Originally published at: Clown who blew $44B destroying Twitter can't wait to cut the US budget - Boing Boing
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Who needs subsides for EVs or a space program? All he cares about is whether the government’s heart is in the white place.
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No doubt his first priority will be cutting the budgets of any regulatory or oversight agencies that will affect his businesses.
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But why would Musk want to shut down subsidies for his companies? He could go further and, for example, redirect mass transit funding to subsidise his robotaxis.
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He is willing to sacrifice his precious companies at the altar of white makes right.
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Yep. Cutting regs is still one of the things the MAGA people cheer that Trump did. Never mind that those cut regs directly led to the Boar’s Head incident, the McDonald’s (likely onion) incident, the massive Ohio train derailment, and many other major events.
Regulations are written in blood. You want them. I work in a massively regulated industry and I have, many times, been asked to cheat a reg here and there by bosses or “project leaders” who are only looking at the bottom line. I refused. I once froze an entire product line because we had a report that the issue could potentially overdose children by 500% - the CEO called me to complain, but when I said what the cause was, suddenly that was totally ok, although I miraculously had a whole team of engineers eager to solve the problem in 24 hours.
There’s absolutely some fat that can be trimmed in our budget. Most of it would be in the politically untouchable area of our defense. I’m sure there’s all sorts of harmonization to be done or excess spending to cut. He’ll never look at that, because that’s what pays him.
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How to have 12.5 billion dollars:
- Buy Twitter for 44 billion dollars.
- Antics ensue.
- Profit?
The super rich really live by different rules than the rest of us.
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Even if he “only” had 12 billion dollars, if he spent $1 every second, it would take him 380 years to run out of cash. Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
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At the very least, they should be forced to live on a different planet. Travel at their own expense.
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He has also just recently admitted that he, and his brother, are illegal immigrants who fraudulently acquired U.S. citizenship, so i guess the only responsible thing to do now is to deport their asses & nationalize his companies
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I know nothing about running a business or social media company, but I guarantee you I could increase the value of Twitter by 1 trillion dollar, just by undoing everything that illegal alien has done to make X.
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I keep thinking about what Elon did to Twitter, just in terms of his cuts, especially his wildly risky decisions that, if they had not gone perfectly through dumb luck, could have completely destroyed Twitter (I mean broken it utterly: lost data, lost accounts, unrecoverable states for processes) e.g. when he decided to move some servers himself in the back of a truck. (It’s the sort of thing you do as a plucky start-up with nothing to lose, not a company with hundreds of millions of users, if you have any regard for them at all.) But he lucked out there, suffered no immediately fatal consequences, and went on to make stupid decisions that destroyed 80% of the platform. That’s the best case scenario for his oversight of the US budget. He knew something about how Twitter worked, but he still did that; he obviously knows nothing about how the US government works. He’d trash it in his goal of removing the restraints of regulation from around his companies.
Yeah, given how loudly and publicly he’s chafed at the regulations his companies work under, he’s all but said outright that that’s why he’s interested in this position.
He won’t, though. The bits that directly benefit his companies will be the bits he keeps. Gotta have those subsidies for the proper functioning of the “free market,” don’t ya know!
I’ve long thought that billionaires should be taxed/regulated out of existence. The last couple months have me leaning towards another solution:
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I’ve worked in government my whole career, and I certainly can’t claim that there’s not silly-to-appalling stuff in the budgets, but that’s not what ever gets cut. That’s the stuff that someone or some industry really, really wanted there. It’s the stuff that no one advocates for, like, oh, say tuberculosis testing or things that help children or low income people that get cut. Not the $600,000 for a newsletter that one of the commissioners really wants. Or the $1m extra for a finance program that has a website that dazzled the city manager but really isn’t any better than the cheaper one. That stuff stays.
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And phase two of that is something he can’t manage either. It’s a whole two steps, and I don’t think he could manage either, but you probably could.
- Hire people that know what they’re doing
- Listen to them.
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It’s also extremely naive to assume that “wasteful spending” is a problem inherent to government but not private industry. If your Fortune 500 company gives executives seven- or eight-figure compensation packages and shuttles them around the world in private jets then you don’t get to complain about how much money the government spends on baby formula for poor people.
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Except when they’re vehemently denying those regulations were cut by Trump. I’ve seen discussions of the recent McDonald’s incident wherein Trump cultists were declaring that no regulation cuts had happened.
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the MAGAt memory hole is deep and wide. everything perceived as wrong with the US is completely and totally Joe Biden and Democrat’s fault, as if there has never been any other presidency before ■■■■■.
■■■■■ gud,
biden (and by extension - and “without any votes” harris), bad.
there was only george washington and abe lincoln before.
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The mismanagement of the Covid pandemic also came about from listening to people who imagined themselves “unconventional geniuses” and “captains of industry”. Why listen to the CDC when Jared can be in charge of protective gear and we can get answers from some guys uncle on Facebook who swears we can cure Covid with horse paste?
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All of Elon’s jet trips would be on the public purse, and reporting where they go would be a National Security violation.
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Almost the entirety of the US budget is public data, if he weren’t completely full of shit he could start making proposals right now
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