Must Watch Dark Origins Video: Musk, the Cartels, and the Chinese
Will Thiel be the only one standing from the PayPal Mafia?
One of my favorite recent photos took place in the last weekend of August. Here it is, at the twentieth anniversary of the PayPal IPO. There’s Peter Thiel, dressed in white, and Elon Musk, dressed in black.
I can’t really quite make out the other people at the party. And of course it’s not really the twentieth anniversary of the PayPal IPO, which took place in February 2022. (Rather interestingly this past week was the anniversary of the founding of eBay, which bought PayPal to neutralize it. The CEO who made the call — Meg Whitman — didn’t make the party. She’s too busy being ambassador to Kenya.)
I like this photo though, because I want to believe that Thiel is a good guy. I admit the evidence is scant but I’m still looking for it.
One of the great untold stories of our time is how Thiel’s friends are trying, perhaps in vain, to rescue him from the hangers on and users — often backed by foreigners — who populate his inner circle. Will Thiel’s friends succeed or will Peter be crushed under the weight of the Anglo-American deep state?
My guess is that Palantir will get turned in much the same way that Facebook has been. (You replace a Chisraeli Sheryl Sandberg with a Brit like Nick Clegg and the world gets a lot more interesting. And good on Thiel for finally leaving the Facebook board.)
Perhaps Palantir’s too valuable to crush — or so the thinking goes. Maybe so, maybe so but Palantir is trading at an all time low. Who, after all, was propping up Palantir’s meme stock status? Could it have been a foreign power? I shudder to think…
Elon, though, isn’t a close call. He’s going down and it’ll happen very hard.
There’s too much there there as a recent Dark Origin makes all too clear.
I can’t really do it justice so just watch it.
The narrator discusses how Musk has been playing both the Chinese and American security state for his own personal enrichment. There’s even some fascinating discussion of Musk’s ties to the Mexican cartel, which is itself tied into the Chinese.
I might have mentioned the role of the Chinese and cartels in money-laundering and whether there might be some interesting stock shenanigans going on with Tesla.
I would probably also have noted that Musk (and the rest of the Chisraelis) seem as if they were pressured to buy Twitter. Could it have been the Chinese who want to inject “real identity” into Twitter after they lost control of Facebook?
Still, it’s all mostly there.
China gave billions in loans to Tesla, tax breaks, construction permits.
Musk even got special permission to work without a Chinese partner.
The Chinese have banned their military from using Tesla. Why?
The narrator goes into how Musk profited from Chinese-provided rare earths from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It does seem, though, that the American security state has gotten wise to Musk’s game with the FCC rejecting Musk’s bid for a $886 million subsidy. And it’s more than a little weird how much Luke Nosek and Musk and his brother Kimbal control the company — at least according to Bloomberg.
(The way it works with these government contracting companies is that they get the money from the government then they get the loans from the banks.)
But the times, they are a changin’…
One wonders, if perhaps, it wasn’t the wisest of ideas to back a luxury electric car company as California’s grid is under threat from extreme temperatures.
Might a more middle class car be in the offing? One with solar panels, per chance?
Stay tuned. Musk doesn’t have a monopoly on the future. Wouldn’t it be nice if our air was breathable again?
Great read! Great comeback from your last post to which I had the same reaction that Eric Weinstein did to Prince Andrew's interview: what was that? (Weinstein got annoying with that question in a way that only Weinstein can, but I digress.) I'm still trying to figure it out. Are you playing "4D chess" or whatever the expression is? I simply refuse to take your Biden articles at face value. I can process leaving the Trump party, but joining the Biden one makes no sense. OK, sure, one should do his best to support the sitting president, regardless of party affiliation, but you are doing more than your very best. To me, Biden is like a time-out, a patch until people figure out, what the real solution is going to be. I'm still trying to convince myself that you were initially writing an Onion piece for shits and giggles and simply got side-tracked. I mean eccentric wealthy people sometimes do weird things. Am I right?
I like the sound of Sensei Thiel though and I agree that Thiel makes it quite difficult to see him as a "good guy". I think, ultimately, it comes down to a question of faith. Once someone starts meddling in international politics, it's very hard to figure out what's real or not. I simply don't know enough. But I still have faith in him based on his faith, which also happens to be my faith, his track record, and the way he communicates. Sure, there's always a chance that someone's a genius crook – and you keep writing very engaging pieces about people just like that – but I still give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm still not sure what will make me change my mind though. A violent insurrection with him leading the charge? What's your point of new return on Thiel? With Trump I just got tried of the constant Dr. Strangelove environment, where extremely serious matters are treated in the most unserious manner possible. There are too many moving parts; he could start a sequence of events he cannot undo. That was my biggest fear with him. Of course, the radical left seems to treat the most unserious matters in the most serious manner possible, so I guess there's the rub. Trump's trajectory is somewhat similar to Jordan Peterson's trajectory, or the trajectory of any idea or famous person. Eventually the internal contradictions are revealed, the thesis becomes the antithesis, hubris and mimetic rivalry take over, and the opposites become alike, that is memes of themselves. I've got no clue where we're headed here. I know what I'd like though. I'd like a return to real people. Enough of these memes.