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Biggest loser in the midterms might be Elon Musk. Not only did his personal expenditures fail to achieve any meaningful result, but his outspoken support of the outparty and high profile makes him an extremely high-value target. His companies are now based mainly in two states controlled by Democrats, who will certainly be under pressure to Do Something, and SpaceX is heavily into SI and datacenters, which lost catastrophically in every ballot measure and is about as popular as AIDS.
In his favor, SpaceX is still indispensible and the other companies provide a lot of jobs and tax revenue that it would be foolish to spurn. But the flipside is that hatred of the man as an avatar of CEO's, SI, datacenters, and conservatives, has taken on a life of its own and you have lots of people like Scott Galloway calling, literally, for blood. I think if Musk is not personally ruined the more radical elements are going to be extremely disappointed to the point of Kirking him.
Elon Musk is the richest person in the entire world. The Democrats don’t even have a federal supermajority. He’ll be fine.
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Can we stop using SI now? Superintelligence already had a distinct meaning.
AI will be fine. The Democrats aren't going to go directly up against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Nvidia... about half the stock market. They're not going to risk letting China catch up. Plus the military and intelligence agencies are very interested in AI superiority for its speed, targeting, information-processing/surveillance and mathematical capabilities with reference to cryptography, not to mention cyberespionage. They're hardly likely to welcome a slowdown.
Lots of things are unpopular but they happen anyway. Trump I promised to pull out troops from the Middle East but generals largely ignored him and cajoled him into doing what they wanted. Trump II jacked up huge tariffs, the markets revolted and he backed down from the extremes. He's still president until 2029 and will likely veto any anti-AI bills. There are ways to get around uncooperative planning environments for datacentres, Elon's pretty good at that. Or just bribing people.
The Iraq War became very unpopular but the US was still stuck in there due to sunk cost fallacy, the cost to prestige, the forces of chaos and destruction that were released by the destruction of Baathism sucked America back in.
Bernie's 'ban superintelligence' bill probably won't get through even with the new senators, unless there's a major crisis and by that time it might well be too late to matter. Even if it was passed into law it probably wouldn't work like it's supposed to, regulation of big tech isn't easy.
I agree AI/SI as an industry will chug along fine after greasing the right palms, but this make me more worried about Musk's prospects specifically. If the populace won't get its datacenter halts and anti-AI regulation, a scapegoat will be needed.
There wasn't even a scapegoat for COVID and millions of people died. Nor the GFC.
Maybe if a swarm does something really dangerous? But it'd have to be a pretty big event.
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I need to see this Galloway take - link? I've never known him to crank up the heat like that, but this is also quite an exceptional election.
He called Musk "a traitor to the West" and suggested he should be dealt with the same the Rosenbergs were.
https://www.tmz.com/2026/11/04/scott-galloway-calls-elon-musk-traitor/
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