If Musk sold a 100 million cars at $50k each and pocketed 10k of that, I’d be mostly fine with that.
But so much of the value he’s generated is hype, speculation and regulatory capture, and even if you don’t give a shit about the poor, from a more traditional business / right wing perspective his gains are not sufficiently distributed across the economy. The number of companies going public has tanked. Like wealth consolidation is impacting traditional avenues of mobility. All the things we say we want from capitalism are suffering.
It seems like at some point we completely divorced wealth and number go up as moral indicators on their own, without stopping to ask if these really were doing all the things we said capitalists did like creating jobs.
I think a while ago, Musk realized that hype was a more reliable wealth extraction than exchange with society, and it’s pretty fucked if we aren’t alarmed when incentives become this misaligned.
FrankWilhoit•43m ago
...and libertarians wonder why they get the back of every man's hand.
techblueberry•51m ago
But so much of the value he’s generated is hype, speculation and regulatory capture, and even if you don’t give a shit about the poor, from a more traditional business / right wing perspective his gains are not sufficiently distributed across the economy. The number of companies going public has tanked. Like wealth consolidation is impacting traditional avenues of mobility. All the things we say we want from capitalism are suffering.
It seems like at some point we completely divorced wealth and number go up as moral indicators on their own, without stopping to ask if these really were doing all the things we said capitalists did like creating jobs.
I think a while ago, Musk realized that hype was a more reliable wealth extraction than exchange with society, and it’s pretty fucked if we aren’t alarmed when incentives become this misaligned.