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Comment by yongjik | Hacker News Reader

This isn't caused by some nebulous alliance of "billionaires," this is caused by one particular billionaire, Elon Musk, and his friends.

These days I'm getting skeptical of these anti-billionaire quips. Sounds like a great segue to "all politicians are the same because they're in the billionaire's pocket," and now look at what that led us into.

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> This isn't caused by some nebulous alliance of "billionaires," this is caused by one particular billionaire, Elon Musk, and his friends.

I am waiting for all the "good billionaires" to step up and do something about it.

There’s at least one, although as a governor he may not count.

> From the Department of Education, Medicaid, the CDC, and more - Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agencies and programs that protect Americans every single day.

https://bsky.app/profile/jbpritzker.bsky.social/post/3lisgh4...

they won't even say something, let alone do something. The only thing that could hurt Musk is the collapse of Tesla stock. Best thing you can do is not buy a Tesla and suggest to others not to buy on either. As the DOGE team like to say. starve the beast, where Leon is the beast.

what function do billionaires fulfill that 1000 millionaires couldn't do better?

That's neither here nor there. Trump and Musk are dismantling the American government piece by piece, and I'm not terribly interested in discussing whether billionaires were the problem all along. That feels like a totally unnecessary diversion.

By all means, after America kicks out Trump, feel free to discuss billionaires and the tyranny of capitalism and everything. Just not now.

why? it's hard to quantify the impact but musk personally spent hundreds of millions to get this outcome

if he weren't a billionaire we might not be in this situation at all

and hundreds of millions to him is like a months salary, so it cost him almost nothing

Most millionaires are just older people who’ve earned and invested well throughout their careers. They’re not functionally a replacement for anyone who’s a billionaire because they run large businesses.

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