The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Elon Musk

Musk’s Empire Is Looking Even More Shaky

So, we’ve talked before about problems with Tesla. Musk’s competitors are, to put it simply, producing better cars which cost less, especially but not only, the Chinese like BYD. Meanwhile, Musk’s politics, like denying climate change and throwing a Nazi salute, while tying himself to Trump just as Trump is pissing off almost every country whose consumers buy Tesla vehicles, has made customers a lot less interested in buying Tesla. He’s trashing his own brand with the people who supported it most.

Musk’s riches are based primarily on Tesla, but he also has SpaceX, which currently has the lowest cost space lift and pretty much guaranteed business from the US government. But a large part of Musk’s SpaceX income comes from Starlink. It looks like SpaceX made about 13 billion in 2024, and of that Starlink provided 8.2 billion. However, in terms of profit, Starlink seems to have provided only about a third of SpaceX’s three billion profits.

That said, Starlink is still in the fairly early stages, with high capital costs, and the revenue numbers indicate it’s a big deal for SpaceX and Musk.

Then we see this:

But here’s the thing: There is an onrushing competitor to Starlink — a Chinese one, Qianfan. They’re far behind Starlink right now, but as they scale, they seem likely to wind up larger than Starlink, and the price for access may be $50 versus $120 for Starlink, though it’s unclear what the terminals themselves will cost.

Musk seems determined to lose Starlink customers, too. He accused oligarch and billionaire Carlos Slim of being tied to Mexican cartels, for example, and Slim immediately cancelled his deal with Starlink, and indicated he’d be pursuing the Chinese alternative.

So, in two to three years, it seems likely that Starlink will not be the only game in town, and the other game will be cheaper. At which point, all Elon Musk has is his political moat; some countries may make it illegal to choose Qianfan.

But… that political moat is looking very leaky outside of the United States since Musk has tied himself to Trump, and Trump has pissed off almost all of Europe, including serious American allies like Poland (see above), Canada, Mexico, and even Japan. China may look like the lesser evil — after all, they rarely tariff anyone unless the tariffs are retaliatory, and they aren’t threatening to annex any countries.

That means the only remaining moat Musk has is his space launch, which is genuinely cheaper. But a cursory search showed me eight Chinese private space-lift companies. They’re all behind SpaceX right now, but then, a few years ago, so were China’s EV manufacturers, and Chinese smarphone producers were behind Apple and Samsung.

Anyway, a company with 13 billion annual revenue isn’t why Musk is so rich. It’s mostly Tesla. Canada, for example, put a 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. China has now counter-tariffed, hitting Canadian agriculture hard. It might not seem worth keeping those tariffs going. Europe is similar. No one likes Musk right now other than MAGA, and they prefer gas-guzzlers.

I can’t remember ever seeing someone as rich self-destruct the way Musk is. He’s mishandled Tesla for years, he’s lost his first-mover advantage, he’s destroying his brand value, and pissing off both consumers and governments in almost every country he sells cars or internet in.

So if you don’t like Musk, well, get ready to enjoy a rich harvest of schadenfreude.

This blog runs on donations and subscriptions from readers. It’s free, but not free to produce. If you value it, please give.

 

Understanding DOGE’s War Against the 20th Century

To understand DOGE, it’s best to start with Reagan. Reagan reduced regulation massively, and where he couldn’t get rid of laws, he and his successors just stopped enforcing them regularly. This took steam over time. So, for example, there was some anti-trust action up until George W. Bush. In fact, without anti-trust actions, there would be no Microsoft as we understand it. IBM had MS write the operating system for the IBM PC because they had been hit by anti-trust action repeatedly and wanted to avoid it. It’s not like IBM couldn’t write its own operating system

Gates himself engaged in repeated violations of anti-trust law, and most of it was allowed to slide; eventually the Feds went after him. The case was going badly for him, but George Bush Jr. ordered it shut down.

Generally, regulations do impose a cost, and in return, the public receives a benefit. There’s also some benefit to corporations, because regulations increase trust. But as time goes by, people assume companies are trustworthy, and regulations start seeming like pure cost.

Cut regulations, and you increase profits. It’s often that simple. The decay of trust which loses money takes decades, and the profits are now.

Likewise, when you cut government workers, the work usually still needs to be done. Contractors take over, and they charge more and usually do a shittier job, if not immediately, but certainly in due time. Here in Toronto, where I live, half the garbage collection was given to private enterprise. At first, they were cheaper, but within ten years, why, they were more expensive than union work, though somehow the actual workers were getting paid less. Strange, that.

Nor is the Federal bureaucracy in any significant way bloated:

The chart above is in absolute numbers, which means the size of the federal workforce, relative to population, has been declining. You wonder why you’re getting bad service? That, plus contractors, is why.

All of this, of course, doesn’t include the fact that Musk was under investigation by multiple agencies. This Grok (his own AI) generated lists from February, amuses:

Before the election, Musk said:

Billionaire Tesla and X boss Elon Musk suggested Monday that he will end up behind bars if Vice President Kamala Harris beats former President Donald Trump in next month’s election.

“If he loses, I’m f—ed,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of the Republican nominee in an interview broadcast on X.

“How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” the world’s richest man quipped. “Will I see my children? I don’t know.”

Perhaps more important is the larger picture of financial enforcement. Musk wants X to be an “everything app,” which includes making it a payment system, and in effect, a bank. Like Crypto-entrepreneurs and many others, he wants the profits of a financial corporation without the oversight, including without the FDIC deposit insurance.

Tech bros have spent over 30 years staring at financial elites and seeing how rich they are, they’re salivating for some of that easy money. Destruction and intimidation of regulatory agencies is what is required to make it truly happen. Remember that Musk and other politically active tech-bros like Peter Thiel made their first bundle from PayPal.

Finance firms have been the most politically powerful special interest group since at least the 90s, but they are being replaced by politically-connected tech firms — an industry they helped birth, and billionaires who would not exist without tax and financial law changes spear-headed by Wall Street.

DOGE’s purpose isn’t to cut costs. It’s to open up new profit opportunities, attack resisting parts of the deep state, and remove legal risk from breaking the law. That’s all. It’s why the second part of the government shut down entirely was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The idea, as always, has been to end the reforms which began with FDR’s New Deal and go back to the 1890s. Notice how obsessed Trump is with ending income tax and going to tariffs: That’s a 19th century political economy setup.

Welcome to the new Gilded Age, with even richer oligarchs.

 

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

 

Musk’s In A Lot of Trouble And Won’t Be the World’s Richest Man Much Longer

I’ve discussed this before, so we’ll keep it brief. Much of Musk’s wealth is in Tesla stock. Tesla car sales are down, and getting hammered particularly, but not only, in China. The Chinese are producing better, cheaper electric vehicles with autonomous driving which actually works, because they use Lidar, which Musk personally decided not to use. Even Western carmakers are catching up to and exceeding Tesla vehicles.

Musk tried to get a fifty billion dollar payout from Telsa, which was spiked in the courts, because, I suspect, he knows Tesla’s going down. He’s been systematically selling Tesla stock, but he can’t sell too much at any given time. So right now he’s trying a parlay, he has to keep Tesla stock up for as long as possible to get as much money out. His strong support for Trump was almost certainly based on the need to keep Trump from ending electric vehicle subsidies, which, so far, Trump has done, even though he was very hostile to them for much of the campaign.

Now don’t feel bad for Musk, he’ll still be one of the richest men in the world, but for whatever reason: distraction, rumored drug use, health or something else, he’s not handling the day to day, month to month business of managing his corporations very well. X/Twitter has bled users, losing millions and while advertisers are coming back, that’s only to kiss up to him for as long as he has Trump’s ear, and Trump is fickle with who stays in the inner circle.

SpaceX is doing well, but SpaceX is still, mostly, a creature of the government, with the exception of its satellite internet. Its success was made possible by Obama policies intended to build a private space industry. It still requires government contracts and aid to do well.

If I had to make a bet, I’d bet on Blue Origin, Bezos’s space outfit. Yes, it’s far behind, but Bezos is an operator and still seems very skilled and focused, unlike Musk. And with him stepping away from day-to-day operations at Amazon, he’s got the attention to spare on what is a dream from him: he made the money at Amazon so he could do space.

The Chinese space program, as you’d expect, is doing very well, including putting up satellite internet which appears to outperform Musk’s, but America is never going to pay China to use its lift capacity so there’s a guaranteed moat.

Musk, in short, has almost certainly peaked. His political actions are, from a business perspective, necessary because he’s screwed up his core business and needs powerful government access. His competitors are chewing on his heels, he personally seems to be in some sort of decline, and his days as number one are drawing to a close.

 

This blog runs on donations and subscriptions from readers. It’s free, but not free to produce. If you value it, please give.

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén