It's not all him, several other people invested in both. According to some article Elon owns 79% of X, and only 54% of xAI (barely enough to control it). Since the valuation of X in the deal is about $20 billion more what others have estimated ($12.3 billion), it definitely seems like it's a corrupt bailout 46% funded with other xAI investors' money, basically netting Elon $8 billion overnight.
That being said, the other investors in xAI are easy marks like Marc Andressen (famous for funding Adam Neumann's project that came after WeWork) and various Saudi Royals who possibly were convinced that this is ok.
Meanwhile Rubio is proudly bragging about revoking student visas entirely for pro-Palestinian speech. Marco Rubio is not the voice of reason in the white house, he's an enemy of the Constitution.
I feel like someone told Elon that he's autistic and lacks empathy, and his reaction was to get all defensive about it and start claiming people who lack empathy are actually superior.
Miss Cleo was big in the 90s. And she wasn't even the dumbest one. Americans have always believed in stupid bullshit. The CIA used to hire psychics too. Go back to the 1920s, and Americans pretty much took it for granted that fairies are real.
What's changed recently is that the news media went from being a mostly curated place where completely lunacy was hard to find, to a right wing clown show led by con artists. When I was a kid news was for nerds only, now it's more like the national sport where everyone has their team. And don't underestimate the degree to which this was done deliberately - Elon buying Twitter was a pretty clear example of the billionaire mafia taking a platform that was sort of trying to be more attached to reality and making it a lot dumber and more right wing.
I admit using somewhat ambiguous adjective placement, but I mean "top news" to also modify "social media" - specifically referring to X which despite being a shithole remains a common place for news reporters and influential political figures and entities to post and read news-related information.
Obama doesn't have a yacht, he visited David Geffen's yacht and the Maga media had a field day claiming Obama's got a yacht. And don't get me wrong, the ideal president would stay far away from all oligarchs and their yachts. But let's not pretend Obama's lack of enthusiasm for upending the status quo and Trump/Musk/Thiel's wholehearted attempt to replace democracy with corporate feudalism are at all comparable.
This is the first part of that. The top news media in cable tv, podcasting, and social media are all run as maga propaganda and I think that's a massively underrated reason for Trump's winning. The easiest of these to take down is social media, but it requires all the other news-related celebrities to go somewhere else.
Because protests don't do shit. There were mass protests over police brutality in 2020. Didn't do shit and the right wing media reaction arguably helped kill off police reform legislation that was in progress before the protests.
The reason protests from the left don't do shit is because the most popular media is controlled by Maga. The top social media network for news, the top podcast, and the top cable TV news are all outright maga propaganda. A narrative can arise without them, but they will determine what happens to it. So last time, the protests arose due to George Floyd, but the right wing media turned it into a narrative about lawless riots, using exaggeration and fake images.
It's not all him, several other people invested in both. According to some article Elon owns 79% of X, and only 54% of xAI (barely enough to control it). Since the valuation of X in the deal is about $20 billion more what others have estimated ($12.3 billion), it definitely seems like it's a corrupt bailout 46% funded with other xAI investors' money, basically netting Elon $8 billion overnight.
That being said, the other investors in xAI are easy marks like Marc Andressen (famous for funding Adam Neumann's project that came after WeWork) and various Saudi Royals who possibly were convinced that this is ok.