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A racial slur
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
1432 points (99.4% liked)
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They're not interested in money, that's just a convenient tool, they're interested in power, and money buys both hard and soft power. Hard power might involve sponsoring a ballroom, or paying for an inaugeration to get the ear of a politician, soft power is more about being known for having inexhaustable wealth and having "useful" people seek you out to do deals with.
Sorry, no. Sponsoring a ballroom or paying for an inauguration are examples of soft power. Hard power is when you use coercive means to achieve your goals, in a geopolitical sense (where the terms come from) hard power is military action or the threat thereof, or economic sanctions. Funding things, building things and paying for things are examples of soft power. A billionaires version of hard power would be blackmail or a hostile takeover.
Or just war. Billionaires control the government, they control the military.
They have influence over it, they don't control it. Elon can't threaten Sam Altman with a hellfire missile strike over their ongoing lawsuit.
Yet. Private militaries have been a thing in the past, and I see no reason to believe they won't be again if state collapse continues.
And sadly still currently are in much of it.
Erik Prince has entered the chat
As much as he may want, and thankfully.
Geopolitically, yes, you're correct, but as you say in another comment, they influence the military rather than control it. That influence comes from economic control of the nominal controller. From an economic angle, that level of control is hard power, as removing it, or worse, putting behind an opponent, can be as damaging, and coersive, to the target as military means would be. Perhaps it's a different scale to sending in the army, but economic warfare, even a billionaire against a politician, has damaging and coersive effects.
No, sorry.
That's just objectively untrue. It only becomes hard power when they lean on that influence coercively. The implication that it could be taken away is the literal definition of soft power. A direct threat to take it away as leverage would be hard power.
When China builds a port in Djibouti, the implication is that if Djibouti doesn't conform largely to China's geopolitical goals in the region the port could be shut down or funding pulled. That's soft power, even though it carries conditions, because of the ambiguous and uncertain nature of the consequences. China in this example wouldn't be exercising "hard power" unless they actively threatened to pull all Chinese shipping to and from the port or change the parameters of the loan structure to get the country to fall in line.
Yes, that is exactly what I am talking about. It was late when I posted before, and maybe I didn't explain what I was saying clearly, but money, and the control of money, is absolutely used coersively. Whether it be "do as I say, or I stop funding you and fund your opponent instead", or supporting vanity projects (where the funding is likely syphoned off to the politician, or used by them to buy favour with others) on the condition that the politician behaves in a specific way, the control is coersive and has clear detrimental consequences for the politician should they not do as they are told.
I very much doubt that there is any ambiguity in the threats, much like you're illustration with China actively threatening to remove their shipping, as you would not want any risk of misunderstanding when those levels of money and power are on the table.
Also, a lot of them like to rape children, and that shit can get pretty expensive.
Ooh so close.