Elon Musk is not a successful businessman. Far from it. He is a corrupt, small-minded, small businessman who lies to cover up his failures, and who later tries to fill in the lies with “help” from all the wrong places.
He is therefore in debt to dangerous people. Chinese authoritarians, Sinaloan narcotraficantes, the “Russian” mafia. Israeli intelligence, CIA, MI6, whatever. Elon Musk is a hostage.
“Protection”
Why doesn’t he or his stock ever go down, no matter what crimes he commits, no matter what politician he insults, no matter what common decency he violates?
How is it that Musk can fly his personal airplane back and forth to known Sinaloa drug-cartel territory to meet with El Chapo’s relatives?
How is it that Musk can impede Ukraine’s war efforts, call Putin personally,1 and retain US government and military contracts?
How is it that Musk can make the most egregious anti-Semitic statements—statements that would sink anyone else on earth—and a week later be walking around a kibbutz with Benjamin Netanyahu?
Well, I’ll tell you.
Musk is protected by mutual blackmail among his many criminal masters. It’s a case of Three Stooges Syndrome.
Musk is too valuable to too many in this community of criminals and extra-state actors with state interests, control, and concerns.
He is a crowdsourced sockpuppet cosplaying as an oligarch.
He can be forced to do or say anything at any one of his numerous companies, and all his masters are willing to share.
It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none.
Cry For Help
Whenever he makes a cry for help, it is ignored. Like “funding secured,” the largest securities fraud of all time.
Or like the backward cowboy hat down at the Texas/Mexico border last fall.
Or like the Twitter purchase and demolition. The cry for help is ignored, because an appropriate one of the mutual blackmailers jumps up and comes out to neutralize it, recontextualize it, minimize it.
The Scum Pond
This community of criminals enjoys a common all-purpose slush fund for payoffs and money laundering in Tesla stock ($TSLA) and options. Anyone anywhere in the world can pay off employees, contractors, politicians, anyone with a brokerage account, in this, the most liquid options issue on the planet. Yes, often more liquid even than $SPY, the S&P 500 ETF. It is not that payoffs absolutely cannot be physically traced. It is that the clearinghouses that could do so have never been asked, and it would be unorthodox and no prime broker or trading house would like it. There is too much valuable information in the “secrecy” of order flows, and they make too much money selling “anonymous” order flow. To allow a government agency to begin snooping anytime they like into the components or patterns of order flow would destroy the payment-for-order-flow business.
Exchange Value
Meanwhile, the inflation of financial value in $TSLA and its options cannot be explained, and it doesn’t have to be. Everyone throws their hands up and talks about investor enthusiasm, because “value is what someone will pay.”
(Let me admit a technical problem: the windows in which this cartel or that mafia buys in order to allow those mules or these smugglers to sell options or stock must somehow be communicated, and I have no idea what those communications look like. I am positive that they are not actually secret, but just hidden in plain sight.)
Use Value
Tesla is not only a financial-payoff vehicle. Its vehicles are also payoff vehicles. Here in Southern California, these exploding self-immolating death boxes with whompy wheels still somehow retain an allure for certain low-level narco employees and their hangers-on. The cars somehow function as perks, cool toys, status symbols for the money-hungry scumbags who enjoy working for narcos, and they function as incentives for those being forced into criminality. And this again goes to Tesla’s bottom line, making the business look good, supporting its function as a financial-payoff vehicle.
Mickey Mouse vs. Moloch
Let me expand on the geopolitics here. I have mentioned narcotraficantes more than once, and that is for good reason. They are heavily involved in Southern California society, in many businesses and enterprises, and at all levels of the local, state, and federal government. Musk and Tesla are a significant part of how they operate and finance a sort of soft-power imperialism.
Narco imperialism is special, though, and it requires different methods from capitalist state imperialism. Whereas the United States empire had Mickey Mouse and McDonald’s, the narcos have only fear, shame, mental illness, and addiction.
The whole problem is that capital is obsolete. Narcos have absolutely nothing to offer anyone on the planet. Growth via exploitation is no longer possible. They are only agents of destruction, and so their whole operation is basically a triage, a mass ongoing human sacrifice. They need something other than healthy workers with disposable income.
Consider how it works. You are laundering drug money through a Silicon Valley enterprise like Tesla, or any of the numerous web startups in California (even here, in Los Angeles, we have “Silicon Beach”). How much could you learn about the employees? With every entry into a new business, narcos gain a new set of targets for extortion and exploitation. Drug habits, psychological weaknesses, sexual pecadillos... What if you launder money through a big real-estate venture, like an apartment complex? One might gain intelligence on hundreds or thousands of people, including their incomes, family structure, education level, and other useful demographic information. Patterns. All this information can be used to strengthen one’s grip over those people, and turn some of them into assets, agents, workers, prostitutes, assassins, slaves. All this is done “gently”, “softly”, with shame, fear, and intimidation. This can go on for years before anyone notices.
You don’t come in blowing up airplanes and shooting judges in the street. You take over slowly, like gangrene or metastasizing cancer.
Innovate or Die
This is not a conspiracy, exactly. Neither Musk nor Tesla is a creation of his masters. He was just in the right place at the right time with the proper appetite for corruption. And now he provides money laundering and political spokesperson services for the world’s worst organizations. Tesla is the lynchpin of the world’s most important communal slush fund. It is the dankest depth of the global payoff cesspool.
That’s innovation.
‘To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ”’ Ronan Farrow, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule”, New Yorker, August 21, 2023.