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WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ELON MUSK?
The guy was always kind of whacked, right? When you name your child “X AE - A 12” (Pronounced as “X-Ash A-12”) you are either living outside the orbital plane, married to Grimes, or both (At the time). But he’s a billionaire; what is he gonna do? Be normal? If you took your kid’s English teacher and dressed him or her identically to any average billionaire and then asked people to pick the English teacher? They would guess correctly 98% of the time, and not just because of the better grammar. Billionaires just have this thing, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Whatever one thought of Elon Musk’s je ne sais quoi back in the good old days, back when he was building fast cars and slowing rockets to a stop, no one thought of him as “small.”
This is a guy who developed an electric roadster that went from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds. Yes, he - before anyone else, developed a way to pay and transfer money on the web. He put together a team that doesn’t just unload people and sh*t on the ISS but his rockets land backward. He wants vacuum-sealed tunnels between LA and SF that allow people to go from downtown to downtown in 60 minutes. He wants to make us a two-planetary species.
Some of these may be crazy. But they are all “Big,” and Musk looked and sounded “Big” even as he always had that eccentric genius thing going that women love.
Big dreams became big reality often enough.
So how is it that Musk seems so “small” and petty now? One word: “Twitter” and his downfall aligns perfectly with his coming out as a “MAGA hero.” Yes, this allegation is coming from a liberal, and yet the calendar lines up, as you’ll see.
To get a concrete grip on how far he’s fallen, imagine the guy that put the car in space; that was cool, and it was big. Now, imagine a new CEO entering the headquarters of one of the world’s most respected companies and perhaps the most recognizable company in social media. Doesn’t a serious person wear a casual suit or even jeans and a nice shirt, start introducing oneself with some humility, asking others their name, show some interest in the people around you, and generally get off to a start where people might say, “He seemed nicer, more human than I imagined”? Big people know how to be “big” in every situation. This isn’t big, this screams…
And yet, right now, just a week after Musk entered the Twitter lobby, he is already talking about charging $8.00 for “blue checks.” Somehow, Twitter managed to grow into a behemoth that cost Musk $44 Billion without charging $8.00 for blue checks. There are 240,000 verified accounts with blue checks. In effect, Musk is making a mere $1.92 million - pennies - to make a statement to the effete, the commentariat, celebrities, and the insiders. He’s saying, “I’m in charge now.”
And he’s making these sweeping changes (including massive layoffs), at a point in time when his judgment is… small. Just this last week, he deleted this:
It is tough to seem smaller, though he made a significant effort on October 17th in another since-deleted tweet, in which he congratulated Kanye on buying Parler.
So.
He was big. He is now small. What happened?
It is not the liberals’ fault that Musk’s demise corresponds almost to the day, April 18th, 2022 - as the Washington Post notes, that he made the laughably simplistic argument that Twitter only kicks off conservatives and that “didn’t seem fair,” given that Twitter is the town square?
It would not be fair if it were at all true.
Twitter is a left-leaning company run out of downtown SanFrancisco. And yet, they must be doing something right. Elon thought it was worth $44 Billion. But Twitter had and has clear rules about spreading misinformation in order to save lives (especially about COVID, where 300,000 lives were lost to disinformation,) Twitter has a clear policy against violent threats in a day and age when 40% of Republicans see violence as a legitimate political tool (And days after the attack on Paul Pelosi that Musk mocked). In a time with increased bigotry and xenophobia, Twitter has a clear policy against any of it on its platform. These policies hit some MAGAs hard (and some liberals), and though Twitter leaned left, it was not Twitter’s fault that many of those banished were right-wing zealots. And yet, Don Jr. still has his account, and so does Dinesh D’Souza, Mike Huckabee, Stephen Miller... It is not a liberal/conservative thing. Indeed, within days of Musk taking over, many MAGAs were testing the limits again.
Musk’s dive to the bottom corresponded with the Twitter “impulse buy.” Normally, multi-billion-dollar deals are hammered out after months of due diligence and a price determined by the findings, economic climate, and projections. Musk - as if he knew nothing about business, did it all in reverse order, and then complained about things he learned after settling on a contract to buy at a set price.
The “impulse” overlapped that period when Musk came out of the closet as a MAGA (Some always knew, not me). He suddenly seemed to have far more interest in his blinky new Twitter toy and spent a lot more time having fun “owning the libs,” than he did in either Tesla (by far the greatest share of his wealth) or SpaceX. Musk made his offer to buy Twitter on April 25th, 2022 - Tesla shares were trading at $332.43. By April 29th, Tesla was trading at $290 to give one an idea as to what Tesla shareholders thought of Musk going “Social Media.” Musk paid far more than $44 Billion to acquire Twitter when it cost an additional $50 per share of Tesla - and Musk owns A LOT of Tesla stock. By May 18th 2022 when Musk admitted he’d more likely vote Republican, the stock was $248, and two weeks later, it fell close to $200 per share.
It is not unusual for billionaires to have to pay a fortune for affairs that a wife finds intolerable. But Tesla shareholders’ reaction to Musk’s Twitter tryst cost a lot more than the Grimes settlement.
This has been a bad year for billionaires across the board. Hold back your tears, but it is hard to lose $100 billion, as Musk has, even if it’s just paper at any given point. Look, $100 billion is still a lot of money, even nowadays. Musk found a way to do it.
But it wasn’t the money that made Musk big, and it wasn’t the drop in wealth that made him small. It was the very sudden bemusement with himself, joking about every serious allegation, joking about peoples’ lives, many of these jokes petty and beneath an adult, never mind a serious one. It was mocking others’ fortune, flirting with conspiracy theories. It was the constant need to “own the libs” and be a player on social media. It was the determination to help settle the Russian-Ukrainian war by giving Russia something… Stop me when I’ve said enough to have just described a typical MAGA. That is how someone with his background becomes small, all within six months.
**HARVEST**
LET’S CHECK-IN WITH THE GREATEST MACHINE NOT ON EARTH, THE JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE.
We go from a man diminishing in stature to a machine and team flourishing and growing in vision and ability:
To say that astronomers have been pleased by their multi-decade, multi-billion development, engineering, testing, launch, and operations of the JWST is like saying that your dog was pleased when you handed him a greasy pork chop.
The latest update on its current missions from the James Webb Organization:
In mid-infrared light, the Pillars of Creation appear otherworldly. NASA’S James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a scene that is large and lofty – and appears lit by flickering lanterns. A “ghost” haunts the crag in the lower left, a gargoyle-like shape snarls toward the middle of the frame, and a dark horse’s head charges out of the edge of the second pillar. The creepiest of all? Newly formed stars take on the appearance of protruding, bloodshot eyes. And in the background, dust dances like heavy, ancient curtains being pulled shut. Here, there is no raven to whisper, “Nevermore,” to harken the classic poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? It looks even more so:
That picture is even more awe-inspiring when one knows that the “pillars” are at least dozens of light years across.
And for those of us who love cosmology, the JWST is being used to explore the earliest pictures of the universe. And when they say “early,” they’re not screwing around:
Astronomers have calculated that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The Hubble Space Telescope has seen back to about 500 million years after the big bang, revealing galaxies with much less defined and more compact structures, very different than those close to us in space and time. With the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are looking back even farther, to the formation of the universe’s very first galaxies. By that point, gravity had already condensed gas into the first stars, which produced the first heavy elements, like carbon and oxygen.
The above shows us two galaxies colliding ten billion years ago, producing millions of stars.
And then the best pictures of all, the ones that look furthest back in time, the James Webb Deep Field picture. Those “smears” aren’t due to a lack of focus, not with respect to the telescope’s focus, anyway. No, the smears are due to gravitational lensing or the immense gravity of certain galaxies bending the light as it goes around the gravity’s center.
Now that is some BIG stuff. All contributions to Webb Telescope Organization.
FRIDAY FUN BAG:
Best Football Game:
Easily, No. 1 Tennessee versus No. 2 Georgia, CBS, 3:30 p.m. EDT
BEST DOG MEME OF THE WEEK
TIME TO GO DARK: “FALL BACK” ON SUNDAY, CHANGE TO STANDARD TIME.
MUCH ADO YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO: The Cure: ‘It’s Friday, I’m in Love”