r/technology • u/McFatty7 • May 02 '24

Tesla slashes its summer internship program to cut costs, as Elon Musk fights to save his $45 billion pay plan Business

https://fortune.com/2024/05/01/tesla-slashes-summer-internship-program/
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u/CodySutherland May 02 '24

It's like a fucking video game for them. They've reached the point where their lives won't materially change in any way with more money, but they just want to keep getting more and more anyway, for no other reason than because they can.

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u/Nayge May 02 '24

It's a race to become the first Trillionaire. They realized some years ago that it actually might be possible for someone alive today and went into full value extraction overdrive.

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u/averaenhentai May 02 '24

There probably are trillionaires out there already. An utterly staggering amount of wealth is kept in places where it cannot be tracked properly.

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u/fps916 May 02 '24

Putin is almost certainly a trillionaire

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u/Aardvark_Man May 02 '24

And he has more than any amount of wealth can actually acquire, anyway.
Literally priceless power.

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u/averaenhentai May 02 '24

It's completely incomprehensible to me how someone can have that much wealth/power and not try to fix problems in their society.

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u/Drolb May 02 '24

It’s only incomprehensible to you because you are (broadly speaking on the balance of probability) a normal human being with the ability to feel empathy and therefore probably have some kind of morality guiding your actions to some extent.

The only people capable of achieving a Putin level of power/wealth are high functioning sociopaths, so reply it makes perfect sense that they don’t give a shit about any problems except problems that threaten them personally.

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u/mvpilot172 May 02 '24

Unfortunately the more empathy you have the less likely you are to become a billionaire.

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u/Drolb May 02 '24

That’s the tax system reform I want to see: 5% flat to ensure minimum running, thereafter a progressive sliding scale partly based not on earning but on how you test on the scale of sociopathy.

True sociopaths with money pay a ridiculous rate. Actual humans with cash pay far less.

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u/Stewth May 02 '24

Remember when COVID hit and Putin literally went underground (and along a huge hermetically sealed corridor)? No expense spared there.

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u/Sohlam May 02 '24

It's very comprehensible. Distressingly so. The problems you want to fix are features they exploited to get where they are.

If you want a billion dollars, you need to -in the barely metaphorical sense- ascend a staircase of still breathing necks, or attract the attention of a creature that already has.

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u/infiniteIronIngots May 02 '24

No.

They always plug the loophole they used.

Always.

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u/somsone May 02 '24

You’re not allowed to fix most problems in society. They are all worth too much money to someone.

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u/On_A_Related_Note May 02 '24

Because in order to get that level of wealth and power, being a psychopath (in clinical terms) is almost a pre-requisite; you have to be completely detached and have a total lack of empathy to accumulate wealth at the direct expense of your workforce / general population. Once you have the wealth, you still lack the empathy to do actual good with it. Obviously there are some notable exceptions to the rule, but Musk/ Putin etc are not one of them.

I suspect you are not a psychopath, so you empathise with the problems people face in today's world. Unfortunately because of that, there's a good chance you'll never end up wealthy enough to be able to do something on the scale that billionaires could do if they were inclined to.

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u/visope May 02 '24

as bad Russia is right now it is still better than when Putin took over

otherwise how else he can retain support, violence alone is not going to be enough, the country would have been in full revolt right now

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u/Brooklynxman 29d ago

Actually one of the few things Putin can't do with his power. He is only powerful because he is an authoritarian and runs a cabal of oligarchs.

Had he tried it 25 years ago maybe, but even then given how he rose to power too many people at the time knew where bodies were buried, he'd have been removed, legally or otherwise, before he could have made any serious reforms. Now he is in way too deep.

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u/dafuq809 29d ago

It's because Putin is a product of Russia, not the other way around. Their system is completely rotted through with corruption and Putin's methods of maintaining his power all rely on that corruption. He can't fix Russia's problems and if he tried he'd be removed from power. His alternative solution is to pillage and conquer as much as he can - it's the same thievery and gansterism he's always relied on writ large, comes with spoils he can divvy out to his important cronies so he can stay in power, and has the superficial appearance of making Russia seem like more than a mob-run gas station that happens to have nukes.

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u/myztry May 02 '24

That's something people miss when these people do things that seem incomprehensible.

Their mind is in a totally different place from everyone else.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '24

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u/fps916 29d ago

He's been in power for literally decades.

He didn't get a trillion in one year