The Misguilded Age
I’m going stop being the top (and only) employee at NextDraft unless readers promote the newsletter enough that I reach one trillion subscribers by the end of the year. If you fail to reach this target, I will summarily end NextDraft and transition to my alternate newsletter: An exhaustively detailed, blow by blow, graphics-heavy review of the gastrointestinal impacts of my news headline induced IBS. The working title: The Spastic SemiColon. (Thankfully, Imodium has agreed to be the sponsor no matter which of the two newsletters survives.) This might sound a little draconian, but threats like these seem to be working these days. Tesla shareholders just approved Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package, for his part-time gig as Tesla CEO. In fairness, the deal requires Musk to hit some monumental milestones and move beyond the reality distortion field (and, if he keeps up his current pace, a trillion will barely cover his childcare costs). Of course, there’s the very obvious American splitscreen of Musk shareholder/fans approving a trillion dollar deal during the same week that the poorest Americans were set to be stripped of SNAP benefits. But there’s a global splitscreen as well. Musk’s chainsaw-weilding efforts to shutter USAID isn’t just leaving people hungry, it’s leaving people dead. Atul Gawande in The New Yorker: The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands. Earlier this decade, USAID had an average budget of $23 billion a year. (Multiply that by 43.4 and you’re talking Tesla CEO money…)
+ I invest in internet startups and my public securities portfolio is neck deep in tech stocks. I’m not in the business of criticizing capitalism or shareholders who decide to approve big paydays for their CEOs (especially when those CEOs are building a robot army). But I am worried that this payday approval is a(nother) watershed moment that represents both our widening economic divide and a market that is giving off some very bad (and very familiar) vibes.
+ NYT (Gift Article): Trump Administration Seeks Immediate Halt to Court Order to Pay Food Stamps. (This was a predictable move from an administration that told grocers they couldn’t offer 10% off to SNAP recipients.) But interestingly, on Friday afternoon (before the court ruled), the administration said it will fully fund SNAP while court appeal plays out. (Maybe American shareholders approved lunch.)
