The Lina Khan Election
One interesting thing about rich guys who pursue power is that they are typically very aggrieved about something, and often the tiniest of those grievances can cause a seismic historical shift. For example, many people think that Trump only ever wanted to run for President in 2016 because Obama made a joke at his expense at a previous Correspondents Dinner.
Now, if we turn to a second video, there are some indications that Elon was very pissed at the government for forcing him to delete an old tweet about Tesla unionization or face repercussions:
I have also heard that Biden’s admin didn’t invite Elon to some EV conference in 2021, and that radicalized him against the left. He still claims it’s about his one transgender child, but that seems kinda far-fetched.
Most people do not follow the day-to-day of Presidential department appointees, although maybe they will with RFK Jr. Who knows? Anyway, Lina Khan was the head of the FTC and she was pretty bullish on trying to regulate the “tech giants.” She even got a profile on 60 Minutes a few months back.
I don’t want to approach “rich guys” as a monolith, although they often are. Rich guys do not like regulatory environments, and Khan was running a mostly-effective FTC. That infuriated some of them. Add in Gary Gensler, who was over the SEC and was trying to actually regulate cryptocurrencies, and the “rich class” got very peeved.
Kamala had more billionaire donors in total (I believe it was 82 to 63, or something), but Trump raised 33% of his total from billionaires (Elon was a lot of that, as well as Ms. Adelson), and Kamala only raised 6% of her total from billionaires. That’s covered in the Breaking Points video above.
There was a secondary narrative to this election that a lot of rich guys disavowed Trump in 2021 and 2022 because he was toxic to markets given his unpredictability. Makes sense. Rich guys like markets to mostly be logical. A few things happened, tho:
And therein lies the Trump comeback.
So maybe, in a decade, when we try to explain this election … we’ll realize that in terms of females, it had more to do with Lina Khan than Kamala Harris?