West’s work at Uber and the Harris campaign illustrates his dedication to the people holding this worldview. He reduced his work in both places to simple games (find returns for Uber investors; raise more cash than the Republicans) where determining the “winner” was a simple matter of counting the money.
In both cases it was critical to complete control of funding and the narratives used to describe the game. No one at Uber had any real-world business accomplishments and no one had any idea how the business model could ever produce sustainable profits, but since they controlled the $13 billion in external funding neither repeated scandals or $32 billion in losses could threaten their control. Anyone who attacked them (or pointed to the huge losses) was denigrated as a unrepentant unionist set on fighting the inevitable tide of technological progress.
Democratic Party insiders fiercely controlled funding even though they no longer had the ability to develop candidates who could win competitive elections or messages and policies with appeal outside elite/PMC circles. Worsening election results were blamed on to Russian interference and the failure of media companies to aggressively censor “misinformation”.
Uber subverted the idea that corporations served the larger economy through risky investments that produced meaningful productivity/efficiency advances whose value was demonstrated in competitive markets. It successfully convinced capital markets to ignore their total lack of competitiveness and profitability, and to only pay attention to their narratives about powerful technological innovation and Amazon-like growth potential.
California Party insiders abandoned the belief that Democrats should serve the concrete interests of a broad range of voters and needed to assemble a broad coalition of interests in order to win elections. The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars from companies and investors who were openly working to capture political processes so they could personally profit from market rigging and directly harm the many Democrats who benefitted from Biden Administration antitrust enforcement.
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The Harris-West decision to ignore elite/non-elite issues and center the campaign on fundraising also helped ensure that it would be impossible for the national Democratic Party to recover from a Trump victory and establish any meaningful opposition to Trump policies. Some billionaire/corporate donors might have had some preference for a Democratic win, believing that (as with Obama) a this would neutralize opposition to pro-oligarchic policies from the left and offered more stability than a Trump victory. But the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.