OTOH, consider the old saying: When you own the bank $10M, you have a problem. When you owe the bank $100M, the bank has a problem.
Part of the purpose of the regulatory takeover is that soon the feds will simply instruct elmo’s (and trump’s) creditors that it would be much better for the health of their business, and their kneecaps, if they simply forgive all those pesky and now “illegal” loans. The “illegality” of course being in any effort to collect on them, not in their original granting.
Well sure, but that doesn’t help him with future spending. Unless banks will just keep lending to him without any collateral, he’s not going to have anything to bribe…er ‘gift’ to Trump to stay in the good graces. Trump is the very definition of a dishonest crook - he doesn’t stay bought.
I’m sure Putin will be glad to instruct Deutsch Bank to give Elon loans as well.
Not if his popularity numbers don’t go up.
Whatever else is true about Trump, a lot of people like him, making him a valid investment for potential future politicking.
But surely Elon is equally valuable in destroying American capability to resist Putin’s ongoing activities?
Concerning
Life in a post-truth world includes the idea that words mean whatever the utterer wants them to.
WMD include chemical weapons. Velveeta slices include chemicals such as carbon and oxygen. Therefore Velveeta is a WMD.
QED.
It’s a weapon of moderate deliciousness.
I’d vote for “minimal” over “moderate”, but I chose that stuff ref the story upthread of the guy “vandalising” CTs with cheeze slices.
A deliciously maliciously harmless move.
“Minimal” is better. I accept your edit.
not Deutsche Bank, but Raiffeisen Bank
or this one:
Not to discount your observations about drug use but I’ve had to deal with Elon Musk going back fifteen years (fortunately never in person but in several conference calls), and have read descriptions of his behavior going to back to his Zip2/PayPal days and his later takeover of Tesla, and he has been temperamental, mercurial, and childishly petty long before he publicly acknowledged ‘microdosing’ on ketamine and psychedelics. Perhaps he’s been using all along but frankly I think this is just Elon’s native personality, and at most the drugs are removing what little inhibitions he might have had, compounded by having a massive public pulpit and the immediate feedback from his pet social media platform and 24 hour news cycle that is focused on his every stuttered, semi-coherent utterance.
Stranger
And here is author Michael Lewis observing all the things about Elon Musk that I’ve been saying for the last decade:
Stranger
ELoon’s latest project:
I look forward to a future where everyone has a Tesla robot!
And that bright and shining day when the robots execute Order X and remove their face coverings and reveal their true ‘Musk’ faces and their voices change because Elon has joined the singularity and now controls all the robots and we all get murdered and live happily ever after!
“If you’re sitting on a lot of Tesla stock, I hope you’re thinking about the fact that Tesla’s hot new product converted 2% of reservations and had 8 recalls in its first year, and the big marketing idea to turn it all around is claiming organized terror groups are targeting the people who drive them”
Totally aside from Musk and Tesla, if smartphones are an example of the business model then your robot butler will never really work for you, it will work for the robot butler company. And I’m supposed to let this (literal!) creature in my home?
I’m reminded of the cyber laws mentioned in the Galactica reboot: nothing mobile was allowed to be controlled by a computer chip.
IIRC, it was “nothing with a computer chip in it was allowed to be connected to a network”, which is why Galactica didn’t fall victim to the malware that crippled the rest of the fleet.
Of course, Elmo has in the course.of a few years gone from “Bro AI is six months away from becoming self aware and killing us all bro” to “Bro AI is awesome and should be in everything”. He’d be our Gaius Baltar at this point.
I can only assume someone told him about Roko’s basilisk (I.e. Pascal’s Wager for tech bros) while he was extremely high and he took it seriously instead of as the joke it is.
Errol Musk says that Elmo can’t possibly be a racist, because he was nice to their black servants when he was a boy.