Yet he’s taking DoD money for Starlink in Ukraine. At what point do his antics turn from the craziness of a billionaire to espionage and being deemed a Russian asset?
Musk openly stated that he spoke directly with Putin after the Ukraine invasion had started. The super wealthy have no loyalties and will sell anyone and anything to the highest bidder. I’ve said it before, every penny after $1 billion needs to be taxed at 100%. Time to reign in the oligarchs.
Is that just liquid assets, or do you also want to tax them on stock they own in companies?
You can definitely tax the hell out of dividends and sales. They are free to hold as many imaginary value tokens as they like, but the second they try to convert those tokens into actual currency, that should be heavily taxed. This goes for stock as well as cryptocurrency/NFTs.
Agree in principle but the ultra wealthy would simply find new creative ways to hide their income.
Do not let perfect get in the way of good.
Your reasoning here is irrational, and frequently repeated by many.
“They will find another way, why even try! Gosh!”
Okay, then we’ll block that way, and the next, and the next, and the next.
This is iterative development and is how the whole world works. I cannot grasp why so many people have this defeatist attitude toward resolving problems.
Comments like these are not only unhelpful, they hurt progress moving forward. Do you also apply this logic to domestic abusers (wouldn’t wife beaters just beat places you can’t see or use sexual assault? ), or speeders (won’t people just speed when no law enforcement are around?), or regular joe tax evaders? I’m going to assume not. It would be absurd to just thow up our hands and say “you know what? We’re never going to stop pedophilia, so lets put no laws or regulations in place to punish pedophiles.”
I’m not going to claim that the original commenter’s solution is perfect or even very effective, but if we do nothing (and comments like yours are encouraging doing nothing) then the percieved problem will gwt worse. We reward the bad behavior and the bad behavior continues and gets worse. Something needs to be done whether it’s perfect or not. If you’ve ever created anything, especially something to be used or enjoyed by others, you know your first draft of it is shit. There are so many things that you couldn’t see until you put the work into it or release it to others and that’s okay. You learn, you revise, you plug the holes, you scrap and implement something new, you continue the process. The “rule of thumb” didn’t stop abuse, but it was a step. We still haven’t stopped abuse, but a lot of us keep plugging along, trying to stop it in our own ways (at individual, local, national, and international levels).
If you do care about this and want to contribute, but don’t like the presented solution, offer up your own or maybe point to resources of those advancing a cause from a different angle. If you’re here to shit on ideas because you don’t care or are trolling and want to actively hinder discussion, you can fuck right off. If you are trolling I’m okay with the offchance the overall message is recieved by someone else who needs it.
We really need to rethink how ownership itself works. All assets should be in a public registry, and no country’s laws should recognize any claim of ownership not backed by the registry. For the sake of privacy, I’d make an exception for up to like $1 million in personal assets owned by an individual, but never for business assets and never for ownership of a company or shares of a company.
Wealth taxes are fantastic in theory, but in practice have never worked. They’re too hard to implement. I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I just don’t think a wealth tax is the answer.
I mean, the truth is that we’ve never found a way to prevent some people from hoarding huge amounts of wealth. Probably not a great sign for the future of our species.
Maybe but we were doing better at it before Reagan came along.
But it isn’t a silver bullet. If we want to deal with the root of today’s problems we need to focus on a number of solutions around anti-trust, pro-labor, wealth tax, lobbying, campaign finance, etc.
Imagine if Lockheed martin “shut off” a jet because it was “getting too close to China”
What would be the response by the DOJ?
I would think the military would call that an act of treason and imprison or disappear any executives they thought were involved
It would be hilarious for the US and/or the EU freeze his assets and punch his market influence to the ground if they accuse him of espionage.
I’ve said in the past that something was clearly wrong when he bought Twitter. His behavior was far too targeted. It’s all way too obvious.
He’s my fun little conspiracy theory. If I could send the CIA to do my bidding, I would have punished him by manipulating him into buying twitter. You can’t nationalize SpaceX because it would signal the failure of privatized space exploration, but you can’t have that idiot out there as a walking national security disaster looking for a place to happen. The only option if he can’t be controlled is to get him out of the way until he retires or another private competitor can become the favorite. Twitter cost him a ton of money and his reputation, exposed him as a fool, and keeps him busy with unimportant bullshit. Everyone just shrugs it off as Elon being Elon. It’s really perfect.
The spin at the end is just fluffy bullshit. Starlink, from the get go, has had bandwidth reserved for military operations albeit US military operation but military operations nonetheless. The real question here is how and why did he know that operation was happening and what other operations has he known about/thwarted/or knowingly or unknowingly passed along information about.
Maybe the same FSB agents that were driving his paranoia. Assuming they knew about the attack, they could get a bigger win by stopping it and removing Starlink from the equation at the same time, than by stopping the attack with military means.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
Musk, transparent as ever, makes sure to tell his biographer that it’s about peace, man, and has nothing to do with his love of authoritarian regimes.
Didn’t his company supply a bunch of Starlinks because of the war? Was he expecting Ukranians needed to watch more Netflix and do more school stuff while getting bombed out by the Ruzzians? What a crock
Yeah, that was when he expected Russia to win easily. Probably figured he’d get a little bit of good PR, then Russia wins and then he could say “I tried to help, but I guess it just didn’t work out for Ukraine.” Just didn’t go the way he expected I guess.
That and I don’t think he was quite so far down the fascist rabbit hole back then.
Once the killers have done all the killing they want, peace becomes paramount. Once they’ve stolen everything they can steal, then theft becomes a crime. A man with a gun kicks in your door, starts eating the food from your fridge and fucks your wife. He’s doing good peaceful things and if you resist you’re a warmonger.
So another traitor, we’re becoming too used to this.
Musk was reportedly motivated to foil the attack out of concern that a strike on Crimea would constitute a “mini-Pearl Harbor” and lead to Russia retaliating with nuclear weapons
So glad the blue-checks get to dictate our foreign policy now.
What was all that DoD money for? A suggestion box?
Not like Russia invading Ukraine was a mini pearl harbor, nooooooo not that.
TBF Russia invading Ukraine has turned out to be like Pearl Harbor (the Ben Affleck movie).
