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Your guide to what the US election 2024 means for Washington and the world
In our time, the meaning of a picture depends on which side you are on. Take the photo of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai, who are sitting in front of Donald Trump’s cabinet members second Inauguration. The liberal caricatures of liberal elitists saw it like me as a portrait of the American oligarchy. Trump, his supporters and the Tech moguls themselves interpret the picture differently.
Trump, a master of the spectacle, set the billionaires there for a certain reason. His message: “I brought her to the heel and used it to the American project.” He knows that most of his voters will agree. Maga is more on the cult of the entrepreneur than on the cult of the strong man, even though they overlap. Many business people consider great entrepreneurs to be the winners of life.
Trump set up his reputation to play a great entrepreneur on TV. He then went into politics and sold the idea that the government was a “faulty company called USA” to quote Gordon Kko’s “Greed is Good” speech from the 1987 film Wall Street. Trump promised to run the government like a company. The choice of Donald Trump against Kamala Harris was an entrepreneur against government officials among countless contrasts.
Trumpism can be the culmination of the political cult of the entrepreneurs. I cannot imagine any other entrepreneur who becomes a government manager in a large economy, except Silvio Berlusconi. Last political cults of the United States were soldiers (Washington, Eisenhower) or company bosses such as Mitt Romney. George W. Bush, who had a Harvard -MBA, was celebrated as a “CEO President”. But the CEO of companies is a rule -bound number in a suit with a degree. The entrepreneur is a wilder beast, autonomous, regularly, often a college failure. He is his own man. (This is a male cult – remember Zuckerberg’s recent praise for “male energy”.)
The largest entrepreneurial assets in history was shaped in Silicon Valley between 1998 and 2008. Today are the beneficiaries. Your 80-hour work weeks are mostly over and leave enough energy to pour into politics. They are known to the ordinary Americans through their first names or nicknames in Musk’s case through his tweets and their anti-corporate dress. The billionaires themselves as an iconoclast that can go wrong, as maybe with Musk’s obvious Nazi greeting.
To underpin the cult is the belief that what is good for entrepreneurs is good for America. The capitalist Marc Andreessen told Podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump’s message “America has to win”, meant that US companies should “win global markets. . . How can someone be against it? “After all, Andreessen argued, only economic growth for” welfare programs and food aid programs, all of these things “could pay.
The argument is doubtful. Firstly, Europeans retire and live longer than the Americans, despite lower economic growth and mostly lower conditions of state debts. Second, growth does not necessarily increase public expenses because Big Tech has perfected tax avoidance. These companies do not create many jobs either. Meta has 72,000 mostly highly qualified employees, including immigrants for H1-B-Visa.
How do the moguls read – the decades that ignore Washington – read this photo? In Andreessen’s stories, Joe bid her in Trump’s arms. While most ordinary Americans seem to have experienced bidism as a time of inflation and drift, the mogules saw something more uncanny: a business administration that stamps out their freedom. Andreessen accuses the securities of the bidges era and the Exchange Commission to “try to kill the crypto industry”.
Crypto and AI are the new battlefields of the entrepreneurs. A difference between Trump I and Trump II is that the price for Bitcoin in 2016 was 900 US dollars and is now more than 100,000 US dollars, while we saw on Monday that the shift in AI is now the global Charging markets can turn.
As with everything else, America is shared on crypto and AI. Democrats are careful about crypto before the opportunity for money laundering. Trumpists see it as a libertarian business that undermines the government (although crypto entrepreneurs want bank accounts and Trump’s support). Biden tried to regulate the AI; Trump won’t. Tech Mogul’s hope that he will help them win what Peter Thiel calls the “global war” to conquer enemy areas such as the EU, Great Britain and Brazil.
Billionaires take care of guidelines, but they also want love. Several, like Andreessen, beat Liberal. But when liberals reject them, they will select the guy who loves them (for now) and shows it with its seating plan.
E -Mail Simon AT Simon.kuper@ft.com
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