Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Will Advise Trump On Business Issues (theverge.com)
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick have joined President-elect Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, which will regularly meet with the soon-president to advise on business issues, the Trump transition team said in a statement. From a report on The Verge: The now 19-member council, established earlier this month, also includes Disney CEO Bob Iger and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Members will "share their specific experience and knowledge as the President implements his economic agenda," according to the transition statement. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi also joins today. The announcement suggests a new link between the president-elect and Silicon Valley, which has been generally wary of the Trump presidency, with the notable exception of Facebook board member and Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who supported Trump despite controversy and has been working as an adviser for the transition team.
This is an article about who in tech is going to be advising the president. That's not partisan, it's just a fact.
If /. users can no longer handle facts being distributed there's a bigger problem than 'what content do we post'.
Using billionaires like Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick to tell you what to do is "swamp draining"?
Yeah, drain that swamp and fill it with....billionaires.
The swamp is filled with political elites and insiders. How is using non-political insiders *not* draining the swamp?
To put this in terms of information theory, the term "elite" is a measurement, and as such should come with units. We usually don't show the units when we make that measurement, but this can lead to confusion.
So for example, LeBron James is an elite athlete, where "athlete" is the units of measurement. Trump could appoint LeBron to his cabinet, that would be putting an "elite" in charge, and it would still be draining the swamp because LeBron is not an elite politician.
The measurement units are different. An elite athlete is not the same as an elite politician, and calling both of them "elite" just confuses the matter.
Trump himself is an "elite", only the unit of measurement in this case is "financial". Elon Musk is also a financial elite.
"Draining the swamp" refers to removing corruption, which implies getting rid of the "political" elite.
It makes sense to take advice from elites in other units of measurement, because elites generally get to be elite because of their skill and experience.
Elites in charge are fine, so long as they are elites due to skill, and not politics.
Musk must be engaging in some serious 1984-esque doublethink here. Or maybe Trump is blackmailing him in some way?
It would be suicidal for the CEO of any company which has government contracts as a major part of its revenue(SpaceX) to snub the president elect.
Not to mention the foolishness of refusing to advise a president who is probably looking at ending subsidies that makes another of your companies more profitable(Tesla).
There is also the angle of advising the president towards actions that reflect your world view, even if that world-view is not shared('we should push LED lights because they last longer and are safer than either incandescent or compact florescent, not to mention delaying the need to build more expensive power plants and power network upgrades' without even mentioning that the reduced power requirements could help fight global warming for example)