Elon bought Twitter for this exact purpose: voter disenfranchisement
"He's so stupid, hurr durr. He paid 40 billion and tanked the brand".
Yeah and he MADE 100+ billion this election by downright lying through his teeth.
Don't underestimate these people. They are intelligent (and often play a role to seem stupid, it's a deliberate tactic) and malicious to the core.
I mean, he was already the world's richest man, but evidently "the most of all" is not enough. They have 99% and we have 1%? They want to kill us for that last % because nothing will ever be enough for them.
Of course, they'll let the killing do itself - why bother with that if a few well placed lies are enough to keep the population permanently divided along the axis of race, age, gender, sexuality... you name it, as long as it isn't class.
Because this IS a class war and our side has been consistently losing for over three full decades.
Musk overpaid a ton for twitter because he made a stupid joke, tried to back out, and got forced to follow through in the courts. It is of course possible that these were Machiavellian machinations with benefits a rube like me could not possibly understand. Or, and hear me out here, he is just a buffoon who fell ass backwards into something that ended up working for him.
Either way, he is a serious danger. But the thing that makes him really dangerous is his wealth, a thing he did little to nothing to deserve.
Because this IS a class war and our side has been consistently losing for over three full decades.
100%. I'll just point out that the Democratic party leadership is very wealthy and their class interests align with someone like Musk. Maybe one reason we're losing is because the people we choose to fight don't want to win.
"hey look. Your life is hard. You can hardly pay your bills. You're struggling to make ends meet.. I hear you, I really do. Do you know whose fault is that, though? It's those damn immigrants and black and brown people. They're taking your jobs. They're taking your tax money being on welfare. Let's go fuck them up. Vote for me. Btw, billionaires are good people and they help our economy so we are going to cut their taxes even more, but trust me bro, it's the immigrants and black and brown people".
Republicans and especially Donald Trump
"Hey life is good. Everything is fine. We love everyone, you know. We are not going to change the status quo, we will just do some tweaks around the edges. Oh you can't pay your rent? Oh that's just a small annoyance, you know, but hey look at us. We are not the other person, ha! We love black and brown people. We love immigrants. We love trans people, too, you can't not like us now, right? Now, fall in line and vote for me, I'm speaking, ok? Also, don't mind me taking millions from the billionaires who are the actual cause of all of your life struggles."
Kamala Harris and many Democrats ran their 2024 campaigns with adopted Republican policies of shutting down the border, blaming immigrants for crime, and taking a hard stance on immigration.
We love trans people, too.
The Democrats, as a party, have been talking out of both sides of their mouth on trans issues. There is no consistent message, some Democrats campaigned on "keeping boys out of girls sports", a stance that literally denies the existence of trans people.
I don't know, man. I am just fucking pissed that 71 million Americans though a convicted felon is fit to be president. This will never make sense to me.
Add to that not doing shit about an ongoing genocide in Gaza. People warned the Dems that they won't vote for them if they didn't do something about the damn genocide. There was a huge "uncommitted" movement about it. They just got too cocky and over confident. They didn't think that movement was serious? Not sure, but they fucked up big time and I'm fucking pissed.
And if you include the $56 billion or so that he managed to convince Tesla shareholders to give him, it completely offsets the $44 billion he paid for Twitter, getting him ahead by "only" $12 billion dollars.
I can't imagine failing so hard with the Twitter purchase and still coming out ahead somehow, with that much.
When you enter the stratum of society that Musk is part of, you literally can't fail. There's a reason we keep talking about certain people continually "failing upwards". Once you hit a billion, you've won capitalism and the only way to lose it is to go straight against the people in power (see China) or be an incredibly dumbfuck the likes of which is rarely seen (see Kanye). It's literally impossible to lose at that point; you have so much money that simply having it generates more than what could be earned by working in any field, anywhere, globe-wide.
Billionaires should not exist at all, but that's another discussion.
I can't conceive of what I could do with "only" $12 billion from that sequence of events alone, and I'd be lucky to even hit $1 million (wages and retirement) total while alive over an entire lifetime of work.