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Notes -
Here are two wacky ideas for buying elections:
Start a buisiness in an emerging, not-yet-regulated industry. Do all the textbook Silicon Valley valuation-pumping capital-raising stuff, but shove all the money into as many federal elections as possible. Max out the personal limit for every candidate's official campaign of one party, then find a surrogate to do the same for the other party. Hand pick one or two primary candidates in out-of-the-way races and pump their SuperPAC to the moon. Use your positioning as the politician-favored firm in the industry to raise even more money. Of course, the key is to only use investor capital for this, not customer accounts that you happen to have custody over. This is surprisingly cheap. You could do it for about $100 million.
Buy a major social media company. Gut the employees and bring in your own people. Change the algorithm in clever ways that will shake out to favor ideas of your own preferred politics. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive, estimated to be about $40 billion even in favorable circumstances.
At least as far as (1) goes, I think Scott included PAC spending in his comparison to almonds, so that's not currently pumping our numbers up enough. We have to do better. (2) is more interesting/nuanced/complicated. Definitely a part of what Elon was buying with his $40B was political influence, and it's in a way that would not be captured by Scott's numbers. It's hard to know how expensive it was relative to the political influence it bought.
One of the things I like about my idea is that it gives a direct connection between dollars spent and election outcomes, rather than a fuzzy, "Oh, maybe you're buying political influence by buying Twitter or donating to a left-leaning university/think tank, but we have no idea how to connect those things in a quantitative fashion. I'd actually kind of love a more complicated scheme than what I presented here, one that allowed us to then do some math to estimate things like what the implied marginal values of electoral outcomes are in terms of dollars. But the best idea I had in that direction was to make the money EC votes proportional rather than winner-take-all. I don't super love that for other reasons, but perhaps there's a nice design that could help us make better estimates.
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"Hey Elon, can I copy your homework?"
"Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious you copied."
"Ok."
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