Donald Trump seen here with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House: NAJ screen shot
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
In a retrograde world where finding crumbs to eat might be enough to make the peons and peasants kiss up to the new king/dictator and the pope like they did in Shakespeare’s time, when monarchs ruled the world. But how in this world has it come to the point where even the tech billionaires feel the need to kiss Donald Trump’s ass/ring?
There are quite a few things we don’t understand about this world where half the population or more seem to think all kinds of fake things are real, like the drones lighting up the skies over New Jersey are an outer space alien plot. Or maybe it’s China spying on the bathroom habits of god fearing Americans who watch Fox News?
Of course they don’t trust the government, so a statement by the Department of Homeland Security means nothing to them.
“We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” the department said in an email press release on Thursday. “The FBI, DHS and our federal partners, in close coordination with the New Jersey State Police, continue to deploy personnel and technology to investigate this situation and confirm whether the reported drone flights are actually drones or are instead manned aircraft or otherwise inaccurate sightings.
“Historically, we have experienced cases of mistaken identity, where reported drones are, in fact, manned aircraft or facilities,” the release says. “We are supporting local law enforcement in New Jersey with numerous detection methods but have not corroborated any of the reported visual sightings with electronic detection. To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully. There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted air space.
“We take seriously the threat that can be posed by unmanned aircraft systems (UAS or formerly UFOs), which is why law enforcement and other agencies continue to support New Jersey and investigate the reports. To be clear, they have uncovered no such malicious activity or intent at this stage … there is no known malicious activity occurring in New Jersey…”
Surely Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg know better than that. So why do they feel the need to suck up to Trump, to kiss his ass, or his ring like a monarch king?
Amazon announced Thursday that it was planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, part of a pattern in which tech companies and their leaders are taking steps to repair their relationships with Trump, according to the New York Times.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced on Wednesday that it was putting $1 million into the inaugural fund, just weeks after Zuckerberg met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg kisses up to Trump at Mar-a-Lago: NAJ screen shot
Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post and famously killed an editorial during the campaign endorsing Kamala Harris for president, leading to mass digital subscription losses, had a “rocky history” with Trump, some say, who long harbored frustration with Bezos over reporting in The Post. During his first term, Trump once questioned whether the U.S. Postal Service gave Amazon a sweetheart deal, and Amazon accused Trump of improperly pressuring the Pentagon to deny the company a major cloud computing contract.
But over the summer, Bezos spoke with Trump after the former president was shot at a campaign event, and on social media he praised Trump’s “grace and courage under literal fire.” More recently, Bezos has said that he is “very optimistic” about the incoming Trump administration.
At the DealBook Summit in New York on Dec. 4, Bezos said that Trump “seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.”
Amazon also said it would livestream the inauguration next month.
Trump said that Bezos, who chairs Amazon’s board, was meeting with him, and that he wanted to get ideas from him and other tech leaders.
Gifts to inaugural committees, which do not have contribution limits, are popular among businesses and individuals eager to curry favor with an incoming administration, according to the Times. Trump’s inaugural committee is offering top-tier benefits to donors who contribute $1 million.
Amazon gave $57,746 to Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political donations. In contrast, the company said the Biden campaign did not accept donations from tech companies in 2020, in an effort to avoid political influence. What a quaint idea in these crazy times.
And of course Elon Musk supported Trump’s reelection to the tune of millions, and so curried favor with Trump that he’s now supposedly going to lead a government committee to “streamline” the U.S. government to make it more efficient.
“It feels like a preview of the next phase, where so many will go meet Trump in person and kiss the ring of the 47th president, a man who’s promised to become a dictator on day one and deport millions of people in a scheme that’s pretty much guaranteed to devastate the economy,” according to Gizmodo. “And it’s already making us nauseous.”
They say the biggest beneficiary in the world of tech from Trump’s victory will almost certainly be Elon Musk, the X, Tesla and SpaceX CEO who spent at least $120 million to help Trump get elected and even spent the last night of the campaign at Mar-a-Lago, supposedly strategizing with the once and future president.
“But there are plenty of other tech leaders who now must prove their fealty to Trump if they want to maintain or win new government contracts,” they say.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also sent his congratulations to Trump on Threads, the social media platform launched in July 2023 to compete with Twitter, and was reportedly terrible at keeping people updated about the election, or any news for that matter. Meta is clearly intent on destroying the timelines news value and obliterating history, dead set on getting people addicted to silly memes and videos and personal “memories” over actual history. That must be where the advertising money lies.
Advertising was invented to fund news. Now it funds silliness and stupidity. Those are the values of our time in the 21st century.
Trump previously threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison. But even after that unhinged rant, Zuck called Trump a “badass” and signaled during the entire campaign that he was another tech billionaire who would help Trump however he could.
Even Google’s Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated Trump.
“Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory. We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone,” Pichai tweeted, including a map showing Trump’s victory.
According to other bloggers anyway, who write about The #1 Reason Elon Musk Kisses Donald Trump’s Ass.
It seems that Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion with the goal of becoming the world’s biggest and loudest troll, according to this line of thinking, where “tweeting bullshit to power” is Elon’s game, and not just to fight off government regulation of the internet or to avoid paying taxes, but to continue getting billions in federal contracts to feed his space exploration fantasies.
Related: The Folly of Dreaming About Winning a Space War With Russia or China
“Musk is a classic enfant terrible and the idiot savant of the techno-plutocrats, half genius, half bullshit artist, an industry mover and shaker who has revolutionized three of the toughest verticals to conquer: eCommerce, automobiles, and space. He’s also a fetishized brat who loves to own the libs and everyone else, then get spanked for being naughty.”
The differences are what’s truly revealing, in this way of thinking, “especially since Donald is totally full of shit, and Elon has actually changed the world several times over. So what’s the allure? Why the bizarre bromance?”
Mark Cuban argues that Trump is a lousy leader because “he’s unethical, he’s not bright, he can be easily bought, he’s very transactional, he doesn’t understand his own policies, and he makes no effort to learn.”
Could these exact characteristics be why Musk loves Trump? Is he that impressionable?
“Running the government like his business, and his business like a local mobster HQ, Trump is on the phone at all hours, getting all his advice and information only from his inner circle, making his next big decision on the fly, and based on whomever he talked to last,” they say.
Yes, Trump believes he is the “consummate showman,” and clearly must be the center of attention, making him pathologically extraverted.
“Trump’s mercurial nature and proven impressionability make him the perfect sucker for an insatiably power hungry motherfucker like Musk,” they say. “Like Iago, Jay Gatsby, or Tom Ripley who hustle their marks, Elon has hitched his ride to the Trump Train because he knows that once in the Oval Office, he’ll have a choice opportunity to mold and manipulate the master. Unethical, dim-witted, corrupt, transactional, and ignorant are the bad leadership traits Musk favors in a President he can convince to do his bidding.”
So that’s it then. It’s not just taxes and government regulations these billionaires are afraid of. They want billions in tax money to fund their adventures.
Some of my friends voted for this bullshit. You will get what you deserve. And we know you will still deny the reality of it all later when the disastrous results inevitably follow. Will it be Joe Biden’s fault even long after he’s gone back to Delaware? That’s what they will say on Fox News. Millions will believe it.
God help us all.
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