It was always an unlikely coalition but it seems to be over. Trump is effectively selling national socialism of a sort and the tech right wants global capitalism, with some protections against China at home but nothing beyond that.
That means the tech industry has no political friends tho. At all. So what now?
>>3259 In general I would agree, but I feel like saying DJT is in the epstein files is something you can’t really come back from. In any case DJT shouldn’t let him back until he kicks the ketamine habit and stops being such a fucking redditor.
No one liked Elon Musk except indians and redditors. It was an alliance of convenience after he bought X. The first cracks started to show with the H1B debacle and frankly I hope the right stops pretending to like him. He should be begging and kneeling to Leader Trump.
It seems to me like a conflict between industry logic and political logic. Trump is fundamentally a political animal, and he understands his role as building and exercising power through a series of deals with coalitions of the moment. I can't imagine that he genuinely cares about the deficit or efficient government or whatever. Maybe he has some sort of deep attachment to low tax rates, but even there, I'm not sure his heart is really in it. Trump, in *The Art of the Deal* and now, is always focused on leverage for his deals. There's always some sort of brinksmanship, some kind of use of instability to his own advantage going on. This is just how Trump works.
In contrast, it seems to me that Elon is pathologically attached to a greater technological ideological vision. He's not exactly a grounded figure, but he does have an attachment to the facts on the ground that Trump does not, simply because he is situating his work within a wider teleological frame of fixing the American polity and, more importantly, getting to Mars. Whereas Trump operates in this kind of nebulous Berkeleyan realm of ideas of American greatness and power and winning, I think that Elon and, a fortiori, the tech right coalition, want to improve the concrete operations of the American government. You can see this contrast in tariffs, in drug pricing policy, in obviously the tax cuts and general fiscal policy, and really in most of the 2025 agenda. The Tech/Technocrat Right is comfortable with extreme action and with a move-fast-break-things mentality, and even has a sort of political-aesthetic affinity for the fascistic element of the Trump coalition. However, they are not fundamentally concerned with the same hazy ideal of American greatness and Bannonite social prosperity that Trump is. More importantly, they do not see the disruption of Trump policies as being worth the possible future payoffs. Yarvin's essays on this topic are illustrative of a point that I wholeheartedly agree with: imposing significant costs upon the country without a clear benefit or a concrete plan is just not a sustainable philosophy of government. While the private sector obviously likes the idea of Republicans finally bringing a certain degree of competence into the USG, they require a lack of instability in order to actually carry out business plans. Brinksmanship that signals the possibility of not even paying off the American national debt is, from an economic perspective, an enormously costly move that will almost inevitably result in higher borrowing costs.
There is a sort of 4D chess metapolitical logic to the Trump strategy, which one might see as a last-ditch attempt to save the American republic from a secular decline and near-term ruin, but I don't think most of the tech right are interested anymore.
>>3263 Covfefe gives a strong defense of the strategy I alluded to in the last sentence, but there's so much uncertainty in charting the grand quasi-Spenglerian course of American history that I can't really say whether Trump or Musk is right (if one follows the view that Trump really is our guy here). It's very fun to say that you "know what time it is," but actually telling the time is very, very hard!
Elon has been successful wherever he has full control and the problem is well defined and outside the influence of hostile agents. In all his companies, he maintains either overt control or has the board mostly in his pocket already. The challenges in building cars at scale or sending rockets to space are challenges dealing with nature primarily. The regulatory approvals and permits are relatively straightforward processes you can hire lawyers to manage.
Trump has been successful in New York real estate which is primarily a political game. Nothing gets done on any economic or physical logic, it's all about managing the interests and emotions of various agents. The types of men who succeed here are corrupt, mercurial, unprincipled. Some of these guys are even serial killers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Durst).
America is a large, multi cultural democracy and therefore power is granted to those good at managing interests and emotions. Ultimately, you do have to deal with economic and physical facts which is why you typically have the power guy partnering with the physics guy to carry out the execution. The power guy should be listening to the execution guy on matters of execution and vice versa. I see both Trump and Elon not playing their role correctly which has caused this split. Trump bungled the execution of the tariffs in a way that neither enhanced the power of the right nor did it improve America's economic position. Elon was dumb to publicly criticize the h1b changes and now he's flaming out over a bill that is both feasible and enhances the power of the right.
You gotta know your role and play it correctly. Both these guys probably implicitly knew their role, but it wasn't formal enough and explicit enough for them to reason about it when there were conflicts.
>>3273 > Elon has been successful wherever he has full control and the problem is well defined and outside the influence of hostile agents. In all his companies, he maintains either overt control or has the board mostly in his pocket already.
Elon losing control of OpenAI supports this. Elon lost to Sam Altman, a highly, highly political player (iiuc the only time he lost big). The OpenAI coup by Ilya and the board was largely unsuccessful due to how political Sam is; he collected on all the favors and good will he had delivered to the valley (especially while president of YC). Yet perhaps this political nature is what led to the loss of his friends. Unlike Trump, who is more yang-political, Sam is yin-political, working from the shadows. This strategy when overused tends to leave a bitter taste on your colleagues.
The OpenAI email archives show the tale of a principalist being slowly gutted by a political fox. Lower-case emails by Sam is also on theme (yin).
>>3273 > Elon has been successful wherever he has full control and the problem is well defined and outside the influence of hostile agents. In all his companies, he maintains either overt control or has the board mostly in his pocket already.
Which is to say, the scope within which Elon is successful is quite circumscribed. The federal government is nothing like a company in which one has controlling ownership. Not even for the president, much less for someone he has appointed. I doubt Elon could be effective even at the state level in, say, California.
>>3277 > Elon losing control of OpenAI supports this. Elon lost to Sam Altman, a highly, highly political player ...
Excellent example of Elon's limitations. It illustrates how Elon responds to failure by becoming enraged at the player who bested him and lashing out publicly in counterproductive ways. As against Altman, so against Trump.
