Advice for The Consigliere: How To Serve The Realm And Your Billionaire Master
Has Elon’s Luck Run Out? Marvel at Foreign Ops Around Marvel and DC and the Art of Fake Epstein Photos
“Everything is sort of the politics of royal courts of billionaires. And half the talented people of my generation [who] I know — one way or the other — just sort of work for billionaires and are constantly worried about their position relative to other courtiers in their courts.” — Ben Smith, New York Times, October 2, 2021.
On some level we have entered into a techno-neofeudal world. You sense this too, don’t you? You see it in the royal or intrigue presented on the HBO screen. Are we in Succession or it Game of Thrones? You might even serve it in your own way. This piece is for you.
No, I don’t exempt myself. I’ve played my part advising the nobles and lords of the cloud or high finance. I’ve done my share of bobbing and weaving between them as circumstance require and principle demand. It certainly isn’t easy.
No, it isn’t easy to serve a king, much less a king who doesn’t know he’s a king and you must be willing to, at any moment, lose your job and with it, your career. Some kings are cruel. Others have the stuff of nobility and sometimes they ping between the extremes.
This is serious stuff but this is the life you’ve chosen by seeking to have more than your precarious middle class allotment that is your right as an American. As that existence is not really assured what do you really have to lose? You could always fall back on being a school teacher or a government worker or any number of jobs that are available to those who can do well on an IQ test that we won’t call an IQ test.
Most likely you meet the oligarch you serve in an elite institution you managed to join. You have youth and energy; he has riches and downside risk to manage. Billionaires collect people and you find yourself in his collection, partly by happenstance, partly through pluck and skill.
You have my sympathy. You are the help. You may have a fancy liberal arts degree but you are still the help. You are not his equal, no matter how much you might be told otherwise. You are not that much different from the house managers, or the Hispanic man who takes out the garbage. The more honest the billionaire is about the imbalance in power the happier you’ll find you are. He is not your friend.
If you do your role well you can and will survive, perhaps even thrive. But Man doesn’t live simply by doing what is sufficient for his masters. You serve the transcendent.
It helps to know your master’s vice and virtue. What made him so successful? Is he a mob billionaire or an intelligence billionaire? Who let him become so rich? Is he a setting sun or a rising one? An heir or a construct? (There is no thing, really, such as a self-made man. Everyone belongs to some network or another. There are no exceptions.) The psychology will differ greatly.
To serve in your court you should master genealogy as this matters more than you could know. You must know the pedigree of the other courtiers around you — which ones wish you good or ill.
I recommend ancestry.com. Get the newspapers.com addition. In the end a lot of things are bloodlines. Knowing the family line will help you know what’s possible. Ideally get their DNA so you can get a proper assessment.
Realize that you and the billionaire you serve are targets and not in a good way. Many will ask you for money. This is to be expected. This is the flip side of success. Wear it well or it will wear you down.
But the press, fearing billionaires, will come for you as a means of getting at the oligarch. Some press attacks are more serious than others. Note especially attacks from The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, L.A. Times, or BBC. This is the Anglo-American Deep State coming for you. Play ball or be crushed. There are minor players here — The Verge, Yahoo News, Rolling Stone and Vice (under new management) chief among them. Take them seriously as they are taste makers.
Other publications belong to other billionaires and those billionaires belong to their own deep states. The Daily Beast is with the centrist Israelis; Breitbart, with the Russian aligned Israelis. (See generally Rebekah Mercer and her ties to Cambridge Analytica, Ted Cruz and the Heritage Foundation.)
The Huffington Post/BuzzFeed is with the Russians and the Israelis depending upon the time of day. CNN is with the centrist Israelis having wrested it from the manic depressive Ted Turner. So, too, Fox News, with Hannity susceptible to Israeli influence while Tucker is influenced by the Russians. Both CNN and Fox News will come under increased pressure from law fare.
All philanthropy is a form of advertising; charity is done covertly. Know that that billionaire philanthropy isn’t really intended to do well in the world but to make the billionaire you serve feel good about all the bad he may or may not have done.
In some cases that philanthropy isn't philanthropy at all but pay offs. See especially Sheryl Sandberg’s Israeli philanthropy, or perhaps, Vitalik Buterin’s ethereum “donations” to India. How should we think of Buterin being rejected for a visa multiple times?
On that point: Was it anti-Asian raaaaacism that blocked Eric Yuan of Zoom eight times for a visa or prudent counterespionage? Well, I suppose it makes you wonder what Zoom — which routes all of its traffic through China — really is. I think it is building a biometric profile of every single person in the world.
How do you think the Chinese got their recently banned facial recognition product SenseTime.AI to work?
“Never bet against Elon.” — Peter Thiel.
My contrarian view is to bet against Elon.
Indeed, I’ll go one further. I think Elon has lost the deep state mandate of heaven. It’s only a matter of time before he implodes. You can see it in the mounting lawsuits and investigations and in the crazy tweets.
First look to the family. No man in Elon’s family is exactly a picture of mental health. His maternal grandfather, Joe Haldeman, was the forerunner of Technocracy Inc., and died in a plane crash in 1974. Elon seems to have inherited the risk taking side. He one time crashed his car on a drive to a pitch meeting and nearly died in a motorcycle accident.
Elon’s father, Errol, is extremely erratic, having impregnated his stepdaughter when he was 72 and she but 30. Errol even killed several men who were breaking into his South African mansion. I’m not here to judge but that’s kind of wild. Also, impressive.
Errol Musk’s ties to a Zambian mine have been the focus of some considerable attention, especially by the far left who seek to minimize Musk’s business accomplishments and argue that he’s the beneficiary of apartheid South Africa.
I recommend Jeremy Arnold’s post laying out some of the history around the emeralds. I quote from Arnold with my emphasis:
About the emerald deposit itself:
Being precise, Errol had (in his own words) "very limited involvement”. From the way he put it to me, it was a handshake deal with a Panamanian man that resulted in something like 110 emeralds up front and then a semi-regular trickle of rough stones over a few years following. There was never formal ownership.
There’s no paperwork for any of this, making it impossible to corroborate. (Errol said the man in question passed away in 2019, but that perhaps his widow could comment. While I have yet to hear anything from her, I’ll update if/as I do. Elon recalls seeing a small jewel box of low-quality emeralds in his youth, but no familial mention of a mining stake prior to Business Insider’s story coming out.)
Per Errol, the deal was struck in the mid 80s and lasted until 1989, at which point the flow of emeralds ceased entirely (he says because of economic infeasibility based on competition from synthetics out of Russia).
The supposed deposit was in Zambia, which at the time of the deal was already some 20 years removed from British rule. (The ruling party of that era, UNIP, was also a ringleader of regional anti-apartheid / anti-colonialist activity.)
I think both Arnold and the “muh apartheid privilege Elon partisan” miss a greater question. Was Errol paid by the Russians through Zambia?
Consider that Zambia and Russia had a longstanding relationship and that opposition to apartheid South Africa was often a Communist affair.
Errol says Arnold was “elected as a city councillor in 1972 with an anti-apartheid affiliation, and twice ran for parliament for an opposition party.” Which opposition party was that? Jeremy Arnold doesn’t say.
Errol, by his own admission, has a strained relationship with his children.
“They think I’m getting senile and should go into an old age home, not have a life full of fun and a tiny baby.
“He describes me as terrible. But there are many things he doesn’t know — the work I did to lessen the effects of apartheid for so many years.
“I’d rather be in my home country, South Africa, with all its violent crime than live in the budgie cage of America.”
…
I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14,” he said.
Given Elon’s own history of fibbing I’m inclined to give Errol the benefit of the doubt though who really knows?
Elon tries to distance himself from his father’s odd behavior but odd behavior is often quite heritable.
Indeed Elon’s own odd choices girlfriends makes me wonder — Amber Heard and Grimes.
Amber Heard was not exactly a picture of mental health despite her protestations to the contrary in court. If she isn’t crazy she certainly has sketchy associations.
Heard is backed by WarnerMedia, whose head of content is Lisa Saffian who is related to Leah Saffian, the business partner of Ghislaine Maxwell. (I couldn’t really tell if they were sisters or cousins or what but they are friends on Facebook.)
Leah Saffian successfully defended Ghislaine Maxwell’s brother, Kevin, on fraud charges in the UK after the collapse of their father Robert’s empire.
Leah is also the one who staged that famous fake photo of Ghislaine at In & Out Burger, according to the Daily Mail.
We might also ask what other photos are staged from the Epstein affair. Indeed, the most famous of them all — the only known photo of Epstein and Prince Andrew together — seems to originate from Mazher Mahmood, a.k.a. The Fake Sheikh and convicted hidden cameraman turned fraudster. (Think hidden camera journalism James O’Keefe or Michael Wallace but Pakistani British.)
Who is Mahmood? Vanity Fair explains in December 16th of this year:
A sex, sin, and scandal machine the likes of which the world had never known, the fiery London-based tabloid had 5 million readers, 30 hotly competitive bloodhound reporters, and one true superstar: Mazher “Maz” Mahmood. Best known as the Fake Sheik, he costumed himself in Arabic robes and an array of other disguises and guises to entrap the rich, royal, and reprehensible into doing naughty things on his hidden cameras. “During my career at the paper I was responsible for over 250 criminal prosecutions, including of pedophiles, people traffickers, drug dealers, pimps and even a doctor who took me on as a hitman to murder his former mistress and was jailed for attempted murder,” he would later tell the 2011 public inquiry occasioned by the News of the World’s phone-hacking scandal. By then, the News of the World had crashed and closed. Mahmood would go on to be sentenced to 15 months in prison for tampering with police evidence in his drug sting of a British pop star.
If the Daily Mail printed one fake photo could this other photo of Ghislaine also be fake? And was the Daily Mail’s message that Leah Saffian photo was fake a way of acknowledging this past error? I don’t know.
The Prince Andrew-Ghislaine Maxwell photo later triggered Mahmood’s photo of Epstein and Prince Andrew.
Again Vanity Fair:
In late 2022, [Prince Andrew] is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in New York to face civil charges of “sexual assault and battery” against a woman named Virginia Giuffre when she was 17. Giuffre, previously known as Jane Doe #102, first went public with her claims against Andrew on February 26, 2011, six days after the Central Park photograph was published, in a story in The Mail on Sunday. The story included another damning photograph, this one of Andrew in Ghislaine Maxwell’s London house. “One picture, said to have been taken by Epstein during Andrew’s first encounter with the girl in March 2001 and published today by The Mail on Sunday, shows the Prince with his arm around her waist,” noted the Mail.
A friend of mine close to Scotland Yard says the photo is fake (or staged) — the key detail seems to be Andrew’s hands — and I reported as much back in the day but candidly it’s hard to tell what to think of the whole situation today.
It’s clear that Virginia Roberts a.k.a Virginia Giuffre’s is a victim but of whom? And of what? Hopefully we can find out when the civil trial against Prince Andrew or Alan Dershowitz begin — assuming that happens. Dershowitz has won a motion to depose Epstein backer and billionaire Les Wexner just this November.
How should we feel that Giuffre’s being represented by Boies Schiller, the same firm that represents Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Holmes and which has seen numerous lawyers flee? It’s all terribly strange.
Still Giuffre appears to have been a victim notwithstanding the decision by the DOJ not to have her testify. The longterm psychological grooming of all of the girls and young women is deeply disturbing.
And as if to add insult to injury Maxwell made a donation to New York-Presbyterian hospital for the victims of sex trafficking — some six years after Giuffre claims Maxwell and Epstein took her to that hospital following her abuse.
Who does Amber Heard really work for?
Officially Heard is an actress. She works for Warner Brothers, which has its own weird ties to former Mossad director Yossi Cohen, according to Haaretz. There’s even the not totally crazy claim that Israeli-born Gal Gadot is Mossad. Yes, the actress that plays Wonder Woman.
What role exactly did Australian manic depressive billionaire James Packer, who has ties to Cohen, Bibi Netanyahu and to admitted Israeli spy (and Steve Mnuchin business partner) Arnon Milchan play in forcing out Kevin Tsujihara from Warner Brothers?
Packer set Tsujihara up with Charlotte Kirk, according to an explosive lawsuit filed by Kirk, and Tsujihara texts leaked to the Hollywood Reporter. Kirk denied leaking them as did, obviously, Tsujihara. Who did? And how did they get them?
Given the role controversial Israeli spyware firm NSO Group has played in targeting Americans abroad did they target Tsujihara to install a team that they liked to run the DC universe as they had with the Marvel Universe?
Marvel creator Stan Lee died deeply disappointed and beset by “vultures,” according to those closest to him. There’s even crazy and totally credible evidence that Lee’s business partners were CIA or CIA adjacent.
There’s Peter F. Paul, a former business partner whose life reads like a Hollywood script with drugs and international intrigue, and Jack Kirby, whose sketch art was done for Argo, a CIA op to free Americans in Iran later turned into a movie starring Ben Affleck. I guess with great power comes great responsibility but it sure hard to maintain as you get older.
Was there a foreign op to take over Marvel? And who might have run it?
The most likely culprit would be Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter, who, like Milchan, is also an Israeli intelligence officer and who is accused of (and being investigated for) trying to get access the health records of U.S. veterans. Perlmutter recently beat a many year lawsuit with a Canadian executive Harold Peerenboom, the details of which are simply incredible. (Perlmutter’s DNA was obtained without his consent during a deposition.)
And then there’s weird libel lawsuit against Elon Musk by Lin Wood, who I may cover in a subsequent post, but who has some of the strategist ties of anyone I’ve ever encountered.
To whet your appetite: Wood served as attorney for casino magnate Steve Wynn, who is in his own trouble with the law over his relationship to China, and funded a super PAC attacking Rep Thomas Massie for his vote against going to war in Iran.
Back to Musk…
Ambert Heard isn’t Musk’s only weird girlfriend. Have you seen a picture of Grimes? Friends don’t let friends sleep with crazy let alone have children with them.
Grimes mother, incidentally, is a former crown prosecutor and former owner of three Metro Vancouver taxi companies. The mob, we know, have nothing to do with that sort of thing now does it? I wonder how she fared in a post-Uber world.
Worst yet Elon’s China exposure is strong, as recounted in the Wall Street Journal. Musk loves praising Chinese automakers. That’s kind of weird. Weird, too, was the Musk decision not to work with Turkish electric battery manufacturers.
So, too, was his Russian-Israeli exposure through the Maxwell network, which is really a Russian network.
Robert Maxwell was a KGB-Israeli spy. His interests, too, included satellites.
I don’t think Musk’s ties to the Russians have been fully explored. Many people have focused on Musk’s efforts to secure a Russian rocket for SpaceX. SpaceX consultant Jim Cantrell traveled with Musk to Russia three times. (Cantrell has his own Russian weird ties: “Jim speaks four languages and spent several years each working in France and in Russia on joint US/Russian defense program.”)
Consider that Musk’s head of charitable giving is Ivan Kurganov, a Russian-born poker player. This seems an odd choice for Musk given Kurganov’s ties. It’s also concerning given the ways in which the Russian organized crime launders money through poker.
Musk has become something of a celebrity in Russia and he has cultivated close ties between the countries.
The Washington Post discussed those ties.
During his appearance, Musk praised Russian scientists Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, the architect of the Soviet space program. He also said that “we’re close to establishing a Tesla presence in Russia, and I think that would be great.”
“There’s a lot of talent and energy and Russia,” Musk told the attendees. “Hopefully that energy continues into the future, and I would just like to strongly encourage people to strive to make the future better than the past and to be optimistic about the future.”
Musk has had a bit of a tiff back and forth with the Russians who once ferried Americans up into space before Musk broke the nine year Russian monopoly.
But Musk, too, may be losing his monopoly. Launch is becoming a commodity and there are many players who see the opportunity. The hope, of course, is that Starship will drive the costs down further but that project is in jeopardy.
The more interesting question is what enables launch without rockets.
Between 1970 and 2000, the cost to launch a kilogram to space remained fairly steady, with an average of US$18,500 per kilogram. When the space shuttle was in operation, it could launch a payload of 27,500 kilograms for $1.5 billion, or $54,500 per kilogram. For a SpaceX Falcon 9, the rocket used to access the ISS, the cost is just $2,720 per kilogram.
Now how much that cost is designed to get in with manned flight and how much it is a real reflection of the numbers I couldn’t say. .
Maybe we will use rail guns. This video claims it can be done for $500 a kilogram.
The savings here could be enormous.
Neal Stephenson, who cofounded Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos, told New York Times podcaster Kara Swisher that he was interested in non-rocket based means of getting into space.
Stephenson was looking for “novel alternate approaches to space, alternate propulsion systems, and business models” and left before it became a standard aerospace company. “Once it became a more kind of directed aerospace engineering entity, that’s when I amicably peeled off,” Stephenson said at the time.
Could rail guns have been what Stephenson had in mind?
In subsequent posts we will examine Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
Thanks for shedding light on the people who wield such power and influence. Looking forward to examinations of Bezos and Gates.