Musk Chickens Out To TACO
This Week In Blunders - June 8-14
“Life is too short for long-term grudges.” - Elon Musk
The world’s richest man has once again proven that his mouth runs faster than his brain – and he may be about to pay a heavy price for it.
Elon Musk went groveling to Donald Trump this week, apologizing for the incendiary posts he wrote about the president last week. But it may be too late.
Reuters reports that Trump may reduce the role of Musk’s SpaceX in a proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense system. The project is estimated to cost $175 billion, and SpaceX was positioning for a big share of the work.
This would mark the first known setback for Musk following his feud with the president, and there could be more to come given Trump’s penchant for vengeance.
Earlier this week, Musk exploded over the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” because it’s on track to sharply raise deficit spending after Musk worked for months to slash it. Musk was also irked that Trump dumped his buddy from consideration as the new head of NASA.
It’s enormously humiliating losing a game of chicken to a chicken.
Wall Street has plastered the president with a notable nickname for his wishy-washy tariff threats, TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out. But now it’s Musk who can’t cash the checks that his mouth was so busy writing.
It was quite a contrast from Musk’s post claiming that he’s the one who got Trump elected.
In his online tirade, Musk also hinted that he could start a new political party if Trump and lawmakers didn’t do what he wanted.
Musk also took down his most incendiary post:
The bomb was a dud. There have long been scads of photos of Trump with the late child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein all over the Internet yet somehow many Americans would rather slander former President Joe Biden as a pedophile. (Still, don’t you want to see what our government won’t release?)
Musk is so rich and possibly so disturbed on ketamine that he often lacks self-control.
This was worse than the time he told his advertising customers at X to go fuck themselves. Or the time his investors made him apologize for baselessly calling a British cave diving expert a “Pedo Guy.”
Bashing Trump put billions worth of federal contracts at risk. Musk likely did the math and realized his shareholders wouldn’t want to suffer steep losses in his dung-slinging fight.
“I was disappointed in him, but, you know, it is what it is,” Trump told The New York Post.
Yes, it is what it is: A blunder. And it sounds like Musk has a lot more groveling to do.
A bad bet for Big Tech
Musk spent hundreds of millions getting Trump reelected. Then Trump did what Trump does best: Kicked him to the curb.
An insightful piece in Vox explains why Big Tech place a bet on Trump and why its bet went bad:
“The Republicans, when out of power, had a critique of the Democrats which spoke to the tech right, the populist right, the white supremacists and moderate Black and Latino voters alike. But it’s much easier to complain about Democrats in a way that all of those disparate interest groups find compelling than to govern in a way that keeps them all happy.
“Once the Trump administration actually had to choose, it chose basically none of the tech right’s priorities.”
Too bad, so sad.
The mine sweeper
Here’s another stupefying Florida-man stunt: Bill the U.S. Navy for fuel you never pumped into its warships.
A federal grand jury in Miami on Thursday indicted Jasen Butler, 37, owner of Independent Marine Oil Services, on multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering and forgery for fraudulently billing the Department of Defense for fuel that he never delivered.
The Jupiter, Fla., broker is accused of screwing the government out of $5 million and using the loot to buy properties in the Sunshine State and Colorado. He even cheated the USS Patriot, an Avenger-class mine sweeper, prosecutors allege.
Now that the alleged billing scheme has exploded in his face, Butler faces decades in prison. He’s also become the punchline of an old military joke: Anybody can be a mine sweeper – at least once.
Race to the bottom
How does anyone afford $10 million a year to run a NASCAR team?
BK Racing owner Ronald Devine, 68, allegedly did it by pinching the payroll taxes that he withheld from employees of his other businesses.
Devine pleaded guilty on Wednesday and faces up to five years in prison for failing to pay payroll taxes between 2012 and 2017. His racing team was sold at auction after it filed bankruptcy in 2018. He’s also buried under a $31 million judgement from bankruptcy court.
Between 2012 and 2018, BK Racing’s drivers included Alex Bowman, Corey LaJoie and Matt DiBenedetto. The team’s best finish was sixth-place in April 2016.
Take it from Ricky Bobby: “It you ain’t first, you’re last.”
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Psychopaths on parade. This is what psychopaths do all day. Ruin a country or a business or a few billion people on a whim, then get bored and move on to something else. You'd think the two biggest psychopaths would understand how to deal with their own type, but the need to harm and the short attention span are too strong.
Elon's a day late and a dollar short. Trump is so consumed by the need for vengeance and retribution, that Musk will pay for sure.