Elon Musk's millions fail to deliver Texas for the Republicans in fierce midterm | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk's millions fail to deliver Texas for the Republicans in fierce midterm

bbc.com

53 pointsonemoresoop19 comments

The problem is that this is less than 0.5% of his net worth. He literally did nothing significant to earn these dollars and the expenditure matters nothing to him in the long term.

> He literally did nothing significant to earn these dollars

A guy who founded several unicorns and multiple fortune 100 companies "literally did nothing significant" to gain his wealth? I'm a fan of absurdism but it's probably best not to apply those comedic principles to your worldview.

How many people did it take to build those companies?

Why does Musk deserve so much attribution for the success? (The Tyranny of Merit is pervasive in our culture)

eg. Shotwell arguably made SpaceX what it is more than Musk

Simple - would these companies be built without the CEO?

A lot of times the answer is yes. EVs were inevitable and similarly Starlink. Question is when would that happened and I don’t think it would be as good as it is now.

In the previous century people created an entire economic system based on the idea that entrepreneurs served no purpose and added no value. And since entrepreneurship adds no value, the state could easily adopt that function and retain the value that would otherwise be stolen (!) by the greedy, useless entrepreneurs. So they replaced entrepreneurs with bureaucrats and proceeded to drive their economies into the ground for the next 50 years.

The most obvious economic lesson of the previous century is that entrepreneurship is the most valuable work in a modern economy. Even the Chinese Communist Party understands this.

It's such a massive blackpill that American progressives are less economically literate than literal fucking communists.

Oligarchs are equally as bad as communists, and there is a fetish with the tech startup bros and getting rich in America right now. (although it now seems there is a significant change in the winds, corruption was a top issue in election choices)

There is a better middle path, as the CCP has moved towards. It's now time for America to rethink our economy, not to communism, but to something more like Market Socialism (https://academic.oup.com/book/4132)

Wealth inequality in America is at an all time high. Things are broken for most people, change is needed.

> It's such a massive blackpill that American progressives are less economically literate than literal fucking communists.

Generally, there is a massive pill that American's are not economically literate, or historically literate. We are tired of hyperbolic statements like this (eg. progressive implies communist). Please try to engage and discuss in good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146196

As per usual, the anti-capitalist argument rests on a smuggled-in moral framework. We socialism because alternative=bad! This sort of anti-enlightenment mindset which eschews empirical outcomes for the benefit of moral presuppositions is necessary, of course, because the empirical results of alternative systems are objectively inferior (see household debt/income data from Western Europe, for example).

> We are tired of hyperbolic statements like this (eg. progressive implies communist)

Reading comprehension fail.

You seem rather closed minded and throwing phrases that sound good, but make you come off as an intellectual elitist who knows better. You do not seem to understand that Market Socialism embraces capitalism. Just because socialism is in a phrase does not mean you know what it means. Foremost, Market Socialism does not give up democracy, rather it seeks to expand it to more places within our country. There are many ways that ideals from capitalism and socialism can be woven together in our economic and political systems. We need to have civil discussions, run more experiments, and find compromise around ideas that show promise.

Things are obviously not working for most people in America, what do you propose for changes to fix our broken system?

It seems really easy! You should go get your billions too, you just need to hire some people apparently

That's loser thinking, the Ai era means everyone can be solopreneur /s

https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-age-of-the-solopreneur

I think this is a good reminder that money alone doesn't actually move the needle on election outcomes nearly as much as it's perceived to. Some of the candidates that won yesterday were given up on by the DNC and completely left out to dry.

Had this been a more favorable election cycle, Musk would have been able to lord over the candidates the amount of money he spent on them. As it is, he shot his shot and no campaign should want to accept his contributions again.

the many can defeat the money

Honestly, I think Republicans just ran awful, garbage candidates.

Paxton was king of the scumbags, between his history of helping pedos, his impeachment from his own party and his philandering and partying with fugitives in Dubai.

Also I was sure the ICE surge at the start of the trump administration was political suicide even if you agree with it. Didn't Hispanics carry Trump in '24?

I live in Ohio, and found Ramaswamy to be an awful, uncharismatic man who never learned when to speak and when to keep his mouth shut. If he could keep from insulting the voter base and slandering people for being raped, he may have won. I know someone personally, who faced similar abuse to Acton as a child and was instantly mobilized against Ramaswamy despite being usually disinterested in politics.

Genuinely, what were the Republicans thinking? Did they belive the 2024 election was the end of history?

> Genuinely, what were the Republicans thinking? Did they belive the 2024 election was the end of history?

"If you vote this time, you'll never have to vote again", so, maybe?

That's the wrong conclusion to draw. Let's use the opportunity to get money out of politics. Money works. Ads work. Bots work. It's time to get rid of all that.

Ironically something seen by Trump 2016 as well. The dollars didn't mean nearly as much, at least not as they were classically spent on blanket print and TV spots.

Isolating very specific populations that force swing districts, then hitting them with wedge issues targeted to their specific demographic, is the new hotness that Trump 2016 really made exceptional use of. Now, whether this process was all the way legal, that's another conversation, and odds are your mind's made up already so I can just keep my toe out of that pool.

Guess he can't ask for his money back, can he? Probably would have had a better result if Musk had tossed all that money into a pile and set it alight.

So toxic his billions did little.

Doubling down on the fact the blue wave smashing the Repugnants out of the picture made my entire day.

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