Group Think - Oligarchs, Politicians, and Movies
Oligarchs
America’s oligarchs exist largely because our legal and political systems are designed with them in mind. It used to be you had to put your family’s name on hospital and museum wings for the hoi polloi to be aware of your existence, but these days we also have a business press that turns the rich and rich-adjacent into creatures resembling celebrities.
If you’ve got wealth and power and public adoration, what else is there? Why would you do anything other than bask in your carefree, fabulous lifestyle?
Social media has done many calamitous things to our society, but you can’t knock its ability to expose how desperate for constant validation our ruling class is. Which would be their sole relatable trait, if it didn’t involve authoritarian rule.
We’ve talked about the student protests, which notable dullards like Bill Ackman have spent months ranting about online. Not content to buffoonishly post about teenagers on a social platform they are far too cool to spend any time on, Ackman and his fellow villains assembled sweaty a group chat to engage in guerilla warfare against unruly children:
The messages describing the call with Adams were among thousands logged in a WhatsApp chat among some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers, including former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital and brother of Jared Kushner, former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
The ‘call with Adams’ was, in fact, a Zoom call these wealthy dunces had with the mayor of New York City, himself a wildly corrupt striver, in which they encouraged him to send the NYPD back into Columbia, and offered campaign donations and ‘private investigators’ to aid the cause, as if the city’s $6 billion dollar police budget and 36,000 officers were incapable of busting a few hundred heads in a tent encampment (while collecting millions in overtime).
Prior to the protests, the group chat gloated over its members receiving private briefings with high-ranking Israeli officials. Its members worked with the Israeli government to spread pro-IDF propaganda:
A chat member asked for help from other members to show the film at universities; it was later screened at Harvard, a showing chat member Ackman helped facilitate, attended and promoted publicly.
And funded ‘anti-Hamas’ media campaigns - a reasonable thing to spend fifty million dollars on - to counter all the…pro-Hamas? messaging we’re bombarded with every day.
What was any of this for? A bunch of US businessmen were going to have little to no impact on the situation in Israel, despite their caterwauling to university presidents. The US has been fully complicit in the war and Israel’s subsequent oppression of the Palestinian people, and Biden’s team of apologists did not need any encouragement from the former CEO of Starbucks.
What did excite them, the thing they craved, was to be involved. They are so insecure in their nearly unchecked power they constantly insist on more of it. Being invited to secret briefings wasn’t a privilege, it was an expectation.
As the head of a hedge fund, or a computer company, your sphere of influence is limited to people directly or indirectly on your payroll. This, for the self-proclaimed masters of the universe, is woefully inadequate. They need to feel as if they’re actually changing the world, because reckoning with the reality that they’re nothing more than economic remoras is out of the question.
Really, they’ve been tittering away in what amounts to the world’s most unpleasant PTA meeting - a bunch of the country’s most insufferable oafs fluffing each other over making politicians pay attention to them. These sad, small men are convinced they’re running things, which is simultaneously true and kind of not. Their attempts to control narratives in the face of changing public opinion reveals the limits of money and influence. It probably feels nice to tell the mayor of New York what to do, but that doesn’t mean anyone else gives a shit about what you have to say.
More Oligarchs
That is, unless you’ve spent decades cultivating a cult of personality. It also helps if you’ve bought a social media platform and used it to amplify your every stray thought and racist meme.
If you’ve done these things, and the government you rely on for your wealth has decided to excuse your behavior, you can spend your time propagandizing for far-right leaders around the globe. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Minutes after it became clear that Javier Milei had been elected president of South America’s second-largest nation in November, Elon Musk posted on X: “Prosperity is ahead for Argentina.”
Now, you wouldn’t be doing it only because you agree with their politics and run your own companies like a brutal dictator. You’d also have a business angle:
Tesla has long bought lithium from Argentina, which has the world’s second-largest reserves. Now Mr. Milei is pushing for major benefits for international lithium miners, which would likely give Tesla a more stable — and potentially cheaper — flow of one of its most critical resources.
For the year and a half since Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a fever swamp, some have mused that he sought to own the platform because he has terminal poster’s brain, which he most certainly does. Granting him a modicum of foresight, he may have considered the benefits of being able to, say, allow right-wing leaders he needs to juice his car company’s stock price to post disinfo on Twitter:
Mr. Musk, 52, has repeatedly used one piece of his business empire — X, formerly known as Twitter — to vocally support politicians like Mr. Milei, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Narendra Modi of India. On the platform, Mr. Musk has backed their views on gender, feted their opposition to socialism and aggressively confronted their enemies.
Musk’s open embrace of authoritarians and right-wing insurrectionists would be less of a concern if, again, he was not being paid by the US government to build its security networks and send its astronauts and satellites into space.
Perhaps, in this way, the shy billionaires in the Zionist Group Chat could learn from Musk - if you’re brash enough, and people believe you are a business genius rather than a venal grifter, you can actually influence world events. Musk’s desire not just to be pulling the strings but to be the literal main character of the global narrative is what has, thus far, granted him the power his shadowy peers can only play at.
Musk is betting that he can keep the plates spinning indefinitely, that none of his lawbreaking or bad business decisions will ever catch up with him because he’s made enough of the right allies. It’s a dangerous bet, and one that makes the world far worse off, but time will tell if he’s guessed correctly.
Politicians
Sometimes, if you are already wealthy and wish to become more powerful, you go into politics. It doesn’t mean you can’t still harbor a victim complex about how the authorities were very unfair about your multi-billion-dollar business frauds, but at least you get to spend your time quite close to the levers of power, and you can sit on meetings with world leaders without needing to be shady about it.
Other times, if you are facing impending financial ruin due to civil and criminal litigation, becoming a powerful politician may appear a potential offramp. There is one glaring example of this belief playing out before our collective eyes, but, believe it or not, he’s not the only one.
Jim Justice, whose companies have been teetering on the verge of collapse since his financial shell game was exposed by the collapse of Greensill is turning his sights to the Senate. He’s favored to win the election since austerity enthusiast Joe Manchin has decided to retire from public service to spend more time with his coal.
Justice’s narrative arc sounds awfully familiar:
The son of a coal magnate, Mr. Justice took over the family business in 1993 and expanded its interests beyond coal, with acquisitions in agriculture and high-end hospitality. Like many sprawling enterprises, the Justice companies have taken on prodigious debts. But they have also taken on a reputation for not paying them — and that may be catching up to them.
The person most likely to become the next Senator from West Virginia is currently having his assets and bank accounts seized by creditors to whom he owes hundreds of millions in unpaid debts. Unlike Trump, who still insists he is a billionaire, Justice’s defense is that all his companies are broke, and that he’s broke, but being both a bad businessman and a crook are far from disqualifying traits in a Republican politician these days.
Justice, like Rick Scott and the many other corrupt rich guys whose portraits adorn the walls of our political universe, gained power on the back of his perceived success, and even when that success was revealed as a lie it won’t stand between him and the influence powerful men like him so badly crave.
Movies
We have never had sufficient cause to discuss Dan Snyder, former owner of the Washington Football Team, in these pages. It is difficult to stand out among NFL owners as a singularly horrible person, but Snyder managed it.
Not content to sit on the sidelines after selling his team for a multi-billion-dollar windfall, Snyder decided to get into the movie business, bankrolling a biopic of Donald Trump, as one does. It hasn’t gone to plan:
Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1. million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious.
Despite Snyder and the production company he helped bankroll threatening lawsuits and demanding changes to the film, they don’t own the copyright to the film and can’t kill it. This is a very funny outcome for a litigious weasel like Snyder, who coincidentally loves to dock his megayacht at Cannes each year, where the film is debuting.
The movie details Trump’s younger life, and apparently contains scenes of his violence towards women, prodigious philandering, and penchant for plastic surgery. Which, what did Snyder think a film about Trump’s younger years would include? Clearly he was not a Stern listener in the nineties.
Not only are billionaires unable to shut the fuck up about their own ‘achievements’, they love talking up their fellow elites if they think there’s something in it for them. The worst possible outcome of commissioning one of these vanity pieces, however, is an artist telling the truth.
Short Cons
Defector - “Problem gambling devours time and money, alienates people from their family and friends, and creates debts that can take a lifetime to repair, even after seeking treatment. A study from 2019 found that problem gamblers commit suicide at 15 times the rate of the general population.”
NYT - “An aide to Mayor Eric Adams who served as his longtime liaison to the Turkish community and whose home was searched by the F.B.I. has been cooperating with the corruption investigation into the mayor and his 2021 campaign, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.”
Variety - “Trump Media and Technology Group, the company affiliated with former U.S. president Donald Trump that operates Truth Social, reported $770,500 in revenue for the first quarter of 2024 and a net loss of $327.6 million.”
Bolts Mag - “Youngkin’s announcement also puts Virginia in a category all its own: It is the only state where someone who is convicted today over any felony is presumed to be barred from voting for life, with no remedy other than receiving a discretionary act of clemency from the governor.”
The Atlantic - “Alito’s statement is notable because, as the Times reporter Michael Barbaro pointed out, it does not deny that the flag was flown in solidarity with the insurrectionists. It also does not disavow the insurrectionist claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and it does not condemn the Trump-directed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order that Alito has sworn an oath to uphold.”
NBC News - “Actor Scarlett Johansson said Monday that OpenAI used an "eerily similar" voice to hers for their new GPT-4o chatbot despite having declined the company's request to provide her voice.”
Rest of World - “One image flagged by a popular Brazilian account shows a helicopter draped in the branding of a local retailer rescuing victims from floodwaters. “The photo that’s being shared on WhatsApp is actually a prompt-generated image,” @mphistoria wrote on X. “These so-called AIs must be regulated urgently.””
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