Any billionaire who thinks of themselves as indispensable to society and has a highly visible public presence. If Musk was behaving towards the CCP half as disrespectfully as he does towards the the US political caste, he'd have been stripped of his China holdings and locked out of that market long ago.
No, the equivalent in US wouldnt be a capitalist billionaire. It would be its opposite: a popular group with marxist or communist ideals that menaces the status quo and current order. Like the Black Panther Party. And, oh, they were disappeared, some of them still are in solitary confinenent because the government is afraid that they could spread their ideology to other inmates.
The only example you can find is from 40-50 years ago? Around the time that China (while we're at comparing with China) was having its military shoot protesters in Tiananmen square?
Just because the government here was so successful that there isn't any remotely threatening fundamental opposition doesn't mean they wouldn't do it again. Those people are still unjustly in prison and still haven't been released.
(R) party is left to exist as a group of useful idiots who never pass any meaningful legislation that isn't immediately dismantled by (D) establishment within a few years.
we are not a plutocracy at all, that's ridiculous. There are many places in the world where rich people hardly pay taxes. That is not at all true in the US where "the 1%" pay 40% of the income tax
if the rich controlled the government, don't you think they'd lower their taxes? or are we lucky to be ruled by the rich because they are so benevolent?
Rich people in America pay taxes, don't be ridiculous. Wealthy (D) supporters abroad don't file tax returns and don't get penalized for it unless they fall out of line with the party. Then suddenly they're audited every year. This also happened to Trump, even though he was filing in NY.
That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety.
Let's say a certain billionare enters politics, and is not a party favorite, and against the bipartisan elite consensus. Say, they are, god forbid, populist, and against job outsourcing, wars, and such.
Media, who loved him for decades, can suddenly start covering his every action as if describing the leader of the Axis in WWII. Suddenly his associates might start to get investigated for things all sides in DC did since time immemorial with impunity. Experts might appear day and night on TV to give a psychological assessment of him. Some high standing people might openly advocate for his elimination. Government agencies might join the "good fight". Mere tech corporations might decide to ban his (the active President's) account.
Others might pay some hack to come up with a bogus document binder hack job, a dossier if you will, that will feature day and night on the news. And inversely, his opponent's son might be news gold, be involved in all kinds of shady dealings, and even lose a certain computing device, and they're not covered, lest their parent is harmed.
Or let's say another billionaire lacks the good taste to not antagonize the consensus of the elites and their lapdogs in the aspirational classes. Perhaps their glowing "let's all kiss the ass of the billionaire tech god" coverage changes overnight...
The lack of verification of the claims made related to the "bogus document binder hack job" doesn't preclude the possibility of conspiracy, sedition, etc. actually occuring, and the dossier played essentially no role in subsequent investigations. He also wasn't exactly anti-war. On the campaign trail rhetorically he was, but aside from the (disastrous but did need to happen) withdrawal from Afghanistan mostly continued the imperialist status quo. Iran and Syria are high-profile examples. He is an authoritarian populist, yes. I'm not sure why only people with money would have a reason to oppose that. The main reason people oppose him is he is an ineffective, narcissistic leader who did his utmost to personally enrich himself, continue to fan the flames of division, and forcefully push through fiscal policy that was basically the opposite of what should have been implemented at the time. It was not all bad, but it is hard to find much good. The market does not like uncertainty, and a bombastic cult of personality ball of teenage angst is not who you want with the levers to the world's largest economy.
What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
The "media" includes Fox News - and it is, in audience terms, the most mainstream of them. It had absolutely glowing coverage of Trump throughout its presidency and continues heavy coverage of Biden's son. The "media" includes the Falun-affiliated Epoch Times, which is still widely available and continues along the same lines. The "media" includes Twitter, which its owner directed to get his own tweets significantly more audience.
None of these people can even remotely claim to have been vanished by the government.
>What does this have to do with mysterious vanishing?
Nothing. As the very first line of the comment goes: "That's not the way things are done in the west. Lacking absolute rule, you need to achieve similar things with a little more subtlety".
When establishment power is privitazed, distributed, and can be yielded more finely, you don't need to vanish people to shut them up or shut them down.
