#Larry #fish #letsgogambling #youknowwhatthatmeans #ACNH #fishing #bat #fursuit #fursuiting #videogames #videogame #mariokart #mariokartworld #Switch #switch2
'Chatham House Rule'
Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024,
naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that
trusted conversations require a degree of privacy.
Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side,
but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”
Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist
#Larry #Summers and the historian #Niall #Ferguson,
and more partisan figures like #Shapiro and the Democratic analyst #David #Shor.
#Andreessen lurks.
But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with #Cuban most often in the center,
sparring with conservatives.
(“no idea what you are talking about :)” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)
The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces,
and on the formation of a new conservative consensus.
Both of those are now fading
(though Torenberg has invested in a company called #ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).
Since Elon Musk turned X to the right
and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack,
“a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman.
“It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”
And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape.
You can see it on X,
where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices,
and where #Srinivasan has been a leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.
“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,”
said #Rufo.
“There’s a big split on the tech right.”
The polarity of social media has also reversed,
and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media,
“now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.
By mid-April, #Sacks had had enough with Chatham House:
“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,”
he wrote, shorthanding
“Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Then he addressed Torenberg:
“You should create a new one with just smart people.”
Signal soon showed that three men had left the group:
The Sequoia partner #Shaun #Maguire,
the bitcoin billionaire #Tyler #Winklevoss, and #Tucker #Carlson.
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america
Elon Musk Finally Admits Social Security Is on the Chopping Block
The richest man in the world is trying to convince the American people that they all deserve less.
In an interview with Fox News on Monday,
Elon Musk spread debunked lies about Social Security and Medicare to justify eliminating them.
“The waste and fraud in entitlement spending … that’s the big one to eliminate, that’s the sort of half trillion, maybe six or seven hundred billion a year,” Musk said.
“That is also a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants, by essentially paying them to come here, and they’re turning them into voters. This is why the Democrats are so upset about the situation,”
he added, unsubtly echoing a white nationalist, #Great #Replacement #theory talking point while #Larry #Kudlow nodded along.
“If we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave. And they will lose voters.”
Trump has said he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, but Musk’s entitlement math makes it clear that both those programs, as well as Medicaid, are on the chopping block.
Millions of older Americans—many of them red-state Republicans—will lose the vital benefits they rely on.
And the millions of younger Americans who’ve been having those benefits taken out of their paychecks for years will never see the fruits of that.
Musk’s lies continued:
“Why are there 20 million people who are definitely dead marked as alive in the Social Security database?” he asked.
“Why were hundreds of millions of dollars of Small Business Administration loans given out to people aged 11 and under? We have an enormous number of people marked alive who are 160.”
️This has been long debunked.
“The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits,”
acting Social Security commissioner Lee Dudek said in February.
https://newrepublic.com/post/192579/elon-musk-social-security-medicare-entitlements
Billionaire #Larry #Ellison’s leap into farming with his company,
Sensei Farms, serves up a classic reminder:
'being smart in one arena doesn’t mean success in another'.
As the WSJ reports, the #Oracle co-founder set out to reinvent agriculture on Hawaii’s Lāna‘i Island,
which he scooped up for $300 million back in 2012.
Thirteen years and more than $500 million later, the project is still floundering.
Ellison dreamed of AI-powered greenhouses and robot harvesters feeding the world sustainably.
Instead, Sensei has been tripped up by tech snarls and rookie mistakes
— like Wi-Fi issues and solar panels battered by Lanai’s winds.
Think greenhouses designed for Israel’s desert climate,
when Lāna‘i is typically muggy.
The company also mixed mature and baby plants together,
a blueprint for a pest paradise.
#Sensei, co-founded by a medical doctor and led currently by a tech exec who runs Sensei from Boston, has had small wins, reports the WSJ.
Its lettuce and cherry tomatoes now appear at the island’s few local markets and restaurants.
But constant delays, leadership shake-ups, and pricey blunders,
including cannabis grow houses that needed to be gutted and rebuilt,
highlight a tough truth:
even bottomless funding is no match for the hard lessons of a specialized industry.
#Larry #Ellison,
who briefly became the world's second-wealthiest person last week when his net worth surpassed #Jeff #Bezos' for a short time, outlined a scenario where AI models would analyze footage from security cameras, police body cams, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dash cams.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said,
describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place.
"We're going to have supervision," he continued.
"...if there's a problem, AI will report the problem and report it to the appropriate person."
Ellison's vision bears more than a passing resemblance to the cautionary world portrayed in #George #Orwell's prescient novel 1984.
In Orwell's fiction, the totalitarian government of Oceania uses ubiquitous "telescreens" to monitor citizens constantly,
creating a society where privacy no longer exists and independent thought becomes nearly impossible.
But Orwell's famous phrase
"Big Brother is watching you"
would take on new meaning in Ellison's tech-driven scenario, where AI systems, rather than human watchers, would serve as the ever-vigilant eyes of authority.
Once considered a sci-fi trope, automated systems are already becoming a reality:
Similar automated CCTV surveillance systems have already been trialed in #London Underground and at the 2024 #Olympics.
#China has been using automated systems (including AI) to surveil its citizens for years.
In 2022, Reuters reported that Chinese firms had developed AI software to sort data collected on residents using a network of surveillance cameras deployed across cities
-- and rural areas as part of China's "#sharp #eyes" campaign from 2015 to 2020.
This "one person, one file" technology reportedly organizes collected data on individual Chinese citizens,
leading to what The Economic Times called a "road to digital totalitarianism."
#Charles #Koch, perhaps the most legendary Republican financier of recent decades,
has never backed Trump, either.
The political network affiliated with him and his late brother #David remained officially neutral in the Presidential races of 2016 and 2020,
and spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in this year’s Republican primaries,
-- much of it supporting Haley.
When she dropped out, the Koch network concentrated on down-ballot races.
But Kochworld, like the Republican Party more broadly, remains divided.
“There are a lot of donors in that network lobbying Charles from the perspective of,
I know you don’t like him,
but he’s better than the alternative,”
Marc Short, who worked for a Koch-affiliated group
and later served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said.
Nevertheless, neither Koch nor Pence is supporting Trump this fall
—a remarkable rift, given the role that each of them has played in Republican politics.
At the same time, Trump has cultivated a new group of what might be called #maga #megadonors.
A study conducted for The New Yorker by the campaign-finance expert Robert Maguire,
of the nonprofit good-government group #crew,
found that, as of this summer,
more than forty of the G.O.P.’s biggest super-pac donors during Romney’s 2012 campaign had never given to a pro-Trump super pac,
including Oracle’s co-founder #Larry #Ellison,
the Dallas real-estate tycoon #Harlan #Crow,
and the hotel magnate J. W. #Marriott, Jr.
Meanwhile, nearly sixty pro-Trump donors in the study,
including #Lutnick, #Mellon, #Perlmutter, and the Wisconsin shipping magnates #Richard and #Elizabeth #Uihlein, had given nothing to the pro-Romney super pac.
Others have significantly increased their giving.
The #Adelsons, for example, donated $53 million to the pro-Romney super pac in 2012 and $90 million to support Trump in 2020,
when they were the largest individual donors of the cycle.
By the end of September, Miriam Adelson had given $100 million to back Trump in 2024.
With such sums at stake, Trump has pursued what the former Bush Pioneer called a “high touch” approach to the Republican billionaire class.
The ex-President has all but invited donors to view their contributions as business investments,
telling oil-and-gas executives who went to see him in April at Mar-a-Lago, for example, that, because he would allow unrestricted drilling,
they should raise $1 billion for his campaign
—a statement redolent of Sondland’s “quid pro quo” that soon leaked to the Washington Post.
The campaign’s strategy, another longtime fund-raiser told me,
was essentially to let Trump be Trump:
“He talks the same book to everybody.”
Oliver, the former Bush finance director, observed that the difference between the model of the Bush campaigns and Trump’s is the difference between having a large pool of “institutional investors” which had been built up in the course of years, and a series of ad-hoc “transactional” dealings with a relatively small group of the ultra-rich.
Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University, offered another key distinction. Trump’s billionaires—many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors, and corporate raiders—tend to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz told me. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.” Wilentz noted that, unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, this new “class of the super-rich” appears both more numerous and less civic-minded. “The other guys might have been robber barons,” Wilentz said. “These guys are oligarchs.”
For all Trump’s success in winning back reluctant conservative billionaires,
many of them have seen firsthand the ways in which his erratic behavior
and anti-market ideas
could disrupt their businesses and the wider economy.
After Trump became President, he asked Schwarzman to enlist high-profile business executives to serve on an advisory council.
The participants included #Musk;
#Jamie #Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase;
#Mary #Barra, of General Motors;
#Bob #Iger, of Disney;
#Larry #Fink, of BlackRock;
and #Jack #Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric.
It was a perfect Trump setup:
the biggest brand names in American business would come to the White House,
kiss his ring,
and offer free advice.
But, as one of the panel’s members recalled,
the first session quickly devolved into an argument between Trump and several participants over his false allegation that China was manipulating its currency.
In the summer of 2017, following Trump’s comments about there being
“very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia,
the group convened an emergency call and decided to disband.
After Schwarzman conveyed the news to the White House, Trump preëmptively tweeted that he had decided to shut the group down.
Early this summer, Trump’s campaign surprised the Business Roundtable,
a members-only organization of corporate C.E.O.s,
with a last-minute acceptance for the ex-President to appear at the group’s quarterly meeting in Washington.
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’ financial columnist and a host of “Squawk Box,” on CNBC,
reported that even C.E.O.s at the meeting who were sympathetic to Trump had found the former President uninformed and
“remarkably meandering.”
A source in the room told me that Trump’s digressions included complaints about his court cases and “crazy rants about Venezuelan immigrants.”
Soon after the event, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld,
a professor at Yale University who tracks the political preferences of America’s corporate leaders,
wrote in an op-ed for the Times that not a single Fortune 100 C.E.O. had donated to Trump by June of this year,
something he called a “telling data point.”
In fact, Sonnenfeld argued, the lack of giving to Trump from traditional Republican donors in the business community was the real fund-raising story,
“a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican Presidential candidates dating back over a century.”
Sonnenfeld told me that such giving “fell off a cliff” when Trump became the Party’s nominee
—going from more than a quarter of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s in 2012,
when Mitt Romney was the G.O.P. candidate, to zero in 2016.
In 2020, he noted, only two Fortune 100 C.E.O.s had given to Trump
—someone in the energy sector who is no longer running his company
and #Safra #Catz, the C.E.O. of the Oracle software corporation.
One lobbyist who speaks with many corporate C.E.O.s told me,
“Unanimously, they hate the Biden Administration’s policies.
But I think almost unanimously they would much rather deal with that than the risk of catastrophic disaster from a Trump Administration.”
By fall, the only Business Roundtable member publicly backing Trump was Schwarzman.
Omnipresent AI cameras
will ensure good behavior, says #Larry #Ellison
"We’re going to have supervision," says billionaire Oracle co-founder Ellison
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/
Oracle’s Larry Ellison joined Nov. 2020 call about contesting Trump’s loss
#Larry #Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company #Oracle -- and the biggest backer of #Elon #Musk’s attempted #Twitter #takeover --
️participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on
strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant.
The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. #Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean #Hannity; Jay #Sekulow, an attorney for Donald Trump; and James #Bopp Jr., an attorney for "True the Vote", a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed #claims of widespread #voter #fraud.
Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss,
an effort still coming into focus months later.
It is the first known example of a
"technology industry titan"
joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law
to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options
and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/20/larry-ellison-oracle-trump-election-challenges/
Blackstone CEO #Steve #Schwarzman, who rejected Trump in the 2024 GOP primaries, is now considering backing the former president, people familiar with the matter said.
A top adviser to Schwarzman has spoken to multiple Trump advisers in recent weeks, according to the people familiar, but Schwarzman has not made a final decision on giving.
Oracle’s #Larry #Ellison
— a billionaire who backed Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley in the GOP primaries
— is in discussions about writing a large check in support of Trump.
Trump and his aides have courted Ellison in recent weeks.
#Richard #Uihlein and #Elizabeth #Uihlein, conservative billionaires and heirs to the Schlitz brewing fortune, told the Financial Times that they will donate to Trump as well.
Perlmutter, a prominent presence at Mar-a-Lago, is working on an outside group to support the former president, according to people familiar with his activities.
A very clear #statement by #Larry the #Cat @Number10cat@twitter.com:
To answer some of your questions:
- No I’m not “#RishiSunak’s cat”
- I live here #permanently, #politicians are #temporary #residents (hahaha)
- Some of them very temporary
- I #agree, he’s not off to a great #start
- No, I’ve not found his #wallet. Yet.
https://twitter.com/Number10cat/status/1588641125245620224
ANOTHER #AWESOME CAT #TECHNIQUE HOW TO #ESCAPE LOL https://twitter.com/aureus130/status/1588905015502344193