Platformer - The billionaires hedge their bets

Two years ago on Sunday, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter. For most other business leaders, what followed would have been a disaster. Users fled and advertisers followed; Musk tried to sue them back onto the platform. A push into subscriptions flopped. The company has now lost 80 percent of its value.

That hasn’t mattered to Musk, though, for two reasons. One is that Musk is the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $270 billion. His paper wealth grew $30 billion on Thursday alone, thanks to a skyrocketing Tesla stock, papering over any Twitter losses over the course of an afternoon.

The second reason is that X, as he renamed the platform, is now less a business than it is a political project. While it has shed tens of millions of users, X continues to be a popular forum for political warfare. And Musk has led the charge, playing a key role in Republican efforts to preemptively delegitimize the election by stoking baseless fears about widespread voter fraud. 

Leave your push notifications on and almost no matter what accounts you follow, Musk and his allies will appear, posting dozens of times per day about the election. On Monday he promoted several posts suggesting that YouTube had hidden Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump. (The interview popped up as the first result on YouTube when I searched for it.) He also campaigned with Trump over the weekend in New York City. And, of course, he mounted an effort to give away $1 million a day to registered voters in battleground states who sign a petition affirming their support of the First and Second Amendments.

Philadelphia’s district attorney asked a judge to stop that effort on Monday, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme.” DA Larry Krasner argued that Musk and his America PAC had violated state lottery and consumer protection laws rather than laws against buying votes, though the Department of Justice warned Musk about that, too. In any case, a judge isn’t expected to hear the case until Friday, when most of the voter registration effort will be complete. Musk, for his part, promoted a post on X accusing Krasner of having been bought by George Soros.

Most heads of social platforms have realized only belatedly that they function akin to heads of state: rulers of large populations that require ongoing efforts at diplomacy, whether with their own user bases, rival platforms, or foreign nations. It is a hugely lucrative but also uncomfortable position that brings with it ongoing death threats and other legitimate security risks. A way that many corporate leaders attempt to navigate these risks is by making more friends and fewer enemies.

Musk has no interest in that. He has given himself fully to a far-right belief system that is linked inextricably to his business interests. And he has decided to invest himself deeply in the election of Donald Trump, knowing two things:

• If Trump wins, Musk will have a powerful ally in the White House, a likely role in the administration, decreased oversight of his businesses, and richer contracts with the government.
• If Harris wins, she won’t retaliate against Musk, and he will still have $270 billion.

In practice, of course, it may not turn out as well for Musk as he hopes. Many Russian oligarchs once believed that they could manage Vladimir Putin, only to find themselves pushed out of an open window when they no longer served a purpose for the autocrat. One wonders whether that might have come up during one of Musk’s many conversations with Putin.

Musk, characteristically, has made an all-in bet on his preferred outcome. But it’s instructive to examine the calculus of the more sober platform leaders.

II.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg all have called Trump in recent weeks in the anticipation of his potential election, according to various reports. None have endorsed him publicly. But none have endorsed another candidate, either.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, drew widespread condemnation for reportedly preventing the Post’s editorial page from endorsing a candidate in this cycle — and waiting until the week before the election to do so. 

Some of this is a standard-issue corporate hedging of bets. When you run a global-scale platform, and the US presidential election is a tossup, you have every incentive to ensure that the lines of communication are open, however personally distasteful you may find the nominees. 

Some of this is game theory. These CEOs know that Trump would likely punish them for criticizing him publicly; he has spent much of the campaign promising to retaliate against his enemies, and even suggested that Zuckerberg should be put in jail for funding nonpartisan election infrastructure. Harris, on the other hand, will say nothing about the fact that the CEOs did not endorse her. Viewed in this light, a friendly phone call or two to Trump is all upside and no downside. 

Finally, some of this — and I really am surprised at how little this gets discussed — is payback to the Biden administration. Biden and Harris have kept tech at arm’s length for their entire administration, and they oversee a Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission that are prosecuting antitrust cases against Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon. In some cases, the government has called for the breakup of various parts of these businesses.

You can understand why Zuckerberg or Pichai aren’t falling all over themselves to get Harris elected, given their experience over the past four years. Trump might indeed worsen the economy in various unpleasant ways, as many economists predict. But it might be worth it to a Google or a Meta if it meant they could keep their monopolies.

III. 

This is not, of course, a moral case for business leaders supporting Trump. There is no moral case for business leaders supporting Trump. Trump is an openly corrupt 78-year-old fascist, twice impeached and on 34 felony counts convicted, who attempted to stop the peaceful transfer of power in 2021 and now promises to further undermine the democracy of the United States if he manages to assume power again.

But a democratic emergency like the one we are now living through is not necessarily a business emergency. In the billionaires’ view, it could actually be an opportunity — to bring an end to the antitrust cases, to block further regulation of Big Tech in Congress, and to pursue their dreams of superintelligence in peace. 

This is an appealing fantasy. But it is one that rests on the idea that whatever happens, the billionaires and their companies will be protected by the rule of law.

The history of authoritarianism suggests that the billionaires are likely to be disappointed. On Threads, Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last tells the story of Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky became an oil billionaire after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and among other things founded a civil society organization named Open Russia to promote democracy and human rights. Two years after he founded it, Putin had him arrested and charged with fraud. His businesses fell apart, and he was sentenced to nine years in prison. Today he lives in exile in London.

“The entire point of the Khodorkovsky affair was for Putin to show the class of people with enough money and power to threaten him that he could destroy their lives,” Last writes. “They got the message, quickly. And so the oligarch class became his courtiers, rather than potential rivals.”

He goes on:

And that's the take-away from the Washington Post's refusal to endorse Kamala Harris. It's not about the paper or the journalists.

It's about every wealthy executive and business owner in America being shown that if *Jeff Bezos* fears retribution from Trump, they should, too.

What's striking is that Bezos didn't even have to get arrested for the lesson to be taught. Hell, Trump *didn't even have to win*.

It's all "anticipatory obedience," as Timothy Snyder and Ian Bassin would put it.

Today the CEOs and billionaires can comfort themselves with the idea that if Trump wins, they might finally begin to make peace with the US government. The story of Khodorkovsky is a reminder of what that peace could cost: acquiescence, in perpetuity, to whatever the administration demands.

To some Big Tech CEOs, I realize, that might not sound much different than the state of affairs they find today. But should the rule of law disappear, few will be more vulnerable to retaliation than they are. I can understand why they do not wish to publicly resist Trump now. But the result may be that they have to submit to him forever.

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Governing

• A look at how Trump’s anti-immigrant conspiracy theories could undermine the election. (Brandy Zadrozny / NBC News)
• Chinese hackers have reportedly targeted the phones of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and people affiliated with Kamala Harris’ campaign. (Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Sarah Krouse / Wall Street Journal)
  • The targeted hacking attempt is reportedly part of a wide-ranging intelligence collection effort. It is still unclear what kind of data, if any, has been taken. (Devlin Barrett, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman / New York Times)
• A look at how people who clip videos on social media have driven mainstream news coverage in this election. (Brian Stelter / CNN)
• Meta, Google, TikTok and Snap will have to face lawsuits by school districts accusing them of contributing to a teen mental health crisis with “addictive” apps. (Isaiah Poritz / Bloomberg)
• QR code phishing scams are on the rise, banks and regulators warn, and are becoming increasingly trickier to spot. (Stephanie Stacey / Financial Times)
• Meta’s Llama model does not fit the Open Source Initiative’s official definition of “open,” AI as AI systems must disclose its training data. Meta said it disagreed with the definition. (Kylie Robison / The Verge)
• A man in the UK was sentenced to 18 years in prison for using images of real children to create AI child abuse images. (Hannah Al-Othman / The Guardian)
• Meta’s Israel policy chief Jordana Cutler has repeatedly flagged Instagram posts by Students for Justice in Palestine for review, citing the company’s Dangerous Organizations policy. The company says that's not relevant. (Sam Biddle / The Intercept)
• Google has been granted a 5-year exemption from the Online News Act in Canada after agreeing to pay news publishers $100 million a year. A shakedown in action. (Nojoud Al Mallees / CTV News)
• EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban parent and Meta partner, is expressing “full support” to chief strategy officer Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio after Milanese authorities opened a probe into his alleged trafficking of private information. (Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli / Financial Times)

Industry

• OpenAI does not have plans to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, the company said. The Verge reported that Orion, the company’s latest frontier model, would launch by December. (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)
• OpenAI’s AI transcription tool Whisper makes up chunks of texts and entire sentences, researchers found. (Garance Burke and Hilke Schellmann / Associated Press)
• About 75 percent of OpenAI’s revenue comes from consumer subscriptions, CFO Sarah Friar said. (Shirin Ghaffary and Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg)
• Influencers are facing a new problem when it comes to divorce – how to divide up their TikTok accounts as an asset. (Katherine Hamilton / Wall Street Journal)
• Meta has reportedly struck a multi-year deal with Reuters to use its news content in answers for the Meta AI chatbot. (Sara Fischer / Axios)
• Meta is reportedly developing its own search engine to lessen its reliance on Google and Bing for Meta AI. (Kalley Huang / The Information)
• Google is reportedly releasing the Gemini 2.0 model in December. (Alex Heath / The Verge)
  • Along with Gemini 2.0, Google is reportedly planning to preview a product, code-named Project Jarvis, that can take over a web browser to complete basic tasks like booking a flight and collecting research. (Erin Woo / The Information)
• Google is behind “shadow campaigns” to discredit Microsoft in front of competition authorities and policymakers, Microsoft said. (Tom Warren / The Verge)
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asked for a pay cut after a series of data breaches, though Nadella’s pay for the 2024 fiscal year still rose by $48.5 million. (Jordan Novet / CNBC)
• The 24-inch iMac has been updated with the M4 chip, Apple said. (Joe Rossignol / MacRumors)
• Apple’s new updates with Apple Intelligence features – iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 – is now available on select devices. (Brian Heater / TechCrunch)
• LinkedIn has verified more than 55 million users for free to fight AI-fueled misinformation, the company said. (Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC)
• A conversation with Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman on why the platform is valuable for training AI models. (Wall Street Journal)
• Perplexity’s search engine is now performing 100 million queries a week, CEO Aravind Srinivas said. (Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch)
  • A profile of Srinivas and his defenses of the company amid legal threats from multiple mainstream news outlets. (Kevin Mclaughlin / The Information)
• Netflix is adding a new “Moments” feature on its mobile app that lets users save and share scenes from movies and shows. (Jennifer Maas / Variety)
• New app Loops is emerging as a TikTok competitor integrated with the fediverse. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)
• Medium is seeing an influx of AI slop, with more than 40 percent of articles being likely AI-generated. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” because nobody reads it. (Kate Knibbs / Wired)

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Send us tips, comments, questions, and reasons billionaires should speak out against Trump: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.