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I don't think that the quid-pro-quo works as you imagine. The people writing for the left-leaning newspapers are true believers. At least some of their readers are true believers as well.
Economically, I think that they would do much better under Trump. Not because of his policies, but because of the culture war. Every day they could lead with "You won't believe what Trump has Xeeted now". They would be an integral part of the people who style themselves la resistance.
Bezos messing with the editors is going to massively decrease the value of his newspapers. If people want to read what billionaires think, they can just use social media. I think that he has solid business reasons though. It is not about changing who is winning, a newspaper endorsement is unlikely to change that. It is about being seen as an ally by the winner.
What is more likely? President Harris going: "You prevented the editors from endorsing me. No more US government deals with AWS!" Or President Trump going: "Your newspaper endorsed my enemy! No more US gov deals with AWS, traitor!"
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If you are certain about the election outcome, it should present an amazing opportunity for you to double your net worth, because 538 is still 53 vs 46. Just figure out how certain you are and what odds the prediction markets are giving you, and calculate your Kelly bet.
The writers and readers can all be true believers. The owner still has ultimate authority over them and chose to exercise it against their wishes.
That demonstrates the owner's authority, and their value as someone that needs to be traded favors to in the future.
I think the value of the WaPo paper is a bit of a writeoff in Bezos' mind. The value of AWS contracts with the government probably outweighs any profit the paper is making.
I'm 80-90% certain that Trump is going to win. I don't really know how to calculate Kelly bets. My betting pool is small anyways, probably no more than $100. I get no joy from gambling, so I'm not signed up for anything and would have some transaction costs involved with setting all that stuff up.
My form of backing up what I think is to make a public declaration on here and to people in person that I think a certain outcome is likely. If I'm wrong I'll be wrong. If someone wants to take the other side of the bet with me I'll trade in a few hours of factorio assistance on their factory vs assisting me if I win. Or I'll just change my profile flair to be something like [I was wrong about the election, USER was correct].
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Huh. Is that your own neologism, or is that the word we're using for what was formerly known as 'tweeted'?
Also, missed opportunity there for Elon Musk to have named the site 'Y.com' -- then he could have trademarked 'Yeeted'.
I think Elon’s just had a thing for the letter X (the unknown variable) since the nineties, when the original x.com failed.
Y.com should be like Twitter, but only for biological males.
So Reddit should just buy Y.com.
You're describing not Reddit, but 4chan. (Twitter is just 4chan for women, after all.)
Precisely. The female equivalent of Reddit, on the other hand, is Pinterest
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