Probably the opposite. He doesn’t think it’s significant, but the risk of petty retaliation IS significant.

Given he was the one who made the call, what other conclusion would you draw?

Well I mean the most generous take would be that he's come around about Trump and has decided that the editorial board making an explicit endorsement for Harris isn't in his own (or the country's) interests.

On X they're floating the theory that he knew this would cause a lot of them to resign, and wanted that for other reasons. All we can do is speculate, I guess.

No need to speculate. It’s in black and white: last time Trump wanted to spite Bezos, he canceled $10Bn in AWS contracts. This is profit driven, plain and simple.

> In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure ... to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.

Notably, most presidential candidates aren’t so petty and vindictive as to cancel contracts with political opponents for spite, but we’re talking about Trump here. It would be best if you woke up to this reality.

It's certainly possible, though if he truly felt pressured that way, he could do a lot more than waiting until 11 days before an election to simply withhold an endorsement.

Like what?

You know all the stuff Musk has been doing with Twitter since buying it? That.

Or, just to throw out a few ideas: insist on more conservative people on their editorial board. Insist on endorsing Trump (rather than simply not endorsing). Insist that more pro-Trump stories be covered, and fewer pro-Harris ones.

Or, if all of that is too far, just sell the paper and get out of the way.

Any of these makes more sense than simply waiting until the last minute to enforce the withholding of an endorsement if the genuine goal is to avoid being targeted in the event Trump wins.

I think this is a last-minute hedge: a lot of people did not expect the Republicans to shield Trump from prosecution as effectively as they did (including the SCOTUS majority being willing to invent an unprecedented reversal of U.S. legal precedent) and weren’t expecting him to actually win again.

Now there’s a roughly even chance that he’ll do so and that’s causing some hard calculations: if Harris wins, they won’t face retribution because Democratic administrations don’t do that. If Trump wins, Bezos and Soon-Shiong can go to him saying that they got rid of the liberals at their companies in a very public display of support.

Trump is an authoritarian at heart: he doesn’t care if you like him, he cares if you support his power. Vance used to be a harsh critic but got the VP position by publicly recanting and displaying obeisance. It really looks like they’re thinking along the same lines: either it won’t matter or he’ll be satisfied with their acceptance of his power since he really wants to attack other people who aren’t fellow rich men.

Jumping up and down like a lunatic.

All the more reason to endorse his opponent!

Bezos cares because his businesses have billions of dollars in revenue from the federal government. Trump has already claimed to personally review those contracts and was reported as trying to kill the $10B JEDI contract:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/26/trump-mattis-screw-amazo...

By all accounts, he’s prepared to be more authoritarian and less bound by the law if re-elected and he’s already threatening journalists with rape and talking about yanking broadcast licenses for channels which don’t kowtow to him.

of course it is. endorsements by major entities such as major newspapers… endorsements by celebrities and all these other points form the constellation of how a candidate is perceived. a huge chunk of people will not just vote blindly for whoever seems to be more broadly supported but actually deeply like whoever is put in front of them. and they will also believe it if a bunch of newspapers release the same story at the same time… even if there is no evidence offered to support the main assertion. or even if its obviously false. creation of the appearance of a consensus is an extremely powerful tool

I would say Zuck went as far right as reasonably possible, and his timing was good. Kind of cowardly, but also impressive foresight on his part.

That's absurd. His political donations are very blue.

It's almost as if coming out in favor of taxing unrealized capital gains right before the election wasn't the stroke of political brilliance that Harris thought it was.

"Hmm, I'm facing a close election. Hey, wait, I know! I'll make enemies of people who buy ink by the trainload and bandwidth by the petabyte-second."

I really wish somebody could have talked her out of that idea, or at least convinced her to wait another couple of months before putting it on the table. It was an incredible faux pas, maybe a history-changing one, whose consequences were trivially foreseeable.

Thats because of the calculation:

- Endorse Harris and Trump wins, Trump will seek revenge on Bezos and Amazon (he tried this in the first term)

- Endorse Trump and Harris wins, Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official

This is capitulation to the perceived threats of a Trump presidency and is very bad.

This sounds like "obeying in advance", a phenomenon that Timothy Snyder wrote about in On Tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th Century.

https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

Helpfully, the relevant quote I was thinking of is directly on the books website:

> Do not obey in advance.

> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

(The quote on the website goes on with several pages of examples.)

> Harris will not act outside the bounds of a normal government official

California has even blocked SpaceX because they don't like the politics of Musk (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...) so I would say is risky to expect any of the two (or its followers) not seeking revenge.

The California Coastal Commission is rather (in)famously powerful. This is kind of a special case.

Presumably you have to draw a line somewhere, though? There is not liking someone's political views and there is not liking someone's attempts to undermine the whole country by (possibly purposefully) selling it to Russia etc.

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for political battle? Your account has been doing both. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

In a recent comment, you write that "single purpose accounts are not allowed on HN". This one is fourteen years ongoing, and I know that you have been alerted to it numerous times: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rayiner

rayiner's account isn't single-purpose.

Will try, just not sure how my comment is at issue when this posting is specifically political content.

HN comments on political content need to follow the site guidelines, just as on any other content.

I mean he still appears to be making lots of money, and moreover being able to bend the rules without any serious consequences.

He has his own broadcast medium to play with and noone has banned it (apart from brazil, but all he had to do was pay some money)

  they go after him

Would love to hear what horrible consequences you think Elon is facing..

They retroactively invalidated several years of compensation packages...

"They" of course being the Delaware Chancellory Court in this situation... man people are clueless about how things work.

"Delaware Chancellory Court" of course being a political appointee in the home state of the powerful politician whom they had an adversarial relationship with, in this situation... but you know how these things work

It’s always telling when people resort to unclear conspiracy theories instead of disputing the actual evidence that lead the court to their decision.

It's telling when people resort to ad hominem. The government is in the process of confiscating tens of billions of dollars from him - if thats not a real consequence I don't know what is. Wether or not that ruling only happened because of his political position is a different matter, it's not like the judge mentioned it was because of his political posts on social media - like other officials have [1].

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-11/la-me-sp...

The government isn't confiscating anything.. they merely ruled that the independent board of directors who authorized the richest pay deal in the history of pay deals wasn't truly independent as is necessary to properly represent the shareholders they legally must represent. Every dollar stays with the company.

Confiscate:

> Take or seize (someone's property) with authority.

> To use one's authority to lay claim to and separate a possession from its holder.

> to take (something) away from someone especially as punishment or to enforce the law or rules.

Tesla had $50 whatever billion worth of stock before his deal, they had it after the deal when Delaware ruled in the shareholders’ favor and they granted it to him again following the subsequent shareholder vote. It’s a real ‘flexible’ use of the word confiscate when the confiscating party never had a dollar of the confiscated funds…

I’m sure Elon is annoyed he has to follow basic corporate governance, but that’s kind of the point of governance.

So it wouldn't be confiscation or a punishment if the courts said you owed me a few years of your salary - because theoretically I could decide to give it back to you in the future?

If you want to wire me a few years of your compensation I will gladly accept.

I don’t have a fiduciary obligation to you, so this analogy falls apart pretty quickly.

Don't worry about the paperwork.

All signs point to this being an extraordinarily tight election. 5 or 10k votes in the right state could swing the whole thing.

I'd be incredibly surprised if there are even 100 people who:

- Don't know who The Washington Post editorial board would endorse

- Would change who they are voting for based on this lack of endorsement

But I could be wrong.

All elections ultiamtely come down to undecided swing voters. It's silly every-time, but you need to vastly lower your expectations for that kind of crowd. Yes, a cheesy dance number endorsing a candidate can be all that is needed to swing an entire election.

This is an issue with first past the post, but that's a much larger thing to tackle.

We’re in. Situation wheee one of the candidates routinely criticizes us and praises our enemies, and still pulls at about 42%. Rationality is not in evidence.

If this race is right, then whatever I thought about people was wrong.

Then again, I always wonder what the hell actually went through peoples minds in Nazi Germany.

Looks like you’re getting a firsthand view now.

If you think that the situation in the US is even remotely close to that of Nazi Germany, please for your own sake unplug from news for a long time until you regain perspective. We are nowhere close to that point. The idea is a lie being told to you by people who stand to profit from your fear, not based in reality in the slightest.

Given that Trump is financed by Miriam Adelson and bragged about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing the Golan Heights as Israel's territory, he would be a rather odd Nazi!

Moreover, he apparently failed with the Machtergreifung between 2016-2020, which was an exceptionally quiet, prosperous and peaceful period.

What is astonishing is that some newspapers try the trump-is-a-dictator tactic again, when most people see through it now.

After more than 60 years the Reductio ad Hitlerium is finally losing its power, heartening to see.

The reason is pretty damned simple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid Or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." The Democrats used to understand this but now they don't and that's why they are struggling.

The polls show Harris and Trump are neck and neck, but the only explanation for a Harris win is fraud?

>It's not for no reason that one state had more registered voters than the actual number of eligible voters in that state.

https://www.votebeat.org/michigan/2024/10/24/michigan-regist...

Musk is a true believer, but Zuck and Bezos probably fear retribution from Trump if he wins and they endorsed Harris.

Isn’t this like Russia’s oligarchy?

I’m not enamored with Democrats, but Trump doesn’t share Constitutional values and I’m very much for independent journalism.

This is bad.

If this is true, it’s beyond bad. It may be the beginning of the end of the free world.

This is such a weird take. People can't conceptualize a world of many discrete important actions and reduce it to one event. It's a failure of imagination.

This is an ironic take.

It’s a distinct lack of imagination and historical knowledge that stops at one event, and refuses to ponder the long term consequences.

Zuckerberg has never been not right wing though.

Silicon Valley is not entirely happy with the economy. They may be mostly Democrats, but there are limits to the current incompetence that people are willing to endure.

So you're suggesting the fresh incompetence will improve things?

Presidents get far too much praise or criticism for the state of the economy. In reality, their effect on it is fairly limited, especially over such a short span like 4 years.