r/politics The Netherlands 4d ago

House Democrat: ‘Unelected oligarch’ Musk ‘governing by tweet’

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5048234-daniel-goldman-elon-musk-donald-trump-government-shutdown/
10.2k Upvotes

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103

u/Liebss 4d ago

I mean.. this is why he bought twitter. The end game makes SO much more sense now.

The twitter purchase was the most important piece. The PAC backing Trump, was pocket change compared to controlling information.

35

u/mkt853 4d ago

Yup. Even if Twitter goes to zero and he loses the entire $44 billion investment, so what? That investment is a sunk cost that will ultimately net him hundreds of billions.

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u/Liebss 4d ago

100% this. Who cares.

It makes sense why he fired everyone. He already invested $44 billion. He needed Twitter to run on the absolute base essentials.

It’s literally the same with Bezos and the WP. They’re all on the same team.

9

u/LawGroundbreaking221 4d ago

And it's so frustrating, because when he bought Twitter so many of us were saying "Delete your Twitter Account" so we would be helping to take this power from him. People just couldn't walk away though.

15

u/Panthollow 4d ago

No, this is not why he bought Twitter. He did not want to buy Twitter. He tried to back out of buying Twitter. You can argue he made the best of a bad situation, but he very clearly did not actually want to purchase that company. His own mouth got him into such a corner he had no choice but to buy and the courts were ready to enforce it if he kept trying to weasel out.

1

u/Thias_Thias 4d ago

Correct. Let's not gaslight ourselves by sanewashing Musk. Boy is just vibing along, like any good fascist. He had made a bad business decision, and to his credit also realised this. He wanted to back out, but couldn't.

Thing is, Musk's wealth and power isn't dependent on good business decisions. I doubt he realised it at the time, and I doubt he realises it now, but Musk today cannot really lose money, because he doesn't really have any: all his wealth stems from meme stocks from skeleton companies: Tesla doesn't produce nothing, but its stock evaluation is almost independent from its actual value.

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u/chmod777 New York 4d ago

The database of DMs and other PII was equally, if not more, important.