Diving Deeper into the Eccentricities of Silicon Valley Billionaires: A Political Analysis

I think lots has been written about this, loads of very thinky, pensive op-eds and sort of analysis pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times. I think, you know, Pete Buttigieg, who’s the Biden Transport Secretary and former mayor, of course, and former presidential candidate, he summed this up really well the other day, when actually he said, you know, you can overthink this stuff a bit, right? You can overthink about the kind of libertarian nature of Silicon Valley and how that aligns with Trump and how the philosophies align, all that. Fundamentally, right, you’ve got a group of very rich people and very rich companies who did pretty well out of the Trump years. They did really well out of the signature and only legislative achievement, particularly of the Trump presidency, which was the Trump tax cuts, which benefited a lot of rich people and a lot of wealthy companies. And ultimately, this is a kind of, you know, this is a bit of a dance of death between the two of them in the sense they both locked into a mutual embrace. They both have something to gain. And Trump has something to gain because right now, as we’ve been talking about, he has been struggling massively to counter or find a point of critique to the Harris campaign. He is deeply, deeply annoyed by the amount of free media that she is receiving as a new candidate, which is a domain in which he normally excels. And so he’s trying to find some way of feeling relevant, getting back into the game. And who would have been convinced? Who would have sat there for two hours listening to this rambling, meandering, Donald Trump getting out his greatest hits of grievances, I won the election, it was stolen from me, et cetera, et cetera. I wonder whose mind was changed and thought at the end of that, I’m definitely now voting Trump, I’m not voting Harris. I think that it’s already, it’s preaching to the choir, it’s preaching to those who are already converted. And that has a merit in itself. I just don’t believe that that is where either campaign think the election will be won or lost. And this is what I mean about Twitter or X-Right, which is that his has become increasingly, I mean, it’s probably, it was ever thus to some extent, but it has become increasingly even more so a place for the eccentric, for the dispossessed and the never possessed as John Benjamin once put it. People who are, I mean, if you watch, actually listen to any of the Musk, Trump exchanges. I mean, actually the thing that I’m amazed about both of them, it shows kind of what complete the fact they’re on both on another planet. Actually, it’s amazing that they think that they could come across well. I mean, basically you’ve got two very, in their own way, of course, very high achieving, but also deeply eccentric, odd men talking very often about deeply eccentric, odd things. And most of the time, as I say, half the time, sounding like they’re in a slightly different universe to everybody else. And of course, the thing is about Twitter or X increasingly these days as well, is that none of them will ever notice that because they live in a kind of rarefied universe of their own where they’re constantly receiving positive reinforcement from the same people and bots and kind of Uber fans. And Musk and Trump both have their own versions of this. There’s a Venn diagram where they intersect, but they’re also distinct and separate. They’re getting positive affirmation. But as you say, John, I think the average person in so far as they might come across any of this stuff, I find it hard to fathom or believe how they wouldn’t look at the two of them and think, they’re just deeply odd, right? Which is actually, you know, aligns perfectly with what the Democrat attack of late has been about both of these men in so far as they’re tap Musk, which is these guys are weirdos and odd balls of misfits, as Dominic Cummings might have said.