Musk Invests $75 Million in Glitchy, Self-Driving Auto…crat

Musk and other billionaires are betting almost a quarter of a billion on old, janky failure

Oct. 16: Billionaires bet on Trump … Musk’s other walking product was also a fraud … Tyson denies child labor in statement probably written by 12-year-old … Israel proves it still has enough power to horrify the world …

No podcast today, cuz I’m still recovering from a cold and still a big baby, but you can check out TFN’s other podcasts here.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk makes his first in-person pitch for his new, 78-year-old, pre-owned, barely refurbished product at a sales presentation on Oct. 9, 2014. (Screengrab / Politico video.)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has invested almost $75 million into former Pres. Donald Trump, new campaign filings yesterday showed.

It’s not the first time Musk has made a major investment in questionable technology that turned out to be bullshit. And Trump has a long loooong history of disappointing investors.

And some of Musk’s products turn out to be bullshit that he’s dressed up as not-bullshit. As very few media outlets seem to have noted, Bloomberg on Monday pulled back the curtain on those Optimus robots from Musk’s Tesla presentation last week. They were being operated by people! (h/t)

Turns out, only three weeks before the presentation, Musk decided to include the Optimus in it, even though the software wasn’t up to the job. Because Optimus’s capabilities were sub-optimal, Tesla had to deploy remote operators to lend a cyberhand.

And even before Bloomberg’s little Wizard of Oz scoop came out, investors were so underwhelmed by Musk’s presentation last week that, the following day, Tesla’s stock crashed like an unself-driven self-driving car. The same Wall Street genius bros who had made Tesla worth almost 18 times as much as the Ford Motor Company, sold off more Tesla stock than you could pack into a Cybertruck, $60 billion worth.

So how does Musk still have money to burn on Trump, with his companies tanking? Because Wall Street geniuses keep paying Musk billions to self-drive their investments into the ground because they believe Optimus is real. Which brings us back to Trump, the other Musk investment with glitchy software.

Much like Musk’s robot, Trump, too, is assisted by remote operators. But there are some key differences from Optimus.

Trump has almost no Read-Only Memory, as he doesn’t read. Almost all of Trump’s output seems to be generated by Random-Access Memory. Like, very random.

Also, unlike Optimus, Trump has virtually no processing power and Trump is believed to be primarily composed not of plastic and circuit boards, but pink slime, dyed orange, that’s one part processed McDonald’s “cow” beef and one part biologically human extruded meat. An Optimus Slime, if you will.

Still, three investors, including Musk, helped out with more than $220 million in donations to political action committees remotely assisting Trump, multiple outlets reported yesterday.

Musk gave $74.95 million to the pro-Trump super PAC that Musk started this summer and called America because he’s never had an original thought in his life and because someone talked him out of calling it Xmerica.

But the biggest investor in Optimus Slime is Miriam Adelson, who gave $95 million to the Preserve America super PAC, despite the fact that its name acknowledges that, yes, America is still here. Pulling up the rear is fellow billionaire Richard Uihlein, who gave about $49 million to Restoration PAC (which is apparently at odds with Preserve America over whether America needs to be Preserved or Restored).

And Trump has been glitching a lot lately. In an apparent case of crossed wires Monday, Trump mistook his party’s efforts to retake the House as a directive to throw a house party.

At the ostensible town hall, after two participants fainted, Trump said, “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” At a town hall.

Trump then stood on stage for more than half an hour swaying to a kickin’ play list that included “YMCA,” “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and, um, “Ave Maria.”

Which actually does sound like a more mentally sound option than fielding MAGA questions.

Other glitches appear to reflect more profound issues with Trump’s programming. Yesterday he floated the “idea” of a 2,000% tariff on imported electric cars. That would represent a massive return on investment for Musk, who could then jack up the cost of his own EVs without fear of foreign competition.

Of course, as with any investment, it’s important to ask what investors are getting. In other words, are those PACs spending the money strategically? Or, Trump style, hoovering it?

Well, we don’t (yet) know the inner workings of all those PACs, but we do know a bit about the Trump campaign itself. And the campaign is starved for cash…except for the people running it, who are swimming in it.

Campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita reportedly has been paid $22 million in his two years on the campaign.

And it gets worse — for Optimus Slime, anyway. Because LaCivita’s deal also includes payments to his company for specific kinds of ads the campaign buys. Which means Trump has structured LaCivita’s compensation to reward a campaign strategy that benefits LaCivita, regardless of whether it helps Trump.

It’s only fair that LaCivita is living LaCivita Loca thanks to his deal with Trump. After all, America’s rules incentivize corporate execs to do the same thing: Bust out the companies they run, leaving the companies a hollow shell while the execs make out like bandits banks.

Musk et al.’s investment also may be moot for another reason. Politics is Newtonian. Trump has been pushing Adelson and others to pony up more of what they win playing the ponies because he’s so dramatically behind Vice Pres. Kamala Harris in fundraising. So what will Harris do in response to the Musk money? She’ll fundraise off it, obviously. As Newton taught us, every stupid Musk action has an equal and opposite smart reaction.

So what are those PACs doing, other than enriching the Republicans “running” them? 

According to CNN, Musk’s PAC, Xmerica America, is running Trump’s ground game in Pennsylvania and other states, funding door-knocking to get out the vote. As CNN reports, it’s largely unprecedented for a campaign to outsource its field operations.

That’s right, Trump is outsourcing untested technology to Elon Musk. Because that always works.

Obviously, the Harris camp is hoping it’s primarily Optimus robots doing the door-knocking, but even if not, if Musk history is any judge, there’s good reason to think he’s yet again overpromised and under-delivering. Even with remote assistance.

America Doesn’t Need Immigrant Workers with All These 11-Year-Olds Just Sitting There

The Dept. of Labor is investigating whether kids as young as 11 years old worked the night shift at Arkansas poultry plants, the way the Dept. of Labor won’t do under rePresident Donald Trump.

The two plants are owned by Tyson Foods, which passes its alleged child-labor savings on to you investors executives. Because it’s not enough to collude allegedly with other food companies to fix prices, or as TFN likes to think of it, break prices. 

Child labor has actually been something Republicans have pushed to return to (it used to be normal!) in legislative and regulatory initiatives around the country in Christian-run states. 

The federal investigations were sparked by a parent and a teacher separately overhearing kids talking about what they did last summer. According to acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, what they did last summer may have included “​​slaughtering, meat and poultry packing, processing, or rendering.” Which is actually a traditional summer activity for Arkansas teens, but for fun.

Labor Department stakeouts this summer focused on the mornings, when night-shift kids were allegedly punching out for the night, the way Jesus intended. One witness said the kids discussed working from 11pm to at least 7am. Investigators said they saw “multiple individuals … [who] were potentially minor employees below the age of 16."

In a statement, Tyson said it does not hire employees under the age of 18, but did not explicitly rule out using minors as poultry substitutes in products such as Tyson Spooky Nuggets, in which extruded meat-based slime is pressed into scary shapes such as bats, ghosts, and Democrats.

Israel Demonstrates Capacity to Keep Horrifying

TFN takes off just two days with a case of big-baby sniffles and coughing, and Israel takes the opportunity to demonstrate that it still can penetrate people’s defenses and make them feel a horror they thought they’d become numb to.

The U.S. issued a strongly worded scolding to Israel after “precision” strikes by the Israeli Defense Forces ignited a Hamas control center in Gaza that was cleverly disguised as a hospital tent camp, right down to having actual patients whose diagnoses did not include fatal burns until Sunday.

In fairness, Hamas does have operations among civilians — knowing that no government would be inhumane enough to attack anyway…or stupid enough to hand Hamas the kind of propaganda victory it gets with video of hospital patients burning alive to death. Stupid Hamas!

Antisemitic Israeli Court Issues Antisemitic Ruling Against Jews Due to Antisemitism

Israel’s highest court…of antisemites…issued an antisemitic order yesterday requiring a full explanation of Gaza medical evacuations by the Israeli government, which is largely Jewish.

The court obviously targeted the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who is Jewish — because he’s Jewish. The court alleged that the (largely Jewish) Israeli government doesn’t have a plan to evacuate sick Gaza residents to other countries for treatment, which is exactly the kind of thing an antisemite might say, given that there’s no other reason to make such an antisemitic accusation.

The order was issued in response to an antisemitic petition filed by three human rights groups who hate Jews.

Before Israel sealed up Gaza, about 50 patients were able to be taken out daily for treatment in other countries, according to Jew-hating lawyer Adi Lustigman, who got her law degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and whose organization, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, opposes human rights for Israel.¹

Campaign Watch

SENATE - TEXAS Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) debated Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last night. They’re pretty much statistically tied, a form of torture the state routinely inflicts upon hopeful Democrats in the weeks before every Election Day. To make things even more anguishing, local station WFAA did some kind of bullshit post-debate “poll”-like thing and apparently 66% of “people” in the “poll” of the “debate” said Allred won. Which means nothing, but might make you feel good for a fleeting moment. Yay!

Two Quickies

• Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a book. In related news, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is bad at book-writing. Burdened by the educational disadvantages of attending Columbia and Harvard, Gorsuch wrote an entire “book,” such as it is, about how much he hates government regulation. Gorsuch is so bad at this, that the book’s subtext is how much better it might be with some editorial regulation. But no, with only the Invisible Hand on editing chores, Politico reports that the Ivy League alum’s book contains “factual omissions and analytic errors.” To be fair, that kind of thing is what got Gorsuch his job.

• There’s a great, fun read on Spirit Airlines, the airline that suffers to secure our salvation. Scott Nover writes for Slate that Spirit — America’s most-reviled airline right behind all the other airlines — does more for us than any other airline. By insisting on low basic fares, Air Jesus, as TFN is calling Spirit for the purposes of this quickie — is forcing other airlines to keep their fares low to compete. Nover cites a 2016 study of one route that found average ticket prices went from $300 down to $180 after Air Jesus started flying that route. That’s why JetBlue wanted to buy Air Jesus. And that’s why the Justice Department stopped it. Problem is, since the foiled merger, Wall Street has been crucifying Air Jesus. And now it’s facing a possible Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing to protect itself from creditors until it can be, y’know…resurrected.

TCB

I’m sorry! I had a cold over the weekend and the last couple days so I bailed on TFN and am late with today’s because I’m a big baby and can’t get my brain to think let alone snark when it’s busy being a big baby. I feel terrible about letting folks down and TFN hopes to be back at full snarkery in short order.

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With the election three weeks away, I recommend LOLGOP’s Substack for finding things you can do and BoltsMag.org for good reporting on lower-profile races. Most of all, TFN recommends keeping calm and carrying on.

Go get ‘em, kids!

1. I don’t like to label individual stories sarcasm, but just in case anyone’s wondering, no, TFN does not believe that Israeli courts or Jewish lawyers in Israel are antisemitic.