United States | News & Politics

1. Damage the brand by association.
2. ???

Has he tried saying nothing? That would probably work.

Maybe he was. Maybe Thiel had a conversation with him about drawing more of the wrong kind of attention.

Yah everyone is reading way too much into this man, he's just a mentally unwell incel who figured out how to get money from people. His emotional state is probably a mess but it doesn't mean he's about to cave in. He has more money than God and he isn't going to crash out so easily.

Hot tip: it's a LOT easier to secure huge amounts of funding than you think, it certainly doesn't take intelligence, just good connections and a complete lack of self-awareness, I know from unfortunate experience that you can secure millions in financing simply by sounding sure of yourself and talking in ways that are too convoluted for everyone to understand... I have literally seen million-dollar checks handed over because everyone in the room didn't want to feel stupid.

Each of his children is a side quest to him.

Mars.

The dumbest part is, he absolutely could have gotten involved in politics and still been fine. Zuckerberg and Bezos have both publicly supported fascism and not seen nearly as much backlash. All Musk had to avoid was making two brazen Nazi salutes on national television and then becoming the face of the most moronic, questionably legal, regularly reversed (by both the courts and DOGE itself) funding cuts in the history of our nation.

But billionaires are actually narcissistic and lucky, not smart and hardworking, so here we are. The richest man in the world, probably high most of the time, crying on TV. If someone had written a novel with this plot 20 years ago I would've dismissed it as too stupid.

Well I wouldn't mind if he felt nothing at all

Men will literally do anything instead of going to therapy

Oh no! Fantasy business failing just like those fired engineers with safety concerns said it would!

Too bad the rare resources are already wasted!

Let me... finish writing out... this reality check for... 0 fucks.

Liquidate that shit into individual gardening grants and public train money.

America has been a brand for the last century or so. A trademark, a copyright.

Nationalists are some of the dimmest people in the world. That said, we really need to take back our flag and our mottos and our dim, stupid, tribal traditions and markers, because most of the world is dim and primitive and despite hating it, we have to play the tribe game to survive. We can work on dissolving borders and all those lofty ideals quietly in the background, but we HAVE to not just squash fascism, we also have to manage the nation full of hateful idiots afterwards, and to do that, we have to appease their need to feel special and good because of where they were born.

There is a fine line you can walk to manage and maintain all of this while making real social progress, but we're nowhere NEAR that line. We keep falling for the same tricks so we don't unify into anything resembling a coalition for real progress.