I had a coworker who turned beet red when I put Musk and PayPal in the same sentence. You know that feeling when your parents didn’t yell and you wished they would? I was too afraid to ask for the full story.
His PR makes him sound like a founder but he was not.
“X.com was … founded by Ed Ho, Harris Fricker, Elon Musk, and Christopher Payne … It merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 and the merged company changed its name to PayPal in 2001.”[1]
I’m sure individual usage will vary, but I would call him a cofounder.
Confinity is the company that developed the PayPal website that survived that merger. Elon Musk was not on the Confinity side, he was trying to pivot his x.com bank into a PayPal clone and buy users ($30 per signup) faster than them until they merged to avoid running each other out of cash. The two startups were operating out of the same building at the time. After the merger, Musk was named CEO but ousted from the company just 5 months later, in part for being absent much of the time (including at the time of his firing), and in part because the PayPal engineers had circulated a petition to the board asking them to remove him. The board agreed.
Co-founder is just a marketing name and has no meaning in reality, actions do. Looking at this he provided in money which was likely to ruin his business by overspending it and greater minds prevailed in the end (I'm not saying paypal is a good thing or not). Why they made him CEO I cannot fathem but it has probably something to do with the bullying behaviour he is known for.
I've been named co-founder once but as soon as its usefulness ran out it got removed from the website (nothing else changed).
Wow, I can’t believe this is so controversial. When companies A and B merge, what would you describe the A-founders as, in relation to the resulting company?
This is nuts, 18F was one of the few groups in the federal government that is/was good at making software! (login.gov is a good example of craft you don't generally see in commercial enterprise software, let alone government software)
According to that tweet they were apparently “far left” because they also worked on Direct File, which sought to cut out the middleman (TurboTax et al.) and let Americans file taxes directly. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you're in bed with Intuit, this seems pretty hard to argue against!
"Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has shut down a wide variety of operations inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in his new role as acting director."
Nothing of this makes sense in that all these actions don't seem to make life easier or better for citizens in particular or the world in general.
A significant part of the animosity towards the EU and Trump's threat of tariffs is its consumer protection and preventing US companies, especially US tech companies, from doing whatever the hell they want.
A major difference between the US and EU is what the TikTok nonsense proved: the US is happy for a US company, aligned to Trump's authority, to track, influence and commodify its users at will; whereas the EU doesn't want any company to have that power regardless of location.
Do you think Trump understands how tarifs work exactly? Or is it just something he learned other countries are afraid of but he has no idea that American importers and their customers are gonna pay them (and he shares this misunderstanding with more than half of the population)?
This article doesn't indicate that he knows what tariff mechanistically does. Only that it will take inflict some amount of suffering on American citizens and possibly force manufacturing back into America.
He knows how they work: he threatens them and his supporters cheer, he implements them and people negotiate. There are other, some would say better, ways to get the same effects but tariffs are Trump's go to. In the metaphor "when you have a hammer everything is a nail" maybe Trump is the hammer and tariffs the nail?
While this is true in principle, it's worth adding the caveat that EU countries have also been pushing for backdoors to encrypted communications in order to expand law enforcement access. Of course while this contradicts the stance on privacy the EU put forward with the GDPR (which sneakily redefined the right to privacy and control of your personal data as an indelible human right btw).
But in case anyone thinks this is a dunk on the EU: this is still not as invasive as the US law enforcement's powers of warrantless surveillance which have repeatedly blown up the EU-US frameworks for data sharing (Privacy Shield and its other iterations, which Mr Schrems seems to have personally made a sport of shooting down faster than they get implemented). It's also not entirely contradictory as the focus here is on protecting the rights of people against corporations while still providing means for the state to violate those rights when necessary (similarly to how the state can violate your right to free movement through incarceration or your right to bodily autonomy by shooting you, neither of which seem to upset the people who'd think this one is a gotcha).
Considering the EU's main function is being a transnational economic region (if you ignore all the fluff about shared values and history and instead follow the definition of "a system's function is what it does"), it's absolutely true that the EU is remarkably restrictive on what corporations can do compared to the US - even before Trump.
EDIT: The two sibling comments prove my point: while EU member states have been pushing for legislation like providing backdoors to encrypted communication, this is neither unique to the EU nor a contradiction and the US already has far wider reaching measures in place.
Consider for example the Switzerland-based CIA and BND (Germany) shell company that distributed backdoored encryption to hostile nations which Germany backed out of when the CIA defended distributing the same technology to friendlies without informing them or their intelligence agencies. Or literally any of the Snowden leaks, which described not only mass surveillance of US citizens but also espionage against US allies (infamously including wiretapping then-chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone) to a degree none of the EU member states have ever done anything comparable to - and which those mostly didn't act on because of the importance of maintaining good terms with the US. Or the post-9/11 legislation which not only allowed warrantless surveillance with gag orders (which is why "canaries" became popular in cryptography communities) but even literally killing or abducting and indefinitely incarcerating US citizens without a trial - not to mention torture.
You can criticize the EU for state overreach. You can't do so by using the US for grounds of moral superiority - not even moral equivalence. You can argue about different attitudes to free speech, gun ownership or the right to self-defense (e.g. castle doctrine), sure. All of these are valid grounds for debate. But the US government can (according to its own jurisdiction) legally do so many more things to both its own citizens and non-citizens both within and outside its borders that trying to use it for a libertarian "win" against the EU seems farcical at best.
The error is viewing the EU has a single entity with only one viewpoint on any subject.
Europol + most major euro police forces + a number of european deputees want to have access to backdoors to spy on citizens, other european deputees do not. The battle is here.
Everything about it makes perfect sense because pesky things like consumer protection and occupational safety cut into the profits of the owning class.
Slippery slope fallacy. And bad politics. Reflexively defending State department ops to destabilize foreign countries through a putative foreign aid organization by hand having about leaded gas (in the context of a guy who restarted the EV industry) is how you get to this point in history.
>The goal of Trump, Musk and co. is to make life better for the rich.
I mean that feels right. But, they have more money than they can spend. They can make their lives better by stopping being so greedy... it's not about better.
It's greed. It's the number on their total net worth, or some other bullshit number.
It's exactly like Musk paying others to play games to get him the best apparent player character. He pays others to earn money to make him look, to himself, like the best fascist-capitalist oligarch, or whatever he's going for.
In reality, their lust for boosting some vanity metric is most closely aligned with "make life worse for the poor". Because whilst they do pay some top employees well, the whole pyramid sits on the exploitation of many millions more poor people who, through their greed, the capitalists push down further into the bloody, stinking, fetid soup below.
Oh, and the capitalists rape the planet too... just to make sure no lining thing escapes the accretion zone of their self-destructive insecurity.
CFPB was responsible for trying to fine creative ways to control other companies, and by debanking others. This was Elizabeth Warren’s doing and a complete farce. As Zuckerberg said, Meta was brought in front of the CFPB by Warren and he was confused because Meta isn’t a bank.
I worked at Facebook when the Libra thing happened, and it was obviously meant to be a global bank that evades banking regulations by sprinkling crypto magic.
When it launched, employees were told that we'd soon be able to receive a portion of our salaries in Libra. Every practical feature of the system was effectively a Facebook bank account where the unit of currency was tied to a basket of major currencies. The rest was smoke and mirrors.
So yeah, Zuck feigning surprise about being dragged in front of CFPB was just an act (like most of what he does in public).
> CFPB Warns that Digital Marketing Providers Must Comply with Federal Consumer Finance Protections
> Tech firms that use behavioral targeting of individual consumers regarding financial products are liable for violations
Care to provide an example? I was casually looking at applying, but I am on the conservative side as easily searchable on Google by voter registrations
18F might also be "far-left" cause it was created by Obama folks. I also wonder if it is also bad in his mind cause conflicts with taken over Digital Service.
By quoting "far-left" the poster is indicating that he himself does not believe that Obama is far left but that it is something someone has said or written about Obama.
Of course, it goes without saying that opposing same-sex marriage doesn't make one "far right". I mean, I know you knew that and are just ragebaiting – but I wanted it to be explicitly clear for others.
I'm not rage-baiting. I'm saying it's a reasonable point that people can disagree on, but if any Republican candidate had had it as a policy position in the last election they would have been labelled as "Far Right".
Yes, you’re rage-baiting; a republican candidate would have been labeled that way because of the aggregate of their positions, not this one.
Though of course, that is by modern standards quite a conservative right position to take. (And incidentally not one I’d consider reasonable to take; though I’m obviously biased by being directly affected)
No, I don't think it takes more than one position to get you labelled "far right" these days. The Free Speech Union, which is UK pressure group in favour of free speech was recently labelled "far right" by Wikipedia for promoting free speech.
I just checked the wiki, but can't find the far-right references.
There is some chatter in the Talk page about some members of the group associating with far-right figures and pushing some very dodgy views on far-right topics. Is this what you are referring to?
>And Kamala Harris was labeled far-left for campaigning on a Trump-lite platform on immigration and the economy that appealed to no one.
I am begging people on the left to stop slandering "we will enforce the law" as a right-wing position. It is not, shouldn't be, and the right doesn't deserve to get credit for it.
Kamala wasn't "Trump-lite" any more than AOC is "Stalin-lite". The differences between the two are fucking categorical.
Your mind was really warped by conservative propaganda wasn’t it? Amazing how effective it is on a certain type of person. Reality just doesn’t matter at all to you does it?
"free sex changes for illegal immigrants" is a campaign slogan. That you are engaging with this topic at a slogan-level means you are not here to really here for curious inquiry. You sound like a election ad.
Thats the problem. "Far-left" is just a label thrown around by ideological people without hard arguments.
Core leftism is about wealth distribution and unbounded solidarity. Being only pro-LGBTQ imo does not make you a leftist and yet, look around in this thread, what is brought up to proove left leaning tendencies.
The labeling/propaganda unfortunately worked and we devolve into tribal identity politics. Thats why some people think we just passed a far-left decade.
”Far left” is the new ”communism”. ”The civil rights movement is communism.” ”Gay marriage is far left.” The labels don’t mean anything else than ”something we don’t like and you should be scared of”.
The overreaction is absolutely crazy. In no way are they leftist. They are about as woke as any typical modern progressive company. A lot of my colleagues in both public and private sectors include their pronouns in their signatures. They choose to use inclusive language and policies.
There is a hit piece article not worth linking that calls out some of the devs who worked there. The comment section of that page is very hateful. As an American it’s shameful to see that level of hate for anything to do with policies of inclusiveness.
The company looks like they hire regular people of all types. A few of the adults are trans or identify as queer and they are acknowledged as equal coworkers. Fairly representative of the tech industry I’d say. What is so bad about that? They seem to write some excellent code and have a good company culture akin to a lot of SV tech companies.
Ironically, one of the founders of DOGE(nee USDS), Mikey Dickerson, was caught colluding with billionaire Reid Hoffman to spread misinformation ahead of a 2017 election in Alabama in favor of Democrats.
Being in bed with tax preparation companies is probably the main thing, but I also vaguely recall a statement by someone years ago (perhaps Grover Norquist or Dick Armey) that filing tax returns should be kept annoying simply for the sake of keeping people angry about taxes in general.
That's just plain stupid. Taxes are already annoying enough.
In New Zealand the government makes it really really simple to pay your taxes (automated tax returns for the majority). You can call our tax department on the phone and they answer and they are helpful and they don't seem to screw you. The idea is to make it simple for people and businesses to pay their taxes so that they pay. The IRD is run like a smart business.
Because paying to build society and help those around you to a better life through shared resources is something you should be angry about?
It's not taxes that are the problem per se it's fuckwits like Boris Johnson's cronies that think taxes are theirs to garnish and use any chance, even a global pandemic, to steal every dime they can lay their hands on.
>Because paying to build society and help those around you to a better life through shared resources is something you should be angry about?
No, but paying an exorbitant amount, but seeing few things being improved around you, but endless wars funded and cronies getting richer, and useless bureucracy enlarged and making your life or business more difficult, is.
I can't imagine many people agreeing with you here.
You need to be (a) able to walk and drive, (b) in driving distance to a post office and (c) able to work around the post office's opening hours and (d) willing to waste the time to drive/line up etc.
Or you can spend less than a minute to upload a photo of your passport.
Which is great until someone impersonates you by spoofing a photo of you that satisfies “liveness” detection. It’s a lot harder to AI up an animated image in person at a post office.
id.me is valued at $1.8bn and has more than 130m users and has "partnerships with 15 federal agencies, 40 agencies in 30 states and over 600 retailers".
Bit of a stretch to call them a low cost outsourcer. They seem pretty legitimate.
They are a private business in search of a problem that is unnecessary for federal and state agencies to rely on for idp and identity proofing services.
Pretty hilarious to think that a $1.8bn business is "searching for a problem".
And given the frosty working relationship between federal and state agencies I am sympathetic to the idea that a private company would be able to deliver a better solution.
Last year: a liquidity event for early investors and employees, none of which helps the ongoing business but instead lets the founders and C-suite buy a private island / holiday home / mobile home / home:
Loans get issued based on profit generation (or asset value), so no, it is not “to keep them afloat”. You can’t get a loan if your company is not doing well or too risky (that’s why startups raise equity - because they are still too risky for someone to lend them money).
A loan is a form of debt, which is one of the two main forms of capital - the other main one being equity. Debt is less expensive than equity, so companies prefer to issue to raise capital via debt than equity.
Its not just profit that is considered for a loan. Anything related to states is more stable and thus less risky. Or how would you evaluate state bonds by profit only? Elon knows what i am talking about.
Login.gov is the default idp for the Social Security Administration, supports 200+ federal agencies for identity, and IRS was in the works to onboard Login.gov before this new admin fuckery occurred. They handle over 10 million monthly active users and 40 million monthly sign-ins across nearly 50 agencies and states. Will it still happen? Who knows. id.me will likely IPO based off the ~$130-$150M ARR they have, some folks will get wealthy, and it'll still end up the equivalent of confirming your discount eligibility at Home Depot for veterans.
Replacing the government with unaccountable middlemen is sort of their goal, isn't it? Think of the efficiency we could gain once we do away with all of that accountability nonsense...
At this point, Elon is doing only damage while he thinks he cleans up. Someone will have to cleanup after the cleanup aka damage doen though, and it won't be pretty.
People depend on the state. Someone has to be the adult in the room. If your marriage fails what do you do with the kids? You abandon them because you don’t want to clean up?
Nope, they were in control, spent 4 years focusing most of their attention on things the voting public found various degrees of stupid, then put up two successive candidates in ‘24 that were absolute jokes. The voters decided that the Democrats weren’t serious and sent them a message: “Even this obviously-corrupt buffoon is better than the arrogant elitist that you put up. Do better or be prepared for irrelevance.”
Personally I’m no fan of 90% of the GOP agenda, but my fondest wish is complete dissolution of the DNC, and another party taking over as the party of the non-rich to restore some balance.
Right! The dems are stuck doing the responsible boring and non eye catching thing.
Economists, policy makers etc. increasingly have to make the dems carry the weight, in a political and media market which moves so fast that facts can’t even matter.
In this situation, is it a surprise that they could deal with Covid, undo 2008, end nafta, or any number of great things, but still lose faith of the populace because they didn’t hit the populist taking points?
It now very much feels like an era of talking points, and damn the facts.
In which case either making the talking points stick, or change the talking points.
It’s a statement on the fact that the children are being held hostage, and that this is how the pattern will be made to continue.
You have to decide whether you are ok with this pattern continuing. If it’s possible to do it without harming the children, then that is what must be done.
If it’s better to let this pattern continue, then thats also an ok choice. But at least the costs must be articulated and accepted. People can know what role they are playing in this relationship; the tradeoffs they found unacceptable.
This is all democrats have done my entire politically aware life. It’s like clockwork. Republicans majorly screw things up. Democrats get elected in a wave and start doing the hard work of cleaning up the mess and making tiny steps of progress and then the next election comes around and Republicans win on some culture war nonsense that they created themselves and they get fuck up the system once again. Every single time. Democrats have no opportunity or willingness to enact the agenda of the people who vote for them. They are in perpetual cleanup and maintain the status quo cycle.
Thanks for the link on 18F in the feds. Didn't realize how much they had put up on Github and other areas [1]. analytics.usa.gov [2] is also pretty cool. Apparently its Jekyll, Sass, React and d3 from their Github.
343,025 first time users in the last 30 minutes, with GSA Advantage, USPS Tracking Results, NIST, CEAC Visa Status Check, and Federal Student Aid being some of the biggest sources. Had no idea this was available.
Isn’t it wonderful when they make rules stating you must pay taxes, then they make it so convoluted and obscure that you’re forced to spend extra money to file them?
DirectFile makes it such that anyone with a simple tax situation (some W-2s, some dependents, etc) can easily file their federal taxes online. Free. Straight to the IRS. My only gripe with DirectFile is that it doesn't yet cover more complex cases (but let's not have perfect be the enemy of good; it's probably good enough for 75% of citizens) and you still have to find a way to do state filings based on your state.
This fuckery will continue unabated for the rest of our lives until we collectively stop paying income taxes with the demand that a Constitutional amendment is put in place to force the government to be honest and helpful both around the procurement (just sending a dang bill) and government spending (expressly forbidding genocides, foreign coups, certain bailouts, etc) with real teeth in it.
Of course, right now it seems even the existing amendments are not safe. Our government is a non-functioning, dishonest imperial oligarchy, and we just keep paying our tithing out of fear, telling ourselves it's all going to schools and highways.
When did the political system stop being about making life better for the average person?
In Sweden we have gotten a paper from the tax office saying "we believe your taxes should be like this" and then you can change parts you disagree with (and risk punishment if you are wrong).
> When did the political system stop being about making life better for the average person?
In the US, when we elected mediocre actor Ronald Reagan, I think. His trickle-down economics nonsense turned out to be a just and early example of catering to the rich in broad daylight instead of behind closed doors. And the people, for the most part, bought it, so now we have legal scams like 401ks that the average citizen thinks are there to help them.
The point has always been to seize control of the money while removing all accountability and they are finally succeeding because liberals handed them the election over Gaza, which is no longer in even in our news cycle.
(Really) not saying it's a good idea, but if Swedes were required to fill in the paperwork, or even better/worse actually transfer the taxes (maybe including payroll), we would probably be more upset with how our taxpayer money is spent.
If you are politically motivated to minimize the tax burden, it makes sense to be skeptical of direct filing (even if you are not bribed by Intuit).
This is true, but it’s much harder to compete against a free government service and that’s not the only option. For example, how much does Intuit’s advertising budget on X have to go up for it to be worth the effort of a few hours? (Repeat for xAI contracts or fleet Tesla purchases)
I don’t know if there is any quid pro quo but that’s why we have ethics laws because otherwise you have to constantly ask whether something is good for the country or just the guy making the decision.
Well the person making the decision can just decide to do what they think will make them most money on a stock trade too, it's like they built corruption into the system. So, they could sort Intuit/Quicken then announce gov will provide free software... make a killing on the short, then say 'only kidding'!
Yes, that’s why we have laws specifically banning insider trading and people in senior level positions are required to disclose their trading activities.
> In December, however, Kelly and 28 House Republican colleagues wrote to President-elect Donald Trump to ask him to end the program: “We write to urge you to take immediate action, including but not limited to a day-one executive order, to end the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) unauthorized and wasteful Direct File pilot program. The program’s creation and ongoing expansion pose a threat to taxpayers’ freedom from government overreach, and its rollout and structural flaws have already come at a steep price.”
The argument (if you take it in the most charitable light) is that reducing barriers to paying taxes will make people less averse to paying taxes. So they fight any effort to bring sanity to the tax code or tax payment process.
So even taken charitably I think they are wrong. But I do believe it is simply just corrupt and malicious.
You'd think the threat of having your bank accounts frozen and armed law enforcement officers showing up at your door were the most significant factors in making people "less averse" to paying taxes. I doubt reducing the barriers to filing your taxes correctly makes anyone happier about having to pay taxes either.
> It is really hard to keep track of their positions which I believe is intentional.
The reasons are unimportant. The important thing is that you trust Uncle Don and Uncle Elon, our grand leaders, who always have your best interests at heart.
The circle of Elon, Thiel, Andersson, etc conceptually orbit Balaji. Balaji, The Network State author, explicitly advocates for a techno-libertarian exit because they perceive the US and especially "team blue" as getting in the way and slowing down their vision.
His ideas builds on Curtis Jarvis work, dark enlightenment. He is a close associate of Peter Thiel and JD Vance. Essentially they want to destroy the federal government, buy up assets and land, start their own micro countries where they can be King CEOs. Sounds like a joke but its not.
It's important to point out, and this not an understatement, that they believe that democracy is a failed project. Democracy in their eyes is either a failed experiment or obsolete.
They share a belief that "change from within"[democracy] is impossible and that "exiting" is the only other option. This extends to governance models where people are encouraged to vote for their governance by packing up and moving (digitally and/or physically) rather than attempting change from within.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deleted a group that was devoted solely to making the government more efficient. Makes perfect sense, in Trumpistan logic.
By your logic, having one small group would be most efficient. Which makes perfect sense, given the tiny size of the US government, in Trumpistan logic.
I didn't make any claims about what is the most efficient number of groups working towards efficiency.
I also didn't make any claims which groups should exist, solely based on the name of the group.
You're the one who made an argument along those lines. Not me. As if, a group named for efficiency couldn't possibly be inefficient. Or, that 2 groups working for efficiency would somehow be automatically better than 1 group.
He got rid of 18F, a group within the Govt to improve usage of tech (and hopefully therefore efficiency), because of a tweet.
A tweet about IRS Direct File, a group that replicates the basic automatic taxation program of other advanced economies?
Over a fear that the Government would take over deciding what taxes people pay, despite a fact that such a program doesn’t necessarily block you from manually filing your own taxes (don’t know if the American implementation has that, but the UK one certainly allows you to override PAYE).
Yes HN commenters, this is the genius behind Government reform.
EDIT: Jesus Christ someone is going to convince him FedNow is a conspiracy and kill another basic system other countries have easily managed.
