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Much has been made of Shanahan's Silicon Valley connections, but interestingly she's barely been mentioned on HN or by TechCrunch. Despite that, she does seem l
by Apocryphon 3y ago
Much has been made of Shanahan's Silicon Valley connections, but interestingly she's barely been mentioned on HN or by TechCrunch. Despite that, she does seem like the most stereotypically Silicon Valley person ever:
* Reportedly had an affair with Elon Musk: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/24/23276518/elon-musk-sergey-brin-tesla-google-affair-nicole-shanahan https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/24/23276518/elon-musk-sergey...
* had a Druid-inspired "love ceremony" to her partner, a Bitcoin executive, who she met at Burning Man: https://twitter.com/stevemorris__/status/1772635961169461738 https://twitter.com/stevemorris__/status/1772635961169461738
* "Global Joy Officer" for a company called the Sloomoo Institute that charges people to play with slime: https://twitter.com/Lowenaffchen/status/1772709512668995642 https://twitter.com/Lowenaffchen/status/1772709512668995642
- gigatexal 3y agoTwo weirdos. Great. Weird enough to maybe be a problem for this election.
- Apocryphon 3y agoShanahan's main strength is deep pockets. I think this gets it right: > If you’re flummoxed by why RFK Jr has picked Nicole Shanahan, a person no one has ever heard of, to be his VP, understand this: This is purely because she’s the only person capable of self-funding to pay for ballot access that was willing to say yes to him. https://twitter.com/lucymcaldwell/status/1772709585083617743 https://twitter.com/lucymcaldwell/status/1772709585083617743 Her Google ties are not making right-leaning Kennedy fans happy.
- api 3y agoIt’s hard to say if RFK will steal more votes from Biden or from Trump. The antivax crowd is pretty solidly Trump since he basically brought the new age into the Republican Party. My personal dumb take is that Trump was our first New Age president. He basically believes in The Secret and grew up in some radical think and grow rich preacher’s church. Makes the Yoga to Qanon pipeline make way more sense.
- Apocryphon 3y agoI think there is huge overlap between New Age woo and multi-level marketing schemes (or whatever products like Trump U are), but I don't think Trump himself is the first New Age president, even though somehow the Qanon cult of personality has sprung up around him based on truly esoteric magical thinking. We're going to have to wait for Jared Leto to run for office.
- nytesky 3y agoWhat is her background, how did she make all this money — from slime. I can’t imagine Brin gave her that much cash as they weren’t married 10 years which is the CA cutoff, and allegedly she had the affair.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoShe asked for 1 Billion in the divorce. The actual final figure is sealed but they had a kid together and he's worth about 100 Billion that so I think that explains most of it.
- ZeroGravitas 3y agoOn the Sloomoo Institute thing, she has a child with autism and those experiences look a lot like the sensory rooms that are proposed as being helpful for kids with autism. The banner video showing kids supports this too.
- Apocryphon 3y agoThanks for the context. “Chief Joy Officer” is still a bizarre SV title and these are pretty exorbitant rates though: https://twitter.com/editingdisinfo/status/1772743491333787761 https://twitter.com/editingdisinfo/status/177274349133378776...