The oligarchs are partying. They feel they have to.
Not long ago Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for life. Last night Zuckerberg, crushed and beaten, went to the big party in honor of Trump at Peter Thiel's house in DC, wearing a goofy bow tie. The Washington Post reports:
"Billionaires seen around Washington over the weekend included Miriam Adelson, the casino magnate and widow of Sheldon Adelson; Paul Singer, the hedge fund titan who is among the most influential Republican donors in the country; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who spent days party-hopping as part of his attempt to win a place in Mr. Trump’s orbit; and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google who eight years ago around this time was unexpectedly showing up at protests against Mr. Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim countries."
It looks like Trump is following Putin's playbook: threaten and coerce the oligarchs until they pay obeisance and support him - then reward them and make them dependent on him.
Want to do something about this? See my list of Trump resistance organizations:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113485662024271142
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Musk, on the other hand, is all in.
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@johncarlosbaez I have been wondering what Jim Simons would have done should he have been alive and well.
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@jesusmargar - "I have been wondering what Jim Simons would have done should he have been alive and well."
That's a very interesting question. I don't believe in "good" billionaires, but at least he was interestingly different.
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@johncarlosbaez
Yeah, I don't believe in good billionaires either but he was a notorious donor to the democrats and bending backwards to please Trump like Zuckerberg has done would have felt out of character for him (it is feeling out of character for Zuckerberg, it is as if he became a different person).
On a related note, I would pay good money for a tell-all book on the relationship between Mercer and Simons.
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@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez OTOH, at one point Simons has pleased (indirectly, but still) NSA, the biggest user of the computer algebra system Magma, by funding Magma licenses on the US campuses. Ruined careers of some people we know along the way.
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@dimpase @johncarlosbaez
Could you please tell me more? How is the NSA the biggest user of Magma? I had no idea.
And whose career did Simons ruin?
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@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez NSA is the biggest user of Magma, and the biggest employer of mathematicians in USA. Magma has the best availabile tools, in number theory and in group theory, for the kind of cryptography-related maths they need.
William Stein failed to get any grant money for SageMath from Simons, despite - or I suppose because of - being in position to develop open-source alternatives to Magma.
https://wstein.org/grants/
In an article I can't find any more he records his interactions with Simons Foundation. It's an interesting read.
EDIT: @jesusmargar kindly pointed at the link I wasn't finding:
https://sagemath.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-simons-foundation-and-open-source.html
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@dimpase @johncarlosbaez I had no idea of either factim not surprise about Simons prioritising the NSA but I'd never have imagined the NSA would use Magma. This explains a lot of their funding model and code secrecy. If you ever find the article again, please send it to me. I'd love to read it.
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@dimpase @johncarlosbaez in the link you sent he doesn't list Simons as denied or submitted?
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@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez
you can see the denial explained here:
https://sagemath.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-simons-foundation-and-open-source.html
They just won't be bothered to deal with a proposal, should it ever come, so it wasn't written.
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@dimpase @jesusmargar - interesting article! I didn't even know about Magma, nor did I know the problems Sage has been having.
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@johncarlosbaez @dimpase
In a really bold move that I wouldn't contemplate myself under any circumstance, Stein left his (presumably?) cosy position at UW to focus full time on Sage development. This meant aeti g a company (cocalc) to exploit cloud computing on Sage. As an end user I cannot say I've seen a lot of difference to sage itself (maybe I use it for very specific things) beyond removing the windows version which was annoying.
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@johncarlosbaez everything u said is probably true. The only silver lining I see is that trump is 79 and not exactly a health nut. Actually given his love of fast food he’s the opposite of a health nut.
He’s old and incompetent. All we can do is ride out rhese crazy times.
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@Diffgeometer1 - I plan to do a bit more than just ride this out, in part because the new system may outlive Trump. Once the oligarchs get used to having the power Trump grants them, some will be unwilling to let go of it - and they control Twitter, Facebook, the Washington Post, etc.
I will help various Trump resistance organizations, and I'm also getting a job outside the US, so that I can leave forever if things get too bad. Trump's new oligarchy will make things worse world-wide, but I still think it's better to live outside the US.
Here are some Trump resistance organizations:
https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113485662024271142
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@johncarlosbaez @Diffgeometer1 the system where the corporations can play such an outsize role in politics has been set up in the US long ago (started back in Reigan times, no?). Them seizing power was a question of time, there isn't that much new now.
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@dimpase - what's going on is unprecedented: a convicted criminal and fraudster runs for president of the USA and publicly threatens some of the richest people on the planet - then they give in, each publicly contributing millions of dollars each to his campaign. He also chose a cabinet full of billionaires.
You can act blasé and claim it was historically inevitable if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't really matter if it was inevitable - this is a disaster.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-tapped-unprecedented-13-billionaires-top-administration-roles/story?id=116872968
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@johncarlosbaez I don't read it as "they give in". I read it as they are seeing new business opportunities.
I am fresh off the boat here, just short of 3 months, and already noticed how rotten business practices in this country can be. Consumer has 0 power. Some prices are rigged in ridiculous ways...
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@dimpase - Trump is dangling new business opportunities to billionaires if they go along with him. But those who caused trouble for him, like Bezos (who runs the Washington Post, which has been very critical of Trump) and Zuckerberg (who runs Facebook, which used to block Trump), and Sergey Brin (who used to attend anti-Trump protests), he threatened with harrassment or prosecution when he became president. And so they gave in.
So it's a carrot and stick approach, very much like what Putin uses.
Example:
"When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price. “If I become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned. Trump’s grievance with Amazon was centered on Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, a connection the president did nothing to disguise. He raged at what he called the “Amazon Washington Post,” claiming spuriously that it had avoided “internet taxes.” In 2018, Gabriel Sherman reported that Trump was “obsessed” with retribution against Bezos for the Post’s coverage."
When Bezos realized in October 2024 that Trump was likely to win, he prevented the Washington Post from endorsing Harris. Later he contributed $1,000,000 to Trump's inauguration fund.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/washington-post-endorsement-kamala-harris-trump-bezos-amazon-threat.html
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@johncarlosbaez @dimpase
Good analysis. The initial incentive seems to be defensive, even for Musk.
Elon Musk's pivot towards Trump can be traced to China and threats of a trade war. China is the second largest market for Tesla, before the EU. It generates over 20% of the revenue.
Investments: Gigafactory Shanghai is the largest Gigafactory. It has a 750,000 vehicles per year capacity (Tesla produces 1,7 million vehicles per year) and unlike most other foreign companies in China, it's 100% owned by Tesla. Tesla also started to build a massive 10,0000 Megapacks per year battery factory in Shanghai.
Chinese president and TikTok CEO were invited into the inauguration. China sent a VP.
Hypothesis: US does not start trade war with China as long as Musk and Trump are close. There maybe be nominal tariff increase but nothing massive.
ps. The way inauguration fund donations are reported is lacking context. It's not a shakeup that Trump invented.
"The Democratic president's inaugural committee took in $1 million in contributions each from about 10 big companies" https://www.reuters.com/world/us/pfizer-unions-others-donated-618-mln-bidens-inaugural-2021-04-21/
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@johncarlosbaez Well, they had a choice - either go all in for Democrats, spending large, very large sums of money, 100s of millions, speaking forcefully against Trump, conducting targeted social media campaigns (if FB chose to influence the outcome of elections, they have tools, as we learened, tools used by rightwing politicians) with a chance that Trump still wins and damages their businesses by withholding contracts, unleashing regulators on them, etc. But they haven't done so. They prefer money to democracy. See e.g.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/25/media/washington-post-wont-endorse-presidential-candidate/index.html
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@johncarlosbaez
All of them are rotten.
Zuckerberg is more rotten than Trump,
Trump is more rotten than Zuck,
And goes on...
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@everton137 - yes, Bernie Sanders speaks the truth here.
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❌ Removed parts:
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@johncarlosbaez me interesan mucho este tipo de comentarios sobre #trump porque intuyo que en los próximos meses va a ser importante saber ver lo que verdaderamente estará haciendo entre la niebla densa de todos los cebos y carnaza que va a estar arrojando cada dia para sus seguidores más estúpidos y para enloquecer a los dems y a las izquierdas europeas en general.
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@johncarlosbaez
Zuckerberg has been actively seeking political power for over a decade. He is very opportunistic and goes beyond what he has to. He even asked China’s President Xi Jinping to name his unborn child.
Zuckerberg had personal political aspirations before the 2016 elections when he made the Facebook board approve a clause allowing him to serve in government without giving up control of the company. He hired the best political advisors money could buy from Obama's team and traveled around the US. His personal PR team was larger than Facebook's. Money can't buy charisma, it seems.
He invited Dana White to serve in the the Meta board. White is an old friend of Trump and it seems that Zuck's BJJ hobby allowed him to make a personal connection with White as well.
His obsession with Roman Emperor Augustus is not a secret. He even mimics the looks of ancient Romans.
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@maxpool - interesting stuff! Zuckerberg doesn't seem cut out for getting votes. Currently he's under pressure from Trump. So maybe his best strategy is to schmooze and flatter his way into some subservient role.
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@johncarlosbaez Easier to buy the President than to recapitulate Apollo 11.
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@johncarlosbaez
Musk can try to see where Kantenführer role takes him because there are no personal consequences.
He supports AfD in Germany. He called antisemitic conspiracy theory where Jews are planning white genocide with immigrants "absolute truth", he promotes Nazis in X and now does salute.
ADL does not see it.
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@johncarlosbaez Fixing the alt for you: "Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration."
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@clockworkpanda - speakers at Trump's inaugurations just can't resist it: their arms just shoot up.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/07/laura-ingrahams-nazi-salute-examined.html
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