Cathie Wood just named the contradiction nobody wants to touch.
She compared Elon Musk to Thomas Edison.
Not as praise. As a pattern.
Wood: “I think he’s the Thomas Edison of our age… he wants to do the right thing to transform the lot of most of humanity.”
The media sees a reckless billionaire setting fires.
Wood sees the only person in the room building anything at all.
The gap between those two readings tells you everything about who controls the narrative.
Start with Tesla.
Wood: “Tesla was an environmental move, which I think a lot of people attacking his cars… they’ve forgotten.”
He built the exact machine environmentalists spent thirty years begging for.
Didn’t lobby for it. Didn’t write a whitepaper. Built it.
Forced every major automaker on Earth to abandon the combustion engine.
Then the second he won, the same movement made him the enemy.
Because the establishment never wanted the problem solved. They wanted the problem funded. And those are two very different things.
A solved problem kills the committee. Kills the nonprofit. Kills the careers built on managing the crisis instead of ending it.
Musk ended it. And they have never forgiven him.
SpaceX looks like an escape hatch if you never read past the headline.
Which is exactly what the press counts on.
Wood: “What we learn about material science and technologies… is going to help us here on Earth as well.”
Mars was never the exit.
It is the lab.
Build under conditions so brutal that every breakthrough changes what is possible back home.
You learn to keep a human alive in a frozen irradiated vacuum.
Fixing an energy grid on a temperate planet becomes arithmetic.
He is not running from the cradle.
He is stress-testing the technology that preserves it.
But that story doesn’t sell ads. Doesn’t move polling numbers. So they bury it under hit pieces and congressional theater and call it journalism.
Most people who reach his level stop building and start protecting what they have.
They buy senators. They buy newspapers. They buy silence.
Musk keeps picking the hardest unsolved problems on the planet and running straight at them.
That is what terrifies the establishment.
Not that he might fail.
That he might succeed without them. Without their funding. Without their approval. Without anything they can hold over his head.
A man they cannot buy is a man they cannot control.
So they do the only thing they have left.
They send the media after him.
Every legacy outlet runs the same playbook. Strip the context. Clip the quote. Frame the motive. Let the algorithm do the rest.
It has worked on every builder before him.
It will not work on this one.
They will spend their careers trying to tear him down.
He will spend his building the thing that saves them anyway.
The stones always come from inside the walls.
Origins of Purple Rain,
Purple Rain' was originally written as a country song, and was intended to be a collaboration with Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks.
According to Nicks, she received a 10-minute instrumental version of the song from Prince, with a request to write the lyrics, but she felt overwhelmed by the task.
She later said: "I listened to it and I just got scared. I called him back and said, 'I can't do it. I wish I could. It's too much for me.'"
Prince then asked his backing band to try the song: "I want to try something before we go home. It's mellow."
According to Lisa Coleman, Prince changed the song dramatically after Wendy Melvoin started playing the guitar to accompany the song: "He was excited to hear it voiced differently. It took it out of that country feeling.
"Then we all started playing it a bit harder and taking it more seriously. We played it for six hours straight and by the end of that day we had it mostly written and arranged."
Prince's explanation on the meaning of 'Purple Rain':
"When there's blood in the sky – red and blue = purple... purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the purple rain."
After recording the song, Prince phoned Journey member Jonathan Cain, to ask him to listen to it.
Prince was concerned that it might be too similar to Journey's 'Faithfully', a song composed by Cain which had recently been in the US charts.
However, Cain reassured Prince by saying that the songs only shared the same four chords.
"I thought it was an amazing tune," Cain said. "I told him, 'Man, I'm just super-flattered that you even called. It shows you're that classy of a guy. Good luck with the song. I know it's gonna be a hit.'"
Ladies and gentlemen,
Prince performing a special and an absolute classic song, Purple Rain, live at Paisley Park, in 1999.
Credits for the background information: @SmoothRadio
If you aren't super jazzed about this new job opportunity with @NASA, you need to make sure you still have a pulse! Do yourself a favor and go to https://t.co/lpFqMdBZ1T to see how you can help build upon the amazing success of the recent @NASAArtemis flight to change the future of humanity! Huge thanks to @NASAAdmin and the great team at @ndstudio for the partnership with @USOPM
Pleased to share my favorite high-resolution capture of the Artemis II launch- the moment the SLS is clearing the tower, captured by a sound-triggered camera placed near the pad.
I'll have prints linked in my bio for this one, and here's a short thread about how it was captured