Musk is really an engineer, and I mean a social engineer.
Going back to the early days of business, the owner of the company would try and sell people products and services directly.
Then it became lame and seen as a signal of a scam and "trying too hard".
Now fast forward nobody does it. But they don't understand that it's only lame and trying too hard when everybody does it.
If few people do it , then those people will be admired and elevated, bringing incredible advantages to the company and themselves.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mike Lindell...they somehow managed understand this (whether reasoning about it or subconsciously) and they are reaping the rewards.
On and off ramps for fiat are necessary and government would just go after the bank or blacklist the SWIFT code of the bank which is providing services to exchanges.
Crypto VC understand that how people feel about something is just important as its utility.
People have a deeply rooted fear of inflation, they are afraid of being diluted in their societal standing. They also have a strong preference for deflation which allows them to do work once and then see their past work appreciate in value.
Enter Bitcoin.
Bitcoin wins because it's giving to the market what existing players (meaning governments) won't do: a deflationary currency.
Governments won't give people a deflationary currency because they project what is going to happen with a deflationary currency and they don't like the total chaos which would mean for the country, but the real world doesn't work that way, the population wants to try and see for themselves what are these outcomes, and if they are less taxing than inflation.
There is a monumental mismatching between the way in which Tesla occupies the airwaves and the number of people who actually own them or would be able to draw a Model S if asked point blank.
I will never understand what is going on with this company, but one thing is for sure, there is an methodical effort to make this happen.
Besides on the internet nobody knows if you own a Tesla or ar just simping for Elon Musk hoping that he replies you and pumps your cryptocurrency.
Ever since the GFC big tech has not produced anything which actually improved the quality of life of the avg. citizen.
And the last huge leap was Windows 95, the rate of innovation slowed down since then, we just barely managed to collect Google and Facebook along the way.
It was Windows 95 which should have shown big tech companies the way. If you stop innovating, then people begin to look at the marketcap of the company and the net worth of the founders as well as the pay of CEOs and sure enough hatred among the public opinion starts mounting pretty fast. People get accostumed to the quality of life provided by big tech in a very fast manner, if the rate of innovation slows down then people will turn on innovators because of the wealth inequality that they see between themselves and big tech companies' insiders.
Microsoft was fighting for its survival a mere 5 years after the release of Windows 95, not because of competitors, but because of the public hatred against them had mounted and that emboldened the DOJ to sue them. It wouldn't have happened if the next iteration would have been as transformative as the jump from Ms-Dos to Win95.
Big tech has to understand that as complex as they are as companies, they are not much different than a bike, you can only slow down so much before you tip over and disaster happens.
They have their 300B cash warchest, they have their AAA+ credit rating, they have interest rates at an historic minimum. They have no excuse for the technological stasis
the Internet is now being used by 4 billions people, so it basically mimics humanity
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
> I think there are registers in people's minds that are simply occupied.
I think this is the case, anecdotally I noticed that if you are a sports fan, then the "us versus them" rhetoric works much less, or at least less than you'd expect in such people.
At least for domestic politics, that's because you already get your dose of "us versus them" from some other domain in your life.
Same for religion which is the main topic covered in the article:
People who are religious are less likely to fall prey of cults.
Religious people are less likely to elevate "false prophets" such as actors, musicians, rockstars and also the new phenomenon represented by technoutopian cult leaders such as Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes.
It has to be him and has to be unapologetic, like Trump was.
People like to make fun of Trump but he delivered a masterpiece. He got to be POTUS for 4 years and the 73M people he convinced to be part of his movement grant him total immunity against past and future actions (including crimes).
His only mistake was to be banned from social media, otherwise he could be a shadow "monday morning" President right now, undermining everything Biden says.
You don't get to choose which type of ship you run, society does that for you. If you are being attacked it's the signal that you are running a ship which is too tight , you gotta loosen up
Ivy League is the last intellectual bastion of the country.
If you break up Ivy League all you are left with is Silicon Valley cult of personality snake-oil salesmen and pump & dumpers posing as experts in every possible field when in reality their solely expertise is building social consensus around them.
How many nuclear fusion companies which are quietly shaping the roadmap for obtaining fusion in the next 20 years came out of MIT/Stanford/Harvard?
Facebook spun off Harvard, Microsoft spun off Harvard, Google spun off Stanford, Amazon spun off Princeton with a bit of D.E. Shaw thrown in the mix.
The author seems to me has watched too many videos from Lex Friedman and Eric Weinstein type where they endlessly talk about how broken those institutions are and never fail to mention Epstein for the extra views that it will generate.
As Bill Gates said the mainstream is always under attack and people of course will charge head down towards such Universites, forgetting how they (very much like the companies emerging from such Universities) are the envy of the world.
This strategy would have worked before MMT took over, now politicians don't need to bring about jobs, they can just print money and pass deficits of epic proportions and substitute the private sector with the state.
Especially Democrats they have no regards for fiscal responsibility , they'd have no qualms in breaking up Amazon, knowing full well that the next step would be to install a dependency scheme in the form of UBI financed via fiscal deficits.
> People will always spend money for things they need, they will also spend money for things they want, our current system is forcing them to spend it for the sake of spending it causing unnecessary over-consumerism.
The worrying aspect is that the one thing that people want more than anything is to be the most rich and relevant person in a given area, hence the inflationary system to avoid people hoarding in order to reach this goal of theirs.
If you transition to an deflationary system and people fall in love with it....well there is a whole lot of room to go on the downside.
First people start giving up vacations, then dinners, then cars, that Netflix subscription, then the smartphone purchase, then the app purchase.. all in the name of hoarding.
Pretty soon the entire economy becomes a giant game of mental posturing to see who can go the distance without spending.
Paradoxically in this scenario the most rational thing to do is to spend like there is no tomorrow because society would be headed into chaos, so when the fecal matter hits the fan , at least you'll have good memories
> Once you're big enough to be a target, you have to spend money on lobbying, and contribute to campaigns.
Absolutely not. You do the opposite of that. You go at layer zero. At the population level and enter the culture wars arena with the goal of winning.
Some of these companies are structured in a way that the founders are poised to retain control of their companies till they retire (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Berkshire).
If you are Zuck or Brin or Dorsey and you want to do this until you are 95 like Buffett then you are better off barking and biting back, acquire a reputation of a fighter so that people like Sanders and Warren would leave you alone. There will be consequences such as employees criticizing and leaving but in the long term you are better off fighting.
When a politician comes after you and your company, you just attack back, if you are not prepared to do this you should simply not start a proper company and opt for a carrer in a hedge fund instead, where you can make money in the dark.
Founders and CEOs should not be the first offender but when they are called out they should absolutely attack back.
Sanders is pouring manure all over corporate America since 2015 and all he had to endure was Michael Bloomberg attacking him back for half a debate, and wouldn't have happened if Bloomberg didn't decide to run.
If a guy like Bezos or Zuck were to tweet back at Sanders something to the tune "I've started a company in a garage and now it has the same credit rating of the US Government, what have you done with your life?"
That would be fair game, politicians prey on weakness, they smell it and keep biting till you lay there unconscious
If you are somebody who wants to win an election, whose vote are you winning by proposing and/or signing a bitcoin ban?
It's not like Bitcoin has a CEO that you can point at in the Forbes billionaires list and claim that you are going against him.
You have to explain and present to people the coins per wallet distribution statistics and convert it to dollars to get to the topic of inequality, then from there trying to equate Wall Street to Bitcoin.
It's not easy, even for a socially competent person, you lose the room and people's attention quite easily. It's far easier to attack Bezos
1) Elections in America are always close, every race, every candidate is not safe. That's the nature of the 2 party system, hence every vote counts
2) You are getting your data from the wrong source, Coinbase alone has 56 million verified users. And unlike FB those are real , not bot, as every user have to be KYC'eed for AML purposes. That's just one exchange.
3) Also with regards to those millions of users, the situation is peculiar because it's for sure one person per family (the millennial or the college kid). So you enrage one person, but that person then would badmouth you with all the people in their close family who were otherwise neutral to the BTC ban, but now that you hurt their son finances, they just aren't anymore.
What if those who produce, use and mantain those tanks, ships, planes and rifles suddenly lose trust in the mean of compensation which the government offers them in exchange of their services?
Nobody ever thinks about this, but government and all the infrastructure it owns are embedded in society
The general view is that Bitcoin takes hold among the population and then there is a fight between the population and the government....quite the contrary, Bitcoin simply takes over the government at an equal or slighly inferior rate compared to the general population.
See how many people in the Capitol are being bitten by the bitcoin bug. For every critic you'll find somebody who is willing to speak in favor of it.
Nobody, not even Biden has the political goodwill to make Bitcoin illegal and enrage so many constituents (aka lost votes)
The only ones who maybe can do it are Xi and Putin, and the latter seems more pro than against because everything which goes against the dollar is Putin's friend.
Xi is also on and off again with Bitcoin but every day which goes by in which he is not decisive is a day in favor of Bitcoin.
You are left with the Warren, Sanders, Corbyn types as well as this Dutch guy who have only one style of messaging: modern day Robinhoods (or Pocahontas) trying to take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves
Going back to the early days of business, the owner of the company would try and sell people products and services directly.
Then it became lame and seen as a signal of a scam and "trying too hard".
Now fast forward nobody does it. But they don't understand that it's only lame and trying too hard when everybody does it.
If few people do it , then those people will be admired and elevated, bringing incredible advantages to the company and themselves.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mike Lindell...they somehow managed understand this (whether reasoning about it or subconsciously) and they are reaping the rewards.