If you follow American politics, you may think of a “pro-business” platform as something that consists of the things that business interests often lobby for: lower taxes, less regulation period, less oversight, less protection for labor, less responsibility of all sorts to anyone other than their own shareholders. Yet all these things that they seek (for the purpose of increasing short term profits) are things that they assume will exist within the context of the basic principles outlined above. Businesses want lower taxes, but they still want well-maintained roads. They want weaker labor protections, but they still want a healthy and well educated workforce. They want less regulation, but they still want transparent laws and functional enforcement. Their short term greed, unwise and distasteful as it may be, is only something they fight for because they assume that the big, fundamental pillars of society and government that allow them to operate freely will always be in place.
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Lost in the spectacle of billionaires catfighting on decaying social media platforms is something mildly more consequential: the firesale of America - and the world's - future. While we obsess over Musk's bloviations and Altman's careful rebuttals, the actual mechanisms of AI power are being divided up among a handful of private entities, operated by oligarchs and funded by overseas interests, with the blessing of an Autocrat.
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Stargate isn't a battle between billionaires or a test of financial commitments. It's a preview of how power will flow in the AI age, through layers of technology, capital, and influence that would baffle the monopolists of the past. As Musk and Altman trade barbs on social media, they're actually fighting over who gets to be the new robber barons – and we're left wondering whether anyone has the will or the means to stop them. This isn't progress. It's a heist.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.