4 ms·
More interesting to me is that this is the third tech billionaire to take a decidedly different stance than he did previously. Musk is quite active, but even Zu
by moduspol 2y ago
More interesting to me is that this is the third tech billionaire to take a decidedly different stance than he did previously. Musk is quite active, but even Zuckerberg took a much more neutral stance for 2024.
Honestly I'm more surprised that Bezos even bothered. Does he really think the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board is so significant that it's worth intervening? That seems implausible.
- eigart 2y agoI would say Zuck went as far right as reasonably possible, and his timing was good. Kind of cowardly, but also impressive foresight on his part.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThat's absurd. His political donations are very blue.
- TylerE 2y agoAll signs point to this being an extraordinarily tight election. 5 or 10k votes in the right state could swing the whole thing.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[flagged]
- Lightbody 2y ago>It's not for no reason that one state had more registered voters than the actual number of eligible voters in that state. https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2024/10/24/michigan-registered-voters-active-more-than-population/ https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2024/10/24/michigan-regist...
- crummy 2y agoThe polls show Harris and Trump are neck and neck, but the only explanation for a Harris win is fraud?
- moduspol 2y agoI'd be incredibly surprised if there are even 100 people who: - Don't know who The Washington Post editorial board would endorse - Would change who they are voting for based on this lack of endorsement But I could be wrong.
- TylerE 2y agoWe’re in. Situation wheee one of the candidates routinely criticizes us and praises our enemies, and still pulls at about 42%. Rationality is not in evidence.
- bamboozled 2y agoIf this race is right, then whatever I thought about people was wrong. Then again, I always wonder what the hell actually went through peoples minds in Nazi Germany.
- lerjan 2y ago[flagged]
- traitfield 2y agoAfter more than 60 years the Reductio ad Hitlerium is finally losing its power, heartening to see.
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoThe reason is pretty damned simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." The Democrats used to understand this but now they don't and that's why they are struggling.
- dclowd9901 2y agoLooks like you’re getting a firsthand view now.
- wumeow 2y agoMusk is a true believer, but Zuck and Bezos probably fear retribution from Trump if he wins and they endorsed Harris.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoIsn’t this like Russia’s oligarchy? I’m not enamored with Democrats, but Trump doesn’t share Constitutional values and I’m very much for independent journalism. This is bad.
- bamboozled 2y agoIf this is true, it’s beyond bad. It may be the beginning of the end of the free world.
- throwaway48476 2y agoThis is such a weird take. People can't conceptualize a world of many discrete important actions and reduce it to one event. It's a failure of imagination.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoThis is an ironic take. It’s a distinct lack of imagination and historical knowledge that stops at one event, and refuses to ponder the long term consequences.
- helf 2y ago[dead]
- jp_nc 2y agoThats because of the calculation: - Endorse Harris and Trump wins, Trump will seek revenge on Bezos and Amazon (he tried this in the first term) - Endorse Trump and Harris wins, Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official This is capitulation to the perceived threats of a Trump presidency and is very bad.
- throwaway918299 2y ago[flagged]
- staplers 2y agothey go after him Would love to hear what horrible consequences you think Elon is facing..
- rKarpinski 2y agoThey retroactively invalidated several years of compensation packages...
- frugalmail 2y ago[flagged]
- mikeyouse 2y ago"They" of course being the Delaware Chancellory Court in this situation... man people are clueless about how things work.
- rKarpinski 2y ago"Delaware Chancellory Court" of course being a political appointee in the home state of the powerful politician whom they had an adversarial relationship with, in this situation... but you know how these things work
- dclowd9901 2y agoGiven he was the one who made the call, what other conclusion would you draw?
- moduspol 2y agoWell I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests. On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.
- dclowd9901 2y agoNo need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple. > In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos. Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.
- wbl 2y agoAll the more reason to endorse his opponent!
- moduspol 2y agoIt's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.
- dclowd9901 2y agoLike what?
- acdha 2y agoBezos cares because his businesses have billions of dollars in revenue from the federal government. Trump has already claimed to personally review those contracts and was reported as trying to kill the $10B JEDI contract: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/26/trump-mattis-screw-amazon-10-billion-pentagon-cloud-contract-jedi.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/26/trump-mattis-screw-amazo... By all accounts, he’s prepared to be more authoritarian and less bound by the law if re-elected and he’s already threatening journalists with rape and talking about yanking broadcast licenses for channels which don’t kowtow to him.
- lerjan 2y ago[flagged]
- rightbyte 2y agoZuckerberg has never been not right wing though.
- smeeger 2y agoof course it is. endorsements by major entities such as major newspapers… endorsements by celebrities and all these other points form the constellation of how a candidate is perceived. a huge chunk of people will not just vote blindly for whoever seems to be more broadly supported but actually deeply like whoever is put in front of them. and they will also believe it if a bunch of newspapers release the same story at the same time… even if there is no evidence offered to support the main assertion. or even if its obviously false. creation of the appearance of a consensus is an extremely powerful tool
- CamperBob2 2y agoIt's almost as if coming out in favor of taxing unrealized capital gains right before the election wasn't the stroke of political brilliance that Harris thought it was. "Hmm, I'm facing a close election. Hey, wait, I know! I'll make enemies of people who buy ink by the trainload and bandwidth by the petabyte-second." I really wish somebody could have talked her out of that idea, or at least convinced her to wait another couple of months before putting it on the table. It was an incredible faux pas, maybe a history-changing one, whose consequences were trivially foreseeable.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deepsquirrelnet 2y agoProbably the opposite. He doesn’t think it’s significant, but the risk of petty retaliation IS significant.