Elon Musk’s $200 million Reform donation
2025-01-01 17:37:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
There was an amusing bit on the latest Rest is Politics podcast where Alistair tells of how he tried to highlight the principle of why accepting money from foreign billionaires is a bad idea [30:22]:
You know what’s really weird about these right wing people? And I know social media is not a great place for ironies, but when Tise, and Farage and Rupert Low and these people are all saying there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Elon Musk giving 100 million dollars. These are the same people who would invent conspiracy theories about George Soros buying elections around the world. Anyway in response to this I did a tweet.
"Breaking news: French billionaire Jean Louis Le Riche and German industrialist Hanz Dietrich Geltman, have decided to donate 200 million euros to the campaign to get Briton back in the European Union after the disaster of Brexit. I am happy to announce I will be campaign director. I’m sure Nigel Farage will see nothing wrong with this at all. Common sense init."
You would not believe how many people took that seriously. One of them actually said "your podcast should be called the Rest is Hypocrisy. Why is it wrong for Musk to do this but it’s okay for this french and German couple?". Absolute madness. But that is the principle. If it is ok for Elon Musk to give money to Reform, then it’s ok for french people, chinese people, russian people.
First of all, it’s pretty funny. Very good use of sarcasm to try and highlight a point. It would indeed be very interesting to hear how Farage would feel about such a donation. But I’m not so sure Farage would be against it.
I can’t help but wonder whether Alistair is himself missing the actual relevant bigger picture point here. Yes the whole mixing money with politics is fraught with dangers. That’s obvious. We all know that. We’ve had it drummed into us our whole life. We get it. But you know what’s a bigger issue? WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE. Literally.
If we don’t find a way to grow the economy by a massive amount, Britain is dead. Europe isn’t going to help us, and anyway, they are fucking dying too. This has been happening for fucking years, but it’s so bad now that everyone can see that all we do is kick the can down the road, over and over and over. The debt repayments are larger than spending on fucking education. That’s like saying we are two steps away from a frontal labotomy of the entire nation. Soon there will be no way to get out of the doom spiral, because we’ll be too fucking stupid. We will be fucked for hundreds of years. A dark age.
Here’s a relevant observation I made a few days ago on the linkblog:
Elon Musk among billionaires set to donate to Reform UK, says treasurer - Funny picture, jacket makes it appear like he just rocked up in a Spitfire. This is bound to cause some leftist media heads to explode with rage. Seriously though, wouldn’t it be worse if he wasn’t interested in the UK? Hellooow, we need economic growth. It’s strange that leftists are totally fine with russian oligarchs, arab princes, and rich Chinese but US billionaires are totally off limits.
The point I was trying to make was that foreign meddling is already happening. It’s been happening for years by the side door, and it’s arguably deeper and shadier, football teams being bought, huge foreign companies running public services. It’s all deep state type meddling. At least Musk is coming through the front door. It’s in the open. It’s not dodgy deals happening behind closed doors, by business leaders that stay in the shaddows, who have no contact whatsoever with real people.
We are in a new world now, and Alistair and Rory, have had a taste of it with their podcast, but they are still from the establishment, the old guard. Elon scares them because they don’t have control. He goes direct. He uses modern day communication tools and he gets shit done. Are there dangers? Yes of course. But that’s the frontier. The frontier is dangerous. Doing things on your own is dangerous.
Farage at least is trying to find a way. He’s going over to the US, to find out what’s going on. To try and find a creative way to work with Trump and Elon. They are at the very forfront of AI, space and self driving cars, robotics and energy. And they are working in the open. Alistair and Rory, though I do like them and the podcast, are only full of excuses and reasons that things are crap. They are like sales folks that are scared to pick up the phone. They have an excuse for everything.
When you are in the shit, you find a fucking way. You find a creative way to channel the interest you have. The end result would be growth but with transparency.
In business you find a way. Pretending to allow while blocking everything just doesn’t work. What’s your number for the quarter gents? #