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Very well put, and neatly in line (down to mentioning Jane Street) with a recent thought of mine:
If you want smart rational capable people to do a job building the culture then you should increase their compensation. Pay me $1 million a year guaranteed for the next 30 years (inflation adjusted) and I will gladly leave my quant job and focus on shaping societal culture into my preferred image, it certainly beats predicting fair values of AAPL 30 minutes in the future better than the competion. Problem is that the "conservative right" refuses to pay the opportunity cost going rate for the kinds of people it says it wants. I'm sure that rich like minded billionaires like Thiel could band together and fund such an organisation of 250 such people without too much cost to themselves; it would cost a fraction of what Musk on his own paid for Twitter over the whole 30 years.
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Right, the only thing that could stop this is if young conservatives prioritized political victory over making money. It is possible to imagine a world - perhaps one in which making money is a little ‘grubby’ or ‘middle class’ while ‘gentlemen’ play politics, as it was with the aristocracy in pre-corn-laws Britain - where this might be the case. But it’s very far from this one. And the hereditarily rich, whether they’re Musk’s kids or Tucker’s, are almost all still taught by the same progressive teachers and academics, so their politics mostly fall in line too.
Consider that Musk might indeed change politics somewhat with his purchase of Twitter. But this is the richest man, by far, in the United States! To have a chance of shifting the window even a little requires a not insignificant portion of the wealth of the richest person in all the land. Meanwhile, a few dozen progressive apparatchiks in DC who nobody has ever heard of likely have more power between them.
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