James Towler

Husband, Dad, Mizzou, KC

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

SpaceX used private capital to create 4,400 millionaires, tens of thousands of new jobs, and entire new industries.

Joe Biden used taxpayer money to flood America with illegal immigrants, pay for infrastructure that never got built, and create zero jobs.

Hope this helps, Ro!

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

SpaceX raised only $12B of capital before going public. With that $12B, they revolutionized the rocket industry, built a global satellite network, and created arguably the most innovative company of all time.

The federal government spends $12B every 15 hours and still can’t get its shit together. Prior to SpaceX, NASA was sending astronauts into space on Soviet-era Russian Soyuz capsules.

So no, I don’t find Elon’s wealth to be a problem, and I wouldn’t trust Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders to allocate a single dollar of it.

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

Today’s SpaceX IPO and the immediate attacks by leftists on @elonmusk should make one thing crystal clear to everyone watching:

Leftism is the enemy of humanity.

It’s an extinctionist movement that hates excellence and, when carried to its inevitable conclusion, would kill off our species.

Watch the ragtag socialist/commie crew of AOC, Bernie Sanders, Platner, Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, etc. long enough and you’ll see it clearly. They resent excellence. They’re suspicious of ambition. They demonize our best builders and capital allocators.

If you’re somehow on the fence because you’ve been led to believe that it’s immoral for someone to have a trillion dollars, consider this: They create precisely nothing of value themselves. They’re the professional version of the worthless critic we all know in our own lives.

No innovations. No companies. No major breakthroughs. No employees, aside from staff we’re forced to fund with our tax dollars.

On the other hand, Elon has created over 150,000 high-paying jobs at his companies. That doesn’t count contractors, suppliers or their employees. When you add those in, you’re likely talking about millions of jobs affected by him.

He’s created tens of thousands of millionaires. His companies changed the car game forever, revolutionized internet access, gave us true free speech online again, helped the blind see, gave autonomy back to disabled people, changed the financial world and will make humanity a spacefaring civilization, which could ultimately save humanity if Earth faces an extinction-level event.

The question they want you asking is whether he has too much money. The question I want you asking is this: What kind of society do you want to live in?

One that celebrates excellence, advances humanity and makes the impossible possible? Or one laden with resentment, where we all need Daddy Government to provide the same shitty but equal standard of barely living for everyone, while choking innovation to death until there are no more rich people left to fund the welfare they promise?

Elon doesn’t use his wealth to shower himself in abundance. He invests it in advancing humanity. If we gave the same amount of money to the government, they wouldn’t accomplish half as much as he has. How do I know? Because we’ve already given them trillions for decades.

What did we get?

Bloated agencies.
Failed programs.
Generational fraud.
Wars.
Armies of consultants.
DEI.
Perpetual wokeness.

A society worth a damn celebrates its best capital allocators. Elon is the best in the business at turning dollars into more dollars by putting them to work in the right places and driving innovation. This uplifts humanity both now and later.

If you need someone to demonize as a way to make yourself feel better, then demonize the leftist politicians who do nothing but criticize the most productive, exceptional people in society. These people don’t want you to be successful.

They want you to be the cattle they herd. They want you dependent. They want you weak. They want your livelihood dependent on their hand filling your hand with scraps after they’ve robbed someone else’s.

The sooner everyone understands that, the better. Eventually, you’ll be the one they rob. Or they’ll simply run out of people to rob.

And worse, humanity will stop advancing. Eventually, we won’t even merely survive.

Why? Because a cataclysm on Earth isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

We’re in an invisible race against time to push humanity into becoming a spacefaring civilization that can save itself before that day comes. Leftism would guarantee our deaths.

The only path for humanity to survive and thrive is to innovate and for us to celebrate and support the creators, builders and innovators who make that possible.

Anyone selling you the lie that those people are the enemy, IS YOUR ACTUAL MORTAL ENEMY.

That’s why leftism must be defeated and the woke mind virus must die.

I want humanity to survive. I hope you do too.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

History will remember Elon Musk alongside DaVinci, Gutenberg, Fulton, Pasteur, Edison, Ford and Jobs.

History will have no recollection of any kind of Ro Khanna.

[dank @cptdankkk]

Kevin O'Leary says most people waste $15,000 a year on stupid stuff like $5 coffees

"Stop buying coffee for five dollars and fifty cents"

"You go to work and you spend $15 bucks on a sandwich, what are you an idiot. It costs you 99 cents to make a sandwich at home and bring it with you"

"Bring your own water, your own drink or your own coffee mug. You start to add that up every day it's a ton of money"

"Most people starting on their job making their first $60,000 piss away about $15,000 a year"

[Political Sock @politicalsock]

AOC is dumb as dryer lint, but she knows how to manipulate attention. That’s her only real skill.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

Instead of prosecuting criminals for stealing copper wire, Karen Bass wants to install solar street lights.

There are 60,000 street lights in LA. The city is currently replacing ~200/month. At the current pace, it will take 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Karen Bass would rather LA be a dark and crime-ridden shithole for the rest of our lives than crack down on a small number of organized criminals.

She’s not just dumb, she’s malevolent. It’s absolutely mind-boggling that she ever got elected to run America’s second-largest city in the first place, let alone might be awarded with a second term.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️AI is forcing education to reveal what it was actually measuring.

A lot of school was never measuring understanding directly. It was measuring compliance-shaped output. Can the student produce the right-looking essay, the right-looking homework, the right-looking answer, the right-looking discussion post, the right-looking project, by the deadline, in the accepted format, with the accepted language?

That worked when output required internal effort. If a student wrote a strong essay, there was at least a decent chance they had read, thought, organized, revised, and understood something. The artifact was imperfect, but it still carried a trace of the mind that made it.

AI breaks the trace.

Now the artifact can look competent without the student becoming competent. That is the civilizational fracture. The school sees an essay. The rubric sees structure. The teacher sees fluency. The gradebook sees an A. But the student may not have built the internal machinery: attention, memory, reasoning, argument, judgment, taste, discipline, struggle, synthesis.

The output survives while formation disappears.

This is the same pattern as every hollow institution: the metric goes up while the reality underneath decays.

The student becomes trained to manage appearances instead of develop capacity. The teacher becomes forced to evaluate artifacts they can no longer fully trust. The school becomes incentivized to keep the system moving because admitting the break would require redesigning everything. Parents want grades. Administrators want graduation. Students want efficiency. AI provides the mask.

So everyone gets what they want except truth.

The real casualty is struggle. Learning requires friction. Confusion. Boredom. Revision. Failed attempts. Memory. Repetition. The slow humiliation of not knowing and then becoming capable. AI can help that process if used correctly, but it can also remove the very pressure that forms the mind. A student can bypass the pain and still receive the reward.

That is spiritually and intellectually corrosive.

Because the hidden lesson becomes:

Do not become capable, become good at producing the appearance of capability.

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Let's run an experiment: Divide a nation into two, make one of them socialist, and the other capitalist 🧐
_

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

He won the Civil War, broke the Klan, went bankrupt at 62, got terminal throat cancer, and wrote one of the greatest books in American literature in the final year of his life. He finished it 5 days before he died.

Ulysses S. Grant was born 204 years ago today.

His name wasn't even Ulysses S. Grant. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio on April 27, 1822. The congressman who nominated him to West Point wrote down the wrong name. Grant kept it. The "S." stands for nothing.

He hated his father's tannery and loved horses. Graduated 21st of 39 at West Point. Fought in the Mexican-American War, then came home convinced it was an unjust war designed to expand slavery. He later said he believed the Civil War was divine punishment for it.

He married Julia Dent in 1848, into a slave-owning Missouri family. His abolitionist father refused to attend the wedding. In 1859, broke and desperate, Grant freed the one enslaved man he'd briefly owned instead of selling him. He could have gotten a year's wages.

In the Civil War he became what no other Union general was: relentless. Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) split the Confederacy in half. Lincoln then gave him every Union army. His Appomattox surrender terms: officers kept sidearms, men kept horses for spring planting, no one prosecuted.

As president (1869 to 1877) he did something no president would do again until LBJ: used federal troops to crush the Ku Klux Klan. He suspended habeas corpus in 9 South Carolina counties, prosecuted Klansmen before predominantly Black juries, and broke the first Klan.

His presidency was also rocked by scandal: Black Friday 1869. Crédit Mobilier. The Whiskey Ring. Belknap. Grant himself never took a dime. He was just disastrously loyal to corrupt friends. The pattern damaged his reputation for a century.

After the White House, he toured the world for 2 years. Dined with Queen Victoria. Met the emperor of Japan. Then in 1884, a Wall Street partner named Ferdinand Ward ran what we'd now call a Ponzi scheme. Grant was wiped out. 62 years old. Penniless.

Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his memoirs. Grant wrote in agony, sometimes 50 pages a day, racing the disease to leave Julia an inheritance. He finished the manuscript July 18, 1885. He died July 23.

The book made Julia $450,000, about $14M today. It's now considered one of the finest memoirs in the English language. For decades historians ranked Grant a failure. Since 2000 he's jumped 13 spots in the C-SPAN survey, the biggest rise of any president.

Happy birthday, General 🇺🇸

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

25% of very liberal people say political violence can “sometimes be justified.”

Among very conservative people it’s just 3%.

In other words, the far left is 8x more likely to support political violence as the far right.

Stop pretending this is a “both sides” problem. It’s not.

[Gary Brode @Gary_Brode]

The Strait of Hormuz Reverse Uno Card

When Raji Khabbaz and I were running Silver Arrow Investment Management, whenever we were trying to figure out why something happened, he was unsatisfied the explanation that people are sometimes stupid and institutions are often stupid. He correctly thought that people usually have a good reason (at least to them) for doing something even if it appears to make little sense to an outsider. More importantly, he thought that “sometimes people are stupid” was a lazy answer that was dismissive. As investors, it was our goal to understand what was happening, not to ignore it.

Recently, I’ve written that many of President Trump’s critics are making the same error. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that previously transported 20% of the world’s oil supply, the price of oil rose. Gas prices in the US have risen in response. Many screamed that this was an obvious move by the Iranian regime and insisted President Trump should have known it was something they’d do. How could he not know?!

In 2002, the US Navy conducted war games they called the Millennium Challenge. One side represented Iran. The other represented the technologically superior US Navy and included an aircraft carrier, warships, and cruisers. The US Navy side had a substantial advantage in firepower. Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper used asymmetric warfare tactics to wipe out the US side in one day. Had this been a real fight, the US would have lost 20,000 servicemen. The result was such an embarrassment that the Navy re-floated the sunk ships, changed the rules of engagement to ensure a US victory, and started the challenge again.

These games were not a secret. They have been widely covered in the mainstream media and have been the subject of a New York Times documentary. Over the past two decades, I have seen the Millennium Challenge discussed in my daily financial news reading at least a dozen times. The event has its own Wikipedia page. Regardless of your opinion of President Trump, do you really believe that neither he, nor anyone in the White House, nor any of his military advisors, nor Secretary of War, Hegseth knew about this? I realize that many of you reading this have strong negative emotions regarding President Trump. I’m not asking you to like or respect him. I’m just suggesting that “he’s stupid and has no idea what he’s doing” is not good analysis. This is a point I’ve made in this space in the past.

Early in the war, Iran closed the Strait which placed economic pressure on the rest of the world. Despite the fact that it was Iran mining the Strait and shooting at the ships that attempted to navigate it, many countries expressed anger at the US and Israel. This was the outcome Iran wanted. Then, the regime decided to allow friendly ships to pass if they paid a fee. The fees were about $1/barrel of oil, or about $2MM per large container vessel. (Many of these fees were paid in Bitcoin, something macro analyst, @peruvian_bull, explained in an excellent post within the past week.)

This looked like worst-case scenario for the US. Iran succeeded in closing the Strait and causing economic problems all over the world, then found a way to profit from their own actions. Then, President Trump played his “reverse uno” card. He correctly realized that it wasn’t just the rest of the world that depended on free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, and that it was Iran that had the most exposure. Iran is a big oil producer, and oil exports account for 80% of Iran’s exports, 60% of government revenue, and 25% of its GDP. It turns out that Iran has more economic exposure to this narrow waterway than anyone else. President Trump sent the US Navy to form a blockade. He closed the Strait himself ensuring no more $2MM/vessel charges and an inability for Iran to export oil.

Iran is close to filling its own storage. Once its oil tanks are full, the regime has two choices, either capitulate and come to an agreement with the US, or to stop producing from its own wells. The problem with the second choice is that it’s difficult to reverse. Stopping production on an active oil well tends to damage it and it’s hard to re-start later. Iran now has a limited amount of time to find a course of action before 25% of its GDP becomes permanently(ish) impaired.

While no one in the US likes paying more for gas, prices were much higher just four years ago in 2022 and around $4/gallon in 2008, 2011, and 2012 when $4 had more purchasing power than it does now. The US is a net energy exporter with an economy that has survived higher prices in the past. Foreign ships are turning away from the Strait of Hormuz and sailing to Texas and other southern US ports to fill up at premium prices. I’m not suggesting that this is great for the US; but rather, that the US is well-suited to manage the situation while Iran is about to be faced with a massive long-term problem.

Finally, Iran maintains control of the country using extensive human infrastructure. There are police everywhere monitoring protests, internet usage, the attire of citizens, and the hair of Iranian women. That level of control is expensive and the government just lost 60% of its revenue. I’m wondering how long they’ll keep doing their jobs without paychecks.

I don’t know how this conflict will end. What I do know is that President Trump and the US Navy have turned Iran’s biggest strategic strength into a giant weakness. Sometimes people do stupid things. And sometimes, we just aren’t seeing the reasoning behind those actions. Last week, one of DKI’s interns wrote, ”The bottom line is that (financial analysis) can tell you what the market’s pricing in, but it’s your job to figure out why”. Right now, the mullahs are facing a difficult decision. It will be interesting to see what comes next.

[Tom Elliott @tomselliott]

That it’ll take him at least 3 years & $30 million to build a grocery already disproves his claim that govt can operate more efficiently than private enterprise.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

👉 @SenMarkKelly wants to run for president in 2028 so he's currently on his mandatory DEI pandering tour.

Here's an idea: Why don't you resign your Senate seat and ask the AZ governor to appoint a woman or minority in your place? 🤷‍♂️

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

This white male who flew rockets now wants people who fly rockets to be chosen based on their race and gender instead of their ability to fly rockets. It must be exhausting to be a Democrat these days.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Just stop, we all know your scam.

>Democrats raise taxes.
>Money flows to NGOs packed with Democratic operatives.
>Those operatives take their cut, write a check to Democratic campaigns
> Report back that the problem still exists and needs more funding.

If you fix the problem... the money stops.

So nothing ever gets fixed.

The money vanishes into a network of nonprofits and nobody goes to jail and nobody loses their job and then freaking YOU go on X and point at billionaires.

You doesn't want to fix anything.

Fixed problems don't generate donations or fund your life...

If you wanted to fix the problem you'd care about the fraud, BUT YOU DO NOT.

That's how I know you're lying.

[0HOUR1 @__0HOUR1_]

To every American that wanted that soldier caught and hurt or murdered I got two words for you.

Fuck You

I saw so many posts by you deranged people you shouldn’t call yourselves Americans you’re piles of shit. 💩

Good Night 💤🌙

[Fusilli Spock @awstar11]

I'm not a Trump sycophant and criticize a lot of what he does. He's a thin-skinned man-child who talks irresponsibly and makes poor hires. But, he's done things no other GOP president has been able or willing to.
I know he's not a conservative and I've never voted for him in the primaries but, compared to the Dem option, I'm glad we have him and not Kamala.
Our nation will survive Trump and may even come out stronger for it.

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

Trump orders two transport planes blown up so Iranians don’t steal and reverse-engineer our technology after a wildly successful rescue mission of two American pilots deep inside Iranian territory.

Biden leaves behind $85 billion in military equipment to the Taliban and over 100 military K9s abandoned at Kabul airport during a disastrous withdrawal that killed 13 service members.

Take a guess which one Democrats are calling a success.

[Shawn Farash @Shawn_Farash]

Democrats talk about "affordability" like they didn't do THIS the last time they were in power.

Remember in November.