How Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump may have backfired

[Dulcinea]

(NBC News) Elon Musk’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump was meant to buoy the candidate’s chances in November. But more than a month after Musk officially put his weight behind Trump, a series of Democratic attacks have suggested that the endorsement has exposed a vulnerability.

Since the tech billionaire endorsed Trump on July 13, the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly attacked Musk for his anti-worker stances. The campaign has called Musk and Trump “self-obsessed rich guys” and reposted audio from an event on Musk’s social media app, X, in which the two laugh together about firing striking workers.

Harris allies including Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, have followed up with attacks of their own, and now some Democratic strategists look eager to keep highlighting the Musk-Trump alliance, which they see as reinforcing Trump’s weak points.

“Every time that Elon Musk tries to do something to help Donald Trump, I think it fires up the Democratic base to work against him,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist based in Chicago.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-endorsement-trump-may-140000713.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO&ncid=crm_19908-1202929-20240902-0&bt_user_id=DS%2BOyQynehwNownjpRENwlw5izgE%2B%2FIz6mH796vC7oHktVvw3dBoESZau5xF76Ha&bt_ts=1725278179412

[Metaphorical]

1. The Tech Bro Party

It was perhaps inevitable, but the GOP has become the Tech Bro Party - over-privileged wealthy white boys who largely came to power by exploiting the technical skills of others without actually having that much of an understanding of that technology. I saw a number of these same people at the "cocktail party" at a tech conference I went to recently (as press). They, for the most part, started out with money, then invested with the hype wave into what were often pretty shady schemes, from Big Data to Bitcoin to Artificial General Intelligence, usually sucking up all of the available oxygen from the room and leaving havoc in their wake.

Musk, Thiel, Vance, and others like them are, sadly, the future of the GOP. They actually see Trump as being a fossil, stuck in the past, but by and large most Tech Bros really do not understand ordinary people. This is part of the reason why I think Trump's campaign has gone so badly off the tracks - he's getting marketing advice from people who aren't really very good at it.