Elon Musk takes one out of the Sheriff Bart playbook

[I know we just did a Patrick Boyle video, but he really is the man for this one.]

Tesla just gave Musk the biggest executive payout ever in exchange for him not wiping out his own fortune. 

 Elon Musk, despite being Tesla's largest shareholder, has repeatedly demanded additional equity-based compensation, even threatening to leave the company if not granted more control. His $29 billion pay package stands out not just for its size, but for its departure from founder norms. Tesla's board has described this package as being a critical first step to energize and focus Musk. Now, I'm not sure what the following steps will be, but the award increases Musk's stake in Tesla from under 13% to about 16% of the company. The only requirement it puts on him is that he has to stay in a senior leadership role at Tesla for two more years. There's no requirement that he devote any more time to the company — he just can't quit.

Musk's overturned 2018 compensation package had entitled him to 20% of the company, and he has said that he needs to own at least 25% if he's going to advance Tesla's artificial intelligence and robotics capabilities — the most important buzzwords of 2025. He says that 25% would be enough control to prevent an activist investor from ousting him, as he did to the management of Twitter a few years ago.

Despite his claim that he's not interested in wealth and only wants control of Tesla to save humanity, in recent years Musk has sold billions of dollars’ worth of Tesla stock. He managed to sell $7.5 billion worth of Tesla shares near its all-time high in late 2022, right before a sales report that sent the stock price plunging.

His new pay package is being pitched to Tesla investors as a contingency plan: if the $56 billion award from 2018 — which was struck down by a Delaware court for being excessive and poorly disclosed — is reinstated upon appeal, he'll forego the new shares. But if the court rejects Tesla's appeal, Musk will still walk away with the largest pay package in corporate history as a “critical first step.”

It's worth noting that Elon Musk's overturned $56 billion compensation package is worth more than Tesla's entire accumulated net income since inception. As of early 2025, Tesla had earned approximately $38.66 billion in total net profit since going public, meaning that Musk's $56 billion pay package would have represented about 1.45 times the company's lifetime earnings. The more modest $29 billion pay package is less than 80% of Tesla's total net profit since going public, meaning that something is left over for the other shareholders.

The logic behind Musk's award is unconventional. As The Economist puts it, under the Elon Musk theory of pay, the worse Tesla performs, the more its boss ought to earn.

 Just for context, this comes on the heels of Musk destroying the brand, cratering sales, and generally screwing up his job. 

Musk does have some leverage here, albeit for terrible reasons. 

If the goal were to maximize the profitability of Tesla, getting rid of Musk would be a great first step. Even if the objective were to make it the leader in autonomous driving or robotics, you could still find far more qualified and competent executives, none of whom would insist on holding a gun to the company's head.

But the time for talking about the potential earnings or market share of Tesla has long since passed. The company is so insanely overvalued that there's simply no way that it will ever justify its stock price.

For the people invested in the company, the best possible outcome, the only one that avoids catastrophic losses, is for the markets to stay irrational and the bubble to remain inflated long enough for investors to unload their shares on another generation of suckers.

While Musk is probably bad for the company’s financial health, he is absolutely essential for its market cap. Tesla has always traded on the belief that Elon Musk was some sort of superhuman genius who was about to release some wonderful new technology on the world. We've referred to this as flying exoskeletons. Boyle refers to it as “pixie dust.”

What's different now is that the more conventional justifications for buying and holding Tesla stock have all fallen away. This is a small and shrinking 20-plus-year-old car company with a toxic brand, and no real product in the pipeline, coming off of a worse vehicle launch than the Edsel. Exoskeletons and pixie dust are now the only justification for being bullish, and only Elon Musk can hold on to the true believers. 

 
 

Boyle ends the video with link to his segment on John Keely, though he never says why.  

Dr. Elara Voss -- LLMs' own Jungian archetypal memory?

 

 If this were happening with human beings, if a number of people were independently coming up with the same character name for a fictional character with remarkably similar traits and backstory, it would feel like the premise of a particularly creepy science fiction/horror story. In fact, it is remarkably similar to one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes with perhaps my favorite cliffhanger climax.

It’s not quite so inexplicable in the world of large language models, though it is an interesting and informative example. We will be coming back to this one.

 

From Who is Elara Voss?

by Max Read

 There are, as of this writing, 62 books credited to an “Elara Voss” available on Amazon: ... What’s more, there are hundreds of books on Amazon and other self-publishing platforms that feature a character named “Elara Voss,” among them Veil of the Bloodwight Syndicate, Gynarchy’s Collar, and Starlight Nexus by Kylian Quinn:

 

 ...

What’s so odd about this is that--for a name now so common across the megaplatforms--before 2023, “Elara Voss” did not exist. There is no person named Elara Voss in the United States. No birth certificate has ever been issued under that name; if you search for it in public records databases, you’ll turn up no results. There aren’t even any characters named “Elara Voss” in any book published before 2023. Until two years ago, the two words didn’t ever appear next to each other even by accident.

But if you direct almost any L.L.M. to generate a sci-fi story or narrative for you, it will name the main character “Elara Voss”--or a similar variation like “Elara Vex,” “Elena Voss,” or “Elias Vance”--with an alarming degree of frequency.

...

When, exactly, “Elara Voss” and its cognates emerged from the latent space to dominate the Kindle Unlimited store is hard to say. I’ve seen some people on Twitter hazily suggest that Elara and kin--let’s call them promptonyms, to coin a phrase--were present in GPT 3.5 (released in November 2022), but the earliest instance of the names I can find online dates back to August 2023, when an account “exploring realms through #AIStorytelling & #AIConceptArt” posted a character sketch of a “visionary physicist and AI researcher” named “Dr. Elara Voss.” (A “Dr. Elara Finch” and a “Dr. Elara Solis” each appear a few months earlier.) Voss appears a handful more times on Twitter in similar contexts over the next few months, and pops up on a fan-authored Warhammer 40k wiki as the name of the “highly respected leader of the Inanis 23rd Voidstalkers.”

But by the same time next year, Elara, Elena, and Elias Voss, Vex, and Vance had become inescapable, to the point that frequent users and A.I.-powered writing apps began to develop specific prompts to avoid them. The promptonyms reportedly appear in every major L.L.M.: GPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, DeepSeek, and Grok. An A.I. tinkerer on Reddit playing around with L.L.M. benchmarks last August found that Google’s lightweight Gemma model used the name Elara “39 times in 3 separate stories,” and Elias “29 times in 4 separate stories.” None of the commenters were surprised: “every time I try using any models for creative writing, doesn't matter whether it's gpt-4, mistral, llama, etc, always the same names come up like Elara or Whispering Woods, etc.,” one wrote. (Alongside “Whispering Woods,” you can file “Eldora” as the name of a magic kingdom.) Elara Voss seems to be the promptonym generated most often, others like “Aris Thorne” (“Why is Dr. Aris Thorne everywhere?” one Redditor wondered) and “Elias Vance” are found frequently too:

 In fact, a whole host of tropes and concepts seem to accompany Dr. Elara wherever she’s found. The prototypical “Elara Voss,” as described by a text generator, is a doctor, usually a physicist but sometimes a linguist or biologist. (Other times, she’s a spaceship captain.) She’s generally on the verge of a major breakthrough or discovery (often cosmic or even metaphysical in nature), or is researching some kind of “anomaly,” but is isolated, troubled, and sometimes “haunted” by what she’s learning. She’s often found “trembling” or her heart is racing; instruments near her are usually “pulsing.” The name “Erebus” often appears in Dr. Elara stories: a “Project Erebus” on which Dr. Elena Vex is working, or a mining colony named “Erebus-IX” to which Dr. Elias Vance must travel, or even a “rogue A.I.” called Erebus, “neutralized” by Dr. Elara Voss.

 ...

Admittedly, I too have a hard time not giving in to the spooky pleasures of imagining a pantheon of A.I. tulpas emerging from the latent space, a new mythos derived from the hidden structures of our culture. But there are also less occult ways of accounting for the frequency with which Elara and her fellow promptonyms appear. As many people have pointed out, there’s a significant character in World of Warcraft named “Lilian Voss,” and the volume of text publicly available online about the WoW universe in the form of wikis, walk-throughs, and YouTube transcriptions likely gives the lore a gravitational pull in most models. If you trace back, e.g., Gemma’s decision-making process you can see that “character names,” as well as “science fiction” and “fantasy,” are all closely linked in the model to a “text about World of Warcraft” neuron, as Abram Jackson shows here and a user called beowulf shows here. (Similarly, there’s a character named “Elara Dorne” in Star Wars: The Old Republic, a voluminously covered M.M.O.R.P.G. like WoW. It’s a good reminder that L.L.M.s reflect “culture” in the narrow sense of “the culture of text publicly available on the internet in great volume.”)

As for her ubiquity across models, that’s almost to be expected. All the largest models are trained on effectively the same corpus--i.e., “almost all publicly available text”--and the processes by which they are made smooth and sanitary for public release sand down particular differences even further. (They’re also likely training on each other’s responses, which should lead to additional convergence.)

So you might say that Dr. Elara Voss is an emergent legend whose qualities reflect a deep mathematical structure underlying our culture. You might also say she’s a statistical agglomeration of science-fiction cliché borne of oversampling video-game wikis. I’m not sure that either of those views is wrong, precisely! What I do know is that we should enjoy her while she lasts: By the next generation of models, she’ll almost certainly have been eliminated. As much as we might enjoy the idea of A.I. lore, the companies selling the tech (as fiction-writing software, among other things!) don’t like the kind of consistency that points to something other than total magic occurring under the hood.

 

To be a good historian you have to be a good statistician...

... or at least someone who's good at thinking about data, and in this case, survivorship bias.

From Bret Devereaux's highly recommended history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

I’ve mentioned quite a few times here that Roman Egypt is a perplexing part of understanding the Roman Empire because on the one hand it provides a lot of really valuable evidence for daily life concerns (mortality, nuptiality, military pay, customs and tax systems, etc.) but on the other hand it is always very difficult to know to what degree that information can be generalized because Roman Egypt is such an atypical Roman province. So this week we’re going to look in quite general terms at what makes Egypt such an unusual place in the Roman world. As we’ll see, some of the ways in which Egypt is unusual are Roman creations, but many of them stretch back before the Roman period in Egypt or indeed before the Roman period anywhere.
...
Instead what makes Roman Egypt’s uniqueness so important is one of the unique things about it: Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean hard desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark; it is, I have been told (I haven’t yet been to Egypt), entirely possible in many places to stand with one foot in the ‘green’ and another foot in the hard desert.

That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation. When objects are deposited – lost, thrown away, carefully placed in a sanctuary, whatever – they begin to degrade. Organic objects (textile, leather, paper, wood) rot as microorganisms use them as food, while metal objects oxidize (that is, rust).¹ Aridity arrests (at least somewhat) both processes. Consequently things survive from the Roman period (or indeed, from even more ancient periods) in Egypt that simply wouldn’t survive almost anywhere else.

...

Now within the typical European and Mediterranean humidity, papyrus doesn’t last forever (unlike the parchment paper produced in the Middle Ages which was far more expensive but also lasts much longer); papyrus paper will degrade over anything from a few decades to a couple hundred years – the more humidity, the faster decay. Of course wood tablets and wax tablets fare no better. What that means is that in most parts of the Roman Empire, very little casual writing survives; what does survive were the sorts of important official documents which might be inscribed on stone (along with the literary works that were worth painstakingly copying over and over again by hand through the Middle Ages). But letters, receipts, tax returns, census records, shopping lists, school assignments – these sorts of documents were all written on less durable materials which don’t survive except in a few exceptional sites like Vindolanda.

Or Egypt. Not individual places in Egypt; pretty much the whole province.

In the extremely dry conditions of the Egyptian desert, papyrus can survive (albeit typically in damaged scraps rather than complete scrolls) from antiquity to the present. Now the coverage of these surviving papyri is not even. The Roman period is far better represented in the surviving papyri than the Ptolemaic period (much less the proceeding ‘late’ period or the New Kingdom before that). It’s also not evenly distributed geographically; the Arsinoite nome (what is today el-Fayyum, an oasis basin to the West of the Nile) and the Oxyrhynchus nome (roughly in the middle of Egypt, on the Nile) are both substantially overrepresented, while the Nile Delta itself has fewer (but by no means zero) finds. Consequently, we need to be worried not only about the degree to which Egypt might be representative of the larger Roman world, but also the degree to which these two nomes (a nome is an administrative district within Egypt, we’ll talk about them more in a bit) are representative of Egypt. That’s complicated in turn by the fact that the Arsinoite nome is not a normal nome; extensive cultivation there only really begins under Ptolemaic rule, which raises questions about how typical it was. It also means we lack a really good trove of papyri from a nome in Lower Egypt proper (the northern part of the country, covering the delta of the Nile) which, because of its different terrain, we might imagine was in some ways different.

 

Trip to the library

I'm a bit surprised I haven't posted this before. 

Emily M. Bender is one of, perhaps the, leading critic of LLM from the theoretically side. (On the business and social impact side I think we'd have to give the title to Ed Zitron.) Though best known for coining the term "stochastic parrot," my favorite example of her work is this essay, in which she demonstrates that, even if the algorithms were intelligent, they still couldn't understand what they were saying.

[I've left out some context. If you think you've spotted a flaw in the logic, you should check out the origin before weighing in.]

 From Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand: 

To try to bring the difference between form and meaning into focus, I like to lead people through a thought experiment. Think of a language that you do not speak which is furthermore written in a non-ideographic writing system that you don’t read. For many (but by no means all) people reading this post, Thai might fit that description, so I’ll use Thai in this example.

Imagine you are in the National Library of Thailand (Thai wikipedia page). You have access to all the books in that library, except any that have illustrations or any writing not in Thai. You have unlimited time, and your physical needs are catered to, but no people to interact with. Could you learn to understand written Thai? If so, how would you achieve that? (Please ponder for a moment, before reading on.)

I’ve had this conversation with many many people. Some ideas that have come up:

1. Look for an illustrated encyclopedia. [Sorry, I removed all books with photos, remember?]
2. Find scientific articles which might have English loanwords spelled out in English orthography. [Those are gone too. I was thorough.]
3. Patiently collate a list of all strings, locating the most frequent ones, and deduce that those are function words, like the equivalents of and, the, or to, or whichever elements Thai grammaticalizes. [Thai actually doesn’t use white space delimiters for words, so this strategy would be extra challenging. If you succeeded, you’d be succeeding because you were bringing additional knowledge to the situation, something which an LLM doesn’t have. Also, the function words aren’t going to help you much in terms of the actual content.]
4. Unlimited time and yummy Thai food? I’d just sit back and enjoy that. [Great! But also, not going to lead to learning Thai.]
5. Hunt around until you find something that from its format is obviously a translation of a book you already know well in another language. [Again, bringing in external information.]
6. Look at the way the books are organized in the library, and find words (substrings) that appear disproportionate in each section (compared to the others). Deduce that these are the words that have to do with the topic of that section. [That would be an interesting way to partition the vocabulary for sure, but how would you actually figure out what any of the words mean?]

Without any way to relate the texts you are looking at to anything outside language, i.e. to hypotheses about their communicative intent, you can’t get off the ground with this task. Most of the strategies above involve pulling in additional information that would let you make those hypotheses — something beyond the strict form of the language.

... 

You could, if you didn’t get fed up, get really good as knowing what a reasonable string of Thai “looks like”. You could maybe even write something that a Thai speaker could make sense of. But this isn’t the same thing as “knowing Thai”. If you wanted to learn from the knowledge stored in that library, you still wouldn’t have access.

...

It doesn’t matter how “intelligent” [ChatGPT] is — it can’t get to meaning if all it has access to is form. But also: it’s not “intelligent”. Our only evidence for its “intelligence” is the apparent coherence of its output. But we’re the ones doing all the meaning making there, as we make sense of it. 

"About a 30-minute drive south along the highways that split up the city, residents in majority-white areas live on average 24 years longer."

A while back we did a post on the California Environmental Quality Act rollback. The usual YIMBY crowd couldn't imagine why anyone would say a bad word about it, but when you read the fine print, it turned out that some of the most radical and troubling parts of the bill had absolutely nothing to do with increasing housing supply.

 

The new exemption for “advanced manufacturing” facilities in areas already zoned for industrial use — including plants that build semiconductors and nanotech — drew some of the fiercest criticism. State law defines the category as processes that improve or create new materials, products or technologies. 

...

A major proponent of the exemptions, State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco said in an interview with CalMatters today that criticisms by environmentalists were  “extreme, unfounded, melodramatic statements.” 

Elsewhere in the interview, Wiener talked about how environmental deregulation will "bring clean advanced manufacturing to California.” Historically though, this kind of manufacturing has not been by any stretch of the imagination, clean. 

California’s Santa Clara County, the seat of Silicon Valley, has more federal Superfund sites than anywhere else in the US.

The county is home to 23 sites in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, meaning the federal government recognizes them as highly contaminated areas and have earmarked them for cleanup. (It’s the same program the Trump administration seeks to cut by 30%.) Almost all of the Santa Clara Superfund sites are located where there once were (or still are) high-tech manufacturing sites.

 Wiener then emphasized that point about zoning.

Wiener said the changes exempt manufacturing projects only on land that is already zoned as industrial. The goal is to make it easier for high-tech industries to build, with Wiener arguing that California risks losing out on major private-sector investment because it’s too costly and difficult to build in the state. 

Here too, the history is ugly. These industrial areas are disproportionately likely to be near low income, often majority-minority neighborhoods, often with tragic results. 

From Adam Mahoney [Emphasis added]: 

Recent research, co-led by Black women researchers and conducted specifically with Black women residents, found that 80% of Black women in [Settegast, a majority-Black neighborhood in northeast Houston] live in high-risk soil contamination zones, with 80% of those residents reporting chronic health conditions.

...

In a neighborhood once defined by its rural charm and tight-knit community, the slow encroachment of industry, neglect and gentrification has transformed both the landscape and the lives of its residents. The average resident in Settegast is expected to die before they reach retirement age. About a 30-minute drive south along the highways that split up the city, residents in majority-white areas live on average 24 years longer.

The neighborhood sits trapped between a massive rail yard, a freeway, and five industrial sites that release thousands of pounds of lead and toxic chemicals. 

... 

When Rivera moved to Settegast in the late 1970s, “it was changing over from a white community to a Black one,” she explained. “Once we came in here, we did not get the same services as the other community had, and we really didn’t know how to fight for resources to keep it up.” 

The neighborhood’s neglect became visible in the crumbling drainage system, sewage build-up, and the slow but steady encroachment of industry. She watched as concrete batch plants and metal recycling companies crept closer, their hulking machinery and clouds of dust transforming the area. 

“Not only did it start to look different, we lost the smell of the neighborhood, too,” she said. The air, once sweet with the scent of the green earth, became tinged with the pungent smell of industry. 

The transformation of Settegast not only scarred the land but also the humanity of its residents. Residents are more vulnerable to poor health from environmental and climate threats than 99% of Americans, according to research by the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University. 

Living in a neighborhood where there aren’t grocery stores with fresh food and hospitals remain distant, Rivera’s seen her neighbors die at younger and younger ages. Today, life expectancy there is the lowest in Houston, and men often die before reaching their 60th birthday. She has seen families unravel under the weight of this loss, as well as unpaid mortgages, and mounting property taxes.

Since the neighborhood has an average household income that is less than half the Houston average, she said, when people die young without wills or estate plans, “their families find themselves drowning. Many simply walk away or sell for whatever they can get.”

The bad news is that the push against "debanking" is massively hypocritical and is driven by crypto-bros and fin-tech scammers. The good news is that Patrick Boyle has a video on it.

If you're new to this story, the always reliable Allison Morrow has a good overview.

If you're looking for a more satiric take...

Trump isn't behind all of the looming economic catastrophes. (Sometimes it's his tech bro pals.)

"Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending"

 

 

 

These pieces from Paul Kedrosky and the Wall Street Journal have gotten a lot of attention over the past few days, but as worrisome as they might be in isolation, they look far worse in the context of August 2025.

The big takeaway here—a finding reached independently by numerous highly respected analysts—is that capital expenditures on generative AI are the main thing currently propping up the GDP. And that the source of some of that money has left certain financial institutions, particularly life insurance companies (and no, I did not see that one coming), vulnerable to sudden downturns.

Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy  

We now have a possible answer. In a sense, there is a massive private sector stimulus program underway in the U.S.. There is an AI datacenter spending program, one that is reallocating gobs of spending, as well as injecting even more. It is already larger than peak telecom spending (as a percentage of GDP) during the dot-com era, and within shouting distance of peak 19th century railroad infrastructure spending.

So, how big was this "stimulus" in the first quarter? Back of ... something or another, based on the above figures:

• Without AI datacenter investment, Q1 GDP contraction could have been closer to –2.1%
• AI capex was likely the early-2025 difference between a mild contraction and a deep one, helping mask underlying economic weakness.

Conclusion

We are in a historically anomalous moment. Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.

And this surge has unintended consequences. Capital is being aggressively reallocated—from venture funding to internal budgets—at the expense of other sectors. Entire categories are being starved of investment, and large-scale layoffs are already happening. The irony: AI is driving mass job losses well before it has been widely deployed.

 h/t Noah Smith.

 Chris Mims writing for the WSJ:

 

The Magnificent 7 tech firms have collectively spent a record $102.5 billion on capex in their most recent quarters, nearly all from Meta, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon. (Apple, Nvidia and Tesla together contributed a mere $6.7 billion.)…

Investor and tech pundit Paul Kedrosky says that, as a percentage of gross domestic product, spending on AI infrastructure has already exceeded spending on telecom and internet infrastructure from the dot-com boom—and it’s still growing. He also argues that one explanation for the U.S. economy’s ongoing strength, despite tariffs, is that spending on IT infrastructure is so big that it’s acting as a sort of private-sector stimulus program…

Capex spending for AI contributed more to growth in the U.S. economy in the past two quarters than all of consumer spending, says Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

 I'm no finance guy, so I'm certainly getting some of the subtleties wrong, but very smart people with excellent track records in the field are getting concerned about all this, especially given the growing signs that we’re looking at a massive bubble in the sector.

 From Ed Zitron:

As I write this, NVIDIA is currently sitting at $170 a share — a dramatic reversal of fate after the pummelling it took from the DeepSeek situation in January, which sent it tumbling to a brief late-April trip below $100 before things turned around. 

The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and of that, NVIDIA's market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. This dominance is also why ordinary people ought to be deeply concerned about the AI bubble. The Magnificent 7 is almost certainly a big part of their retirement plans, even if they’re not directly invested.

Back in May, Yahoo Finance's Laura Bratton reported that Microsoft (18.9%), Amazon (7.5%), Meta (9.3%), Alphabet (5.6%), and Tesla (0.9%) alone make up 42.4% of NVIDIA's revenue. The breakdown makes things worse. Meta spends 25% — and Microsoft an alarming 47% — of its capital expenditures on NVIDIA chips, and as Bratton notes, Microsoft also spends money renting servers from CoreWeave, which analyst Gil Luria of D.A.Davidson estimates accounted for $8 billion (more than 6%) of NVIDIA's revenue in 2024. Luria also estimates that neocloud companies like CoreWeave and Crusoe — that exist only to prove AI compute services — account for as much as 10% of NVIDIA's revenue.

NVIDIA's climbing stock value comes from its continued revenue growth. In the last four quarters, NVIDIA has seen year-over-year growth of 101%, 94%, 78% and 69%, and, in the last quarter, a little statistic was carefully brushed under the rug: that NVIDIA missed, though narrowly, on data center revenue. This is exactly what it sounds like — GPUs that are used in servers, rather than gaming consoles and PCs (. Analysts estimated it would make $39.4 billion from this category, and NVIDIA only (lol) brought in $39.1 billion. Then again, it could be attributed to its problems in China, especially as the H20 ban has only just been lifted. In any case, it was a miss!

NVIDIA's quarter-over-quarter growth has also become aggressively normal — from 69%, to 59%, to 12%, to 12% again each quarter, which, again, isn't bad (it's pretty great!), but when 88% of your revenue is based on one particular line in your earnings, it's a pretty big concern, at least for me. Look, I'm not a stock analyst, nor am I pretending to be one, so I am keeping this simple:

• NVIDIA relies not only on selling lots of GPUs each quarter, but it must always, always sell more GPUs the next quarter.
• 42% of NVIDIA's revenue comes from Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and Tesla continuing to buy more GPUs.
• NVIDIA's value and continued growth is heavily reliant on hyperscaler purchases and continued interest in generative AI.
• The US stock market's continued health relies, on some level, on five or six companies (it's unclear how much Apple buys GPU-wise) spending billions of dollars on GPUs from NVIDIA.
  • An analysis from portfolio manager Danke Wang from January found that the Magnificent 7 stocks accounted for 47.87% of the Russell 1000 Index's returns in 2024 (an index fund of the 1000 highest-ranked stocks on FTSE Russell’s index).

In simpler terms, 35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs. If NVIDIA's growth story stumbles, it will reverberate through the rest of the Magnificent 7, making them rely on their own AI trade stories.

 ...

I realize this sounds a little simplistic, but by my calculations, NVIDIA's value underpins around 8% of the value of the US stock market. At the time of writing, it accounts for roughly 7.5% of the S&P 500 — an index of the 500 largest US publicly-traded companies. A disturbing 88% of Nvidia’s revenue comes from enterprise-scale GPUs primarily used for generative AI, of which five companies' spend makes up 42% of its revenue. In the event that any one of these companies makes significant changes to their investments in NVIDIA chips, it will eventually have a direct and meaningful negative impact on the wider market. 

This would be bad even in the best of economic times, but given our erratic and incompetent administration and the multitude of looming crises and their potential for nasty interactions—and even cascading failures—this has the potential to be very bad indeed.

Quick side note for a future post: one of these days we’re going to start a serious thread on the abundance movement and the dangers of credulously accepting its claims. When we get there, remind me to bring this up, because throwing money at generative AI has always been a big part of the sales pitch.

 

MACA: Make America China Again (OK, the "Again" doesn't really work but you try coming up with cute titles for fifteen years)

Great Marketplace segment from Matt Levin on how a economy (in this case China's) functions when it can't trust its own government's data.

How to deal with untrustworthy government economic data? Look to China 

Liu said nobody really believes China’s National Bureau of Statistics when it says Chinese GDP grew over 5% last quarter.

China watchers like her look for data from third parties that are proxies for economic activity, like freight volumes.

“If economic activities are of a high level, then you would anticipate trucks are moving around,” Liu said.

Investors and economists also look to data on electricity use or nighttime light or heat emissions from satellite imagery.

These work-arounds help but they don't take the place of reliable official numbers.

“There are marketing firms, domestic Chinese firms, some foreign firms in China that do market research,” Kennedy said. “They do their own surveys of consumers.”

But that system is by no means perfect. Sure, the Chinese economy has grown dramatically the past few decades, but Derek Scissors at the American Enterprise Institute says the lack of good government data has nevertheless hurt Chinese businesses.

“Firms can't tell what's going on,” Scissors said. “They look at official data and say, ‘Should we get into this industry? I can't tell.’ And then they make bad decisions.”

As sub-optimal as that may be for China, a similar situation here in the US would almost certainly be worse.

It’s also important to remember here, nobody has ever really trusted the Chinese Communist Party’s statistics, and Chinese markets have learned to adapt.

Scissors said U.S. businesses have come to depend on good government data, and he worries whether politics might infect more than just the jobs report.

“If we're moving into an era where official statistics are unreliable, that's a huge shock the Chinese economy never had,” said Scissors.

Because they never had reliable stats to begin with.

Josh Marshall on the value of credible data and on the cost of losing it

Josh Marshall has a detailed and extremely well-thought-out reaction to the BLS firing on his Editor's Blog. The whole thing is essential reading, but I want to focus on his conclusions, both because of the way they relate to our post yesterday and how they emphasize a point we've been making for months now.

It’s difficult to capture the magnitude of the importance of government economic data (and other data in different realms). Employment numbers and all government economic data are, taken together, like the instrument control panel for the national economy — for policy makers, markets, corporate decision-makers. Trump’s action injects uncertainty into every decision-making process throughout the economy. It’s not too much to say that credible and consistent economic data is a big driver of prosperity and growth. It allows more informed risk-taking, better informed decisions. But it’s not only these in-the-moment decisions. The revised and final data become the canonical record of what happened. And not just for government. Histories of this era will be written based on that data, economic research, etc.

The impact of this decision is great for the credibility of government financial data which, for most of the last century, has been deemed basically beyond reproach as a systemic, professional and non-politicized record of economic fact. The impact on credibility is already there. What actually happens and how those subsequent actions impact the economy going forward remains to be seen.

It has been obvious since April—and has only grown more so in the following months—that the markets have failed to price in the enormous and growing risks facing the U.S. and world economy under Trump. As we saw again today, every time something happens that makes catastrophe even more likely, the markets will respond with a sharp drop and then go back to “things are fine” mode the next day.

 

 

Many—perhaps most—analysts and commentators are more comfortable discussing market moves as rational reactions to new data, but we are purely in the realm of animal spirits now. To make sense of investor behavior in the summer of 2025, you have to think in terms not just of market psychology, but of dysfunctional market psychology, using concepts like denial, cognitive dissonance, or battered spouse syndrome.

The worst possible time to start playing Kriegspiel with the US economy

[First, a word about the admittedly obscure title. There is a chess variant where neither player gets to see the other player’s pieces. When you want to make a move, a referee tells you whether it's legal or illegal and if there's a possibility of a pawn capture. From there, it's up to you to make educated guesses about where your opponent’s pieces are.]

If you keep up with the news at all, you've certainly heard that last week President Trump reacted to a bad jobs report by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The response has been outraged—CNN justifiably termed it Orwellian—but putting aside how bad this is for democracy, I've been thinking about the disturbing practical implications.

One of the ways we distinguish between a healthy nation and a totalitarian or failed state is by the quality of its data. When countries feel the need to cook their own numbers, it is never a good sign. When they do it this openly, it's even worse.

The U.S. has long been known for producing timely, accurate, and trustworthy statistics, and it is difficult to overstate how essential a role they play in policymaking, business decisions, and investment strategies. The Fed needs these numbers to intelligently set policy. Financial institutions need them to allocate resources and manage risk. If we include data about weather, agriculture, etc., countless businesses rely on this government service on a daily basis.

If these sources of information become less accurate or if you undermine people's faith in them, the direct and indirect cost is immense.

Even putting aside all those troubling echoes of 1984, this would be incredibly foolish and reckless even under the best of circumstances—and those are not what we're facing at the moment.

A little over six months into this administration, we are facing multiple self-inflicted, unprecedented crises, all of which have the potential to interact in dangerous and unpredictable ways: a massive tariff war; an attack on the independence of the Fed; a potential labor crisis targeting our food supply; destabilization of the institutions that keep society and commerce moving smoothly; stunning levels of corruption; looming financial crises; and the increasing probability of the ultimate economic tar pit, stagflation. Add to that a weakening dollar and a ballooning deficit.

Between devastating cuts and open attacks on the institutions that provide data, the people who will have to navigate these potential catastrophes will have to do so blind. 

A Letter from Tom Lehrer

While looking through the blog archives to see what we'd written about Tom Lehrer, I came across this post from the excellent site TechDirt that I had meant to write about before my goldfish-level attention span saw something else bright and shiny. 

I had intended it to be part of our ongoing IP thread, but it's also a nice memorial reminder that professor Lehrer was pretty cool in general. 

Then, in 2020, we wrote about him again, noting that he had put up a website where he had announced that all of his lyrics had been officially dedicated to the public domain, and he encouraged people to do what they wanted with them. At the time, we noted that this did not cover the actual music, but Lehrer had suggested he would add that at a future time.

Apparently, that future time has come. Lehrer has expanded the letter on his website, now dated to November of 2022, even if much of it is identical to what we wrote about two years ago. But the big difference is that he’s now including all of the music in the public domain dedication:

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions:

All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain.

The latter includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages.

Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action.

Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved.

In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.

So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.

 

The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel is still out there.

Tom Lehrer Full Copenhagen Performance




Wernher von Braun




Poisoning Pigeons In The Park

Eight years ago at the blog -- perhaps our most evergreen post

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

"A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

Another excerpt from Charles Mackay's  Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I believe "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" was an initial business plan for Groupon.

Some of these schemes were plausible enough, and, had they been undertaken at a time when the public mind was unexcited, might have been pursued with advantage to all concerned. But they were established merely with the view of raising the shares in the market. The projectors took the first opportunity of a rise to sell out, and next morning the scheme was at an end. Maitland, in his History of London, gravely informs us, that one of the projects which received great encouragement, was for the establishment of a company "to make deal-boards out of saw-dust." This is, no doubt, intended as a joke; but there is abundance of evidence to show that dozens of schemes hardly a whir more reasonable, lived their little day, ruining hundreds ere they fell. One of them was for a wheel for perpetual motion—capital, one million; another was "for encouraging the breed of horses in England, and improving of glebe and church lands, and repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses." Why the clergy, who were so mainly interested in the latter clause, should have taken so much interest in the first, is only to be explained on the supposition that the scheme was projected by a knot of the foxhunting parsons, once so common in England. The shares of this company were rapidly subscribed for. But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one, started by an unknown adventurer, entitled "company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100 pounds each, deposit 2 pounds per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100 pounds per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised, that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98 pounds of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o'clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o'clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2,000 pounds. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again

 

"Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers."

I've come to the conclusion that rational people are overly likely to project rationality onto others, particularly in the fields of politics and business. To be clear, assuming that someone's actions are sensible and well thought out is not a bad starting point, but you shouldn't let it blind you to the possibility that the person in front of you is acting out of anger, catharsis, panic, or simple stupidity — particularly when there's a history of one or more of those things.

Rather than look for a secret game plan that explains why the White House has made a string of decisions that only served to deepen the crisis, it probably makes more sense to assume that this is a profoundly dysfunctional group of people acting mostly out of panic.

The past week has given us at least two perfect examples. First, the idea that pardoning the most notorious sex offender currently imprisoned in exchange for testimony that would exonerate Trump to the extent that people would stop asking to see the files is absurd — but fanning the speculation with “I could if I wanted to” sound bites actually makes things worse. At the risk of starting an argument over Occam's razor, rather than looking for a cunning strategy, it's probably best to go with the most obvious explanation here.

Trump says Epstein poached young women from Mar-a-Lago. That raises new questions about what he knew. 

It is also important to consider the fact that Trump is an increasingly confused elderly man with an ever-diminishing attention span with a bizarre compulsion to boast at the most inappropriate times. Some commentators are treating yesterday's comments about Epstein “stealing Trump’s people” as a blockbuster confession. It certainly sounds bad and it could very well indicate that Trump knew what Epstein was doing — but it could also be another bizarre non-memory that the president has been prone to as of late.

Possibly related to the tendency to project rationality onto irrational people is the reluctance of the press to look too closely at extreme craziness. This latter concept was recently addressed by both Josh Marshall and Lawyers, Guns & Money’s excellent Cheryl Rofer.

Here's Marshall [emphasis added]:

A few days ago I got in a back and forth with someone on Facebook about the Jeffrey Epstein story. This person insisted it’s a non-story and criticized the Times — that’s what was important to him — for devoting so much time to it. It was a “pseudo-story” as the journalism argot has it, a kind of pent-up story with no substance or consequence or even existence beyond journalists pretending it’s real. I said that this was a category error. As journalists, our job is to cover and explain what is actually happening, not to act as gatekeepers deciding what’s up to our standards of substance or policy-seriousness or whatever else.

Now, it’s very true that “what’s actually happening” is carrying a lot of weight here. Lots of things are happening all the time. The Kardashians are happening. Reality TV shows are happening (a complicated topic we’ll return to). Fad diets are happening. But in political news when we say that “something is happening,” I mean chains of events which are driving public opinion, changing the dynamics of political power, shifting policy in ways that affects people’s lives, etc. When a sitting president is facing a significant rebellion in his political coalition, having his presidency consumed by efforts to contain the cause of that rebellion and so forth that is a major story. The fact that the essence of what is happening — the beliefs, conspiracy theories, etc. — are, in many ways, absurd does not change that fact. Indeed, if you can’t wrestle with the heavy amount of absurd at the heart of our political moment you will simply be lost or be having an irrelevant conversation with other gatekeepers.

I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics. It was the John Boehners and Paul Ryans who were a kind of respectable veneer placed over its true engine of power and motive force. From the outside, it appeared that these leaders had to run the GOP while wrangling the far-right Freedom Caucus. In fact it was the Freedom Caucus that ran the GOP through a tacit collaboration with presentable and ultimately tractable figures like Boehner and Ryan. Trump’s intuitive political genius was to see that you could ditch the front man and run the GOP directly from the Freedom Caucus, which has been the story of the Trump Era.

And Rofer:

Josh Marshall does something today that’s like what I did a few days ago on QAnon. He takes the crazy seriously. It’s been easy to dismiss Hulk Hogan and his lawsuit or the idea that pedophiles are drinking the adrenochrome of our children. These things are far outside the wildest imaginings of most of us. But the Hogan lawsuit was the product of outside-the-box strategy, and significant numbers of people believe the QAnon dogma or something like it and act on those beliefs. The Hogan lawsuit has distorted journalistic practice, and Donald Trump’s QAnon supporters vote and influence others.

We need to consider how they are thinking. We need to get ahead of Peter Thiel, who was instrumental in the Hogan lawsuit and is now playing multiple roles in politics. He is a mentor to the Vice President and involved in multiple grabs for significant governmental roles via companies he controls. QAnon believers are a significant chunk of Trump’s support.

The reason we need to understand their thinking is to get ahead of them and to develop strategies of our own to thwart and defeat them.

Marshall details why he did not see the Hogan lawsuit as newsworthy. Most of us have ignored the QAnon fictions because they are ugly and bizarre. It’s easy to point and laugh at the people who believe them. But those people now occupy large parts of our reality. The Epstein furor, which is weakening Trump, is a product of QAnon beliefs. The degree to which it is throwing Trump off his game is hard to understand in any other way.

 

 

 

Musk : engineering :: Trump : deal-making

We've hit this point before, but this is a good time to revisit it.

Elon Musk’s fortune rests on his reputation as a “real-life Tony Stark.” The primary reason people continue to insanely overvalue his companies is because of his mystique as an almost superhumanly gifted natural engineer who, despite his lack of formal training, will somehow be able to leapfrog over companies with more advanced technology to provide things like robotaxis, AI, and humanoid robots.

The reality is just the opposite. While Musk is able to carry off the impression of competence when phonetically repeating things his staff told him, when he goes off script, the results are invariably embarrassing. It was one of these times that got Musk on our skeptic radar: when he proposed a high-speed vac train that ran on a cushion of air. As silly as the subsequent Hyperloop startups were, none of them were stupid enough to actually use this design, substituting in a maglev approach instead. Basically, when real engineers tried to build real things, they scrapped Elon’s ideas and just kept the name.

Musk’s relationship to engineering is almost perfectly analogous to Trump's relationship to the art of the deal. His reputation as an incredibly savvy businessman was, perhaps, the key factor in his political rise, but—possibly even more than Musk—the reality is the reverse of the persona.

The widespread perception of Trump as a business genius was largely an illusion produced by a talented TV producer, augmented by relentless self-promotion and questionable business ethics (these last two further support the Musk analogy). The myth of a competent Donald Trump ignores a history of ill-conceived deals and badly run companies.

Examples of the man's inability to negotiate continue to accumulate.

From Paul Krugman:

So U.S. consumers will soon be suffering. But why are U.S. manufacturers so upset with the Japan deal? Because in combination with Trump’s other tariffs this deal actually leaves many U.S. manufacturers worse off than they were before Trump began his trade war.

This is clearest in the case of automobiles and automotive products. Trump has imposed a 25 percent tariff on all automotive imports, supposedly on national security grounds. This includes imports from Canada and Mexico. And here’s the thing: Canadian and Mexican auto products generally have substantial U.S. “content” — that is, they contain parts made in America. Japanese cars generally don’t.

But now cars from Japan will pay only a 15 percent tariff, that is, less than cars from Canada and Mexico.

OK, it’s not quite that straightforward, because imports from Canada and Mexico receive a partial exemption based on the share of their value that comes from the United States. Yes, it’s getting complicated. But we may nonetheless now be in a situation where cars whose production doesn’t create U.S. manufacturing jobs will pay a lower tariff rate than cars whose production does.

Wait, there’s more. Trump has also imposed 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, which are of course important parts of the cost of a car. Japanese manufacturers don’t pay those tariffs.

Overall, the interaction between this Japan deal and Trump’s other tariffs probably tilts the playing field between U.S. and Japanese producers of cars, and perhaps other products, in Japan’s favor.

If this sounds incredibly stupid, that’s because it is. So how did this happen?

You might imagine that making a deal with one of our most important trading partners must have involved a team of experienced, skilled negotiators backed by economic experts. But in reality it was clearly pure amateur hour. Look at the photo at the top of this post, from CNBC. It shows Trump with a card in front of him laying out one much-hyped though probably meaningless part of the deal, a promise by Japan to invest in America. How much? The card says $400 billion, but that number was crossed out by hand and replaced with $500 billion, which somehow became $550 billion in the final announcement.

Next thing you’re going to tell me that Trump will start modifying weather forecasts with a Sharpie. Oh, wait.

So Trump’s negotiators probably had no idea what they were doing, and didn’t realize that in their frantic rush to conclude a deal they were agreeing to tariffs that would be highly unfavorable to U.S. manufacturing.

Why were they frantic? Trump has been the subject of considerable mockery over having made big promises about his ability to negotiate trade deals, then coming up empty month after month. So he and his people were surely anxious to make some major announcements before his self-imposed deadline of Aug. 1 — anxious enough not to realize quite what they were agreeing to.

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 2)

 We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

 

Thursday, September 27, 2018

"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

While reading up on public perceptions of the space race during the postwar era, I was disappointed to learn that my favorite Mort Sahl line wasn't actually from Mort Sahl.

Satirist Mort Sahl has been credited with mocking von Braun by saying "I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."[39] In fact that line appears in the film I Aim at the Stars, a 1960 biopic of von Braun.

Thank God we still have Lehrer.

"Wernher von Braun" (1965): A song written and performed by Tom Lehrer for an episode of NBC's American version of the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was; the song was later included in Lehrer's albums That Was The Year That Was and The Remains of Tom Lehrer. It was a satire on what some saw as von Braun's cavalier attitude toward the consequences of his work in Nazi Germany

 

R.I.P. Tom Lehrer 1928-2025 (Part 1)

We wrote quite a bit about Lehrer here at the blog. This week we'll be revisiting some favorites.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Dying is easy; comedy is hard -- journalism edition

"When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide."

It started with poisoning pigeons in the park.

Maybe I should be more specific.

It started a few weeks ago when I heard the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as part of a Tom Lehrer* tribute on Prairie Home Companion. Impressed by the wit of the lyrics (the man rhymed cyanide, for God's sake) I decided to see what a professional song writer would think about Lehrer.

My go-to guy in these matters is Brad Kay, songwriter, music historian and former mystic knight. Brad can be a tough critic, particularly if your name isn't something like Gershwin, Waller or Ellington, but if I was expecting him to be dismissive of someone who was just a comic songwriter I was in for a surprise.

Brad had literally nothing but praise for Tom Lehrer. He talked about how graceful and apt Lehrer's choice of words was and about profoundly he understood each of the genres he worked on. This led to discussions of Spike Jones (who was an accomplished and successful percussionist before he started using gunshots and noisemakers in his music) and P.D.Q. Bach (who as Peter Schickele has composed a large number of well-regarded symphonies, musicals, and film scores). All of this suggested that the first requirement for creating comic music of more than passing interest was being a good musician.

It's probably not surprising that the general public has trouble taking the creators of comedy seriously, but their peers have no such difficulty. P.G. Wodehouse counted George Orwell among his fans. Any number of dancers and acrobats have commented on the grace and athleticism of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (Keaton was particularly remarkable having mastered that most difficult of athletic feats, the controlled fall, by age three). As for acting, it's almost a truism that comic actors can easily do drama while dramatic actors often struggle with comedy.

So if the best musicians, writers, dancers and actors can be found doing great comedy, how about journalists?

The following clip [Sadly now a dead link -- MP]  is a thoroughly typical segment of the Daily Show. Take a look and consider it from a journalistic standpoint. Look at how clear and concise Stewart is. Check out how important but underreported facts are introduced and how everything is placed in a relevant context. I wonder how many hours of cable news you'd have to watch to meet the standards of just another Daily Show?

*Arguably the world's coolest mathematics professor.

 

Dan Froomkin discusses why Epstein is the only Trump scandal the mainstream press isn't afraid to cover

 

 

 Yesterday I made a passing reference to the role that this being Republican-on-Republican violence made the story an acceptable target for respectable news organizations. 

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

 I meant to come back to this idea, but now, thanks to veteran press critic Dan Froomkin, I don't have to.

From Why can’t journalists cover democracy like they cover Epstein? 

Coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal shows that mainstream journalists still have the capacity to latch onto a story and not let go.

They’ve thrown everything they’ve got at this story, and delivered the goods. Every day there’s something Epstein to report about: New reactions, old reactions, new evidence, old evidence, fresh quotes, old quotes.

They’re reaching out to sources, mining the archives, asking everyone what they think.

Print journalists are not letting this story fall off the tops of their front pages no matter what. Cable news anchors are leading their newscasts with it on the hour, one after another.

It’s impressive.

But now that we know that our top journalists can sustain a major story and stoke public outrage when they choose to, the question arises: Why haven’t they done that with other stories whose long-term significance in many ways dwarfs this sordid sex scandal?

OK, yes, I get it: The Epstein scandal represents the first major split between Trump and his base, which until now has been resolutely behind him. That’s new, and therefore news.

The story also has sex.

But most of all, the reason our top journalists are so excited about this story is because, for once, the criticism of Trump is coming from “both sides.”

The leaders of our top newsrooms are pathologically afraid of being accused of partisanship. So only if people on “both sides” agree does the media consider something a real scandal.

That effectively gives the right veto power over what the media cares about. If the right presents a united front, the coverage — even of threats to American democracy, or to the planet — will be listless and sporadic. Which it is.

But I would argue that if you weren’t afraid of accusations of partisanship there are many bigger and more consequential scandals that deserve the all-hands-on-deck, keep-the-story-on-the-front-page treatment Epstein is getting.

 

A few quick thoughts on the latest Epstein news.

Nicole Lafond writing for Talking Points Memo:

By now you’ve maybe seen the news that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is, effectively, shutting down the House’s legislative work and sending everyone home early for August recess in order to block any House floor action on the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased convicted sex offender.

His rationale for all of this is two-fold. He says that after conversations with the White House and President Trump, he believes that lawmakers need to give the executive branch “space” to do the work they are already doing to release the files. This supposed work to make the documents public is only a few days old. Trump only directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into unsealing grand jury material in the case (a maneuver that will likely yield little) after a week of bad-for-Trump headlines — spurred by his own Justice Department’s decision to not release any more info to the public. A growing rift began to emerge last week not just among Trump’s MAGA base of conspiracy theorist influencers, but within the Republican Party as well.

At least 10 House Republicans had indicated they would join Democrats in supporting a bipartisan resolution sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), which calls for releasing a lot more from the Epstein investigative files than the Trump administration is currently looking into unsealing. Massie and Khanna planned to use a procedural move, a discharge petition, to compel a vote on the matter.

As is so often the case in 2025, it's important to remind ourselves just how bizarre these events are. The Democratic resistance has struck an extraordinary blow in the Republican-controlled House based on a scandal most of which was in the public record a decade ago.

It is also important to remember that without Elon Musk—or, more precisely, the Musk/Trump feud—none of this would have happened. Just to recap the events: Musk made a number of bitter enemies in the White House, sometimes leading to actual physical confrontations. When he left, one or more of those enemies dropped the dime on him with The New York Times and provided the paper with the photographs and videos behind their exposé. No one likes having their drug habits and weird family life exposed in the paper of record and, as mentioned before, Elon Musk is even more vindictive and driven by rage than Donald Trump. Musk used his powerful right-wing platform to pound the Epstein drum.

While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.

Once the press, particularly The Wall Street Journal, got going on this one, it was inevitable that damaging revelations would start gushing forth. The Wall Street Journal started things with the story that prompted the lawsuit from Trump. The New York Times, in catch-up mode, rushed forward with their own story a couple of days later, followed by one where CNN dug through old unaired footage and photos and uncovered a wealth of material. This was followed by the WSJ coming out with yet another story, this time revealing that Trump had been lying when claiming that Bondi never told him he was in the Epstein files.

I'm not going to speculate on how long this will continue other than to say I suspect we still have at least a little ways to go. I'm certainly not going to hazard a guess as to what impact this will have on the midterms and beyond. The situation is complicated, and we have no real precedent to guide us. I will say, however, that those who dismissed the Trump/Musk feud and the re-emergence of the scandal as sensationalistic distractions probably need to rethink some of their assumptions.