He knows how to grift.

He knows how to abuse employees

He knows how to strip businesses of their value for short term gain

Nah.that would create the illusion they contribute something. Exterminate them.

I don't understand how an entire tech industry fell so hard for him.

The ultra-wealthy are not only not geniuses, but they might be downright incompetent.

The most recent episode of How Money Works (here on YouTube) demonstrates this during the recent bonanza of tech layoffs (these include the AI layoffs, attributed falsely to replacement by AI automation).

The story it tells starts with the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, which lead to mass telecommuting and then the great replacement. The working class got a modicum of class consciousness since it was clear that their jobs were necessary and involved skills that would be difficult to replace.

The tech industry had developed its own culture from this and had gotten used to being able to openly negotiate their salaries, and the C-suite didn't like that. In fact, the billionaire class openly resents the workforce on which it depends.

And thus, they laid off a ton of people. Too many, it turns out. It started with the RTO mandates, some of which were intended to incentivize workers to voluntarily quit. And some of them did. Specifically, the best and brightest talent were the ones most confident they could get work elsewhere at better pay that still allowed telecommuting.

So the billionaire class, via the great layoff, facilitated their own brain drain.

And now those same tech companies have found they've gotten rid of too many people, including essential talent that actually knew how to run the businesses (and the technology). So they're now hiring them back. The greybeards are negotiating at an advantage, and are asking for higher salaries. And the ones that are no longer available are being replaced with rookies fresh out of college.

So yeah, the tech industry billionaires, out of pure vindictiveness, collectively fucked themselves.

I hypothesize our billionaire class got rich in their early careers through a combination of fortuitous opportunity, family connections, infusions of generational wealth and ruthless willingness to sabotage their peers. Then they were subject to years of sycophancy and cronyism where they were shielded from any criticism. They gladly assumed they earned their lot, and got there because they are brilliant. At that point, having immense wealth, it's difficult to not fail upwards, and so they don't actually see the difference between skillful decision-making and incompetence.

Sadly, incompetence with extreme amounts of money is very dangerous, and so we have the high lords playing their games of thrones and wrecking the world for the rest of us.

we do quite litterally print money and hand it around in time of crisis

The US Treasury borrows from the Federal Reserve on assets that are added to the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And then the Treasury pays back the debt incrementally over the period of the loan (often on the order of 10-30 years). So it isn't "literally printed", it is borrowed at the Federal Reserve Prime Rate, which is typically less than the growth rate of accumulated tax receipts by year.

For example, there was no reason Obama was obligated to focus on saving the banks per se. That same money could have gone to home owners instead.

Absolutely. TARP was some bullshit used to prop up bank equity value at the expense of homeowners.

But the principle behind TARP was that the US government exchanged currency for equity stake in these failing firms. And the firms that recovered then bought back the state at marginally higher face value, which allowed the Treasury to book a profit for every business that hadn't outright failed already. Over the life of the program, the real cost to the Treasury was minimal (arguably profitable, depending on who you believe).

The Treasury could have bought up mortgage notes instead, at pennies on the dollar, and started collecting interest on the debt just like the private banks had. Then they could have renegotiated mortgages of underwater homes at lower interest rates, while the private sector lenders filed for bankruptcy. That would have drastically reduced the foreclosure rate and dumped the material cost of the financial crisis on stock and bond holders of these private companies.

But in either case, we weren't just printing a bunch of crisp new dollar bills (or their electronic equivalent) to fund the purchase. We were effectively doing the Vulture Capitalist trick of borrowing against the assets we'd just purchased, at an interest rate that was below the expected return value of the assets.

I think this is a more global problem of “people now think they’re experts on everything, and shout about it loudly”

I dunno… I don’t think the average person in 1926 assumed they were an expert on medicine or physics or finance or whatever. If a doctor, or physicist, or banker told them something, they’d generally nod their head.

it's crazy to me that you're citing the authoritative and very top-down approach of the 1900s as a positive example here. never before or after has a society been more militarized.

Vaccine denialism was a problem during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.

In the eighties, I remember that Christian Scientists would refuse medical treatment for their dying children, choosing to pray instead. The kids usually died.

There was always a subset of the population who refused to acknowledge science or expertise.

These days, we've gotten rid of the government departments of experts that are supposed to advise our legislators regarding the consequences of the bills they want to pass. Instead they just listen to the lobbyists of the corporations who finance their campaigns.

Or in the case of Trump, his own imagination, since he hallucinates more than Google Gemini. A recent example is his belief that the CHIPS act requires the hiring of trans folk to run microchip-making factories. (It doesn't. Also the rumor that he confused transgender with transistor is probably false.)

don’t think the average person in 1926 assumed they were an expert on medicine or physics or finance or whatever. If a doctor, or physicist, or banker told them something, they’d generally nod their head.

So many of those professionals were just professional scammers back then. Until the professionalization of these fields, in the 1940s/50s, you really couldn't trust them. And avoiding people who claimed to do surgery/treat cancer, while keeping all your money in your mattress was genuinely a smarter move.

the other half is that they weren’t able to shout it into an algorithm that absolutely loves the controversy it generates, and serve it to billions of people automatically.

A lot of this shit is amplified and filtered to operate as it's own native advertising.

The shit opinions that align with the marketing agenda are the ones that get front-paged.

printing money and donating it to the people would cause inflation but it's still good.

here's why:

company A owns $3k, while people B, C, D have $1k each.

now let's give another $1k to B, C, D. now there's more money in circulation, name $9k in total instead of $6k. So the dollar is only worth 66% as much as it was before. Let's calculate wealth of each participant in terms of previous value:

• company A: $3k * 0.66 = $2k
• person B, C, D: $2k each * 0.66 = $1.33k

so people have more wealth than before (at the expense of companies)

That's actually complex issue. Trivial model would probably suggest it will cause inflation proportional to the amount of created money. But market behavior is complex and you could get away without inflation if checks were small enough.

The bigger issue would be government creating money directly circumventing Central Bank - that perverts political incentives and is potentially a downhill towards catastrophic collapse

We're already straining the resource capacity of the globe, and Americans are an enormous consumer endpoint relative to population size.

Simply issuing more cash won't create more end products. And when a handful of cartelized retailers control the flow of trade?

Prices are already artificially inflated to accommodate marketing costs and profit. Why retailers continue to raise prices to catch that additional free cash?

Fiat currency will, by definition incurr inflation. What if money were tied to necessities like a liter of water, kWh of energy, or kilograms of grain?

This is actually true though. Basically every country has done it.

If printing money results in enough value created, there is no inflation.

Of course, you have to create a lot of value per money printed, which no country has achieved. And that's where taxes come in and fill the gap.

Many of the "economic miracles" involved printing a lot of money. But since their value output increased so fast, (and again, taxes) they experienced little inflation.

It is theoretically possible to print money without taxes and not have inflation. That would be more than a miracle though. If you get even more efficient with money, even deflation would happen.

It's the same reasoning behind debt. Debt is "bad" because you have to pay more than what you were paid. But if you are smart with that money and create more money from it, you can pay back the debt (including interests) and get some extra money for yourself.

No. That would be achievable through reallocation of funds, e.g. from tax revenue. If the quote is correct, that's just increasing monetary mass, aka printing money. Which is Inflationary AF.

That being said, I find it hard to believe that a CEO in this day and age wouldn't have at least this basic understanding of how the economy works. This being Musk, there's no need to invent extra character flaws. The man has plenty to go around.

I just looked over the interview. it was fucking WEIRD man. He's kind advocating for a UBI? Basically he's saying that AI is going to give us the whole Star Trek "post scarcity" future thing and like money is simultaneously going to be useless, but that how that could happen is the Treasury could just give people checks and inflation wouldn't be an issue because the AI would be creating so much abundance. It's genuinely hard to parse

In the short term. But you still need a stable currency for international trade. So far, the US has managed to keep the dollar strong(ish) especially with regard to our oil and tech exports. And they've done this after floating over $30T in debt, no small feat.

Idk if Musk Bucks meaningfully change that math. So maybe it's fine. A few hundred billion, which is still barely a percentage point on the national economy.

But it does add stress to an already inflated system.