If we tried to explain "international finance capitalism" to them do you think they'd experience a moment of enlightenment, or would they reject that glimpse of the true world and retreat further in to the shadows?

Musk had assumed an unprecedented role in the economic life and pop culture of his adopted country.

Ooh they're working the Xenophobia angle! They're going to try to create Musk as a dangerous foreigner manipulating the levers of power as part of an international conspiracy! They're gonna say "Judeo-Bolshevik!"

Musk has also become a supranational billionaire power player with endless political and economic entanglements that transcend borders

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Libs could get so much done if not for their iron clad commitment to buffoonish ignorance.

As a political figure, he has his own foreign policy, and his interests don’t always align with those of the United States, nor of the right-wing MAGA movement with which he’s identified himself.

Seriously y'all wanna take bets on whether or not they try to insinuate he's Jewish in this article?

In China, he must maintain friendly, even obsequious relations with an authoritarian regime that could seize his mammoth Tesla factory on a whim and cut off his access to a crucial market for the company’s growth, although it struggles to sell in a year what BYD, the booming Chinese electric vehicle company, sells in a month.

For fuck's sake. In America he's secretly running the Republican Party. It China he's just a helpless smol bean. Just a liddle powerless smol bean. Just maintaining obsequious relations with the authoritarian regime country that didn't let the world's most divorced man become a critical part of their strategic access to space in a totally unforced error. Another Xi win folks

The language is that of a case officer working a potential asset. How much influence does Putin have over the richest person in the world, who’s also a key contractor for the U.S. security state?

Firstly, lol at Libs making Russia, which famously has a "smaller economy than Italy" and is definitely losing the war in Ukraine which it definitely started unilaterally for no reason, a nigh omnipotent threat that somehow managed to position a foreign agent int he center of American power, but also idfk know even the way Libs discuss Russia is so ridiculous. ffs.

If Russia is courting and coercing Trump’s most important backer, it’s important to reckon with the implications, especially on the political left, without falling into Russiagate hysteria or neocon hawkishness.

Wow bad fucking news for you, buddy. You better start believing in Russiagates because you're in one.

It’s a national security issue that should matter to the left, because it’s also about a new kind of borderless plutocratic rule that has downstream effects for all of us. As America’s oligarchs exercise their own foreign policy, they wield a form of transnational power that shouldn’t belong to any one person.

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It’s less a matter of being Democrat or Republican than that they’re self-assured authoritarians with a keen sense of the profit motive.

Pretend I posted the "You didn't read the book" meme again.

Top industry figures like billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while ostensibly on opposite sides of the partisan divide, both invest in surveillance tech, drone startups, data analytics companies, and other digital-age staples of the permanent war economy. They might be self-proclaimed libertarians or big-time Democratic donors, but their interests lie with continued U.S. military hegemony.

No. That is so shocking I am hearing this for the first time!

In January 2023, Musk portrayed Ukraine’s Starlink use as a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation and posted that he wasn’t allowing the Ukrainians to use Starlink for “long-range drone strikes.”

In 2022, Musk ordered SpaceX employees to disable the Ukrainian military’s access to its Starlink satellite internet service in order to stop a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet. Musk eventually acknowledged making the decision. He said that he was told that attacking Russian-occupied Crimea was a red line that could lead to Russian nuclear retaliation.

“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk posted in September 2023.

CYBERPUNK

Musk wasn’t acting as a peacemaker, nor had he and SpaceX been neutral to that point. In choosing to intervene during that drone operation, he was not bringing anyone to the negotiating table, preventing atrocity, or advancing a diplomatic effort. He was putting his thumb on the scales for one side, based on conversations with that side’s leader.

Chat is it bad when you stop global thermonuclear war?

However they acquired the capability

My brother in christ you can buy them on Amazon.

However they acquired the capability, it matters that Russia is using Starlink at scale; that Chechen dictator (and Putin loyalist) Ramzan Kadyrov claims to have Tesla Cybertrucks kitted out with machine guns fighting in Ukraine; and that Putin — the capo dei capi of kleptocrats — reportedly has enough sway over Musk to ask him to not activate Starlink over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Or even to stop a clandestine Ukrainian naval attack.

Obsession with a plot idfk this shit sucks. "Hey maybe this international capitalist warmonger is doing international capitalist warmonger shit!" It's also very funny that what the guy is complaining about are explicitly deescalations to try to prevent global thermonuclear war.

Like... This shit just sucks. Like yeah bro, Musk is a capitalist. Thiel is a capitalist. They're all capitalists doing capitalist shit in accordance with class interests that transcend nation and ideology. We've known how this works for 150+ years.