Isn't it past time we flush this ugly fellow out of our national politics and conversation, now? I don't mean President Trump. For now I'll give him a bye. The guy we need to flush at long last is ... Elon Musk. Seen in the photo here with one of his exes, the actress Talulah Riley, best known for Westworld. Musk busted pleading to visit Pedo Island in Epstein files The world's richest man repeatedly sought to arrange a visit to "Little St James," aka Epstein's island or Lolita island. In particular, in November 2012, Epstein emailed Musk in expectation of such a visit, asking about logistics, "how many people will you be for the heli to island?" The future head of the US Department on Government Efficiency responded, "Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" Musk had divorced Talulah in March of that year. Plainly though they had not cut each other off entirely: they would remarry in...
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As most of you probably know, dear readers.... Elon Musk is the man behind Starlink. Starlink is a constellation of satellites of a sort critical to internet operation -- to the global and near-instantaneous character of it that we have come to take for granted. That constellation is the property of Starlink Services LLC. The parent company is SpaceX. The founder and CEO of SpaceX is ... Elon Musk. Also, as you probably know, Musk has become a big figure in US politics of late. We will skip further explanation and simply say that the European powers want an alternative provider of satellite internet services. Starlink, meet your new commercial and geopolitical competitor ... Eutelsat Communications. the company is based in Paris, France. Its chief executive is Eva Berneke, a Danish engineer. It is Germany that is at present making a fair amount of noise about using Eutelsat as a way of freeing Europe (and Europe's eastern frontier, Ukraine) fr...
Since Musk has destroyed twitter, I have been getting most of my social-media fix at Mastodon. I haven't tried BlueSky yet, though I know some people laud it as the revival of the old pre-Musk twitter. The good thing about Mastodon is that it is NOT the revival of the pre-Musk Twitter. It is a federated system, the co-operation of distinct servers in such a way that it would be difficult for a billionaire with a huge ego to buy it and ruin it. One neat development there is a tradition, if you will, called #3GoodThings. Posters regularly exercise this random listing of positivity. Here is an example of a #3GoodThings post. One of several that appeared Sunday. ------------------------------------ 1. I beat #TacticalMystery 2. I spoke to a friend of mine who I do sometimes see on my social feeds, just haven't chatted with them proper in months 3. There is no work today. ------------------------------------- Now, if you have no idea what #TacticalMystery is, t...
To the point. Musk has been left out of the staging of an "infrastructure" announcement, and he is acting as if he is very unhappy about that. What this portends for the coming months and years of the second Trump administration I do not know -- let me know, dear reader, if you figure it out. On Tuesday, January 21, Donald Trump's first full day as POTUS the second time, he announced a joint venture that would be backed by the US and that would involve as operating companies OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. It was supposed to use the billions those companies are pitching in, in order to build data centers and computing infrastructure across the US with an idea to advancing the development of artificial intelligence while creating more jobs than it costs -- though surely some humans will be rendered redundant in the process. Little were they to know that the Chinese were about to steal a Long March on them with the release of a quite different AI system, DeepSeek. But we w...
By now you have all seen the footage. Elon Musk, amidst the pageantry of the so-called "indoor parade" after the inauguration of a President -- Musk showed his own view of our new chief executive by offering him a long familiar sort of salute. Then, to make it clear that this was no accidental expression of exuberance, he turned around and did it again. He wanted to make sure we all saw the Sieg Heil gesture. [Also, look at that facial expression: neither accidental nor exuberant.] Nor has he denied that this is what he was doing. Others have denied it for him. But he has not denied it. He has said that "they" shouldn't make such a big deal of it. That is not a denial. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” he wrote. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” I am happy to speak for a moment as one of the "they" who think this a big deal. We don't think you're Hitler, dude. We think you're Hugo Ferdinand Boss. The German cl...
Click here for the full list of this year's Pultizer winners: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2024 One of my pet peeves is a matter of pronunciation, the common mis pronunciation of the word "Pulitzer". whether used of a man, and corporation, or a prize. It is often slaughtered into "pule-itzer" where the first syllable rhymes with "yule" or "mule". That is wrong, though, The word is pull-it-sir, as if a titled gentleman had just asked you "how do I get this cork out of this bottle"! Anyway: I wish to draw your attention specifically today to one of the two National Reporting Pulitzers. Both of the National Reporting awards went to the "staff of" major news organizations for their work on a big ongoing issue. One went to staff of WaPo for its " sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle." The other? to the staff of Reuters, my old stomping ground, for stories of Elon Musk's aut...
Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts. Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it. On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness. One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company. THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create con...
What have been the biggest stories in business/financial news over the last year? Quite synchronistic of you to ask: I was just about to address the point. Breaking the answers down by month as usual, is tricky this year, since one of the big stories -- involving Elon Musk and Twitter, seemed to pop up in headlines in every month from April onward. I've crammed all the twists and turns of that saga into the single April entry. There are two other key things to know about this list before you dig in. First, it is a very U.S. centric list. More so than the earlier items in this series. Second, the war in Ukraine has left a big mark on it. Indeed, every item on the list that follows is either US based or Ukraine War related. There are s even of the former and five of the latter. This selectivity is of course absurd. There was lots of rest-of-the-world finance news that had little to do with the Ukraine war. In the United Kingdom, for example, Liz Truss had ...
I take today's subject from a recent article in SLATE by Jonathan Fischer. Fischer's article was written prior to Musk's surrender this weekend -- Musk seems now to have decided to proceed with his Twitter purchase on the original terms, at great expense. The Fischer article involves in the first instance the litigation between Musk and Twitter, over whether Twitter was going to be able to get a court order requiring Musk to buy them out as he promised early this year. Such orders for specific performance are rare, and it looked when Fischer wrote that the management of Twitter would probably have to be satisfied with receiving some of Musk's billions for their troubles. It wouldn't have been a shabby consolation prize, though. Fischer takes that as his start point. He then tells us that the Chancery Court in Delaware has released a lot of text messages to and from Musk bearing on the litigation over Tesla. Fischer has been pouring over the texts and what he con...
Elon Musk is now in full excuse-mongering mood. It is not his fault that he isn't going to buy twitter, after all. It is some other fellow's fault. Maybe that fellow behind the tree. As a regular issuer of tweets, I would rather he not. His desire is to shake up a system that seems to work well enough without him. That is a full disclosure of my interest in the matter. But here is a judgment in principle distinguishable from that: he is starting to seem rather pathetic. Go back to planning your self-exile to Mars, flyboy.
What was the significance of the Space-X flight, now concluded? By way of clearing away of side-issue: I'm not an admirer of Elon Musk. He is the epitome of the faux-entrepreneur who makes his money on connections rather than real savvy or productivity. He has sometimes seemed like Donald Trump, but with a high-tech gloss (I mean of course the Trump of casinos and a television show, before his descent into politics, where his role has been something far worse.) But Musk aside: what is the significance of Space-X? My answer: it marks a stage in the privatization of space travel. We have passed the 'hero stage' of astronauts. Much of what they do -- replacing old satellites with new ones, running experiments where zero-grav is important -- has become a more-or-less routine matter. Yes, the science of those experiments can be cutting edge, but the heroes stay on the ground. The astronauts are important for laboratory maintenance. Or, sometimes, their bodies ARE the e...
A fine discussion of Elon Musk, at The Hill. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/345338-can-we-wean-elon-musk-off-government-support-already Musk represents a certain moderate-left image of how a socially responsible capitalist can and should act. One blogger/enthusiast wrote not long ago that Musk has shown by example that "capitalism can be a good thing, especially when someone with ... long range vision uses it for the betterment of humanity." Ashlee Vance, a prominent tech news reporter, has written a biography of Musk, extolling him as embodying "the quest for a fantastic future." It all just makes me want to say "bah, humbug," out of season.