Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally).
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter - a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI":
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/
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As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it crypto*currency* because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.
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As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it crypto*currency* because no one is even pretending that it's a form of money. It's a tradeable collectible, not even particularly useful for paying for crimes or laundering money.
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Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and *not* because it does useful things:
https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/
That's the logic of the whole market today. AI - the world's money-losingest technology - attracts investment at the expense of everything else.
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Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and *not* because it does useful things:
https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/
That's the logic of the whole market today. AI - the world's money-losingest technology - attracts investment at the expense of everything else.
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When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed,, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and *it* will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down *real* cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.
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When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed,, saying we don't need cancer research because "GAI" is almost here and *it* will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down *real* cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it's about to become God and cure cancer.
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Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto - it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow *one hundredfold* in the next *40 months*.
Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
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Today, Goldman Sachs isn't merely all-in on crypto - it's all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk's claim that "Musk's ragbag of assets" will grow *one hundredfold* in the next *40 months*.
Quiggin's short essay has been rolling around in my mind since I read it a couple days ago. Then, yesterday, I spotted this essay by Owen McGrann entitled "The Dead Economy Theory":
https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
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The perfect name for this! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.
Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.
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The perfect name for this! Or so I thought. Then I read McGrann's article, and discovered that it's yet another piece asking how the economy will work after AI takes all of our jobs because AI is absolutely going to do that and there's no point in even questioning whether that will happen.
Look, thought experiments about how to deal equitably with labor displacement in the face of automation are all well and good. I'm a science fiction writer, that stuff is my bread and butter.
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But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that *can't* do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."
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But applying "dead economy theory" to the blithe acceptance of the claims of AI pitchmen is a terrible waste of a killer coinage. The true risk of AI to your job isn't: "an AI will do your job." It's: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that *can't* do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot."
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By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The *actual* dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
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By the same token: the real "dead economy" risk isn't that all the productive labor will be done by chatbots owned by a habitual liar and eminently guillotineable billionaire like Sam Altman. The *actual* dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
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We *could* do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're *actually* doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That's not just a *dead* economy - it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
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We *could* do "AI cancer research" by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we're *actually* doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That's not just a *dead* economy - it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
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These are the LAST DAYS to get *Canny Valley*, the extremely limited edition, signed and numbered book collecting my Pluralistic collages. I'm not selling these - they're exclusively available to people who donate to Creative Commons for their 25th anniversary:
https://giving.gofundme.com/campaign/778218/donate
eof/
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic The economy is feeling very "Weekend at Bernies". A corpse being manipulated by a bunch of dudes with their hand up its ass.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic Too big to fail = too big to care, combined with work fast and break things.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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Well, that logic aligns very well with the choice of the current president…
Literally everything he ever did in his life was a flop, and yet here he is.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic SpaceX IPO is the most successful grift that I've seen so far, truly the most successful conman of all time.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic He's coasting on extraordinarily expired karma.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic It's a continuation of the theme of destroying everything. Some things are destroyed outright. Sometimes destruction is set in motion to take full effect later. And sometimes destroyed things are replaced with the illusion of those things.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic Whenever he's quoted now he sounds like a troll on 4chan. I suspect he was more coherent back in 2020.
Edit: The Thai cave thing was in 2018, so perhaps not.
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Here's a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it's $1t (nominally). But *that's* not the fun fact; *this* is: everything he's done since 2020 was a flop.
--If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/17/its-the-stupid-economy-stupid/#trillionairitis
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@pluralistic It is incredibly disgusting how these fuckers used the pandemic to fleece us.
