Summary
Tech leaders who once backed Trump are fed up as his second term descends into chaos.
Venture capitalists and startup founders complain about erratic policies and feel burned by crypto bro schemes like $Trump coin, which tanked after launch.
Appointing David Sacks as “crypto czar” only fueled suspicions of cronyism, while proposed defense budget cuts leave companies like Anduril and Palantir reeling.
Even billionaire allies like Jeff Bezos are souring as tariffs and economic uncertainty hit their bottom line. “Everyone is annoyed,” says one disillusioned founder.
“When tech people got involved in the government, they thought Trump was going to take more of a surgical approach and act less like a wrecking ball."
What about his first term, insurrection and campaign and everything about and around him suggested it’d be anything other than a wrecking ball approach???
Billionaires have done a lot these past few years toward outing themselves as being just as stupid as any other random dumbass.
They are. They just lack morals and empathy. They’re incapable of feeling shame for exploiting other humans.
They were also all extremely lucky at least once.
I think that’s the key. We attribute to them special qualities because we like to think in terms of cause and effect. But they all seem to have just been there at the right time with the right people and the right thing.
They show us there is nothing special about them every time they try to do something new and miserably fail. Think the money Meta spent on VR, or the way Musk alienated users and advertisers on Twitter.
We are basically beholden to lottery winners.
Birth Lottery Sociopaths
2000s indie rock band, or dotcom billionaire?
Yeah well I’m not saying it’s entirely luck, but luck is certainly a significant factor in becoming a billionaire.
Right place, right time, right resources at said place and time etc.
They’re not super geniuses better than anyone else, they just had a lot fall their way, and had the work ethic/psychopathic tendencies to capitalise on it.
In about 2018, I think, a team of researchers put together a mathematical model of how markets work. What they found is that wealth just naturally accumulates to a few people. It’s inherent to how markets work, and it’s more or less at random; in their simulation runs, every person started out in an equal position.
It’s all luck. It doesn’t even take being in the right place at the right time, although that helps. Since us humans operate on narratives and just-world fallacies, it’s really easy for us to construct a post hoc story about why a certain billionaire succeeded. But it’s all luck.
(I remember that I read about this research in Scientific American, but I don’t have the link handy.)
Here’s that Scientific American article. I keep it in my bookmarks because it’s one of the articles that easily disproves countless bullshit theories. Also an article my dumbass drumpf loving father refuses to read.
His first term was pretty milquetoast during his term, at least in the ways that these stakeholders cared about. Yeah, he mucked with some trade relationships but largely backed down except for China, and China is a thorn in their side too. The economy basically looked similar to most presidential terms for the last 30 years (except for George W Bush, who had very subpar economic results). Yeah he did some horrible stuff and some incompetent stuff, but economically, his term was just fine (except for 2020, which derailed everyone).
The 2020 election, January 6th, and Trump’s continuing behavior in the wake of that, and the PJ2025 associates that swarmed around him should have been the sign that he was too dangerous to risk. However they could have still thought that Trump’s behavior was more of a show for riling up a base, and his second term would still give them a chance to have him shuffle off to a golf course while the big boys got what they wanted like usual.
This term, there just are no winners, at least domestically, and lots of losers.
Naked greed has a way of making even the orangest turd seem to sparkle like gold.