Notably, $47 million of that money from Musk’s America PAC was earmarked to defeat Texas Democrat James Talarico, who defeated Musk’s preferred Senate candidate, Ken Paxton, with 55 percent of the vote. Talarico even made Musk’s influence a central part of his campaign ads, with the slogan “Texas is not for sale.”
Opposition to data centers is a way to express how angry most people are with the tech industry.
How did Musk get it so wrong? I blame the X bubble. My former colleague Casey Newton, who (with some well-deserved embarrassment) returned to X, explained that he did so because it was the site that had the most influence among the AI community. In a sense, this is exactly the problem. The crazy maxxing agents of AI influence are completely out of touch with normal people. There is, right now, one very important Bipartisan position in the United States, and it is: Screw a data center.
It’s pretty obvious that opposition to data centers is a way to make concrete how angry most people are with the tech industry, particularly with the mafia-like tech regulation of late and the constant 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 on X all the time, that’s impossible to see, especially since the site’s owner, Musk, is shaping the algorithm in ways that make him feel good.
Since Musk seems to have forgotten what it’s like to experience joy, or even mild satisfaction, I’ve taken the liberty of making a list of things he could have bought to get a better return on his investment. You could probably change several things on this list to further money, but at the very least I could have enjoyed a new purchase a little:
Musk spent last night deleting tweets so he wouldn’t look as stupid as he is. What a shame it’s not so easy to delete other things! Texans were already asking questions about favorable deals to benefit Musk, and now there is a wave of politicians who opposed his money coming to power, including the governor and attorney general of Texas. That may mean not redacting Musk’s emails from Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, answering some questions about the influence Musk bought among Texas Republicans.
So actually, maybe the best investment on that list would be the dream team of lawyers who beat up Musk on the Twitter deal, because Musk has a bunch of new enemies in power, and the simplest thing they can do in the world to curry favor with his voters is investigate him. I bet you’d never know if you spent all your time on X.
