The article shows that Washington and big billionaires always have billions of dollars to bail out banks, Twitter, or fund SpaceX scams. But when it is time to save the Afghan partners who saved American soldiers on the battlefield, they always say they have no resources or time. While retail investors are losing money in these economic games, our families are hiding in dark rooms with zero future. True accountability means you fix your real promises to people, not making shell games for rich people on television
Ponzi Schemes fail because eventually, people want to cash out and there is no cash there to realize. In rational times the SEC and the CFPB would call a pause, but they have been neutered by the Conman in Chief with a little help from Musk's DOGE. When the bill comes due for this latesst ponzi scheme, the government will try to bail him and other wealthy Oligarchs out by selling T Bills... I wonder who is going to buy them? Yet another bubble. When it pops, the result will be a depression.
I couldn't agree more. Reagan opened the great cash spigot to the wealthy and transferred the small amount of wealth the middle class had over to the insatiable upper class.
Not those of us who moved our money into international (Europe and Asia) funds as soon as he was elected.
It was clear his policies were going to slow the growth of the economy and crash the value of the dollar from his promises. That is exactly what has happened.
The first few greedy investors will make out well the last in “ suckers “ will loose . Then , after the collapse ,the vultures will swoop in and grab the depleated assets . Will we ever learn?
Except that the conditions are worse now: governments and central banks have substantially fewer resources to intervene in a crisis, and the regulatory guardrails put in place are being diluted radically.
Too big to fail is a key to all of this. Recall that Musk's first big boost came when Tesla cashed in on the gov't bailout of automakers (while Obama left homeowners, often people of color) to fend for ourselves. Must is not a genius, he's a vulture. Like Trump he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run. The gov't will not let these big businesses owned by the oligarchs fail, both for political reasons (because of Citizens United, lobbying, etc.) and economic reasons.
Probably the only real solution (besides revolution) is for public ownership of critical technologies, or at least a big enough part of them to keep the others in line. The public sector provides most of the critical foundational research (often called "basic research") for all these technologies, from what is typcially called "tech" to mRNA vaccine's, and on and on. Then we hand it to the vultures to exploit and keep most of the resulting profit for themselves. This can clearly be seen in the rising productivity of workers over the last 50 years, but the capture of a disproportionate share of it by the rich capitalists.
When will we learn? The current politcal economy is rigged, and tweaking it will not ultimately work.
Maybe it's worth $1.77 Trillion if global financial markets say it is. Big money needs places to go having nothing to do with us little people. The markets have a mind of their own, we're just along for the ride.
The privileged will make $$$ on the ride up, the rest will be in the breadlines on the slam-dunk down. By the rest, I mean little people who put their $$$ into institutions who manage the $$$.
It’s an illusion. Their sources of investments are taxes we pay and investments we make (via institutions). Our utility bills have increased to build the huge warehouses cooling the IT robots. (What a fool I am thinking the taxes I pay and investments I make are for my future!).
We see communities protesting against the warehouses being built in their backyards. More hotter days. The ride Mark referred to accelerates the wealth transfer and climate change…. It’s as if our lives are shortening and we funded it with no representation.
They have ways of getting rid of the common people: making healthcare obsolete or very expensive , kicking out the hard workers (although illegal), moving on to eliminating Permanent Residents. Stop the public funding of education and means of transportation. On and on!!
@Mark a.o. We little people as in "ordinary people who work and pay the correct amount of income taxes" are not "just along for the ride". Each and every time it turns out, that we are the ones paying for the tickets.
Trump's Immigration Czar Stephen Miller has been an outspoken immigrant hater since high school. With an office in the West Wing, he's the architect of their draconian immigration and deportation scheme.
I was raised Catholic, fell away a long time ago but love Pope Leo. He's an American standing up to Trump and speaking out for migrants. That's what Jesus would say.
My opinion is we are all immigrants…this land once was occupied by the Native Americans only. I was an immigrant, Trump’s Grandpa was an immigrant. Steph Miller’s hatred can go back to his ancestors’ country.
The US does not want (more) immigrants and I for one, would have preferred honesty in that regard. "We are all immigrants" and "this is a country of immigrants" etc. are slogans, that bear no relation to US immigation policies.
The "anti-immigrant" IIRIRA caused 100s, maybe even 1000s of deaths. It was enacted in 1996 and signed by Prez Clinton. This law was never repealed. It caused of a lot of the current misery.
According to the UNHCR currently more than 120 million people have been forced to flee due to war, violence, persecution, hunger. Add the people who want to leave their home country for of lack of opportunities, corruption, etc. No country can absorb these numbers of immigrants. Programs like Temporary Protected Status and Options to Request Asylum sound humanitarian, but become cruel once time is up and/or status is not given.
Washington, big billionaires, and Wall Street have no resources or time for the American People either. They just have resources to make themselves richer every day and to hell with the People...sooner rather than later. Remember, we are NPCs they extract money from until there is no more money to extract. Then they plan to move on to more lucrative money sources when the People are gone. This is how their minds work. They are not in any kind of reality except the Ponzi money reality. It is up to the People to put a stop to this. Human ingenuity is what the People have. (https://substack.com/home/post/p-201124983) That substack offers 100 ways to legally lower Musk income. It is time to use it to our advantage. Our first chore is to stop worshipping money and people like Musk, Trump, and Wall Street. One way: don't buy Starlink in any form. I have gotten a lot of advertisements to toss Comcast and buy Starlink instead for my home computer links to the internet. Like Mr. Armitage in the substack above recommends--don't do it. Stop being one of Musk and Wall Street's cash cows.
Frontier keeps offering deals to switch from fiber to Starlink and I won't do it. I've seen how Musk plays games with Starlink. He'll shut it down just for fun.
Agreed, Teresa, it is the same attitude that the elites of the last Gilded Age, and the right-wing have never backed away from Ayn Rand's philosophy of the makers (elite) and the takers (everyone else). With today's technology, of Social Media algorithms and AI in general, they can manipulate the psychology of the masses who either don't have the time or interest in staying informed in today's world.
One thing not mentioned in this essay is that Musk lied about being the founder of Tesla written in to the paperwork when he purchased the company. That fact is enough to question Musk's honesty and demonstrates how he lies to carry out his grift. He is more skilled than trump at scamming the public, and bought the presidency so he could destroy the agencies that were regulating his various businesses and harvest the personal information of every American held by the government with the so called DOGE.
I believe he should be prosecuted and convicted for his actions in DOGE alone. He is a Nazi, and he demonstrated it with his Nazi salute during the inauguration ceremony.
We do have parasitic elected officials as well as industrialists of all stripes. We have our work cut out for us to live in a balanced society in which the work of all is valued with salaries that are commensurate with the cost of living, which has become exorbitant due to parasitic industrialists and so called 'owners' of our housing, food production, education, and healthcare.
There is also a concern that Musk’s “successful” business Starlink will lead to dramatic changes in the upper atmosphere ( https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html ) with potentially disastrous consequences for life on earth. But that’s for our children to deal with.
Good point, but that assumes Musk actually means what he says about Mars. Prof. Krugman’s Substack today details how Elon is just a conman using hyped up sales jobs to fleece the gullible.
This man is running many Ponzi schemes to make money. This is why he projects Ponzi on Social Security. Ponzi is all he can do, and anything, like the lives of The People of the USA, are nothing but Ponzi's in his way. This is an evil man. Yet, notice who and how many follow him, drooling all the way. That would be Trump, rich people, Stock Markets, and Wall Street and all Wall Street Acolytes. Just to start with.
His Mars fantasy is a fantasy. He probably read a lot of scifi books when he was a teenager, and some sources of fantasy conspiracy theories about the earth collapsing and a bright new future world of white people only on Mars continuing. Getting humans to Mars is ridiculous because of the years it would take, and so is being self sufficient on a planet with a ridiculously hostile to life environment.
And some data and documentation showing starlink background connected to dominion voting machines. See https://substack.com/inbox/post/200838650 from the Election Truth Alliance , along with multiple posts from This Will Hold.
Two things in reply. One, I continue to recall how Trump said that he was losing in PA and then Elon worked his computer magic, and then Trump won PA. What did Trump mean? And why was this never reported more deeply about what Trump meant? Two, when Musk moved his DOGE people into government agencies in Jan/Feb 2025 they set up their own servers to mimic or takeover the legitimate agency servers. They did it quickly and easily in conference rooms. And no one was the wiser until it leaked. If they could do that then, why couldn't servers have been set up to intercept legitimately reported vote totals between the origin count computer and the vote reporting computer, and thus change the count by spoofing the origin server? With no paper trail who would know? And if the communication was done by a controlled satellite system like Starlink, there would be no logs of the communications relays. All seven "swing" states went to Trump. There was no way in 2024 that Trump was going to leave the results of the election to "chance" because he if lost, he was going to prison. He cheats all the time; why wouldn't he in November 2024 when the stakes were so high? Well, he would. And I think he did with Elon's help. So the payoff for Elon was his ability to access all the US government databases he wanted for whatever purpose he had to help his businesses. That was what DOGE was for.
Action: Throw money at it (preferably other people's money).
Secondary characteristic: throw materiel (and men) at it.
In case of failure throw more money, more men, more materiel.
There's nothing new about this approach, it's been going on since goodness knows when. For jaded old Europeans like myself... it's the American Way. And now, the difference is the sheer unimaginable scale of it... All in the hands of idiots, scammers and conmen.
A wonderful country... It still always felt like the realm of the possible... But with so many blind spots. Expanding blind spots... expanding... expanding... until there's power with no vision, no hearing, no feeling, no understanding... Just insatiable greed and limitless stupidity...
In which Europeans shared and many still share... because of the idiotic, irresponsible belief that Uncle Sam will always ride to the rescue...
What a degenerate mess the generation that took over in the 1980s and their successors have made of the world.
Time to shut up and pull ourselves together. If we still can.
Right, because billionaires, according to your average conservative, deserve to be worshipped because they do all the work and pay for everything (somehow) and everyone else is just a tiny insignificant cog. And that is the world's greatest con right there, the glorification of the rich elite and the belief that a government for and by the people run by college educated people trying to do the right thing is somehow the true enemy. Fox News and right wing-media, which is now most of the media, thanks to consolidation by the right-wing elite, push this message day after day and night after night. The masses eat it up and think how awesome it is that the first trillionaire lives in America and having one person with that amount of wealth is a good thing. And so, we are stuck, with a broken paid off democracy/corpocracy where the looting pirates are running the show.
And herein lies rub - “Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut.“
AND lest we forget, “Elon Musk's projects and companies have received an estimated $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the past two decades. This government funding includes federal, state, and local sources, with nearly two-thirds of the total allocated over a recent five-year span.”
So, in addition to all of the “investments” through stock market mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc, taxpayers also have the great privilege of contributing or “investing” $BILLIONS through govt contracts, loans, and subsidies” to the WORLD’S richest man, soon to be TRILLIONAIRE!
Remind me, when do we get our first dividend check?
(But there’s no THERE, there. It’s a facade. And btw, if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Mr Krugman was referring to djt, the most successful businessman in the world, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Mr Art of the Deal himself, or is it Steal?)
This right here is where the Musk story stops being merely ridiculous and becomes institutional capture.
He sells tomorrow, Wall Street packages the mythology, government power blesses it, and ordinary investors get drafted into the dream through index funds.
The product is no longer the car, the tunnel, the robotaxi, or Mars.
The product is belief itself.
And once belief gets written into markets and policy, the con stops being entertainment. It becomes infrastructure.
In October 2016, Elon Musk promised that by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive autonomously from Los Angeles to New York City without the need for a single touch. Musk stated that the car would operate fully autonomously, covering the coast-to-coast route without any human intervention, including automatic charging along the route. He added that this capability would be "replicable by every car Tesla makes" from that point forward.
It is almost ten years later now, and this feat is still nowhere near possible. Anybody got a bridge to sell? Anyone wanna buy some tulips?
There’s a sucker born every minute.
Also note in the photo above that Muck is wearing a “DOGEfather” t-shirt with a black MAGA hat. Nice! The world’s richest man basically killing the world’s poorest by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”…
You might wonder how he can sleep at night, but he’s already stated that empathy is a weakness.
It took me a couple of years hearing Musk's pronouncements being taken seriously by the media to realize he was full of it. I stopped listening to all his promises a long time ago I don't know if he's worse than Trump but they're similar.
What concerns me most is the shift from voluntary speculation to institutionalized speculation.
People can choose to buy into a story. But when that story becomes embedded in major indexes, retirement funds, and public markets, millions of people are effectively participating whether they want to or not.
At that point the issue is bigger than Elon Musk. It becomes a question of how much influence concentrated wealth, political power, and financial institutions should have in shaping what everyone else is required to carry on their balance sheets.
Very true. Most people have no idea what is in their retirement portfolios.
I was looking at mutual funds yesterday. I went into the holdings of my Vanguard index fund there were the Magnificent 7. I chose not to invest anymore in that fund because all of the eggs are in one basket. It's done great so far, but I prefer to diversify.
The Vanguard site doesn't show you the percentage of their Total Stock Market fund that's in the top tech stocks, but Morningstar shows that just those seven companies account for 30 percent of the value of the fund. Crazy. I made the same call you did.
The great irony is that Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. They were going down. Then Obama issued the green subsidies - which Mu卐kRat pounced on, and suddenly Mu卐kRat was a "genius".
Without Obama, nobody would have even heard of Mu卐kRat. He'd be a nobody.
My husband recently retired. We met with our tax accountant to figure out his convoluted pension plan and discuss moving his 401K to a local bank. I mentioned the bank had an investment plan that at least protected your principle though gain was still at risk. He brushed off my concerns as alarmist. I would bet he doesn't read Paul Krugman. We lost 60% of his small 401K in the crash of 2008. We can't afford to lose 60% of his substantially higher retirement fund. But what do we, or Paul Krugman, know. We'll go with our gut and keep the money we've managed to save through the years safe, especially since trump and his gang of crooks are proposing severe cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It may be the only income we'll have in our elder years.
Superman ideals monetized. When a significant portion of a population chose to follow myth blindly instead of reason, it is indeed very disturbing and dangerous.
Musk willfully signed the death warrants of millions of children and never showed a shed of remorse in the aftermath (all because when he was a spoiled rich white kid in Apartheid South Africa, USAID had the gall to offer help to non-whites, which offended his sensibilities).
I don’t understand why he is not ostracized like the mass murderer he is.
Because our government loves the sadism and murder. To Trump, Mike Johnson, Congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court and now Wall Street, all of this is going exactly to the Project 2025 plan. They WANT the poor people to die because poor people can't make them richer; poor people cost them money.
The difference is subtle. A ponzi scheme works by attracting new investors by declaring large returns on investment. Many earlier investors let their investments ride because the stated rate of return is so high. The few that pull their invesments early are actually paid - which just fuels the FOMO of those still in or considering investing. But little money is actually being earned so eventually the scheme becomes unsustainable as the pool of new investors shrinks while the pool cashing out increases. Think Bernie Madoff.
A pyramid scheme works on a similar but slightly less fraudulent premise. The "investors" aren't actually promised a specific return, they are promised a return from selling the company's products and, more importantly, from enlisting additional "distributors", a small fraction of whom's sales are credited to the recruiting distributor. It is easy to see that the earliest "distributors" do quite well as they have a large pool of gullible people to recruit. But ultimately there is a limit to how many distributors of so-and-so's brand of overpriced vitamins or cosmetics a community can support. The early "distributors" are the top of the pyramid. The further down the pyramid, the more difficult to compete with earlier distributors and to recruit more distributors from an ever-shrinking pool.
Good explanation. A friend of mine once got sucked into a pyramid. He tried to recruit me, but it didn't make sense to me so I didn't bite on it. I've had more than my share of good luck in life.
I know someone who is involved in a pyramid scheme. She likes to make sales, but she isn't in it to get rich or recruit. She LOVES the concept of her wellness product and has bought into the 'woo-woo' of it 100%.
The idea was, you would send the letter on to 2-120 of your friends, who would send it on to 2-120 of their friends, repeat 1-3x(who would send it on to 2-120 of their friends,) who would each send YOU a dollar.
Imagine a million people each sending you a dollar!
Masks genius?? Seriously?? He used daddy's money to buy one company that he leveraged to buy another. He does what tRumpf does. That does not make him smart. He bought Tesla and Starlink....these companies did not emanate.from his imagination...
I wonder what the future holds for Musk's enterprises since he's so strongly linked to MAGA. A lot of places are diversifying away from US. We aren't the only people on the planet. Our significance is sliding everyday as Trump takes us both back to the future and into a brave new world.
Correct! the real engineers who founded Tesla were Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who founded Tesla in 2003. Musk is not an engineer and doesn't know how to code. His degree was in business. That's why he had to hire all those high school and college students to help him eliminate whole government departments, like Noah weather and US AID. Musk simply took his huge profits from selling Paypal and began buying Tesla stock, soon becoming its largest stockholder, & forcing out Eberhard and Tarpenning.
He bought Starlink??? From whom did he buy it? Starlink was created by SpaceX, which was started from scratch by Musk, with his own money, not something that came from his father. You guys have Musk derangement syndrome— Musk has done plenty of awful things, why make up false ones?
People with the remotest knowledge of the facts stop paying attention to anything you say
As far as I know, you are correct about Starlink. SpaceX, however, built on McDonnell-Douglas's Delta Clipper program, using many of the same engineers. SpaceX was very fortunate that NASA cancelled the Delta Clipper contract in 1996, and just as fortunate that NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract in its early days in 2008. Without either of these events SpaceX wouldn't be here today.
I don't have money to invest, so I just sit back and watch the show. Like George Carlin said, "When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America, you get a front row seat."
When I was working, I invested in the company 401K. When I retired, I turned that into an IRA. When my mother died, I invested my inheritance in mutual funds with the same company. Almost all are indexed funds. If this actually goes through, I have a lot of work to do.
You don't have to be a Wall Street fat cat to be hurt by this. In fact, most of them are probably smart enough to be moving money out now.
Without the Obama administration, there would be no Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
All the federal subsidies, tax credits, CAFE credits, etc Musk has received via his companies make him the biggest federal welfare queen of the century.
Now, Musk is getting rich from government contracts. I think a future administration should freeze all contracts with SpaceX and any other Musk businesses, as long as Elon Musk is associated with them in any way. With DOGE, he tried to destroy our government in order to line his own pockets. We should not be further enriching him with our taxpayer money.
You can't believe the investment industry is so stupid?!?!?! The same industry that pumps up the stock market every time Trump says Iran is going to sign a deal tomorrow? The same industry that keeps propping up Musk no matter how blatantly he scams them time after time?
I swear, these people are so stupid they could be held up by voicemail.
This is more an example of the old adage "if you owe the bank a million you're in trouble, if you owe the bank a billion the bank's in trouble". The financial "wizards" have to keep bailing "mad Elon" to prevent the country from realising just how shaky is the financial "house of cards.
It is a race to see who crashes America first, Musk or Trump.
In the short run, the "market" doesn't care about the truth. It cares only about what other people do when they behave *as though* something were true.
All that matters is "number go up!" The trick lies in not being the bag holder when the music stops.
I don’t think OP has misunderstood, because what you describe is literally stupid. When you actually look at how these markets function, these completely made up markets, they are ridiculous. It’s gambling x children’s games on a grand scale, designed to make the players rich and no one else. They build nothing, they produce nothing, they help no one.
Our society has taken a noble concept - people with means investing in the creativity and brilliance of those without, and receiving a proportional reward when that initial investment helps to create things beneficial to society - and turned it into a horror show, where the investing is more important than the creating, and people can become grotesquely wealthy by never doing anything but gambling on greed and fear.
The investment industry is more greedy than stupid. The investment banks make their big money in the IPO and don't typically hold any of the stocks afterward. The securities dealers make commissions by trading the stocks and typically don't hold them themselves. The non-index funds hold stocks but watch them like hawks and dump them as soon as they fail to fit their performance goals. Which leaves index funds and private investors to take the brunt.
Then consider the possibility that they are corrupted. You may be more likely to buy into a scheme if you get a small cut - and then can just run. Predatory capitalism is at its end stage and most of the Wall Street predators are shoveling money away with the full understanding that they may have to bail out to a safe place where they can live comfortably for the rest of their life while Rome is burning.
For a couple of years back in the late 1990s, there was one absolutely sure way to make tons of money in the stock market as a retail investor: Open up a modest (say, $250,000 or so) retail account with Merrill Lynch, but have another independent account with any other broker. Your Merrill Lynch adviser would call you periodically with tip to buy stocks that Merrill Lynch's analysts said were sure to make a big move soon. All you had to do was write down whatever that stock was, then short the hell out of it in your other account because what Merrill Lynch was doing was dumping all the crap stocks on the small retail customers that their big customers were getting out of.
Andrew Cuomo ruined that by prosecuting Merrill Lynch for doing that modified pump-and-dump.
Musk is self-demonstrably a fascist treasonist who should be deported and his assets should be seized to pay for the damage he's done to America. What has happened to the sentiment of demanding accountability from him and all regime sycophants for their insurgent behavior?
Is that accountability now manifested in allowing him to achieve the status of trillionaire in the country which has so richly and UNDESERVEDLY rewarded him AND which he has subsequently BETRAYED?
NO! He must still be held fully and actionably accountable.
Cheering and supporting this fascist is treasonous. Accordingly, investors in companies owned, operated or influenced by Musk are complicit in fascism and treason and should also be held appropriately and actionably accountable. Supporting him is REPREHENSIBLE and unpatriotic.
His damage to the entire world (via his awful DOGE actions) justify putting him in one of his rockets programmed for deep outer space, never to return. He doesn’t belong on this beautiful earth.
The few US private company pension plans left are insured by a US government agency. As soon as any recession hits, they are all out of money. One of the reasons the US government needed to bail out General Motors and Chrysler is that if they failed, the pension guarantee would cost about as much as any potential bailout.
"In reality, it's a very successful but fairly small satellite launch company, bolted onto a stagnant money-losing social media company and a money-incinerating AI company, and then sprinkled with a lot of hype about humankind going interplanetary," said Robin Wigglesworth, editor of the Financial Times' finance blog, Alphaville.
Starlink, the only profitable piece of the entity, has been lowering prices to pump up its revenues to make it look good for the SpaceX IPO. Look for price increases and lower profits after the IPO.
Meanwhile, back in the reality based world, China builds more solar power infrastructure and more high speed trains, while graduating more engineers, physicists, and mathematicians.
The article shows that Washington and big billionaires always have billions of dollars to bail out banks, Twitter, or fund SpaceX scams. But when it is time to save the Afghan partners who saved American soldiers on the battlefield, they always say they have no resources or time. While retail investors are losing money in these economic games, our families are hiding in dark rooms with zero future. True accountability means you fix your real promises to people, not making shell games for rich people on television
Ponzi Schemes fail because eventually, people want to cash out and there is no cash there to realize. In rational times the SEC and the CFPB would call a pause, but they have been neutered by the Conman in Chief with a little help from Musk's DOGE. When the bill comes due for this latesst ponzi scheme, the government will try to bail him and other wealthy Oligarchs out by selling T Bills... I wonder who is going to buy them? Yet another bubble. When it pops, the result will be a depression.
Whrn this scheme implodes Musk will scuttle off to Argentina or onr if thr Gulf states
We'll have to force Argentina to extradite him, along with Theil and any of the other oligarchs who ripped us off and then decamped to Nazi paradise.
And as one of the architects of this debacle, a future President should give him the Osama Bin Laden treatment.
With any luck Musk will join Tiel in Argentina!
Not the hoosegow?
Hopefully M.A.R.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Man_(TV_series)
Might want to enable spellcheck...
We need to claw all that stolen wealth back. First we'll need One Big Beautiful Blue Tsunami! 🌊
I couldn't agree more. Reagan opened the great cash spigot to the wealthy and transferred the small amount of wealth the middle class had over to the insatiable upper class.
Here we go again! Workers in their 40’s and 50’s are going to be hit especially hard by the upcoming “ponzilla”.
Not those of us who moved our money into international (Europe and Asia) funds as soon as he was elected.
It was clear his policies were going to slow the growth of the economy and crash the value of the dollar from his promises. That is exactly what has happened.
The first few greedy investors will make out well the last in “ suckers “ will loose . Then , after the collapse ,the vultures will swoop in and grab the depleated assets . Will we ever learn?
2007-2008 all over again.
Except that the conditions are worse now: governments and central banks have substantially fewer resources to intervene in a crisis, and the regulatory guardrails put in place are being diluted radically.
Too big to fail is a key to all of this. Recall that Musk's first big boost came when Tesla cashed in on the gov't bailout of automakers (while Obama left homeowners, often people of color) to fend for ourselves. Must is not a genius, he's a vulture. Like Trump he was born on third base and thought he hit a home run. The gov't will not let these big businesses owned by the oligarchs fail, both for political reasons (because of Citizens United, lobbying, etc.) and economic reasons.
Probably the only real solution (besides revolution) is for public ownership of critical technologies, or at least a big enough part of them to keep the others in line. The public sector provides most of the critical foundational research (often called "basic research") for all these technologies, from what is typcially called "tech" to mRNA vaccine's, and on and on. Then we hand it to the vultures to exploit and keep most of the resulting profit for themselves. This can clearly be seen in the rising productivity of workers over the last 50 years, but the capture of a disproportionate share of it by the rich capitalists.
When will we learn? The current politcal economy is rigged, and tweaking it will not ultimately work.
TARP prevented over a million foreclosures.
Maybe it's worth $1.77 Trillion if global financial markets say it is. Big money needs places to go having nothing to do with us little people. The markets have a mind of their own, we're just along for the ride.
The privileged will make $$$ on the ride up, the rest will be in the breadlines on the slam-dunk down. By the rest, I mean little people who put their $$$ into institutions who manage the $$$.
It’s an illusion. Their sources of investments are taxes we pay and investments we make (via institutions). Our utility bills have increased to build the huge warehouses cooling the IT robots. (What a fool I am thinking the taxes I pay and investments I make are for my future!).
We see communities protesting against the warehouses being built in their backyards. More hotter days. The ride Mark referred to accelerates the wealth transfer and climate change…. It’s as if our lives are shortening and we funded it with no representation.
They have ways of getting rid of the common people: making healthcare obsolete or very expensive , kicking out the hard workers (although illegal), moving on to eliminating Permanent Residents. Stop the public funding of education and means of transportation. On and on!!
There is also the little issue of the baby boomer retirement wave. There will be massive withdrawals from those funds.
The first baby boomers are 80. The retirements started years ago.
The biggest withdrawals will be when they die.
@Mark a.o. We little people as in "ordinary people who work and pay the correct amount of income taxes" are not "just along for the ride". Each and every time it turns out, that we are the ones paying for the tickets.
What "global" market? Both US and China just announced that they are building a wall between each other's markets.
A rough ride!
Yes, it's shameful. So sorry
Trump's Immigration Czar Stephen Miller has been an outspoken immigrant hater since high school. With an office in the West Wing, he's the architect of their draconian immigration and deportation scheme.
I was raised Catholic, fell away a long time ago but love Pope Leo. He's an American standing up to Trump and speaking out for migrants. That's what Jesus would say.
My opinion is we are all immigrants…this land once was occupied by the Native Americans only. I was an immigrant, Trump’s Grandpa was an immigrant. Steph Miller’s hatred can go back to his ancestors’ country.
What a sick country our leaders make it.
Frump’s mother is an immigrant, from the Hebrides in Scotland.
The US does not want (more) immigrants and I for one, would have preferred honesty in that regard. "We are all immigrants" and "this is a country of immigrants" etc. are slogans, that bear no relation to US immigation policies.
The "anti-immigrant" IIRIRA caused 100s, maybe even 1000s of deaths. It was enacted in 1996 and signed by Prez Clinton. This law was never repealed. It caused of a lot of the current misery.
According to the UNHCR currently more than 120 million people have been forced to flee due to war, violence, persecution, hunger. Add the people who want to leave their home country for of lack of opportunities, corruption, etc. No country can absorb these numbers of immigrants. Programs like Temporary Protected Status and Options to Request Asylum sound humanitarian, but become cruel once time is up and/or status is not given.
Thank you!
Washington, big billionaires, and Wall Street have no resources or time for the American People either. They just have resources to make themselves richer every day and to hell with the People...sooner rather than later. Remember, we are NPCs they extract money from until there is no more money to extract. Then they plan to move on to more lucrative money sources when the People are gone. This is how their minds work. They are not in any kind of reality except the Ponzi money reality. It is up to the People to put a stop to this. Human ingenuity is what the People have. (https://substack.com/home/post/p-201124983) That substack offers 100 ways to legally lower Musk income. It is time to use it to our advantage. Our first chore is to stop worshipping money and people like Musk, Trump, and Wall Street. One way: don't buy Starlink in any form. I have gotten a lot of advertisements to toss Comcast and buy Starlink instead for my home computer links to the internet. Like Mr. Armitage in the substack above recommends--don't do it. Stop being one of Musk and Wall Street's cash cows.
I turned down looking at a house to buy because the internet link was Starlink. The realtor was not pleased.
Frontier keeps offering deals to switch from fiber to Starlink and I won't do it. I've seen how Musk plays games with Starlink. He'll shut it down just for fun.
Agreed, Teresa, it is the same attitude that the elites of the last Gilded Age, and the right-wing have never backed away from Ayn Rand's philosophy of the makers (elite) and the takers (everyone else). With today's technology, of Social Media algorithms and AI in general, they can manipulate the psychology of the masses who either don't have the time or interest in staying informed in today's world.
One thing not mentioned in this essay is that Musk lied about being the founder of Tesla written in to the paperwork when he purchased the company. That fact is enough to question Musk's honesty and demonstrates how he lies to carry out his grift. He is more skilled than trump at scamming the public, and bought the presidency so he could destroy the agencies that were regulating his various businesses and harvest the personal information of every American held by the government with the so called DOGE.
I believe he should be prosecuted and convicted for his actions in DOGE alone. He is a Nazi, and he demonstrated it with his Nazi salute during the inauguration ceremony.
I have read this too. I agree with you completely.
We need to have One Big Beautiful Blue Tsunami! 🌊 followed by a serious reckoning.
I have been seeing a lot of Starlink commercials on a Hallmark channel
Time to ignore them all.
We do have parasitic elected officials as well as industrialists of all stripes. We have our work cut out for us to live in a balanced society in which the work of all is valued with salaries that are commensurate with the cost of living, which has become exorbitant due to parasitic industrialists and so called 'owners' of our housing, food production, education, and healthcare.
There is also a concern that Musk’s “successful” business Starlink will lead to dramatic changes in the upper atmosphere ( https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html ) with potentially disastrous consequences for life on earth. But that’s for our children to deal with.
I find it amusing that continued deployment of Starlink satellites will kill Elon’s ability to reach Mars thanks to the Kessler syndrome.
Good point, but that assumes Musk actually means what he says about Mars. Prof. Krugman’s Substack today details how Elon is just a conman using hyped up sales jobs to fleece the gullible.
This man is running many Ponzi schemes to make money. This is why he projects Ponzi on Social Security. Ponzi is all he can do, and anything, like the lives of The People of the USA, are nothing but Ponzi's in his way. This is an evil man. Yet, notice who and how many follow him, drooling all the way. That would be Trump, rich people, Stock Markets, and Wall Street and all Wall Street Acolytes. Just to start with.
His Mars fantasy is a fantasy. He probably read a lot of scifi books when he was a teenager, and some sources of fantasy conspiracy theories about the earth collapsing and a bright new future world of white people only on Mars continuing. Getting humans to Mars is ridiculous because of the years it would take, and so is being self sufficient on a planet with a ridiculously hostile to life environment.
He's just trying to pack the low-earth orbit with Starlink sats to eliminate competition.
And some data and documentation showing starlink background connected to dominion voting machines. See https://substack.com/inbox/post/200838650 from the Election Truth Alliance , along with multiple posts from This Will Hold.
Two things in reply. One, I continue to recall how Trump said that he was losing in PA and then Elon worked his computer magic, and then Trump won PA. What did Trump mean? And why was this never reported more deeply about what Trump meant? Two, when Musk moved his DOGE people into government agencies in Jan/Feb 2025 they set up their own servers to mimic or takeover the legitimate agency servers. They did it quickly and easily in conference rooms. And no one was the wiser until it leaked. If they could do that then, why couldn't servers have been set up to intercept legitimately reported vote totals between the origin count computer and the vote reporting computer, and thus change the count by spoofing the origin server? With no paper trail who would know? And if the communication was done by a controlled satellite system like Starlink, there would be no logs of the communications relays. All seven "swing" states went to Trump. There was no way in 2024 that Trump was going to leave the results of the election to "chance" because he if lost, he was going to prison. He cheats all the time; why wouldn't he in November 2024 when the stakes were so high? Well, he would. And I think he did with Elon's help. So the payoff for Elon was his ability to access all the US government databases he wanted for whatever purpose he had to help his businesses. That was what DOGE was for.
Asymmetric warfare! We are all doing it. One action at a time. Here is a good interview with Christopher Armitage about this approach:
https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/the-new-rebellionlive-with-sandi?utm_source=podcast-email&publication_id=5818316&post_id=201801680&utm_campaign=email-play-on-substack&utm_content=watch_now_button&r=40me&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
We can use this approach with Trump and crew, and these evil, money grubbing industrialists and businessmen.
Hell yeah.
Neologism: HYPERPROACTIVE.
Act first think later (if at all).
Action: Throw money at it (preferably other people's money).
Secondary characteristic: throw materiel (and men) at it.
In case of failure throw more money, more men, more materiel.
There's nothing new about this approach, it's been going on since goodness knows when. For jaded old Europeans like myself... it's the American Way. And now, the difference is the sheer unimaginable scale of it... All in the hands of idiots, scammers and conmen.
A wonderful country... It still always felt like the realm of the possible... But with so many blind spots. Expanding blind spots... expanding... expanding... until there's power with no vision, no hearing, no feeling, no understanding... Just insatiable greed and limitless stupidity...
In which Europeans shared and many still share... because of the idiotic, irresponsible belief that Uncle Sam will always ride to the rescue...
What a degenerate mess the generation that took over in the 1980s and their successors have made of the world.
Time to shut up and pull ourselves together. If we still can.
Rant endeth here.
Yikes!
Right, because billionaires, according to your average conservative, deserve to be worshipped because they do all the work and pay for everything (somehow) and everyone else is just a tiny insignificant cog. And that is the world's greatest con right there, the glorification of the rich elite and the belief that a government for and by the people run by college educated people trying to do the right thing is somehow the true enemy. Fox News and right wing-media, which is now most of the media, thanks to consolidation by the right-wing elite, push this message day after day and night after night. The masses eat it up and think how awesome it is that the first trillionaire lives in America and having one person with that amount of wealth is a good thing. And so, we are stuck, with a broken paid off democracy/corpocracy where the looting pirates are running the show.
"Trickle down", in action.
And herein lies rub - “Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut.“
AND lest we forget, “Elon Musk's projects and companies have received an estimated $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits over the past two decades. This government funding includes federal, state, and local sources, with nearly two-thirds of the total allocated over a recent five-year span.”
So, in addition to all of the “investments” through stock market mutual funds, retirement accounts, etc, taxpayers also have the great privilege of contributing or “investing” $BILLIONS through govt contracts, loans, and subsidies” to the WORLD’S richest man, soon to be TRILLIONAIRE!
Remind me, when do we get our first dividend check?
Someone, make it make sense…😵💫
https://goodjobsfirst.org/elon-musks-business-empire-is-built-on-38-billion-in-government-funding/
(But there’s no THERE, there. It’s a facade. And btw, if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Mr Krugman was referring to djt, the most successful businessman in the world, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Mr Art of the Deal himself, or is it Steal?)
Hell, they say they have no resources to help American citizens!
I passionately dislike Trump and Musk, but I also dislike many of the the comments in here.
There is an unbiased middle ground. I suggest some of you deslusionals take some time to find it.
🎯
This right here is where the Musk story stops being merely ridiculous and becomes institutional capture.
He sells tomorrow, Wall Street packages the mythology, government power blesses it, and ordinary investors get drafted into the dream through index funds.
The product is no longer the car, the tunnel, the robotaxi, or Mars.
The product is belief itself.
And once belief gets written into markets and policy, the con stops being entertainment. It becomes infrastructure.
www.xplisset.com
as once famously said, 'it is easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled'....many will lose their arses in the end of this ponzi
In October 2016, Elon Musk promised that by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive autonomously from Los Angeles to New York City without the need for a single touch. Musk stated that the car would operate fully autonomously, covering the coast-to-coast route without any human intervention, including automatic charging along the route. He added that this capability would be "replicable by every car Tesla makes" from that point forward.
It is almost ten years later now, and this feat is still nowhere near possible. Anybody got a bridge to sell? Anyone wanna buy some tulips?
There’s a sucker born every minute.
Also note in the photo above that Muck is wearing a “DOGEfather” t-shirt with a black MAGA hat. Nice! The world’s richest man basically killing the world’s poorest by “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”…
You might wonder how he can sleep at night, but he’s already stated that empathy is a weakness.
most sociopaths sleep well
It took me a couple of years hearing Musk's pronouncements being taken seriously by the media to realize he was full of it. I stopped listening to all his promises a long time ago I don't know if he's worse than Trump but they're similar.
USAID, PBS, and NPR.
He is on the Autism spectrum. Sociopathy, lack of empathy, extraordinary focus, all par for the course. He sleeps very well at night.
What concerns me most is the shift from voluntary speculation to institutionalized speculation.
People can choose to buy into a story. But when that story becomes embedded in major indexes, retirement funds, and public markets, millions of people are effectively participating whether they want to or not.
At that point the issue is bigger than Elon Musk. It becomes a question of how much influence concentrated wealth, political power, and financial institutions should have in shaping what everyone else is required to carry on their balance sheets.
Very true. Most people have no idea what is in their retirement portfolios.
I was looking at mutual funds yesterday. I went into the holdings of my Vanguard index fund there were the Magnificent 7. I chose not to invest anymore in that fund because all of the eggs are in one basket. It's done great so far, but I prefer to diversify.
The Vanguard site doesn't show you the percentage of their Total Stock Market fund that's in the top tech stocks, but Morningstar shows that just those seven companies account for 30 percent of the value of the fund. Crazy. I made the same call you did.
A bit the same way Musk did with Tesla: more than selling a car he sold personal data
And Carbon Credits to other auto makers.
The great irony is that Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. They were going down. Then Obama issued the green subsidies - which Mu卐kRat pounced on, and suddenly Mu卐kRat was a "genius".
Without Obama, nobody would have even heard of Mu卐kRat. He'd be a nobody.
Maybe stop blaming Obama, if you really care about either London or Oceania ......
Yes; and the infrastructure is built on a papier-mâché constructed of monopoly money.
My husband recently retired. We met with our tax accountant to figure out his convoluted pension plan and discuss moving his 401K to a local bank. I mentioned the bank had an investment plan that at least protected your principle though gain was still at risk. He brushed off my concerns as alarmist. I would bet he doesn't read Paul Krugman. We lost 60% of his small 401K in the crash of 2008. We can't afford to lose 60% of his substantially higher retirement fund. But what do we, or Paul Krugman, know. We'll go with our gut and keep the money we've managed to save through the years safe, especially since trump and his gang of crooks are proposing severe cuts to Social Security and Medicare. It may be the only income we'll have in our elder years.
This is a very good, clear read about the dangers of the SpaceX IPO. (Thanks to JVL of The Bulwark for the reading recommendation.) https://themoneyprinter.substack.com/p/the-spacex-ipo-and-the-end-of-public
Excellent analysis
Superman ideals monetized. When a significant portion of a population chose to follow myth blindly instead of reason, it is indeed very disturbing and dangerous.
I value Mr. Krugman’s writings, and read every one, but sometimes they are so damn depressing. Guess it’s because the truth hurts, especially now.
I try not to stare into the abyss. But lately, it's all abyss...
Ain’t that the truth?
Of course if Gilgamesh had not stared into the abyss his story would have been quite a bit different.
But the metaphor is so vague that the Norse version has Odin giving up an eye.
We will get through this but we will be scarred.
I’m noticing that too. 🙁
The spiral of nascent fascism getting you down. It gets worse..
Agreed. So true that you can write it out so clear
Musk willfully signed the death warrants of millions of children and never showed a shed of remorse in the aftermath (all because when he was a spoiled rich white kid in Apartheid South Africa, USAID had the gall to offer help to non-whites, which offended his sensibilities).
I don’t understand why he is not ostracized like the mass murderer he is.
Because our government loves the sadism and murder. To Trump, Mike Johnson, Congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court and now Wall Street, all of this is going exactly to the Project 2025 plan. They WANT the poor people to die because poor people can't make them richer; poor people cost them money.
Not just wilfully, but gleefully aswell.
Totally agree and thank you for saying so. This deserves much more attention.
"Human Ponzi scheme" is very apt.
Perhaps one could refer to the more updated 'Elonzi scheme´ instead.
Something smells a bit too musky here.
I can think of a few other terms to go with it.
I was wondering if it was a pyramid scheme. Is there a difference?
The difference is subtle. A ponzi scheme works by attracting new investors by declaring large returns on investment. Many earlier investors let their investments ride because the stated rate of return is so high. The few that pull their invesments early are actually paid - which just fuels the FOMO of those still in or considering investing. But little money is actually being earned so eventually the scheme becomes unsustainable as the pool of new investors shrinks while the pool cashing out increases. Think Bernie Madoff.
A pyramid scheme works on a similar but slightly less fraudulent premise. The "investors" aren't actually promised a specific return, they are promised a return from selling the company's products and, more importantly, from enlisting additional "distributors", a small fraction of whom's sales are credited to the recruiting distributor. It is easy to see that the earliest "distributors" do quite well as they have a large pool of gullible people to recruit. But ultimately there is a limit to how many distributors of so-and-so's brand of overpriced vitamins or cosmetics a community can support. The early "distributors" are the top of the pyramid. The further down the pyramid, the more difficult to compete with earlier distributors and to recruit more distributors from an ever-shrinking pool.
Good explanation. A friend of mine once got sucked into a pyramid. He tried to recruit me, but it didn't make sense to me so I didn't bite on it. I've had more than my share of good luck in life.
Good sense > good luck. Well done.
I know someone who is involved in a pyramid scheme. She likes to make sales, but she isn't in it to get rich or recruit. She LOVES the concept of her wellness product and has bought into the 'woo-woo' of it 100%.
Always, for just one notorious example.
Thank you very much! Now I understand the difference.
Ponzi created the paradigmatic pyramid scheme.
Nope.
Those of us old enough remember chain letters.
The idea was, you would send the letter on to 2-120 of your friends, who would send it on to 2-120 of their friends, repeat 1-3x(who would send it on to 2-120 of their friends,) who would each send YOU a dollar.
Imagine a million people each sending you a dollar!
People were gullible enough to buy into it.
Became illegal.
Masks genius?? Seriously?? He used daddy's money to buy one company that he leveraged to buy another. He does what tRumpf does. That does not make him smart. He bought Tesla and Starlink....these companies did not emanate.from his imagination...
and used taxpayer funds for loans by govt
I wonder what the future holds for Musk's enterprises since he's so strongly linked to MAGA. A lot of places are diversifying away from US. We aren't the only people on the planet. Our significance is sliding everyday as Trump takes us both back to the future and into a brave new world.
Correct! the real engineers who founded Tesla were Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who founded Tesla in 2003. Musk is not an engineer and doesn't know how to code. His degree was in business. That's why he had to hire all those high school and college students to help him eliminate whole government departments, like Noah weather and US AID. Musk simply took his huge profits from selling Paypal and began buying Tesla stock, soon becoming its largest stockholder, & forcing out Eberhard and Tarpenning.
He bought Starlink??? From whom did he buy it? Starlink was created by SpaceX, which was started from scratch by Musk, with his own money, not something that came from his father. You guys have Musk derangement syndrome— Musk has done plenty of awful things, why make up false ones?
People with the remotest knowledge of the facts stop paying attention to anything you say
As far as I know, you are correct about Starlink. SpaceX, however, built on McDonnell-Douglas's Delta Clipper program, using many of the same engineers. SpaceX was very fortunate that NASA cancelled the Delta Clipper contract in 1996, and just as fortunate that NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract in its early days in 2008. Without either of these events SpaceX wouldn't be here today.
Why create when you can loot?
Worked well for Genghis.
I don't have money to invest, so I just sit back and watch the show. Like George Carlin said, "When you're born into this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America, you get a front row seat."
When I was working, I invested in the company 401K. When I retired, I turned that into an IRA. When my mother died, I invested my inheritance in mutual funds with the same company. Almost all are indexed funds. If this actually goes through, I have a lot of work to do.
You don't have to be a Wall Street fat cat to be hurt by this. In fact, most of them are probably smart enough to be moving money out now.
He was such a genius!
Without the Obama administration, there would be no Tesla, SpaceX, etc.
All the federal subsidies, tax credits, CAFE credits, etc Musk has received via his companies make him the biggest federal welfare queen of the century.
Now, Musk is getting rich from government contracts. I think a future administration should freeze all contracts with SpaceX and any other Musk businesses, as long as Elon Musk is associated with them in any way. With DOGE, he tried to destroy our government in order to line his own pockets. We should not be further enriching him with our taxpayer money.
Only under Trump did he really get corrupt and greedy. Wonder why? 😜😡😏😩🤮
Remember DOGE? Musk fired the SEC regulators who would have said "NO". Coincidence?
And all the gov't agencies that were investigating his abuses.
don't forget govt loans
The big and wealthy have always been the biggest recipients of US dollars.
Great article! Just can't believe that the investment industry is so stupid.
You can't believe the investment industry is so stupid?!?!?! The same industry that pumps up the stock market every time Trump says Iran is going to sign a deal tomorrow? The same industry that keeps propping up Musk no matter how blatantly he scams them time after time?
I swear, these people are so stupid they could be held up by voicemail.
This is more an example of the old adage "if you owe the bank a million you're in trouble, if you owe the bank a billion the bank's in trouble". The financial "wizards" have to keep bailing "mad Elon" to prevent the country from realising just how shaky is the financial "house of cards.
It is a race to see who crashes America first, Musk or Trump.
You have misunderstood the game.
In the short run, the "market" doesn't care about the truth. It cares only about what other people do when they behave *as though* something were true.
All that matters is "number go up!" The trick lies in not being the bag holder when the music stops.
I don’t think OP has misunderstood, because what you describe is literally stupid. When you actually look at how these markets function, these completely made up markets, they are ridiculous. It’s gambling x children’s games on a grand scale, designed to make the players rich and no one else. They build nothing, they produce nothing, they help no one.
Our society has taken a noble concept - people with means investing in the creativity and brilliance of those without, and receiving a proportional reward when that initial investment helps to create things beneficial to society - and turned it into a horror show, where the investing is more important than the creating, and people can become grotesquely wealthy by never doing anything but gambling on greed and fear.
South Seas Bubble
Mississippi Company Bubble
Tulip Craze
Florida Land Boom
Hoover crash and GW Bush crash. Savings and Loan crash (similar to Bush crash) in between.
I know. That the futures market is up because Trump says a deal with Iran is imminent is mind boggling.
They are corrupt and also stupid
It keeps working. They are playing with other people's money. It will work wonderfully, right up to the point it doesn't.
Enjoy life right now. Go for a hike, garden, read a good book, invest in family and friends.
The investment industry is more greedy than stupid. The investment banks make their big money in the IPO and don't typically hold any of the stocks afterward. The securities dealers make commissions by trading the stocks and typically don't hold them themselves. The non-index funds hold stocks but watch them like hawks and dump them as soon as they fail to fit their performance goals. Which leaves index funds and private investors to take the brunt.
Then consider the possibility that they are corrupted. You may be more likely to buy into a scheme if you get a small cut - and then can just run. Predatory capitalism is at its end stage and most of the Wall Street predators are shoveling money away with the full understanding that they may have to bail out to a safe place where they can live comfortably for the rest of their life while Rome is burning.
Everyone involved is making money. Only the rubes holding the bag at the end will lose.
They were in the run up to the Great Recession... but we have less resources to fix it now.
But they're making money! /s/
money taken from the ignorant retail investor
For a couple of years back in the late 1990s, there was one absolutely sure way to make tons of money in the stock market as a retail investor: Open up a modest (say, $250,000 or so) retail account with Merrill Lynch, but have another independent account with any other broker. Your Merrill Lynch adviser would call you periodically with tip to buy stocks that Merrill Lynch's analysts said were sure to make a big move soon. All you had to do was write down whatever that stock was, then short the hell out of it in your other account because what Merrill Lynch was doing was dumping all the crap stocks on the small retail customers that their big customers were getting out of.
Andrew Cuomo ruined that by prosecuting Merrill Lynch for doing that modified pump-and-dump.
That's the entire business model.
The investment industry is humans. We humans are ...
Musk is self-demonstrably a fascist treasonist who should be deported and his assets should be seized to pay for the damage he's done to America. What has happened to the sentiment of demanding accountability from him and all regime sycophants for their insurgent behavior?
Is that accountability now manifested in allowing him to achieve the status of trillionaire in the country which has so richly and UNDESERVEDLY rewarded him AND which he has subsequently BETRAYED?
NO! He must still be held fully and actionably accountable.
Cheering and supporting this fascist is treasonous. Accordingly, investors in companies owned, operated or influenced by Musk are complicit in fascism and treason and should also be held appropriately and actionably accountable. Supporting him is REPREHENSIBLE and unpatriotic.
His damage to the entire world (via his awful DOGE actions) justify putting him in one of his rockets programmed for deep outer space, never to return. He doesn’t belong on this beautiful earth.
Wait for it: the next move is to privatize Social Security and fund it with index funds.
Nothing new there. That has been a Republican wet dream since the advent of Social Security.
The people who remember what happened to their 401k’s after the 2008 crash might have something to say about that.
Oh, we'll have plenty to *say* about it. Unfortunately, we won't be able to *do* anything about it.
I have had this view of Musk for years now, but he keeps at it. How long can this go on? I just don’t get it. Realty has to bite eventually.🧐
I predict he is blackballed from gov't contracts once he is brought up on criminal charges for his doge bullshit
Only if Progressives win the White House.
You can buy a lot of your own reality with a trillion dollars.
There seems to be no system self-correction for the runaway billionaire in the US. Time to invent one.
Greetings from a European reader whose pension is guaranteed by a government agency that, by statute and EU law, must stay away from this scam.
Americans were led to believe they had guarantees, as well. Until everyone lost their ever-loving minds.
The few US private company pension plans left are insured by a US government agency. As soon as any recession hits, they are all out of money. One of the reasons the US government needed to bail out General Motors and Chrysler is that if they failed, the pension guarantee would cost about as much as any potential bailout.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈𝐒 𝐒𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐗, 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲?
"In reality, it's a very successful but fairly small satellite launch company, bolted onto a stagnant money-losing social media company and a money-incinerating AI company, and then sprinkled with a lot of hype about humankind going interplanetary," said Robin Wigglesworth, editor of the Financial Times' finance blog, Alphaville.
Starlink, the only profitable piece of the entity, has been lowering prices to pump up its revenues to make it look good for the SpaceX IPO. Look for price increases and lower profits after the IPO.
Meanwhile, back in the reality based world, China builds more solar power infrastructure and more high speed trains, while graduating more engineers, physicists, and mathematicians.