The tech bosses who poured $394.1M into US election

That sounds like a lot of money. Really surprised the article didn't provide an answer to the most obvious question "how much was this in context to the total amount raised and which side benefited from having the most money".

> The Democrats, their allied super PACs and other groups raised about $2.9 billion, versus about $1.8 billion for the Republicans

Seems like money in politics isn't really about money in politics. It's all just so exhausting...

https://archive.is/VYuSz#selection-5043.0-5043.128

At what point will these people have enough money and power? Less than 10 people now have more money than the bottom 50% of Americans combined. There’s so much concentrated power now it makes me wonder when Americans will just give up, dramatically constrain their lifestyles and get by on way less of an income just to have a simpler life.

One thing to consider is taking these numbers and diving them by number of votes. Which in sense is what is the goal for spending. And looking at the number. Sometimes one needs to wonder if world has gone wrong somewhere looking at it.

And if just sending check to each voter might have been more productive.

Our government is for sale to the highest bidders. The two major political parties are simply competing factions of the upper class. Even the Supreme Court justices have been revealed to be on the take, lavished with "gifts" from the wealthy. I don't think the plutocracy has ever been more overt and unapologetic.

Y'all blew it with that Citizens United case, it was never going to go any other way after that. Everyone said it was going to happen and now look.

There shouldn't be billionaires, nor royalty, nor kleptocrats. But I repeat myself.

Political donations are only one small piece of this. What we've seen this election cycle is how tech CEOs have gone mask off and completely backed the incoming Trump administration [1].

It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley's history is inextricably interwoven with the US military. Where once the likes of Facebook, Google or Amazon were upstarts, they are now functionally defense contractors, some more openly than others (eg Palantir).

Americans like to criticize the Chinese control of Chinese Internet companies, including cooperating with the Great Firewall and moving in lockstep to Chinese government policy and messaging (which they do). I hate to break it to you but American Internet companies are doing exactly the same thing.

The real threat of Tiktok was that it doesn't move in lockstep to the US State Department. US tech giants hide behind "algorithms" to manufacture consent [2] (eg by hiding, downranking and/or blocking content relating to Palestine [3]).

People who work in tech generally are more socially progressive. Economics is more of a mixed bag. Most people don't realize pretty much everything is about economics. Big Tech pay lip service to these progressive attitudes by embracing things like Pride Month. Such people might decry the naked politics of Elon Musk, to name one prominent example.

But all this progressivism by Big Tech is purely performative and that's going to be increasingly obvious. You don't see so many of these tech CEOs on this list of political donations but I really wonder what the picture looks like when all the dust settles on PAC donations. I think you'll find there's very little daylight between the politics of any of these CEOs.

[1]: https://archive.is/DqGCg

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[3]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorship...

This is written in order to give the impression that Democrats did not have economic support from donors while there was overwhelming superiority in fields like Hollywood and Arts that favoured them that are not shown in the pictures they display.

In fact, in tech if you remove Elon Musk from the picture that got late to the party, there was an enormous superiority in donations from Google and Meta people. As a leftist press it is, had that superiority remained and had they won like in the last elections, the Guardian would have remained in silence.