12: Elon Musk

🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 https://t.co/da25MpuaJ2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 12, 2026

Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX ............ Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony. ............... OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future. ................... Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner. ............... Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business. ..................... But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius. .................. We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme. ...................... Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration. ................. To see what I mean, consider Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X. To finance the deal, investment banks lent Musk $13 billion, debt they planned to quickly move off their books by selling it on to investors. But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. By the summer of 2024, X was valued at less than half of its purchase price. Faced with losses of 40 cents on the dollar if they sold the debt, his bankers were forced to hold the Twitter debt far longer than anticipated, prompting the August 2024 Wall Street Journal headline: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis”. ................ But then two things happened that bailed out the banks along with Musk’s future creditworthiness: the 2024 election of Donald Trump and the advent of AI. After Trump’s election, advertisers began returning to X, citing a need to appease Musk and Trump. And in March 2025, Musk merged his newly-founded AI company xAI with X, playing off the accelerating AI buzz to further prop up X’s valuation and his own personal balance sheet. ................. Unfortunately for Musk, xAI’s Grok is, by all accounts, much inferior to the AI models offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s also widely considered unsafe and unreliable. At one point it began spewing racist and antisemitic comments, dubbing itself MechaHitler. Trump administration officials have pushed government agencies — including the Pentagon — to use Grok, but with little success. ........................ So Musk, having bailed out X by rolling it into xAI, is now bailing out xAI by rolling it into SpaceX, which has a genuinely successful business in Starlink. ................. And today SpaceX is going public. Its initial public offering (IPO) debuts today on the Nasdaq at a price that implies a $1.77 trillion valuation for a company that had revenues of only $18.7 billion last year and lost money. .................... How can this, um, astronomical valuation be justified? The IPO is premised partly on the assumption that retail investors will buy in, not because they have made any rational assessment of SpaceX as a business, but because they believe that they are buying stakes in Elon Musk’s genius. ........................... But the ranks of the faithful may not be enough to keep the shell game going. So Musk’s Wall Street allies are also rigging the game. Some of the major stock indexes, notably the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell, have recently changed their rules in order to admit SpaceX almost immediately. .................. It’s important to understand that the inclusion of a company’s shares in a major stock index carries enormous financial rewards. A large share of stocks is held in “index funds,” mutual funds that hold portfolios designed to mimic the behavior of major indexes. Thus there is an immediate demand for the shares of a company when its shares are added to a major index because index funds must now add them to their portfolios. ............... Historically, the major indexes have waited at least a year after a company’s IPO before considering its inclusion in their market measures, to give the stock time to “mature”. The bending of the rules for SpaceX shows that Musk is again exerting his ability to co-opt and corrupt key institutions. (Notably, the S&P 500 has resisted the pressure and will wait a year before including SpaceX.) ............... Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut. ................ Should anyone in Trump’s America be surprised?

They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble But I'm going to tell you anyway ................. The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now. ............... The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years. ................

what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality

. .................. the Social Security payroll tax applies only to earnings up to a certain cap. This year, that cap is $184,500. Earnings at or below this amount are taxed at 12.4 percent. The cap rises every year according to a formula roughly matching inflation. .................. Back in 1983, the cap was set so the Social Security payroll tax would hit 90 percent of total income in America. That 90 percent figure was built into the Greenspan Commission’s fixes. The Greenspan commission assumed that, as the cap rose with inflation, the Social Security payroll tax would continue to hit 90 percent of total income. .................... Today, though, the Social Security payroll tax hits only about 83 percent of total income in America. It went from 90 percent to 83 percent because a steadily larger portion of the nation’s total income has gone to the top. ................. In 1983, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 11.6 percent of total income. Today, the top 1 percent takes in more than 20 percent. ..................

This year, someone earning $1 million in wages stopped paying any Social Security payroll tax at the beginning of March. Jeff Bezos probably stopped a few minutes past midnight on January 1. Elon Musk, a few seconds after midnight on January 1. (In point of fact, Bezos, Musk, and other robber barons of this Second Gilded Age get all the cash they need by borrowing against their fortunes, rather than bother with pesky wages, so they probably pay a pittance in Social Security taxes.)

.................... If all income in excess of $400,000 were subject to the Social Security payroll tax, Social Security’s solvency would be guaranteed forever. We could also expand Social Security benefits. .............. So there’s no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical and necessary response is simply to raise the cap, Mike Johnson and other Republican shills for the oligarchs to the contrary notwithstanding. ............... Social Security is America’s most effective anti-poverty program. Last year, it lifted 23.5 million Americans out of poverty, including 16.5 million seniors. Before its creation, about half of our nation’s seniors were living in poverty. Today their poverty rate is just 10.3 percent. Without Social Security, nearly 4 in 10 seniors would have had incomes below the official poverty line. ................ Hollowing out of private pensions makes Social Security all the more important. One in 5 Americans 50 and older have zero retirement savings. Meanwhile, the average Social Security benefit at the start of last year was $1,975 a month ($23,700 annually). .............. Social Security is also the federal government’s biggest children’s benefit program through its disability and survivors’ benefits. In 2024, 1.7 million children received Social Security benefits, and the vast majority are eligible to receive survivors’ benefits if a parent were to pass away. Additionally, millions more children are part of a household where all or part of the household income comes from Social Security. Social Security is estimated to lift close to 1 million children out of poverty each year. .................. The bill imposes Social Security taxes on wages above $250,000 and applies the same 12.4 percent rate to capital gains and business income. That would boost benefits for almost all retirees by $200 per month, using a more generous measure of inflation to calculate the cost-of-living increase, and setting a minimum benefit at 125 percent of poverty. When estimated in 2023, it achieved 75-year Social Security solvency solely by increasing taxes on incomes above $250,000. ....................... It adopts the tax increases of the Sanders bill, adjusted to start at $400,000. The bill has no benefit increases, so it significantly overshoots solvency, and there would be extra revenue. The bill achieves 75-year solvency for both Social Security and the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund.