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That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for the Manosphere. One day you’re heiling at a post-inauguration celebration, cutting aid to starving children, supporting racist far right politics, amplifying hateful and violent messages, and allowing deep fake nudes to spread on your social network, and the next day you’re the world’s first trillionaire, proving, yet again, that it’s never been a better time to be bad. This is like the Make-A-Wish era for evil Bond villains. Of course, it helps if they’re talented, business savvy, market makers, politically astute, future-focused, and in the AI industry. And thus, this message just in from Ground Control to Major Elon: Rocket Man just became Deep Pocket Man. “SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company, blasted through records as it began trading on the stock market on Friday, making the world’s richest man its first trillionaire and signaling a new era of ultra-affluence and widening wealth inequality. The stock opened at $150 per share, more than the price finalized in its initial public offering Thursday at $135 a share. It rose to $165 in the first 30 minutes of trading.” NYT (Gift Article): Live Updates: Elon Musk Becomes World’s First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading. “Musk was worth around $350 billion in November 2024 shortly after he helped elect Donald J. Trump as president. His net worth has more than tripled in less than two years.” At this point, the only thing that had a faster exit velocity than a SpaceX rocket is the puke that just hit my laptop screen.
+ “The streets of black-and-white houses are blocked off by electronic access gates that encircle the city like a medieval moat. I watched a man who made the mistake of wandering inside the minimart get escorted out by armed guards in tactical gear. In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.” Amy Gamerman in the NYT (Gift Article) on Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border. Elon Musk Is Colonizing Earth. “Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out.” (In retrospect, ET got out just in time...)
+ Reuters: SpaceX demolishes IPO records. Of course, we’ve got some big competition on the IPO horizon. And some investors have stakes in all of them. WSJ (Gift Article): See the VCs and Family Offices at the Core of the Mega IPO Wave.
+ With those kinds of returns, these folks might even be able to afford the new VIP membership package at Erewhon.
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IOU an MOU
The memorandum of understanding that provides the framework for a peace deal appears to be really happening this time. “Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif has said that a final, agreed text of a peace deal between the United States and Iran had been reached. Islamabad is working with both sides to finalise next steps.” Here’s the latest from The Guardian and CNN.
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Vicious Circle Jerks
“The specific incidents themselves are local, and related to a national issue, or even something to do with the city or the region that they take place in. What’s changed over the last five to ten years is that the international dimension has become much more significant. Particularly when there is video footage, an event in one country will be taken up by international far-right influencers and networks. And then that feeds far-right narratives and ideas in other countries, but also feeds back into the country where the narrative originated.” The New Yorker: How the Dangerous Rise in Anti-Immigration Politics Went Mainstream. (Today’s top story provides one clue.)
4
Weekend Whats
What to Eggers: Leave it to Dave Eggers to write an excellent and perfectly timed novel. His latest, Contrapposto, about art and artists, hits with particular force at this moment when we’re willingly handing our creativity over to machines. You can’t beat a human when it comes to art and storytelling, and that’s particularly true of this writer and this novel, which Andrew Sean Greer calls “a book of profundity, humanity, and ravishing beauty.” While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, check out this interview with Dave on NPR’s Wild Card. Through 826 Valencia and other orgs, Dave has been working with young writers for decades. He has a message: “This is the first time in history when a whole generation is being told or tempted to have a machine write for them. You are one of one, unprecedented in the history of human evolution. There’s only one of you. So to give your voice to a machine to say speak for me, I’m going to be silent, is such a crime against yourself. It’s so dystopian, beyond anything I could do in a dystopian novel, and I did a lot.”
+ What to Watch: Alice and Steve on Hulu is a really fun and funny show in which Alice is devastated when her best friend Steve starts dating her 26-year-old daughter Izzy. The show stars Nicola Walker, Jemaine Clement, and Yali Topol Margalith. (Some trivia: Margalith is the granddaughter of Topol from Fiddler on the Roof, so she’s following in the family Tradition!)
+ What to Book: Few writers trace the way humans communicate and share information as well as Alex Wright. In his latest book, Empire of Ink: The Printers, Rogues, and Radicals Who Invented the American Newspaper, Alex “traces the evolution of the American news trade from the Revolutionary War to the dawn of the twentieth century, in search of the messy origins of modern media … As the American newspaper trade mushroomed from a tiny handful of publications in the mid-1700s to more than 20,000 by 1900, it evolved into a noisy, chaotic media ecosystem that often feels surprisingly familiar.” (One thing that kept coming to my mind. So many of our advances in tech and media have been about communicating with one another, while our latest advance (AI) seems more likely to isolate us from one another while we interact with a machine.)
+ What to Wear: Right now, you can score a NextDraft T-Shirt for only 13 bucks using the code LUCKY13 at checkout.
5
Extra, Extra
The Will to Be Ill: “When Dawid Zyla started studying measles in 2020 at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, his colleagues sometimes questioned why he would devote his career to a virus of the past.” Sadly, it turned out that Zyla was ahead of his time. NYT (Gift Article): With Measles Roaring Back, the Search for a Treatment Is On.
+ Murder, She Boat: “In questioning Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a Foreign Relations Committee hearing, they revealed that the targeting decisions about which boats would be attacked did not take into account whether they had drugs or arms aboard. In other words, the military may have attacked—and may attack in the future—a boat that carries neither drugs nor weapons, yet somehow, according to the Trump administration, constitutes a military threat to national security.” No Guns, No Drugs—Why Did We Blow Up These Boats?
+ Going Postal on Voting: “The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a new rule that would allow it to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government. The rule, proposed last week, is vaguely written but appears to establish broad authority for the agency to intervene in the m