Item — HN Reader

FTA:

"And who will stop this? Sam Altman? How many divisions does he have? The state doesn’t let corporations own nuclear weapons or fighter jets, it won’t let them have access to autonomous AI weapons either."

Elon Musk's SpaceX. He could land a large rocket wherever he wants, it's basically a missile.

4 comments

Large rockets are one thing; spacex doesn't really have the inventory to do much. It's the ~10M lithium bombs that are one OTA from weaponization that would make Musk especially dangerous if he were so inclined.

Then the FBI raids his home and arrests him. Thereafter, no more rockets.

Elon already solved this once.

He got a guy elected that was conducive to his world view and very unlikely to sic the FBI on him. Maybe he can do it again.

really funny to propose that The Guys Who Are Doing This might hypothetically stop it

Take the Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin for example, he did in fact have his own mercenary army. Turning on his president did not end well for him.

Yes. But. I imagine the others did not fail to learn from this.

What evidence would falsify this idea that wealth alone gives you political power?

This straw man doesn't merit falsification. Nobody claims wealth alone gives political power. Wealth applies leverage to all endeavors, but political ends still require strategy and operationalization. It's just a lot easier with a couple trillion dollars, vs. a single individual vote once every couple of years.

Agree with sibling that this is a straw man. The state exists to protect and serve the capitalist class, not particular capitalists. Actual state policy generally arises out of conflicts between factions within the capitalist class, striving either for direct benefit or for different guesses of what benefits the class as a whole. But the capitalists don't have to provide any benefit to the state to earn its protection, as in your model. It is literally what the state is for.

I don't doubt that governments also learned from the same incident.

He stopped at the point where Putin had already fled Moscow, and only because of the hostage situation with his family.

I'm not sure to which degree that would have deterred Elon.