"Late Kakistocracy" is that phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of ppl who will work for it, and so the folks who aren't qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified
Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.
The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.
It had fewer than 50 employees.
And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.
Here is the part the administration tried to bury.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.
One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.
A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.
This is public money. Your money.
Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.
And there is more coming.
A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.
https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE
It doesn’t include goodwill. Heard them caveat at the meeting.
There was another slide that showed op income growth vs invested capital - maybe more useful to measure returns in the segment.
Also the ventures investments don’t seem like great businesses to me. Prob good/average. $MKL
@nachkari Agree. Why sweat it out with crowds in Rome or Madrid in June when these two are perfect visits? Maybe tack on Norway for some mountains and fjords.
While the media out here laddering the alt managers daily, $KKR co-CEOs each bought $4.4M in the open market today or ~$17M each over the past 2 weeks.
'Our Board recently authorized an increase to our share repurchase program by an additional $500 million.
Taking a step back, there is clearly a lot of noise in some of the markets where we operate. But from our seats, there is a big disconnect between perception and our long-term prospects across our diversified business model.
That's why we have been leaning into buying back our stock. And you would have also seen our co-CEOs and a number of our directors buying stock personally in the quarter.'
- Robert Lewin, CFO - KKR. Q1 2026 Investor Call.
@PEoperator You think this crowd has never heard of the patron saint of levered aero aftermarket serial acquirer pricing power compounder paradise? Where you been for T20?
My intuition is that we're back to regular capitalism here -- lots of capex spending & lots of competition, that never ends. When it comes to creating hyper-profitable, competition-immune business models, AI is not comparable to the internet. Not even close.