From The Independent.
Excerpts:
Elon Musk, the “First Tech Bro”, has just found out the hard way that a spend of nearly half a billion dollars and control of a major social media platform cannot always change the political weather.
The grand iconoclast tried to make light of the Republican’s midterms catastrophe, posting early on Wednesday that his “election-interfering space lasers didn’t work”. A post telling followers to “Vote red (Republican) today” also, rather sheepishly, disappeared.
Musk is not a man who relishes failure. His spending went to a slew of candidates who failed to get elected in Texas, now the epicentre of his companies’ operations.
For a man whose wealth is estimated at more than $800bn, spending nearly half a billion dollars in campaign donations is surely loose change.
But the money was spent for a purpose beyond ideological alignment – Musk has an on-off relationship with Donald Trump, but one which has advanced his interests strategically. And how. Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX slumped following the US midterm elections, wiping out more than $100bn in combined market value.
Elon Musk is now in trouble.
In essence, two sides of the Musk sphere of interest have taken a battering. The first is his position as America’s most powerful “tech bro” power broker, a man who could shape the direction of politics and policy towards companies like his Starlink and SpaceX entities.
He was outdone by the more raw democratic force of voters disillusioned by Trump over the economy and the Iran war – and in many parts of the electoral map, also anxious about the impact of massive data centres to power the next stages of frontier technology.
The second is that it has laid bare how closely entwined his businesses are with the American state – businesses that rely on a steady flow of regulatory permissions, subsidies and support at the state and federal level to continue their extraordinary growth trajectory and power the next stages of artificial intelligence.
Via https://independent.co.uk/voices/elon-musk-donald-trump-midterms-republican-starlink-b3079726.html
