Who Owns Musk? Is This Really How The Richest Man in The World Behaves?
A secret but real history of Hydra, Cobra, and Spectre as told through Germany's Axel Springer
What does it mean to own something?
Tom Brokaw’s New York Times column about his friend Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, details the values of Chouinard and how the company he cofounded will be used to fight climate change now that he’s donated his shares to a nonprofit.
Good on him, I guess. It’s nice to see someone live their values though how it will work, I don’t really know. I’m sure that’s something for the lawyers to figure out.
There’s a more troubling implication that the Patagonia story reveals. If you donate your company for good and noble reasons, can you donate it for bad reasons? Of course you can. Witness Tripp Lite, a company gifted to the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo. Is Barre Seid a billionaire? Is Leonard Leo? After all, it’s Leonard Leo who gets to make the decisions on how Seid’s money will be spent. Or are neither of them billionaires at all but merely way stations between the Chinese manufacturers and the American consumers?
But there’s this larger question still about what it means to own a company in the first place. I get in trouble when I talk about ownership and stewardship. If you ask questions about ownership and how it works, people think you’re a socialist. You can tell a time’s taboo by the -ists or -phobics we call one another. That’s Papist! That’s Communist! That’s Islamophobic! That’s Racist! and so on. You can play this game at home. That is, if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford one with the Chinese and cartel buyers coming in but don’t complain too much! That’s xenophobic!
Fortunately the Deep State has a plan which involves moving you around the country, especially if you live in an area with reduced water.
James Fallows, former speechwriter to Jimmy Carter and not at all deep state bard, makes it abundantly clear: we have a lot of land in this country. There’s clearly an effort by the deep state to make the heartland cool again. You can see that in AOL founder Steve Case’s book, Rise of the Rest.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this approach — I’ve lived in Fresno and Houston — but I do wish they’d lead by example. A few of the deep staters even have. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is moving to St. Louis environs, no doubt hoping to use satellites to spy monitor global food production. The fight over Missouri, as detailed rather expertly by Vermonter-turned-Missouri resident Eric Garland, is encouraging. If we don’t have the heart to fight for the heartland who will?
*****
Now back to the Musk texts. Pegasus understood that if you show the cell phone and its contents and it’ll show you the crime.
The Musk’s texts make me wonder: What if the richest people are just the custodians of other secret forces?
I’ve long suspected that this was true having known a few billionaire families who aren’t on the Forbes list — there’s a lot of hidden wealth out there! — but reading the Musk’s tests it seems to me to be obviously true.
That’s the takeaway I got from reading the text messages betwixt Musk and his collaborators/ “friends”. The text messages were recently released. There’s so much to be said about how modern Silicon Valley works — or doesn’t — that it’s hard to know where to begin. There’s a hint of the dragon’s tail there, if you squint, and of the sort power politics that nerds, having suffered, visit upon one another. You can almost see them, post Dungeon and Dragons or cosplay, saying to themselves, “You must pay King Elon tribute, vassal!” Forgive me, my offense dear reader. As you know, we mustn’t criticize job creators, or “builders.” Just don’t ask what they’ve actually built. Or notice that they’ve bought a bunch of coastal real estate.
Speaking of which, Jason Calcanis, admitted gambler, is looking dodgy as all get out. If you haven’t read the best send up of him read Wired’s “Revenge of the Dotcom Poster Boy.”
Or watch Anduril founder Palmer Luckey’s great take down of him at his own conference.
That low class behavior by Calacanis to be expected because Jason’s the quintessential Genexploiter and hype man, backed as he is by Sequoia, which is to say, China.
Let’s dig into those texts between him and Musk. Or let’s not and say we did. Here’s my rough translation.
“You can’t hype, my deal, man,” says King Elon to Liege Jason about the Calacanis SPVs. “That’s too low class.”
“What am I supposed to do here? You let your aide de camp, Luke Nosek, do it! How ‘bout I talk to the Saudis for you?”
My favorite bit was where he offered to “jump on a grande” for Elon his “brother.” I won’t convict anyone for a misspelling and frankly don’t give a damn for a man who can spell a word only one way but I find the split up more than a tad Freudian? Is it grand? Is it grenade? You be the judge, dear reader.
Then there’s the Charlie Warzel’s cover of the texts in The Atlantic. Nothing to see here but the world’s richest men trying to buy a ridiculously overvalued texting platform. If only that were so.
No, our Chinese-backed oligarchs think Twitter has value because they want to believe that the thing they waste all their time on is valuable. But Twitter is not a business; Twitter is a battlefield. And the British and American deep state isn’t going to give it up easily.
As for Musk and his compatriots, say what you will about drunken sailors at least they didn’t try to buy the bar.
*****
A friend in the venture capitalist community who knows Elon well and I were joking that we would date most recent financial crash to these text messages. Silicon Valley has clearly run out of ideas. “They’re drunk!” he tells me. But drunk with what exactly? Power — power without a purpose.
Though don’t tell that to Joe Lonsdale who seems to delight in warming up Reaganism or Gingrichism.
Say why is Joe Lonsdale advising the Republican Party on tech policy? Is this the same Lonsdale who was trying to get everyone to buy into Ubiome — once the future of medicine before its founders ran off — where else? to Germany? The same Lonsdale who has repeatedly praised the Emiratis?
Oh, that’s right. He hired Kevin McCarthy’s son. How could I forget? It helps if you understand that both Lonsdale and McCarthy are very corrupt. McCarthy put a Chinese spy into the California GOP to pay off his wife with a no show job after McCarthy’s infidelities came out.
Here Lonsdale is touting his ties to Florida political power to get Musk attention. Shortly thereafter Musk endorsed DeSantis for president.
“Haha even Governor DeSantis just called me just now with ideas how to help you and outraged at that board and saying the public is rooting for you. Let me know if you or somebody on your side wants to chat w him. Would be fun to see you if you guys are around this weekend or the next few days.”
“Haha cool,” replies Elon. The King is busy. Do not bother him with a mere governor. Who does DeSantis serve, I wonder? We will turn to this as he runs for president whilst his state is underwater.
Mark my words right now. I will not allow him to be president.
****
One of the ideas which I have been playing with is that billionaires aren’t real. They are constructs, or, if you prefer, bridges, really. They are merely the nexus point between different countries or undercurrents. Sometimes the bridges exist despite ostensible walls — like the Berlin Wall — which exist even if they can’t be acknowledged.
I want you to keep that in mind when you consider this text message from Döpfner to Elon.
“Why don’t you buy Twitter? We run it for you. And establish a true platform of free speech,” texted Mathias Döpfner.
“Interesting idea,” Musk replied.
“I’m serious. It’s doable. Will be fun.”
“Our editor of Die Welt just gave an interview why he left Twitter,” said Döpfner. “What he is criticizing is exactly what you most likely want to change. I am thrilled to discuss twitters future when you are ready. So exciting.”
“Interesting!” replied Musk.
If these DMS are accurate then it was most assuredly Mathias Dopfner that told Musk to buy Twitter. He almost looks like a handler here, doesn’t he? But who decided this should be done? Was it Dopfner? Deutsche Bank — where Dopfner’s wife’s family worked and which invested early in PayPal? KKR, which supplied the capital to buy Axel Springer, or was it KKR’s LP, China?
Viewed one way, this office, overlooking East Berlin, is a symbol of the West. View another way Döpfner and his political ally — Angela Merkel — are really the bridges between Russia and the EU. When Merkel and Putin are together they speak in German.
Rather remarkably at the very same time that Dopfner tells Musk to buy Twitter Business Insider — an Axel Springer property — was doing stories about Musk’s alleged treatment of women on his plane.
Call me paranoid but I find it hard to believe a lot of the German elite, especially the overly pro-American ones and especially especially the ones who pretend to be American. When I hear a German accent being very flattering to this country, my guard goes up. When I see a company built by a German which doesn’t work all that well I wonder what’s really going on.
What is going on here? My sense is that when it comes to the Germans, everything is its opposite. World War II never really ended and the German-speaking nobility never really conceded defeat. They simply rewrote a lot of their histories and burned the documents. They refashioned themselves more Western, more American loving than the Westerners or Americans.
Döpfner lays it out in the statement he forces everyone to sign. If you work for him, he wants you to affirm that you are pro-Israel, pro-American values and that you support “freedom, the rule of law, democracy, and a united Europe.” Uh huh. He’s also super in favor of “Holocaust education” whatever that means.
This loyalty oath is even being imported here. Now do I think this is wise to have loyalty oaths for American journalists? I do not. I don’t even think it is constitutional.
Fortunately for Politico writers I don’t think it’s sincere. I think it’s a typical German double-speak. When Döpfner talks about the importance of free speech, he’s ignoring all the libel his empire promotes.
Sometimes this hypocrisy is explicit. Döpfner had a love child with Mitläufer descendant and billionairesss Julia Stoschek. (Stochek's great-grandfather Max Brose employed prisoners-of-war as slave laborers in his factory during World War II.)
Her father, Michael, even went so far as to cover up the family past by using company money to hire the historian Gregor Schöllgen to write an unsubstantiated biography on Brose's life and the history of the firm, downplaying his association with the Nazi Party. Stoschek blocked monies for the Christian Social Union, a political party in Coburg, until they agreed to name a street after Brose. Laws written in the denazifaction era bar streets from being named after Nazis. The family was unsuccessful.
Döpfner’s baby mama has not made a full accounting of the slave labor fortune that sustains her art collection. Why would Döpfner elect to have a child with a woman from this sort of family, especially when he was already married to the daughter of a board member from Deutsche Bank?
To be fair, America conspired to help some Germans rewrite their histories through things like Operation Paperclip. We needed the scientists and they needed the excuse to get out of dodge. “New papers, please!” There is always a global race for brains, even Nazi brains. The problem, of course, is that the brains middleman between the great powers and that’s indeed what we saw with many of the German scientists. There has been a long history of German scientists working for both sides. There’s even a term — Die Hacke.
This is exactly what the Marvel comics were talking about when they talked about an international secretive cabal that was always on the look out for new technology to upend the existing global order. For Hydra, technological disruption was a weapon. So, too, for Silicon Valley? You have to wonder after reading Wang Huning outline his plan to destroy America through technology.
You see this shadowy stuff in other forms. There’s Spectre from the Bond films, of course, and there’s Cobra from the G.I. Joe series.
Wikipedia can be instructive here:
Dangerously destabilized, Cobra Commander's persona runs the gamut from friendly and charismatic, to terrifyingly brutal and psychopathic. His charm can twist intentions and morals, so that his rhetoric actually reads as plausible and relatable to his minions. Psychoanalysts who have studied his case files, have described him as an ingenious hustler with visions of grandeur, which makes him all the more dangerous. Most dictators are hampered by pretending to pursue a noble cause, but Cobra Commander does not have that problem. He hopes to fray the fabric of society, using terrorism, tyranny, and economic slavery, to uproot the existing power structures around the world.
Cobra Commander was created by Marvel Comics writer and Army veteran Larry Hama, who envisioned the character as "being in love with the sound of his own voice." Hama was reportedly inspired to create Cobra Commander by famous conservative pundit William F. Buckley.
Is Hydra real? Is Cobra real? Of course not.
But you don’t have to wonder if there is a global oligarchy working to overthrow America and who its members might be.
*****
And what of German aristocrats whose ranks Döpfner seeks to join with his gifted wealth? Do they not have a bit of the Hydra in them?
Like all aristocrats Germans especially know how to hide their wealth and from public scrutiny by whipping up the sensibilities of the working classes whose attention they seek to focus on anything but themselves and how they’ve ducked their responsibilities. They need the Kulturkampf so that you don’t look too closely at who owns what and how they got it. There’s a supporting point here about how post-WW2, Germans love their privacy more than any other developed nation. They have that in common with a lot of criminals.
“To rule Germany,” Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor and Putin confidant, once said, “I need three things: [AxelSpringer] Bild, Bild on Sunday, and the boob tube.” In other words, Bild and circus. Focus on the shiny thing in front of you — and not the Russian gas powering your factory or the slow descent into a Chinese vassal state.
To fully understand the German-American relationship, it’s helpful to know that all that you can about Axel Springer — and Marvel comics. AxelSpringer is a media conglomerate roughly equivalent to Fox News. “We want to be the leading digital publisher in democracies around the world,” Mathias Döpfner said. He left out that such a task would be financed by the autocracies who backed him.
I predict his fates will follow the German economic model, built as it is with Russia gas, German know-how and Chinese slaves. That model has now collapsed utterly.
How did Mathias Döpfner come to run what he hopes will be the leading digital publisher in the world? He was gifted it — all $1.2 billion plus of it!
In 2020, Friede Springer designated Döpfner as her successor as she gifted, sold and transferred the right to vote her stake in the business to him. Under the arrangement, she sold a 4.1% stake to Döpfner and gifted 15% more, bringing his direct stake to 22%. She also transferred voting rights for her remaining 22% in the business.
Why did she do this?
Mathias Döpfner is like Leonard Leo or the Patagonia nonprofit. He was handed AxelSpringer shares by the widow of its founder, she who was, supposedly, a mere nanny. But why was he gifted those shares? Who does he really represent?
You can begin by reading the fabulous Washington Post article about Döpfner’s contrarian plans for digital publishing.
Or you can read the fantastic Columbia Journalism Review discuss it.
I have a few selections that I found deeply interesting.
Like the British tabloid barons he admired, Springer wasn’t shy about using his outlets to advocate for political causes, particularly German reunification. In 1958, he traveled to Moscow to privately pitch a reunification plan to Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. (The meeting, which lasted two hours, went badly.)
For whom did the meeting go badly? Might German reunification have been a ruse under which the East would dominate the West?
Is that dream finally over now that Nord Stream 2 is sundered? Let’s hope.
*****
Axel Springer’s empire was only possible through British and American financial support. And he routinely did what he could to work with ex-Nazis.
Once again Axel Springer is only being allowed into the United States because we choose to let him push its disruptive poison here. Already Döpfner has upset the social peace by publishing a hacked or leaked Supreme Court opinion.
Will we allow this to continue? Why should Politico be allowed to cause chaos with stolen material?
*****
My friend Congressman Steve King once set me this photo and I think it encapsulates much of modern Germany. Here was a sincere man (on the left) with a deeply conniving man on the right. Supposedly they both support the West.
King, a Christian, believes in the Gospel. He was defeated for reelection because he refused to toe the line with the Chinese compromised, Kevin McCarthy, and found himself targeted over many nontroversies. King opposed the slave power of the illegal immigrant lobby and so, in McCarthy’s eyes, he had to go.
Angermayer believes in personal enrichment — legalization of LSD and biotech deals which don’t work — and crypto. He made millions selling Wirecard stock.
Choose your path, America. You deserve better than malarkey.
Interesting content but somehow I became distracted by the body language exhibited in the "ALL IN" episode featuring Palmer Luckey. Jason Calcanis is not the only one "looking dodgy as all get out". Luckey is the only person on stage who is not girding his loins.