egregious actions done on my/our country. FUCK ELON AND FUCK TRUMP 🖕🖕🖕🖕
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All he needed to do was stay quiet and get rich via multiple companies, maybe keep pushing electrification and renewables, and most of society would have kept considering him the real life Tony Stark pushing humanity forward.
The US especially has no trouble idolizing flawed people as long as they have lots of money and/or high-visibility accomplishments.
If Musk does have one exceptional skill on top of his good fortune in life, it seems to be finding promising companies and taking credit for their shit. And it totally would have worked for him. But no, being a mustache-twirling nazi-saluting villain gets you more attention.
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He was always perceived as capitalist scum
He was regularly lauded as "One Of The Good Ones" as recently as Trump's first term. The Electric Car Guy. The Hyperloop Will Be The Best Form of Rail Transit Guy. The We're Going to Mars Guy.
He's a carnival barker, but its absurd to say he only gulled the conservatives. Liberals have been falling for this man's schtick for decades. Right up there with Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Soros as an obscenely wealthy gremlin we were all supposed to trust.
If Elon Musk had suddenly died days before he accused that diver who saved those children from that cave of being a pedophile, he would've been remembered as the real life Tony Stark that never got the chance to bring us to a new golden age. But now he's viewed as a shitty James Bond villain.
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His reputation was and is being a scammer who got lucky.
I think the bigger historical footnote will be that he was allowed anywhere near a government in the first place
The government was designed for guys like him.
I'm not in the US, but the news coming out almost daily since Trump took office has been pretty worrying to me. I encourage everyone to watch and spread this video: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America. I feel like a tinfoil hatter but, what's laid out in the video is very convincing after just a couple weeks into Trump's presidency.
Yeah, watching this unfold makes me wonder just how useless things like a constitution and laws and due process really are in every other country. Because apparently none of those things actually matter and some rich asshole that wasn't elected can seize power tomorrow if they want. While no one does anything about it. Makes it all seem like a big joke.
It's the result of over 50 years of chipping away at all the anti corruption laws. Trump wouldn't have been able to do this with the laws put in after Nixon, but there's been a concerted effort to overturn all of it through the Supreme Court.
You should listen to the Masterplan podcast that lays it all out, if you haven't yet.
I disagree there, they are still breaking laws, like what Musk is doing at Treasury, but there is no one enforcing the law. No one (Founding Fathers) accounted for Congress and the Supreme Court being so captured that they would do nothing to threats like this.
That is a huge difference from Nixon. His own party turned against him quickly when the evidence showed the illegal actions were connected to him directly. The modem Republicans never will do that to Trump or things he commands.
Yeah it's crazy to me, over 300 million citizens in the US alone, but just a handful of billionaires is all it takes to destroy democracy and the government. It honestly feels like violence will be the only option to get at these billionaires as it seems there is no longer any way to cripple them financially. They are completely fearless in their meddling.
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Yeah as a non-American, it certainly does look from the outside as if a ketamine-fuelled Nazi is going around just taking over government offices largely unopposed.
And letting a thin-skinned, Ketamine-fueled, video-game cheating, Nazi apologist billionaire take over the machinery of the United States is not something that anyone voted for.
mother jones throwin hands.
Ketamine-fueled
That's the important part. We have an adderall addict and a ketamine addict running our government.
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I hate how ketamine is always catching strays over this idiot's behavior...
Not enough IMO, he's no apologist after that Nazi Salute he did
the line between nazi apologist and nazi is there isn't one.
The best part is every one of those adjectives is also a hyperlink.
hmmm this was clear as day before the election... so a more accurate headline would be "the majority of people who voted, voted for Elon... the majority of the rest couldn't be bothered"
Putting that aside, I am holding predictions until the Feb 05 marches and I am willing to give the dormant populous of the USA a couple more weeks to go on a general strike and stop this madness... but it increasingly seems the people in the USA are now too numb, too busy, too stressed out, too ignorant to realize they are sheep being taken to the slaughter house
That's just it. Most people are too numb, busy, stressed or ignorant. I reckon it's by design
He didn't seize control. He was given it by the President. I figured the article would cover the nuance the headline missed, but it didn't.
And then I see others here making the same point and getting downvoted.
The problem is Trump and the very best people he is once again bringing in.
He purchased it from the president.
Deport Elon Musk
This isn't an deportation level crime. This is "hang for treason" crime.
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Elon Musk should be deported to ADX Florence or Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp
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Yeah, most of us didn't vote for Trump either. We need to reform the elections to establish an actual democracy
But they knew the close relationship, the money spent, the egos of all involved. How did they NOT see this coming? I hate to say it but it was inevitable that something bad was going to happpen, maybe not as fast as it has, but it was clear a vote for Trump was a vote for Musk.
I think less people actually knew than we think. Sure they saw Musk on stage with their mango mussolini, but they couldn't put two and two together.
Yeah, it’s a bummer but I think many comments are giving the American public too much credit.
The combined effects of “decent white Christians simply vote Republican” and “super rich white man good, two super rich white men better” probably count for a majority of trump’s votes.
Yes they did. Musk and Trump literally campaigned together, Musk was on-stage next to Trump at multiple rallies where he spoke too. It was clearly reported during the election that Musk was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get Trump elected.
Here's an article from September (before the election) with Trump saying he'd create DOGE and have Musk lead it. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-elon-musk-government-efficiency-commission-e831ed5dc2f6a56999e1a70bb0a4eaeb
Anyone who voted from trump and didn't expect this is either lying, or intentionally being ignorant.
You and I are paying attention at a level of detail that almost no Americans do. It would merely take an ordinary level of ignorance to be unaware of this.
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To be fair Elon was announced at the RNC aka the Break The Grindr party. Everyone was bummed that JD Vance had an Indian wife and he was barely a 6 (tho the talking heads kept shameless commenting how hott he was). All the pussy dried up and then Trumps crew started showing Musk off. He’s been a lovely item ever since. Guy is swept up in what little glamour there is for those swamp monsters. Now his tanks are tanking. The kardassians curse strikes again.
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