Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

People are complicated. Love is not.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Stand up, dammit!

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Books are my comfort food!

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: Could *Always* Be Worse…

Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: Could *Always* Be Worse…

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This post is in: , ,

… And it almost certainly will be:

… The man who bought Twitter, turned it into “X,” and saw his advertising revenue plummet, is heading to the Cannes Lions ad summit in France next week.

WPP, one of the world’s biggest ad companies, said Musk will appear at an event with WPP CEO Mark Read on June 18.

This one won’t be a grilling. From the release: “The interview will cover the transformative power of technological innovation, how AI is reshaping creativity, business and society, and the future of X.” No word on whether Musk will be there in person or will be beaming in, like he did most recently at a Paris tech conference…

Musk’s appearance is primarily newsworthy because he didn’t go last year and has mostly avoided ad gatherings in general. (Linda Yaccarino, the former NBC sales boss who became Musk’s CEO a year ago, is also scheduled to appear in Cannes this month.)…

Musk routinely predicts a future for Twitter/X where the company won’t be dependent on advertising dollars because he’ll also be making lots of money from subscriptions and other revenue streams.

But those alternative dollars haven’t shown up in meaningful amounts, and advertisers are still quite wary of Musk. So off to France he goes…

That’s assuming nothing too terrible happens when Friday the 13th falls on a Thursday this month:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk could leave if $56 billion pay package not approved, shareholders warned – https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/6/24173064/tesla-board-chair-warn-elon-musk-leave-pay-shareholders

[image or embed]

— The Verge (@verge-poster.bsky.social) Jun 6, 2024 at 2:47 PM

Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm is calling on the company’s shareholders to approve Elon Musk’s massive $56 billion pay package or risk driving the billionaire CEO to greener pastures.

On June 13th, Tesla shareholders will decide the fate of Musk’s compensation package, which is estimated to be worth as much as $56 billion. It will be the second time that shareholders will vote on the CEO’s pay, after a Delaware judge voided the first one earlier this year on the grounds that the approval process was “deeply flawed.” And now the company is engaged in a full-court press to convince shareholders to approve his compensation, as well as a proposal to reincorporate Tesla in Texas to circumvent the oversight of Delaware’s courts…

Later, she implies that Musk could decamp to “other places” without proper motivation. “What we recognized in 2018 and continue to recognize today is that one thing Elon most certainly does not have is unlimited time,” Denholm says. “Nor does he face any shortage of ideas and other places he can make an incredible difference in the world. We want those ideas, that energy and that time to be at Tesla, for the benefit of you, our owners. But that requires reciprocal respect.”…

“daddy elon is going to be so disappointed with you fucking dirty paypigs if you don’t pay up” would genuinely be less humiliating

[image or embed]

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.bsky.social) Jun 6, 2024 at 3:23 PM


(“Most paypigs are found on Twitter.”)

lmao i skimmed this and there's a veiled threat he might go to the competition and honestly, you're willing to fuck off AND ruin the competition if we DON'T pay you? deal of the century

— Sneed's Feed and Seed (formerly Chuck's) (@ruleo.bsky.social) Jun 9, 2024 at 6:22 AM


I don’t know Mr. DeLong’s writing well enough to judge how much snark is embedded in this first sentence:

… Mr. Musk changed the world.

He wanted to jump-start the decarbonization of human civilization’s energy. He succeeded. He drove Tesla to create the electric vehicle industry as we know it. Yes, he overpromised. But he often overdelivered and overdelivered spectacularly. Truly wonderful things happened with Tesla’s performance as a technology inventor, deliverer and deployer.

But “happened” is in the past tense. Much has changed since 2018, the year Tesla dreamed up an unorthodox pay package that, in theory, tied Mr. Musk’s pay to the company’s performance. Problem is, the performance was not for making high-quality cars or making affordable cars or making cars at scale. The performance was for pushing Tesla’s stock price up.

This pay package was, I think, bad for Mr. Musk. And it was, I am sure, bad for Tesla and, by extension, our nation’s crucial fight against global warming, by far. Tesla is now asking its shareholders to reapprove this pay package, which would hand Mr. Musk an eye-popping roughly $46 billion, making him, the world’s richest man, one of its highest-paid executives.

I have a recommendation for Tesla shareholders: Vote no…

Tesla had always had build-quality problems. But it used to have a road map for fixing them. And it used to have a road map for gaining manufacturing expertise, adding capacity, introducing models to crawl down from the rarefied technoexperiment and luxury car markets into the enormous market of providing what Americans see as their basic transportation. But those seem to have fallen away. The idea that there would soon be a truly affordable mass-market Tesla receded from real soon to maybe someday. Instead we got the Cybertruck, for which demand is rather limited, as it is not set up to do the things that people who use pickup trucks need them for. And meanwhile, in China, BYD’s blade-battery technologies and process-manufacturing expertise grew by leaps and bounds….

… I argue that we must accept the possibility of short-term pain for a forever payoff. Tesla almost certainly accounts for a plurality of Mr. Musk’s fortune. SpaceX makes up the bulk of the remainder. And SpaceX appears to be in very good hands, as he trusts the awesomely competent Gwynne Shotwell, who, as chief operating officer of SpaceX, has managed the marriage of fire and ice, building an organizational culture that combines an astonishing attention to detail with a willingness to experiment beyond the limits of what had been thought possible. She proves that Mr. Musk is capable of far better business judgment. Business judgment that Tesla desperately needs. Right now.

(As though Ms. Shotwell hadn’t taken enough abuse from His Lordship already!)

But least, at Musk will always have his beloved, much-memed Cybertrucks…

Reader Interactions

58Comments

  5. 5.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Rishi Sunak whines family couldn’t afford Sky TV when asked if he’s ever gone without

    Rishi Sunak grumbled that he did not have Sky TV as a child in an excruciating interview. The super-rich PM laughed awkwardly as he was questioned on whether he understands the struggles facing ordinary families.

  9. 9.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Ryan: ​
      He still uses an 8 inch floppy disk, punch cards, and a dial up modem.

  11. 11.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @NotMax: ​
    at the time he was growing up it was. it’s now owned by comcast, but it still reeks of the old regime.

  15. 15.

    Chet Murthy

    Brad Delong was an assistant treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, full prof of econ at Berkeley.  In the Great Recession, he decided that his discipline had fucked-up big time, b/c mainstream economists mostly thought they’d vanquished recessions.  So he decided to figure out why, and he reinvented himself as an economic historian.  He’s one of the few economists I’ve seen who actually takes the feedback of reality and adjusts his thinking based on it.

    He’s not perfect.  But he’s always worth a read.

    P.S. His recent book _Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century_ is excellent.  Just excellent.

  16. 16.

    Martin

    Musk is so pissed about the Apple announcement that he autoblocked everyone on Twitter from Apple.

    Not sure if that’ll result in getting pulled from the App Store or a lawsuit.

    Just learned that Lynn Conway died. Pioneer of semiconductor design. She transitioned back in the 60s, kept it a secret and built her career. She was a big deal.

  22. 22.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Book about book bans banned by Florida school board

    A book about book bans has been banned in a Florida school district. Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.

    Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website.

    In a peculiar case of life imitating art, Jennifer Pippin, a parent in the coastal community, challenged the book. Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.

    Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

    Oh… Well… We can’t have that.

    In a statement to the Tallahassee Democrat, Gratz noted the irony of his book being banned.

    “They banned the book because it talks about the books that they have banned and because it talks about book banning,” he said. “It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.”

    I don’t think they’re ashamed, mainly because I don’t think they are capable of shame. I think they are just a bunch of thin skinned shit weasels who can’t handle any kind of criticism.

    I also think they are fragile little fascists.

  24. 24.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Timothy McBride
    @mcbridetd
    So is committing a crime, because a convicted felon, a requirement to be running mate?

    Aaron Rupar
    @atrupar
    JD Vance says Trump’s VP vetting materials include a question about whether any of the prospective candidates have “committed a crime” or lied. The irony!

    Irony is dead.

    @Sally: Yep. Decades from now, HS students will think their history teacher is using the Onion as a reference.

  26. 26.

    satby

    I hope Tesla stockholders are so sick of the really bad press and decisions of Musk that they do vote no on that pay package. Probably the only chance to save the company is getting rid of him, and it may already be to late.

  28. 28.

    Princess

    Musk, along with being a fascist, has the attention span of a gnat these days, most likely from the drugs he’s taking. He’s bored with his companies before they’ve hit their potential and he’s half-heartedly muddling them in other newer shiny objects. It’s hard to see how having a different ceo would not be best for Tesla at this point.

  31. 31.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Baud: Unfortunately thats paywalled for me, but Wonkette has the clip. Self-awareness not  Alito’s strong suit, huh?

  32. 32.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @OzarkHillbilly: Decades from now, HS students will think their history teacher is using the Onion as a reference.

    You don’t even have to wait decades. Yesterday, Jon Lovett came back to Pod Save America. Did he leave, you ask? No, he was temporarily off while a contestant on Survivor. I can’t picture him camping and catching his own food, but who knows.

    So he just came back and the sole piece of news he’d seen was that Trump was convicted. In the last segment of yesterday’s pod, his co-hosts played a game in which they asked him to identify which news items were real and which were fake. He couldn’t always do it.

    Btw, at the end, he said Trump’s conviction was the most important news item they talked about, but Alito’s flag problems were the most shocking

  34. 34.

    Geminid

    An NBC News article linked to by this morning’s Politico Playbook:

       Phone banks and pickleball: How the Biden campaign plans to court older voters

     The Biden campaign has started “Seniors for Biden” in an effort to exploit a trend towards President Biden among older voters.

       Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will help launch the effort with an event on Friday in New Hampshire, the battleground state with the highest percentage of residents 65 or older.

    The plan is to reach out to older voters through methods including phonebanks, postcards, and pickleball tournaments.

  37. 37.

    nonrev

    I encourage every user of xwitter to block all advertisements they see and encourage others to do so also.  Yes if xwitter dies I will miss it but social media will live on and favorite, well followed posters on twitter will pop up elsewhere.  We need to learn to do without this idiot @$$hole troublemaker and his biases, meddling and lunacy

  40. 40.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud:

    I have yet to see an explanation of what value Musk brings to Tesla.

    I have.  First, he is great at securing government subsidies, and without those Tesla is long since bankrupt.  He is probably a drag on that process now, but I don’t actually know.

    Second, he was a fantastic hype man.  It took awhile for the public to notice the emperor has no clothes, but he is absolutely responsible for Tesla stock being several times what its financial performance justifies.  Now that power is failing, but is Musk Hype what’s keeping it from collapsing to its real value?  That’s an important question for shareholders.

  42. 42.

    Eolirin

    @Frankensteinbeck: Neither of those things will matter if other manufacturers run them over by making better, more affordable cars, in volumes Tesla can’t compete with, which is exactly what the company is staring down, and instead of trying to fix is wasting resources on things like the Cybertruck and an autopilot feature that doesn’t work, is bringing them terrible press, and has opened the company to liability and regulatory action. Also some weird fake robot thing, and pulling engineers off Tesla projects to try to stop Twitter from falling over and catching fire.

    Yeah, without Musk hype the stock value might collapse, but it has a chance to recover if sensible management can turn the company around. Otherwise the best bet for shareholders long term is a buyout for their tech patents from a more competently run company following bankruptcy or near bankruptcy.

  43. 43.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Chet Murthy:

    Brad Delong…He’s not perfect. But he’s always worth a read.

    Been reading him longer than just about anything else from the earlyearly days of the blogosphere.  Still am.

    Thanks for his book suggestion, will need to get that.

  44. 44.

    Dave

    @Eolirin: And for the sake of the company it’s probably better off if the stock isn’t ridiculously inflated and overvalued as painful and stupidly panicked as that sort of correction tends to be.  Then they are more likely to make decisions based on reality and be less distracted by the shiny stump of what remains of their current CEO rolling down the hill of life.

    And the other silliness that tends to accompany overinflated stocks.

  45. 45.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    First, he is great at securing government subsidies, and without those Tesla is long since bankrupt…Second, he was a fantastic hype man.

    Both of those can’t be repeated enough.

    Back in Oct 22, Adam Silverman had this excellent summary about the man:

    Musk is what happens when you’re raised in wealth that is all accumulated from the slave labor that resulted from apartheid in South Africa.

    He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly gifted, he’s not actually an engineer. What he is is someone who was handed an emerald mine and all of its proceeds and profits as a toddler, continually failed upwards, and can’t even get it through his head that the one thing he’s sort of good at – being a promoter of the ideas of people that actually understand the tech they’re trying to build or develop or think up – is the only thing he’s sort of good at.

    And the minute he opens his mouth or decides to tweet, he does damage to the one thing he’s sort of good at and reinforces that he’s really a dumb fuck asshole.

  46. 46.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Delong’s blog is where I discovered the meme that Paul Krugman was supposedly shrill, the Lovecraft-esque announcements that some pundit or other had joined the Ranks of the Shrill, and the comment about revenge being a dish best served atop a Nobel Prize.

  47. 47.

    Baud

    I’d read Delong, but that would go against my principle that all economics is bunk.

  49. 49.

    Juju

    The Cyber Truck kind of looks like it should be used  for the custom kitchen deliveries in the Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”  music video.

  50. 50.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Juju: I saw my first Cybertruck in the wild last week. Driven by a 30- to 40-ish white male, natch. Apart from being fugly–which we already knew–I was surprised by how cheap it looked. The metal cladding looks cheesier than a tin can.

    A silly vehicle produced by a silly man.

  51. 51.

    Ken

    @Juju: @O. Felix Culpa: I remind all of my theory, which is that the cybertruck came about when the designers showed Musk an early draft, he said “Perfect, make it exactly like that,” and no one dared to contradict him.

    It’s sort of like the legend about Stalin and the Hotel Moskva’s asymmetrical facade, but for real.

  52. 52.

    mvr

    @O. Felix Culpa: Saw my first yesterday, driving west on I-80 through Nebraska, as I was going east. My first response was to reconsider whether I had actually seen a “cybertruck” since  you’d expect such a vehicle to be a truck.  I decided I was wrong to expect that.

    Datsun pickups were trucks despite their diminutive size, back in the day, even though they were small, because they were meant to do what a pickup does – move stuff around.  This vehicle didn’t look like it was designed for that. Looks more like it is designed to intimidate.

  53. 53.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @mvr:

    Looks more like it is designed to intimidate.

    That’s possible. Although one would have to stop laughing at it first.

  55. 55.

    Ruckus

    @Eolirin:

    Musk doesn’t want study, reasonable progress and profits. He wants to win the World Series by throwing out the first ball. He forgets, or never knew that there is a lot that has to happen after the first pitch.  And let’s be honest, his first pitch wasn’t bad. But it seems to me that he’s bored with the first pitch but has zero idea how the game is played after it. He’s a person that believes his money makes him the best person. He forgets, or never knew that what comes after the first pitch is what actually wins or loses the game. It isn’t any different in business, the first pitch gets attention, it’s what comes after that which wins the profits.

  56. 56.

    Ruckus

    @O. Felix Culpa:

    That’s because it is a silly vehicle. Made out of a material that does not have good working qualities in sheet metal, especially one designed by someone with a nursery school level engineering education.

  57. 57.

    artem1s

    @Juju: 

    The Cyber Truck kind of looks like it should be used for the custom kitchen deliveries in the Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” music video.

    Hands down the best description I’ve heard yet. I award you the all internets for today.
    FWIW, I saw one in the wild about a week ago. It wasn’t as ugly as I expected. And it was actually bizarrely and ironically awesome. The reported flaws were mostly masked by it’s custom paint job as a replica of the Cleveland Browns orange, logo-less helmet which IMO presented a perfectly awesome, ironic blending of two completely ruined brands that have come to represent the epitome of failure due to inept management. I salute you, anonymous CyberBrownsTruck owner.

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