You may have heard that Tesla’s board has proposed giving Elon Musk a one trillion dollar payday. Tesla is falling apart, and the ostensible theory is that only Musk can save it, as if he’s not the guy who ran it into the ground with his bad decision making.
Elon, of course, is currently “the world’s richest man” but his fortune is probably under 500 billion. So he wants to triple it.
This, as you may have figured out already, is not about saving Tesla, but looting it before it crashes out completely, which is what’s going to happen. Only 100% anti-china EV tariffs are keeping Tesla alive right now, but the problem is that non-Chinese companies are now producing cheaper, better cars and no, Tesla isn’t going to regain its lead.
Elon is just a rat trying to leave a sinking ship with a huge wheel of gold embossed brie, and the board (his cronies) are helping him.
Meanwhile:
(Every person who told you that the end of dollar hegemony was impossible was either an idiot or lying to you.)
Oh, and meanwhile China has banned all its tech companies from buying NVidia AI chips. Seems they figure their homegrown chips are now as good as the lobotomized versions NVidia is allowed to sell to Chinese companies.
In about three years, China’s chips will be as good as NVidia’s. In about six years they’ll be as good and a lot cheaper. Then every country outside the West will switch.
Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, every non-Western country will use Chinese Open Source AI, because using American or European AI is way too risky (if you don’t understand why, you’ve been a coma for the past 40 years.)
NVidia is driving something like 40% of American stock valuations and AI is the huge bet America is making. America can’t even make magnets.
So what happens when China can produce essentially everything the West can, at equal or better quality, and it costs less? Passenger jets, military tech, chips, AI, robots, drones, cars, consumer goods. Everything. (or a reasonable facsimile, well north of 90% within five to ten years, and it’s already north of 80%.)
Well, the oligarchs who have been competing to be the richest guy in America are going to find they have a whole bunch of US dollars that the most important economy in the world, China, won’t accept for anything meaningful. You won’t be able to buy Chinese companies with it. You won’t be able to buy Chinese tech secrets with it. Chinese scientists won’t want to work in the shithole that the US is turning into, especially given all the racism against Chinese.
American oligarchs will, as my father put it, find out that they were competing to be “King Shit of Turd Island.” Like being the world’s richest Indian in 1950. You’ll live a nice life, but you don’t matter.
Serious elites have three jobs, in order of importance.
- Keep their country powerful and advanced and important;
- Keep control of their country
- Compete among themselves.
American elites reversed the order of these tasks for generations. They’ll be lucky to avoid a civil war, is how badly they’ve fucked up. And the tech-bro “masters of the universe” are about to watch China roar past them and gain the tech lead in everything that matters. They can own America’s Tik-tok, but who cares, because America is a has-been nation, coasting on legacy fumes, and it’s only going to fall further and further behind.
Thiel and Musk and so on are just crabs in a bucket, competing for power in country going to Hell. May the best most ruthless crab be crowed King Shit of Turd Island.
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GramSci
Thank you, Ian.
There aren’t words crude enough to describe US scum oligarchs.
But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. With the capital strike of 1936, if the Huns hadn’t marched into Paris one short month before the 1940 Democratic National Convention, Thomas E. Dewey or John Nance Garner would have become president and it would have been Ronald Reagan or LBJ all over again, thirty or forty years earlier.
But it’s not all their fault; it’s also the USian electorate, drunk on the banality of empire.
My wife and I wish we could get out, but family trumps sanity.
NR
Given that working-class people in America show absolutely no desire to break the power of the billionaires, I guess the best we can hope for is that the billionaires’ wealth and power won’t be able to completely insulate them from the consequences of their actions. I don’t know if that will be the case, but maybe. Who knows.
ibaien
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2025/sep/16/song-chun-zhu-why-one-of-the-worlds-most-brilliant-ai-scientists-left-the-us-for-china
a good piece that dovetails with several points in this post.
Huntly
Didn’t you hear? Tesla will get 80% of it’s revenue from the Optimus robot sometime between now and then, but not before! Or maybe it will be solar, or maybe power walls. So who cares about cars man!
someofparts
For vitriol adequate to the occasion check out South Park. Satan is stuck in the White House and hates it there, wants to get out, but can’t because Trump just got him pregnant.
John
I spent a year traveling around south Asia in 1981. India was interesting in that it had a very closed poorly distributed socialist lite economy. They had many of the consumer goods of the west….but they were all poorly made shit products. There were stringent import controls so everything had to be made in India. Being a dollar hippy traveler was like being a king. The Indian oligarchs lived behind high walls and the broad streets of New Delhi had no traffic. A lot of visible extreme poverty.
Our oligarchs would love to duplicate that.
Feral Finster
I figured it out a decade or so ago. If we don’t go up in a mushroom cloud first, the United States will increasingly resemble Brasil, albeit a Brasil with less attractive females and a more hyperbellgerent foreign policy. Fewer mosquitoes, though.
This suits the oligarchs just dandy.
mago
Maybe dengue mosquitoes mr Finster but they’ll only inject the poor.
Sometimes I send a comment that doesn’t hit the light of day, and I shrug and say, all right, something went astray without knowing what it was or trying to figure it out as happened yesterday.
I’ll just quote Hemingway or was it Fitzgerald? The rich, they’re not like you or me.
different clue
@ Feral Finster,
Manmade global warming will bring all the mosquitos to America in the fullness of time. And the icky ticks are already spreading with their icky tick diseases.
Feral Finster
@Mago:
It was Fitzgerald. And the rich are not like us. That’s how they got to be rich.