> has more money and power than people can even comprehend.
Musk spent $445 million in Texas, and Talireco still won. Hillary outspent Trump 3:1 and lost. Harris outspent Trump 2:1 and lost. Bloomberg's expensive campaign sank without a trace.
The notion that money buys elections doesn't hold up well.
Money can get one's message out. But if the voters don't like it, they won't vote for it.
Money can't outright buy a result, but it does tend to move the needle. The same money Musk spent in 2026 probably would have changed the outcome of 2020. 2026 just had too big of a swing for the ads to make a difference.
But for what it’s worth I think your analysis needs more depth. Harris outspent Trump but how much did Republican/Democrat aligned organisations spend? What about all the local news stations that have been bought up and now play biased pieces dictated from out of market? etc etc. It’s an area you could write a dissertation on and I’m sure many have.
Well at least from where I'm sitting, it's working fine for us. We aren't in the midst of an oligarchy made up of the Epstein class, for one.
Could thing be better with the tech industry here? Sure, but at the same time, profits and industry leaders aren't the only things that matters. And at the very least companies here can't just exploit the public with total impunity.
I am also a European. Our oligarchy looks different for sure (and look into the history of pedophile scandals in Belgium, BTW).
I am not as optimistic as you. We seem to be stagnating our way into a stark choice between becoming an American tech vassal, a Chinese tech vassal, or losing out the remnants of our ability to compete on the world markets. Half of the continent borrows money at an unsustainable rate in order to pay millions of people to do nothing for decades.
We have made decisions that looked reasonable at the time they were made, but too much has changed in the meantime and now we are stuck in bad equilibria.
The Bismarckian pay-as-you-go pension system was stable as long as people had plenty of kids and died, on average, a few years after retiring. Now they have one kid and spend 20 years in retirement before they die. The maths of that system just does not work out anymore.
The European highly regulated industry was king as long as the rest of the world had no other choice, but now that Asia has industrialized, they are blowing us out of the water. First with lower prices, but now also with quality. German exports are half of what they used to be, with another halving expected. And of course without exports, our current social spending cannot be sustained either - you cannot keep such a massive redistribution mechanism running on an economy based on selling each other cups of coffee in a beach bar.
Our most talented engineers tend to move abroad and stay there. Brain drain is one of the most serious things that can happen to a country or a continent, and we are suffering from it.
We just cannot continue to live like that, something will have to yield, but many voters just don't want to hear that.
We are. In the UK we have the former Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson selling information to Epstein. There are lots of other people all around the world connected to Epstein and mostly investigations are slow or on-existent or blocked through lack of cooperation by the US.
Epstein's network is one we know about because its been exposed and because of the sexual abuse aspect of it has both drawn attention and made people less likely to cover up for those involved. Its only a fraction of the corruption that goes on though.
> We aren't in the midst of an oligarchy made up of the Epstein class, for one.
Europe even has literally hereditary monarchies; let alone an insular upper class who are famous for their debauchery. They just have much less free speech protection so it doesn't get bought up as much because of the legal risks.
Related note, but while looking up some background info on Wikipedia it appears [0] it was technically illegal to publicly insult Donald Trump in Germany at the start of his presidency which would have added a hilarious angle to a classic joke [1].
[1] In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in Red Square in Moscow and yell, "Down with Ronald Reagan", and you will not be punished.
The US is great for free speech as its constitutionally protected. However it is also very corrupt. Pros and cons.
There are a lot of advantages to constitutional monarchies in terms of stability. The monarchs do not actually have much power. I on balance prefer living in the UK and would not want to move to the US. There are pros and cons, and its culture and society (e.g. unarmed police) as well as politics and some if it is about personal circumstances (as someone who is obviously ethnic minority or foreign everywhere in the world I prefer a less racist society, for example).
I can yell "down with the King" or "down with the Prime Minister" pretty much anywhere. There are some restrictions on protest in a few places like Parliament square.
Indeed I am, and you're right, there is a reason for it. The tech unions don't need to capture mindshare in order to advertise VC-funded startups ;)
We shouldn't assume that YC is hosting this forum out of benevolence. However it is true that this place is also useful for things other than just advertisement, so that's a neat side effect. We just shouldn't assume that that's the primary purpose of HN.
If I ever hit a home run in baseball, it would be blind luck. If I did it twice, nah, that would be incredibly unlikely, as I have zero talent at any ball sports.
Gates, Jobs, and Musk - each had a home run 3 times. That is so unlikely to be happenstance, ya gotta admit they had talent.
And yet, no matter how obvious the prestige (both national and personal), power (ditto), and wealth available to anyone who can build an org with capabilities similar to SpaceX, nobody else seems to be anywhere close. In spite of the massive subsidies and support which a number of governments (espec. China) are providing to credible would-be Musks.
What if at-scale rocket science is just extremely hard, and efforts to find "another Musk" continue to fail?
No, bell-cot's point is that they are the same company that gets the profits from the payload. It's vertical integration (pun accidental, but not avoided). That gives them a massive financial advantage as a launch company. It makes it hard for anyone else to compete with them - if they have the capacity to handle all other customers' launches as well as their own.
Internet satellites... that does look like a monopoly, or at least effectively one.
Companies spin off parts of their process into separate companies all the time. Auto and airframe companies are notable examples. If it was more profitable to do these in house, they would.
Serious question - could they actually nationalize starlink? Suppose starlink takes their C&C keys and builds a control center in some other country. What does the US government do?
> Serious question - could they actually nationalize starlink?
Yeas, why not?
> Suppose starlink takes their C&C keys and builds a control center in some other country
That won't happen. It is obviously better to be fully legal billionaire (even if the government take away 99% of his assets) in the USA than to be in some other country (which can in any time change it's mind), wanted for treason by the USA. Not even close.
That at least was a reasonable idea. The Russians had a lot of old Soviet era ICBMs they had no need for anymore (plus, IIRC an agreement with the US to disassemble them), so using their engines as a cheap powerplant until SpaceX nailed reusability made sense.
That failed and SpaceX was then forced to develop its own brand new engines.
Musk spent $445 million in Texas, and Talireco still won. Hillary outspent Trump 3:1 and lost. Harris outspent Trump 2:1 and lost. Bloomberg's expensive campaign sank without a trace.
The notion that money buys elections doesn't hold up well.
Money can get one's message out. But if the voters don't like it, they won't vote for it.
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