Empty Promises Made Giants of Musk, Trump & Crypto

Now We're Seeing Just How Cheap Talk Is

Elon Musk and Donald Trump aren’t pals anymore, but they still seem useful to each other. (CNBC)

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Elon Musk has employed his self-crippled $44 billion megaphone to talk his way back into the consciousness of a population that’s bored with him.

We’re still less than fascinated. His new favorite topic will be just another way of proving he can’t beat the American people into submission with his wallet.  

And that repeating something over and over doesn’t always make it compelling. 

But it might.

“Hunter Biden’s laptop!” “Hunter Biden’s laptop!” 

Everybody on the New York Post staff who actually worked on the 2020 story about the laptop took their names off it.

If it wasn’t solid enough for the people involved in the accuracy-averse New York Post to take pride in it, it’s hard to expect anyone else to trust it. That includes Twitter, of which Musk has dramatically reminded us, by posting emails about the decision-making process preceding restricting the story’s play on the platform.

Like we’re supposed to get all excited about this now. After all, we knew Twitter was reticent about pushing this circus sideshow two years ago. 

And we also knew the Post as the outfit that convicted Richard Jewell in print for an Olympics bombing he didn’t do, and two other guys for helping blow up the Boston Marathon, who didn’t do that, either. And had to settle on all three.

The same paper, along with Post pal Donald Trump, also tried to convict the Central Park 5, and they were innocent, too.

New Yorkers were polled a few years ago on which news source they least expected to be truthful, and they picked Rupert Murdock’s paper hands down. Nothing else was close. The Columbia Journalism Review once called the New York Post “a force for evil.”

So when the Post said it somehow came up with a laptop hard drive with stuff on it that makes Hunter Biden look like a jerk, what did we expect from Twitter and Facebook, under pressure after letting all kinds of garbage dance around on their platforms? Facilitate the pounding of the latest load of political poop to the American electorate three weeks before election day?

It’s not like no one on social media knew about it. There was so much “What about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” going around then that Hillary Clinton must have had PTSD.

New York Post

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The Post reportedly didn’t seek comment then from the Bidens or explain how the hard drive happened to come into its grubby hands.

It came from Rudy Guiliani. Who he got it from, we don’t know, but the strong suspicion then was that they whispered with an Eastern European accent. 

That’s not the leading theory now, though it still isn’t easy to discard.

Currently, Musk and his oxen are largely ignoring that Trump’s FBI had grabbed the hard drive but found it demonstrated no Biden corruption.

Musk knows that as long as you keep repeating any nutty claim, it sounds more credible. That’s why Twitter slowed down the laptop story, and why Musk likes it more and more. 

It’s just the right time for Musk and Trump, who have recently hit the ground bleeding. 

The political future of the ex-President and Musk’s dreams of Twitter in his own image crashed almost simultaneously.

It was hard to ignore that they were joined in splatting on the concrete by the cryptocurrency empire of Sam Bankman-Fried. It was a big couple of days.

Trump and Twitter will probably survive in some forms, perhaps even more twisted forms than those they now present. Bankman-Fried’s FTX Group ain’t coming back, no matter how much he tries to rehabilitate himself through Word-Of-Big-Mouth.

FTX has not only crashed but burned. The question everybody’s asking is whether it will drag down the rest of crypto. Possible. Cryptocurrency markets are melting like a stick of butter on a Winter Haven windowsill. BlockFi and Bitfront have effectively disappeared. 

Similarly, will Trump drag down much of the Republican Party? Will Musk-wrought damage to Twitter sink businesses that depend on it?

Beyond such concerns, what Trump, FTX and Musk’s Twitter have in common — other than each other — is they’re all built on giant steaming piles of baloney.

And millions of people bought that baloney like it was beefsteak. 

The king of “It’s true because I say it’s true” is our friend Trump. He is an inspiration to us all.

He said that parceling out oil leases on federal land was the way to drive oil production, and because he said it, it’s so. He said he had a plan to replace ObamaCare, and millions expected to be able to sign up for it. They can stop waiting now.

The Commander-in-Chief said Covid is “going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” … “This is going to go away without a vaccine.” 

It wasn't a big shock that millions of people stubbornly avoided masking and vaccinating. 

He said the 2020 election was a fraud, and people who should have known better, didn’t.

He told them he would carry the GOP to victory in the 2022 midterms.

Not so much.

The sycophantic Republican leadership became a little less sicko after Trump’s vote-dredging usefulness narrowed significantly. The former president will be replaced as the head of the party, though probably not by anyone whose face would look appropriate on a mountain in South Dakota.

As The Great White House Liar was rambling on a few years ago, Bankman-Fried threw up a proper separate company to hold funds to back up his plans for FTX Group and its “native token,” FTT. But he didn’t use much cash or securities – beyond his adherents’ investments – to back it up. He seemed to have mostly used more FTT.

He told everybody he had invented a currency that was stable because … well, because he said it was.

Warren Buffett once said that the value of crypto in general was hard to find by anyone outside its thrall, and “that explains the difference between productive assets and something that depends on the next guy paying you more than the last guy got.”

Bankman-Fried rose above such naysayers. He hired the redoubtable McGarryBowen ad agency, which made very entertaining FTX commercials. Not many facts were provided, but there was a lot of reassuring talk.

The ads were almost as ground-breaking for their time as Stan Freberg's were for his. But Freberg was just tickling enough cash out of people for a package of Gino’s Pizza Rolls or Chun King Chow Mein. McGarryBowen and FTX had whole savings accounts in their sights.

In a Super Bowl ad, Larry David kidded that he had gone through history pooh-poohing various great ideas like the wheel, the fork and American democracy, and then added FTX-style crypto to his list. He was telling people that they would be as foolish as he if they stuck to following their own instincts.

In another ad, Tom Brady and his now-estranged wife Gisele Bündchen phoned up their half-wit friends, who readily agreed to pledge “I’m in” to FTX. 

The persuasive powers of a good quarterback and a beautiful model, wielded for a few seconds, were enough for a lot of real people to agree to put their money where the sun didn’t shine on what was happening to it. 

Sweet Happy Sammy could talk people into giving him their money, but he couldn’t talk away the reality that it might not be there when they wanted it back.

It’s reminiscent of Albania in the late 1990s. Europe’s most backward country, just then emerging into a market economy, was rocked by a series of collapsing pyramid schemes. 

Photo by henor teneqja on Unsplash

Millions of Albanians, encouraged by friends, had invested in questionable companies. Americans have now done the same after accepting assurances about an opaque financial market from a football player. Most Americans know as little about how blockchain works as the Albanians of 1996 knew about corporate structure.

Many Americans take football players’ opinions too seriously lately. See: Georgia.

Also see: Alabama, now  bizarrely represented in the United States Senate by Tommy Tuberville, who made a name for himself instructing student-athletes in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and other bastions of higher education.

Even without McGarryBowen, there would have been tons of encouraging chat about FTT and other cryptocurrencies on social media, especially Twitter. Your confidence tends to burgeon when the echo chamber tells you you’re on the right track, even if you have never seen a train.

One of the people tweeting the most about the wonders of crypto was Musk, who has been active in the market. It’s interesting that there’s no stopping the use of Twitter to boost one’s own sketchy investments.

Well, there kind of is. Musk got his tweet in a wringer with the Securities and Exchange Commission when he used the platform to pretend that he had secured enough funding to take Tesla private in 2018. He was obliged to make a settlement with the SEC, one that he now wants his lawyers to talk his way out of. 

Of course.

He’s wanted to take over Twitter ever since he abused it. It’s kind of like responding to being accused of mail fraud by buying a new postage meter.

Upon overpaying for Twitter, Musk made a big deal about the possibility of letting the banned Mr. Trump use it again. It didn’t seem to matter that Trump is now largely restrained from doing so by contractual arrangements with Truth Social. Or maybe Musk figured those can go away if he or Trump announce they can.

He fired Twitter’s watchdogs, expecting everything to turn out okay because he said it would. 

He said that the Twitter security checkmark would have value just because he announced he was charging people for it. No consideration to actually checking out applicants.

Musk’s tweeting of the “Hunter Biden Laptop Twitter Files” about restricting the story’s 2020 Twitter play have not so much increased Twitter’s free speech component as they have served as a distraction to its Wild West atmosphere burgeoning since his takeover. 

Twitter has apparently become even more of a playground for various white supremacists, Nazis and anti-semites than before. 

Musk’s files have also encouraged Trump to take the next step in his attempt to gather his loyal troops to back his fantastic claims of being cheated out of a second term. 

“Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he posted on Truth Social.

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

That’s some scary talk right there but it’s just talk. Let’s hope it doesn’t inspire anything untoward.

After all, Jan. 6 is just a month away.