Send Musk To Mars
This Week In Blunders – March 16-22
It’s time to stop burning Teslas and give Elon Musk what he really wants: A taxpayer-funded trip to Mars.
America can finance a Space X mission to colonize the red planet with all of Musk’s baby mommas, and all of Musks spawn, as well as the kind of sycophants who like to suck up way past the moon.
Martians, if there are any, probably won’t want Musk. But if the South African can come to the U.S. illegally, and end up owning the White House a few decades later, he can run Mars, too.
America has long ignored the widening wealth gap that has culminated in billionaires overtaking democracy. Today, it’s at the point where the richest man on Earth is ripping resources away from the poorest people on the planet – and doing it with a chainsaw.
Some view Musks efforts as simply reducing government waste. Other’s see them as a reckless purge of potential political opposition.
Arguably government needs a haircut, but not a scalping.
This is the kind of sci-fi narrative that would best be played out on Mars.
“It’s like, I can’t walk past the TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” Musk told Tesla employees on Thursday. “Like what’s going on? Some people, it’s like listen, I understand if you don’t wanna buy our product, but you don’t have to burn it down. That’s a bit unreasonable.”
A bit unreasonable indeed. We should not be burning Teslas. As Americans, we must show compassion. As Christians (they say we are a Christian nation), we must love our enemies. And as fellow human beings we need to save Musk from himself.
Nobody has destroyed an automobile brand faster than Musk. Tesla owners fear for their safety amid a nationwide vandalism spree and are getting rid of their vehicles in record numbers.
“It’s like driving around a great big MAGA hat,” writes Dan Neil, car critic for The Wall Street Journal.
And Tesla sales are slumping worldwide.
“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” JPMorgan analysts led by Ryan Brinkman wrote in a report earlier this month.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, who has been one of Tesla’s biggest cheerleaders, blames Musk’s job-slashing antics as head of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“This has essentially turned Tesla into a political symbol ... and this is a bad thing,” he wrote on Wednesday.
Alienate Tesla’s progressive-leaning customers, and sidle up to right-wingers who hate electric cars. That’s Musk’s apparent strategy, and it’s not working.
Perhaps he’s got some nefarious plan to drive down the value of Tesla shares so he can acquire more of them at a discounted price, or even take the company private for a song.
For now though, with Tesla stock down nearly 40% this year, he’s begging his employees not to dump their shares. This is what desperate CEOs do, from Enron on down: Spout hype and tell employees to hold on to their shares to staunch the bleeding on the stock market.
Musk told employees to hold on because Tesla was delivering a robotic, artificial-intelligence world “where you could literally just have anything you want.”
He’s even got Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik pumping Tesla stock on Fox News. “It’ll never be this cheap again,” Lutnick said as a split screen showed burning Teslas in Las Vegas. Who ever heard of a Commerce Secretary pumping a stock?
It was a tough week for Musk all the way around. He also suffered the indignity of a massive Cyber truck recall on Thursday. The vehicles are not only an eye-sore, but a road hazard for other drivers with an exterior panel that that can detach while driving.
Amid all of this market noise, I can still hear Mars calling. American taxpayers can surely cough up a couple trillion dollars for a mission to send Musk to Mars.
He can have the whole planet for himself. It will cost far less than the damage Musk is doing here on planet Earth.
Did the Fed Chairman just say that?
Don’t worry. Whatever inflation may come from President Donald Trump’s tariff attacks on America’s biggest trading partners will be “transitory,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday.
Oh, how I wish he would stop using that word. The last time he said inflation would be “transitory” was 2021 and it’s been raging ever since.
Trump has shown very little interest in curbing inflation, despite his campaign promises to do so starting on day one. His tariff threats have sent the stock market tumbling and rekindled recession fears.
But don’t worry about inflation. Powell is on the case.
A fraud by a fraud detector
In 2017, Paul Roberts founded Kubient, a company that specialized in fraud detection in the digital advertising business. But his artificial intelligence-driven software apparently didn’t detect the fraud oozing within his soul.
On Thursday, he was sentenced to a year in prison for securities fraud after pulling off the ol’ round-tripping accounting trick.
Kubient struck a deal with another digital advertising company, ostensibly to provide services to each other for nearly identical fees. Neither, of course, provided these services. They just booked the revenue.
Kubient raised more than $32.5 million when it went public in 2020, but it was delisted from Nasdaq and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy by the end of 2023.
“Paul Roberts cooked the books,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Matthew Podolsky “He lied to investors and auditors about his company’s revenue and about his company’s premier product: an AI-powered tool that, ironically, was supposed to detect fraud in the digital advertising industry.”
UBS and the IRS
Here’s a handy tip for tax season: Declare all your offshore accounts on your tax filings.
On Tuesday, a Miami man pleaded guilty to hiding more than $20 million in dozens of secret Swiss accounts at five different Swiss banks, including UBS, Credit Suisse, Bank Bonhôte, and Bank Julius Baer.
Brazilian-American businessman Dan Rotta, 78, now faces up to five years in prison.
Investigators began cracking down on offshore bank accounts in 2008.
In 2014, UBS Group AG, which now owns Credit Suisse, paid a $2.6 billion fine after pleading guilty to helping thousands of Americans evade taxes, and it’s still facing sanctions for non-compliance.
Prosecutors have since spent years investigating the bank’s customers.
On March 10, a wealthy Florida woman, Gilda Rosenberg, pleaded guilty for concealing $90 million from the IRS through undeclared accounts in Switzerland, Israel, Andorra and Panama.
Does UBS stand for the United Bank of Switzerland, or is it an acronym for what it has dished out on behalf of its wealthy customers? Unmitigated Bullshit.
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Love it! Please let's send Musk and all his supporters to Mars - permanently!!!!
Great column, Al. From your old friend Mim.