Elon Musk and Twitter

[Beanz]

Was never a big Sam Harris fan but he turns out to be very insightful and lucid on many subjects. His take downs of Jordan Peterson's childlike pro religion arguments are fantastic.

The man-children are happy to dish out nonsense but inject a bit of sanity into their rants by pointing out simple facts and they just can't take it.

[Beanz]

https://youtu.be/diHcpZvBjT0?si=PXhzkPdmGl8pkmq6

[Kirkland Laing]

First time I've heard his name

Was never a big Sam Harris fan but he turns out to be very insightful and lucid on many subjects. His take downs of Jordan Peterson's childlike pro religion arguments are fantastic. The man-children are happy to dish out nonsense but inject a bit of sanity into their rants by pointing out simple facts and they just can't take it.

First time I've even heard his name. I just saw this on the internet. I've heard Peterson's name, he just recycles pull yourself up by your bootstraps rhetoric to make money with podcasting or whatever no? I'm not a fan of all these podcasting/new media people, have never listened to a podcast ever and probably never will.

[Beanz]

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[Beanz]

FB_IMG_1737554306425.jpg

[Master]

Musk could buy Tik Tok but after Twitter I think he is broke.

[Kirkland Laing]

If it were possible to short a public figure with maximum leverage, Elon Musk would surely be the top target. The political and enterprise value of “Musk Inc” is built on treacherous ideological sands.
You can short Tesla as an impure proxy for the larger Icarus story. The shares have almost tripled since April to $430 (£350) even though the company no longer has the sort of growth story that can justify a price-to-earnings ratio of 110.
Tesla has suffered its first year of falling car sales worldwide. It is running into ferocious competition on price and quality in China and is rapidly losing German market share in electric vehicles (EV) to BMW and Mercedes
The company is valued at $1.37 trillion, four times the entire auto industry of Germany, the greatest engineering nation on earth.
Such anomalies do not last for long.
The driving rationale for the parabolic spike in the share price since Donald Trump’s election is the belief that Musk will enjoy techno-regulatory privilege and crony capitalist favour. The Tesla chief was still in good enough grace to earn a spot with the Trump family at the inauguration, where he could be seen on Monday gazing with fixed attention at the cupola of the Capitol.
His privilege is recompense for spending a quarter of $1bn helping Trump over the line in swing states – whether by fostering free speech or by exploiting the black arts of algorithmic propaganda, depends on your angle of view.




The problem with the market’s political bet on Tesla is that Musk has already made himself arch-enemy of the Maga priesthood, who increasingly regard him as a globalist carpet-bagger. They think he is trying to subvert the ethno-cultural revival of the American nation state, spreading money around to capture the Trump movement for his own purposes.
“He is a truly evil person. His sole objective is to become a trillionaire. He will do anything related to make sure that his companies are protected,” said Steve Bannon, the Gramscian chief ideologue of the Maga cause, in an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Serathis month.
“Quite frankly, the people around Trump are tired of it. We’ve seen peak Elon, his intrusive nature, his lack of understanding of the true issues,” said Bannon.
“Before, because of all the money he put in, I was prepared to tolerate it: not any longer. His half-baked ideas are really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale,” he said.
The final rupture was over Musk’s backing for H-1B skilled visas, mostly for Indians working for “big tech”. But it would have happened sooner or later because the Maga theology of primordial traditionalism is at odds with everything about the Silicon Valley plutocracy.
Bannon later told the New York Times that the clash goes to the core of competing belief systems. “I would almost argue it’s an unbridgeable gap,” he said.
The tech Right salivates over network states run on blockchain, seeking to re-invent human life and society upon new technological foundations. This threatens the essence of the traditional nation, bound together by what Abraham Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory.
“These people are techno-feudalists and it’s a dangerous thing. It’s going to be the populist-nationalist movement that’ll take them on and break them,” said Bannon. Bluster or not, can one dispute his larger point?
Musk has sought to deflect the Maga backlash by plunging into European politics and cosying up to Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and Britain’s Reform. I doubt that many will be fooled by this crude ploy.




Trump can try to stand above the two warring factions of his coalition but ultimately he may have to sacrifice Musk if he wants to hold on to his mass base, which he will not find hard to do. Washington is too small for two such egos.
Musk may be sitting on a future gold mine with SpaceX and his network of satellites. But what is Tesla worth once Donald Trump tires of him? He has already alienated his core clientele in the West. What eco-liberal wants to be seen driving a Tesla any more? The brand has lost its cachet among that well-heeled tribe of EV early adopters and the market is bursting with other models to choose from.
Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund, has sold all its $600m worth of Tesla shares, ostensibly over Musk’s blocked $56bn pay package – but undoubtedly for a mix of reasons.
Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s star analyst, is keeping the faith. He has just raised his price target from $600 to $800 in his bull scenario, premised on sales of 7m vehicles a year by 2030. The underlying car business would be a small fraction of this.
The real share value would be in everything else: driverless robotaxis, streaming media, software upgrades, navigation services, robots and so forth. “While autos still matter, we see embodied AI as the driver,” he said.
The $800 case is that Tesla is so far ahead on data and autonomous driving that it will carry away the prize in the late 2020s. But Musk still has no Level 4 approval for Full Self-Driving capabilities and no robotaxi with software good enough for unsupervised driving. Rival Waymo is already running 100,000 paid rides a week, albeit “geo-constrained” to limited areas.
You can hail a driverless robotaxi today in Wuhan. WeDrive is rolling out services across Chinese cities. It is patchy but the Chinese are catching up fast. BYD is investing $14bn in self-driving tech. It already dominates the Chinese market for sales of EVs and hybrids.
Tesla’s sales in China are still rising but not nearly as fast as the overall EV market. They made up 37pc of the company’s worldwide deliveries last year, though the price wars have been brutal. The Shanghai plant exports the Model 3 to Europe, which now faces an extra (modest) tariff. Musk is about to lose the $7,500 tax credit for EVs in the US as well, and that threatens profit margins on his coming affordable model.
Perhaps he will talk Trump out of his economic war with China but I strongly doubt it. If he does not, he is so closely associated with the new White House that his Chinese operations will become a prime target for retaliation.
Besides, Xi Jinping wants China to dominate the world market for EVs, self-driving AI, humanoid robots, fixed energy storage and everything that Tesla makes.
Musk has manoeuvred himself into an invidious position, caught between the Chinese Communist Party and the Maga movement and reliant on the fickle favour of a volatile American president. Those Icarus wings of beeswax and feathers have flown too close to the sun.





The writer thinks Musk is fucked. I'm not so sure. Trump could easily fuck up with whatever economic warfare shit he has planned and set off inflation and a bad economy. If it happens I don't see him siding with his base, I see him siding with the money. It'll be legalised looting all the way down for him and the oligarchs and watch out any red baseball caps if you decide to protest.

[Kirkland Laing]

Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government

Imagining how we'd cover overseas what's happening to the U.S. right now

I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend:
Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices
February 1, 2025
By William Boot
WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.
With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.
The G-7 country’s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state. Trump is a convicted felon with a long record of family corruption and returned in power in late January after a four-year interlude promising retribution and retaliation against foreign opponents and a domestic “Deep State.” He had been charged with attempting to overthrow the peaceful transition of power that had previously removed him from office in 2021, but loyalist elements in the judiciary successfully blocked his prosecution and incarceration, easing his return to power.

Over the last two weeks, loyalist presidential factions and Musk-backed teams have launched sweeping, illegal Stalin-esque purges of the national police forces and prosecutors, as well as offices known as inspectors-general, who are typically responsible for investigating government corruption. While official numbers of the unprecedented ousters were kept secret, rumors swirled in the capital that the scores of career officials affected by the initial purges could rise into the thousands as political commissars continued to assess the backgrounds of members of the police forces.

[Kirkland Laing]

Part 2



The mentally declining and aging head of state, who has long embraced conspiracist thinking, spent much of the week railing in bizarre public remarks against the country’s oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, whom he blamed without evidence for causing a deadly plane crash across the river from the presidential mansion. Unfounded racist attacks on those minorities have been a key foundation of Trump’s unpredicted rise to political power from a career as a real estate magnate and reality TV host and date back to his first announcement that he would seek the presidency in 2015, when he railed against “rapists” being sent into the country from its southern neighbor.
In one of his first moves upon returning to the presidency, he mobilized far-right paramilitary security forces to begin raids at churches, schools, and workplaces to identify and remove racial minorities, including those who had long lived in harmony with the country’s white Christian majority. He also immediately moved to release from prison some 1,500 supporters who had participated in his unsuccessful 2021 insurrection, including members of violent far-right militias who promptly upon release swore fealty to him in any future civil unrest. Elsewhere, even as he released violent criminals onto the streets, Trump by fiat pulled longstanding government security protection from former military and health officials he felt had betrayed him.
Underscoring his apparent disconnection from reality, reports surfaced that the president had ordered military forces to unleash an environmental catastrophe and flood regions of a separatist province known as California that is led by a high-profile political opponent. The order underscored how the military, which had resisted Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs in his first administration, was now led by a subservient defense minister, a favored TV personality with no experience in management who faced an embarrassing series of allegations about his drunken behavior in the workplace.
Foreign allies who had long aligned themselves with the United States on the international stage were unsettled by increasingly destabilizing nationalistic and imperialist rhetoric coming from the president’s social media accounts—largely posted to a network owned and run by Trump himself—and worried in private conversations in capital embassies that he would mobilize the compliant military to fulfill heretofore unimaginable territorial ambitions that included seizing the country’s northern neighbor, which shares the world’s longest undefended border, and potentially colonizing Panama and Greenland.
Both the country’s defense minister, who has previously said he does not believe women should be allowed to serve in combat roles, and Trump’s new interior minister, who appeared on national TV wearing the paramilitary uniform of the border security force central to Trump’s political rise, spent much of their first days echoing and amplifying the president’s hysteria about racial and ethnic minorities. They and other government officials also immediately canceled all official observances of religious and ethnic minority holidays and launched efforts to scrub official websites and prohibit educating workers or schoolchildren about those minorities’ long, proud history in the country. Overnight Friday, hours after journalists had gone home, the defense minister’s office announced it would bar establishment independent media outlets from working out of the country’s military headquarters and replace them with friendly right-wing media organs.
The administration’s propaganda minister also announced Friday, apparently with little preparation, that it would initiate an immediate, unexpected, and seemingly ill-considered trade war with the country’s two primary economic partners, a move that if implemented would upend the national economy, disrupt supply chains, and accelerate the return of an inflationary crisis that has roiled domestic politics over the last five years and had just seemed to be returning to normal. Ironically, it was that very inflationary crisis and Trump’s promises on the campaign trail to lower the price of eggs that paved the way for his unforeseen election victory in November.
The country’s other business oligarchs have watched Musk’s unexpected and rapid rise to power with trepidation, and leading media and technology companies who compete with Musk’s extensive business empire—like Meta, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, Apple, and OpenAI—have quickly lined up to negotiate and pay bribes to the president that would allow their companies to operate unimpeded; initial payment terms ranged from million-dollar gifts to the presidential inauguration to $15 million and $25 million payments, made by Disney and Meta, to fund the construction of a presidential shrine. The highest known payment was $40 million from Amazon, which was structured as a gift to the president’s wife in exchange for the media company having the opportunity to film a hagiographic biopic.
It was unclear, exactly, what deal terms any of those bribes and payments unlocked and when subsequent tribute payments would be expected, although on Saturday Trump moved to fire and neuter government watchdogs that had long bedeviled the country’s financial elite.
Throughout the week’s fast-moving seizure of power—one that seems increasingly irreversible by the hour—neither loyalist nor opposition parliamentary leaders raised meaningful objection to the new regime or the unraveling of the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances. A few members of the geriatric legislature body offered scattered social media posts condemning the move, but parliament — where both houses are controlled by so-called “MAGA” members handpicked for their loyalty to the president — went home early for the weekend even as Musk’s forces spread through the capital streets.
It was unclear what role, if any, Musk’s forces would allow parliament to have in the new governmental structure by the time it next returned to the national assembly known as Capitol Hill.