All That Power - Kanye West, Sean Combs, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump
Kanye West
Every time a powerful man is exposed as a unrepentantly horrible human being, we often learn how many people along the way excused, enabled, or helped to cover up such behavior. Harvey Weinstein - currently attempting to dodge a second prison term - kicked off the MeToo movement in 2017, but a steady drip of terrible stories about awful men would indicate we’re still a ways from a true societal reckoning.
The story of Kanye West could, in different circumstances, be a sad tale of an artist struggling with serious mental illness. And perhaps that is how some of his handlers at Adidas rationalized the decade he spent working with the shoe company. The genius myth is tough to shake, and for years Kanye was granted leeway by the media and public because if they squinted a little they saw shades of other Great Artists who had tumultuous personal lives.
In reality, Kanye was a bigoted, violent, verbally abusive tyrant for a very long time and the highest ranks of Adidas executives looked the other way in the name of profits:
When he exploded in bitter outbursts at Adidas managers, the company typically sought not to rein him in but to appease him. In negotiations over the years, Adidas kept sweetening the deal, doubling down on its investment and tethering its fortunes more closely to him.
Even as Mr. West voiced increasingly toxic beliefs, privately and publicly, Adidas stepped up production and released Yeezys more frequently.
In 2013, Adidas had a single-digit share of the US sneaker market, so when West proposed a collab, the German shoemaker jumped at the chance. Kanye got himself a fifteen percent royalty and guaranteed minimums. Over the years, as Yeezys became a hit for Adidas, the company would offer him increasingly lucrative contracts, at one point setting aside a $100 million dollar fund for the artist to ‘spend with little oversight.’
For Adidas employees forced to work with West, though, the story was much different. He was verbally abusive, regularly praising Hitler and the Nazis. He forced employees to watch porn with him. He demanded concessions from executives while his public behavior degraded so badly he was forced to cancel tours and fashion shows.
For years, Adidas employees complained and surfaced his behavior to the company’s top ranks. Discussions were had, but in the end the company chose Kanye over the mental health of its staff. The Yeezy line was so popular that its namesake going on public antisemitic rants didn’t shake his brand sponsor’s faith in the deal.
In late 2022, after Kanye said ‘I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me,’ the company finally did. In the interim, he’d tried to run for president, cozied up to Trump and other far-right personalities, been banned and un-banned from Twitter, started an unlicensed school, and continued spouting Nazi garbage. He terrorized hundreds of Adidas employees, sure, but the company achieved the market share it craved.
In the end, Adidas sold nearly half a billion of its remaining stock of Yeezys, with some (but not most) of the proceeds going to the Anti-Defamation League and an organization started by George Floyd’s family. Kanye still got his royalties on the deal, and continues to put out both antisemitic rants and his own line of clothes and shoes.
Sean Combs
Unlike Kanye, Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs had a long and well-documented history of bad behavior. In the late nineties he shed his gangster rap persona and reinvented himself as a high society playboy, throwing white parties in the Hamptons and dating actresses and models.
From there, Combs built himself a business and media empire. He created Making the Band, a popular reality show, and signed big name acts to his Bad Boy label. He inked deals with Ciroc Vodka and DeLeon Tequila. He started a cable, radio, and digital media network. These projects and his lavish parties helped Combs fully integrate with polite society.
However, in a late 2023 lawsuit, an ex-girlfriend of Combs’s took advantage of a New York law allowing victims of sexual abuse to file civil suits regardless of when the abuse took place, and laid out a pattern of abuse, trafficking, and rape that spanned a decade.
Combs settled the suit, but more accusations and lawsuits followed. They painted a different picture - Combs as controlling, abusive, prone to threats and violence. Things we’ve come to expect from powerful men.
Then, the FBI showed up. In late March, Combs’s homes were raided by the feds as part of a sex trafficking probe. The rapper and mogul who’d made himself incredibly rich talking shit was now having that shit investigated by the Feds. Combs was forced to step down from his media company, and dozens of brands and companies cut ties.
Combs’s abuse was an open secret in the highest echelons of the celebrity world, but it took lawsuits from a few brave abuse survivors for the white party set to rediscover their sense of shame and decency.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is not the first rich industrialist to espouse bigotry and promote conspiracy theories. Musk, like many educated white men before him, has proven a sponge for whatever racist, reactionary nonsense an army of right-wing trolls tweet into his drug-addled brain. His only innovation was buying himself a social media platform so everyone could watch it happen.
Last month, a Mother Jones writer catalogued five days’ worth of Musk’s tweets to get an idea of what his online diet looks like these days. It was about as bad as you’d imagine:
He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.
Rather than a visionary driving the discourse, Musk is a willing pawn of some of the least creative denizens of the Intellectual Dark Web:
Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times.
Musk’s obsession with culture war issues no one outside of the Fox News bubble could comprehend isn’t surprising for a white male billionaire, but his commitment to turning Twitter into a haven for disinfo and gutter racism could have consequences outside the US. He’s engaged in a bizarre defense of Jair Bolsonaro, battling with Brazilian judges to protect the indicted former president, at the risk of losing a huge chunk of his dwindling user base.
Musk isn’t simply a rich dude with bad opinions, though, which is why what he’s saying, to whom, and for what reasons is important. The guy who’s exerted unilateral control over satellite systems he sold to Ukraine is also building the US government’s spy network. His space company is instrumental in NASA’s programs, while his car company is facing numerous investigations and lawsuits for severe safety lapses. American EV manufacturers were counting on access to Tesla’s charging network, whose team Musk laid off in a recent fit of pique.
So the problem is not that there’s one very loud jackass on one small social network leaping face-first into every rabbit hole he can find. It’s that our governmental and legal and financial systems have propped him up for years despite clear evidence of his vile beliefs and sketchy practices, and now Musk is so deeply involved in systems critical to our country and its democracy that there’s no easy way out.
Donald Trump
No discussion about powerful men being shielded from consequences would be complete without the man trying to dissolve democracy to keep himself out of jail (no, the other one).
This week, Trump’s obsequious Florida judge postponed his trial indefinitely, claiming delays in resolving process disputes that, conveniently, she herself has refused to resolve.
Elsewhere, a Georgia state court agreed to hear an appeal on a judge’s decision not to remove Fani Willis from Trump’s election subversion prosecution, potentially delaying the trial or, if Willis is removed, putting it in the hands of a more friendly DA.
Despite every legal and structural institution up to and including the Supreme Court running interference for Trump, there is one place he may be made to pay for his flagrant disregard for the law.
Earlier this week, the judge in Trump’s New York fraud trial found him in contempt (again), and threatened him with jail. Trump responded with a rant about Stormy Daniels, a witness who testified this week about her brutal sexual encounters with the former president. Later, either Trump or one of his minions deleted the post.
Perhaps it is his sudden vulnerability to consequence that has turned him inwards, decaying his speeches into deranged mutterings about rooting out and murdering his enemies. His campaign, such that it exists, is made up of election deniers and fascists writing sweaty fan fiction about what they’d do to the government bureaucrats who stood in their way of their dismantling of the executive branch last time around.
Whether the authoritarian remoras gliding in Trump’s wake get a chance to steal the election is an open question - they’ll have to do so without any financial or institutional support since the RNC is now Trump’s personal legal defense fund.
And whether or not the legal system openly pledges fealty to Trump, the next six months will only reinforce the notion that powerful men can say and do what they want with little risk of accountability.
Short Cons
WSJ - “For weeks, thousands of trucks and diggers had worked 24 hours every day, scooping millions of cubic feet of sand at the world’s biggest construction project known as Neom in Saudi Arabia. But the workers had dumped the massive pile of dirt—now hundreds of feet wide—in the very spot where architects planned to dig a waterway out to the Red Sea.”
Futurism - “Basically, AdVon engages in what Google calls "site reputation abuse": it strikes deals with publishers in which it provides huge numbers of extremely low-quality product reviews — often for surprisingly prominent publications — intended to pull in traffic from people Googling things like "best ab roller."“
American Prospect - “At first glance, CFPB is working to prevent a standard, scammy practice: how credit card companies pay comparison-shopping websites to move their cards up the rankings, even if they provide worse interest rates and terms.”
NBC News - “Law enforcement agencies and prosecutors from Colorado to New York have turned to a little-known artificial intelligence tool in recent years to help investigate, charge and convict suspects accused of murder and other serious crimes.”
WSJ - “The FAA said it was investigating “whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records.” The agency has been scrutinizing Boeing’s production since the Jan. 5 midair blowout of a door plug on a 737 MAX jet flown by Alaska Airlines.”
CNBC - “UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty on Wednesday estimated that data from one-third of Americans could have been compromised in the Change Healthcare cyberattack.”
Rest of World - “Gondal had to chase Tesla’s India executive over emails for six months before he received his refund in June 2023. “There was no communication, no emails. And even years later, there was no apology [from the company],” he told Rest of World.”
Wired - “Yet while Musi has many trappings of a startup success story, a closer look raises questions about its unusual business model, which the company says involves sourcing music from Google’s YouTube. Fans on social media have often asked questions like: “Is Musi legal?” and “What is the catch?””
Gizmodo - ““I saw the ad on social media and it looked like the legit website of Little Tikes so I got excited for the supposedly ‘70% clearance’ they had,” one complaint obtained by Gizmodo reads, noting that it “seemed very legit.””
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