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There were plenty of people in the room who had publicly disavowed #Trump after the #Jan6 #insurrection at the Capitol — #Peltz among them — but it was pretty clear now that he was going to be the candidate, & it was time to get onboard & figure out how to help him win. There were a lot of problems. An especially uncomfortable one was that a lot of donor money was going to paying Trump’s mounting #legal bills rather than building a serious political campaign.

#Kleptocracy

#Peltz, who was 81 at the time & made his fortune via junk bonds & leveraged buyouts, had gathered some traditional high rollers, including the hedge-fund manager #JohnPaulson & the Las Vegas casino #tycoon #SteveWynn, as well as #RonnaMcDaniel, then the chair of the #RNC. He had also invited #ElonMusk.

#Kleptocracy #RulingClass #Bourgeoisie #Aristocracy #Totalitarianism

For much of his career, #Musk gave modestly to candidates of both parties. He was drawn to President Barack #Obama, making several visits to meet w/him in the Oval & inviting him to Cape Canaveral to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But he didn’t really like spending time w/politicians, & never aspired to be a political power broker, at least in the traditional sense. His business empire spanned the globe, & admins everywhere came & went. He seemed to view himself as being bigger than any party.

In the years since the 2020 election, though, #ElonMusk had been following a number of his friends in the tech industry—some dating back to his earliest days in the business, when he helped found the company that became PayPal—on a journey to some of the more baroque regions of the #FarRight. He was becoming increasingly outspoken about his views but had less to say about the daily scrum of partisan #politics.

#Kleptocracy #RulingClass #Bourgeoisie #Aristocracy #Totalitarianism

#ElonMusk had quietly given more than $50 million to fund advertising campaigns attacking #Democrats in the 2022 midterms, WSJ has reported, & in 2023 he donated $10 million to an outside group that helped fund the presidential bid of Gov Ron #DeSantis of Florida. Now he seemed open to doing a lot more.

#Kleptocracy #RulingClass #Bourgeoisie #Aristocracy #Totalitarianism

#Peltz gave #Musk the honor of speaking first. He told the group that he had always been a Democrat, but no longer. And, despite being new to political campaigns, he had some ideas to share. What worked w/his electric car company, Tesla, he said, was not paid advertising but word of mouth. If everyone in the room told two friends to vote for #Trump — & told them to tell two friends — he would win. Then Musk underscored what he saw as the real stakes of the presidential race.

#ElonMusk was born in South Africa, became a Canadian citizen & once admitted that his immigration status was in a “gray area” when he founded his first company in the United States. But in recent months, he became obsessed w/a [false] #ConspiracyTheory that #Trump & his followers were promoting: that #Democrats were allowing #immigrants to pour into the country to create more Democratic voters….

#Kleptocracy #RulingClass #Bourgeoisie #Aristocracy #Totalitarianism

In the months leading up to the gathering at #Peltz’s home, #ElonMusk helped spread the idea—a central plank of #MAGA’s election denialism—across his own social media platform, X.…

Now, over a dinner of shrimp & lobster tails, he put the matter in stark, existential terms: Were Biden to win in Nov, Democrats would use the ongoing flood of #immigrants to create a permanent majority. If they failed to get #Trump into office, #Musk said, this would be America’s last free election.

#Musk has always seen himself as the protagonist of his own science-fiction novel, on a hero’s quest to save humanity.… He & his fellow tech leaders were not just businessmen; as they saw it, they were visionary founders reinventing the world. They knew what to do & how to do it. The hundreds of billions that they accumulated along the way only confirmed the importance of their mission & validated their unique ability to carry it out.

#RulingClass #Bourgeoisie #Aristocracy
#HarrisWalz2024

Over the course of this election cycle, a group of these men have coalesced around a new mission: putting #Trump back in the WhiteHouse. They are the #Republican Party’s ascendant donor class, & they operate on a plane very different from that of the donors who preceded them. They have not only a seemingly limitless amount of #money to help make this particular vision a reality but also their own #media profiles & #platforms to use toward that end.

#RulingClass #Bourgeoisie
#HarrisWalz2024

They are the opposite of private, dark-money donors, making a public show of their support for #Trump & even sometimes announcing their donations on #socialmedia. It’s an ambitious & highly motivated group, powered by #SelfInterest & self-regard & unencumbered by self-doubt.
#Peltz & the rest of the anxious, old-money #Republicans had gathered in Palm Beach to strategize about how to elect Trump. The answer was quite possibly #ElonMusk & the new breed of high-#tech #billionaires.
#HarrisWalz2024

For many years, #SiliconValley’s reactionary right orbited around one man: the venture capitalist #PeterThiel. Thiel was a right-wing libertarian before he was a #billionaire. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, he brought the “PC wars” to the West Coast, helping to found The Stanford Review, a student-run #conservative newspaper whose many acts of editorial provocation included defending the conduct of a senior who pleaded no contest to the statutory #rape of a first-year student.…

The road to *utopia* was rocky; #Sacks led a coup to oust #Musk & replace him w/ #Thiel. But they soon sold the company to #eBay for $1.5 billion in 2004, making them all fantastically rich & sending a diaspora of entrepreneurs & investors across #SiliconValley — the “#PayPalMafia” — to build more revolutionary, billion-dollar companies like #YouTube & #Yelp.

As the internet blossomed, #Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named #CurtisYarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the #NewRight — aimed at deposing the #ConspiracyTheory based *cabal of liberal elites* running the country.

#Yarvin saw #democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-#monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their #dictator phobia.” He & #Thiel grew close; Yarvin stayed in Thiel’s homes, & they watched the 2016 election returns together.

As #Thiel became wealthier & more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own #wealth & #power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like #JoshHawley, now the 44-yr-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently #JDVance, who has cited #Yarvin as an influence himself.

#JDVance reached out to #Thiel after hearing him deliver a talk at Yale Law School, & following his graduation, Thiel helped set him up in #SiliconValley, first recommending him for a job at a biotech firm whose founder he was close w/& later helping him raise $120 million for his own venture firm, Narya Capital. When Vance ran for #Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

#Thiel embraced #Trump in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million to support the campaign & even working alongside #SteveBannon on Trump’s transition team. 2 of his associates came along: #TraeStephens, who worked at his venture firm, #FoundersFund, & #BlakeMasters, COO of #ThielCapital, who would later run for the US #Senate. Another #PayPal & Stanford Review alum, #KenHowery, served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden.

These men became the nucleus of the #tech industry’s #MAGA mafia, & in recent months, quite a few more have joined them. They don’t represent a majority in #SiliconValley, but they are a high-profile minority. Some, like #JoeLonsdale, are members of #Thiel’s extended network & long committed to the cause. Lonsdale, who was editor of The StanfordReview & interned at #PayPal, has used some of the fortune he built as a founder of #Palantir to create a conservative think tank…

the #CiceroInstitute, which is lobbying states to #criminalize #homelessness, & the University of Austin, which he has described as an antidote to universities that have been overtaken by “radical, far-left ideologues.”

Others, like the venture capitalists #MarcAndreessen & #BenHorowitz, were Democrats troubled by the changing climate for #tech investors.

Not only has the #Biden admin vigorously enforced #antitrust #laws, putting a damper on deal-making, but it has also sought to aggressively regulate the #cryptocurrency sector. At the same time, the arrest & conviction of the crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried #SBF, the government bailout of #SiliconValley Bank &” the rising, uncertain specter of #ArtificialIntelligence were all feeding a broader skepticism toward the #tech industry in general.

Personal fortunes were being threatened — Andreessen & Horowitz presided over a huge #crypto fund — & so was the larger techno-*utopian* project. Late last year, Andreessen grew frustrated enough to pour out a 5,000-word “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” denouncing progress-impeding forces like “#SocialResponsibility” & “#tech #ethics.”

For Andreessen, #Biden’s proposed so-called #billionaire’s tax, which would require that people whose wealth exceeds $100 million pay taxes on unrealized capital gains, was the ultimate threat. He called it “the final straw” tipping him to #Trump; Horowitz said it smacked of Leninism.

As these new donors started gravitating toward #Trump, he began making new promises on the campaign trail. He would make America “the #crypto capital of the planet”; he would fire #Biden’s #SEC chair, Gary Gensler; he would steer more #military contracts to the booming #PrivateDefense-#tech sector; he would repeal an executive order intended to provide some checks on the development of #AI.

“In the matrix of people supporting #Trump — a 2-by-2 matrix of ‘Are they purchasable?’ & ‘Can I purchase them?’ — #Biden & #Harris are not purchasable, & Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime,” says Reid Hoffman, one of #PayPal’s early employees & a prominent Democratic donor.

#Sacks is one of the group’s most outspoken members, unremittingly championing #Trump these days on his podcast, “All-In.” After his time at #PayPal, he did a stint as a #Hollywood #producer before returning to #tech as an entrepreneur, executive & #VC. In recent years, he has also leveraged his #wealth to become a modern #media *personality* w/ “All-In,” which he started during the early days of the Covid lockdown w/3 of his rich VC friends.
#SiliconValley #Republicans #Kleptocracy #Bourgeoisie

…#ElonMusk was one of the last to take a fully reactionary turn. Since his #PayPal days, he has moved into realms that transcend “#technology” in the #SiliconValley sense, becoming a modern industrialist in the spirit of Henry Ford. But his ties to the #tech industry & its pro-#Trump #moguls remain strong. He had been on his own *journey* over the last few years, pushed to the right by a confluence of forces.

It started w/what #ElonMusk described as California’s “fascist” Covid lockdowns, which forced him to temporarily close his #Tesla plants [profits over people], & continued w/his outrage over #Biden’s decision to exclude him from an #EV meeting at the WH [vanity]. In 2021, he moved from CA to TX, surrounding himself w/a more #conservative social circle.

#ElonMusk’s reactionary #anger was fueled, too, by the decision of one of his children to #transition; he later said that he had been “tricked” into authorizing #gender-affirming #care for her.

#Musk had left the dinner at #Peltz’s house dissatisfied…. He had started talking privately to #Lonsdale, who was a member of his new friend group in Texas, & a few others about how he might take matters into his own hands.

#ElonMusk didn’t want to publicly endorse #Trump; the furthest he would go, he told friends, was an “anti-#Biden endorsement.” Musk was doing things his own way. He started secretly building his own #superPAC.

By the beginning of the summer, the #Republican Party’s new donor class was moving toward Trump, & they had a new item on their wish list: They wanted him to put one of their own on the ticket.

#JDVance left his #VC firm when he was elected to the #Senate in 2022, but he brought the VC agenda w/him into office. He went to bat for the #crypto industry, argued against #AI #regulation & championed the breakup of #Google — the holy grail for some venture capitalists who believe that it has become a #monopoly & is crushing the #StartUp market. Thanks to #Thiel, #Vance had already risen remarkably swiftly, jumping straight to the Senate in his mid-30s, & now on #Trump’s short list for VP.

…#Trump had finished the #Republican primary being badly outspent by #Biden, & his #legal expenses were still a drain on resources. He needed a running mate who could help him raise #money. Being so new to politics, #JDVance didn’t seem to offer much help on that front. The party’s new donor class was ready to prove otherwise.
#Sacks, who once threw a “Let Them Eat Cake” 40th bday party for himself, complete w/18th-cent-style powdered wigs, took the lead

@Nonilex Re: "For Andreessen, #Biden’s proposed so-called #billionaire’s tax, which would require that people whose wealth exceeds $100 million pay taxes on unrealized capital gains, was the ultimate threat."?

@franciswashere apparently

@ferricoxide @franciswashere it’s literally how Musk bought twitter. Not with real cash money.