One of the essential problems of spending too much period on social media is that you are cooking your brain by study posts from a group of attention-seeking lunatics. If your social media of choice is the location formerly known as Twitter, and it is your chief origin of communication alongside the exterior world, you may delusionally throw distant nearly $500 myriad dollars on midterm elections, fair akin Elon Musk.
In particular, $47 myriad of that prosperity from Musk’s America PAC was aimed at defeating Texas Democrat James Talarico, who trounced Musk’s preferred Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, alongside 55 percent of the vote. Talarico equal made Musk’s power a chief part of his run ads, alongside the motto “Texas is not for sale.”
The opposition to data centers is a way of making tangible how pissed off most group are alongside the tech industry
How did Musk get this so wrong? I accuse the bubble of X. My erstwhile coworker Casey Newton, who has (with several well-earned shame) slunk rear to X, explained that he did so since it was the location that was most influential alongside the AI crowd. In several sense, this is exactly the problem. The agentmaxxing loons of AI influencing are wildly out of contact alongside normal people. There is, correct now, one very important bipartisan stance in the United States, and it is: Fuck a data center.
It’s beautiful apparent that the opposition to data centers is a way of making tangible how pissed off most group are alongside the tech industry, particularly alongside the gangster tech regulation of late and the changeless stream of threats coming from AI companies. These guys have really tied themselves and their AI aspirations to Donald Trump’s sinking ship, and if you’re hanging out on X all the time, that’s unattainable to see, not smallest since the site’s owner, Musk, is shaping the algorithm in ways that create him awareness good.
Since Musk seems to have forgotten what it is akin to cognition joy, or equal mild satisfaction, I have taken the liberty to create a catalog of things he could have bought to get him a improved come back on his investment. He likely could flip multiple things on this catalog for more money, but at minimum he could have gotten a small hurry of pleasance from a new purchase:
- Larry Ellison’s personal isle ($300 myriad in 2012, $440 myriad in today’s dollars per CPI calculator) (source)
- 13 Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptails ($32 million) (source)
- 5 The Graff Diamonds Hallucination watches ($55 million, $78 myriad today) (source)
- The Washington Post ($250 myriad in 2013, $360 myriad today) (source)
- 30 Sunseeker 100 yachts (base cost $14.6 million) (source)
- 43 Hope diamonds ($300,000 in 1911, concerning $10.3 myriad today) (source)
- Ken Griffin’s NYC penthouse ($239.96 myriad in 2019, $321 myriad today) (source)
- 76 New Zealand aureate visas ($10 myriad affirmative $27,000 use fee in NZD, concerning $5.77 myriad in USD) (source)
- 44 30-second Super Bowl commercials ($10 million) (source)
- At smallest 977 rides on Blue Origin’s New Shepard ($450,000) (source)
- Willem de Kooning’s Interchange (~$300 million, ~$400 myriad today) (source)
- $14.67 current cardstock to all Texan (~30 myriad Texans) (source)
- 34 renovations of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool ($13.1 million) (source)
- 223,000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards (at MSRP of $1,999) (source); 60,000 Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards (at “globalized normal price” of $7,240) (source)
- 8 2026 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show Fantasy Bras (source)
- His extremely own non-Grok type of The Odyssey (budget $250 million) (source)
- 4 sets of Wachtell, Lipton lawyers from the Twitter takeover lawsuit ($90 myriad fee) (source)
But hey, at smallest changing the name of SpaceX’s “Superintelligence” division rear to “Artificial Intelligence” is free!
Musk spent final night deleting tweets so he wouldn’t appearance as foolish as he is. Too bad it’s not as uncomplicated to delete another things! Texans were already asking questions concerning sweetheart deals to advantage Musk, and now there’s a motion of politicians who ran against his prosperity coming into power, including the administrator and the attorney broad of Texas. That may average unredacting Gov. Greg Abbott’s Musk emails, for case — answering several questions concerning the power Musk bought alongside Texas Republicans.
So actually, perchance the finest funding on that catalog would be the aspiration squad of lawyers who clobbered Musk on the Twitter agreement — since Musk has a bunch of new enemies in power, and the simplest item in the earth they can do to curry favor alongside their voters is examine him. Bet you’d never cognize that if you spent all your period on X.
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