A heartbroken elderly Albanian man says Jared Kushner has taken everything he spent a lifetime building, including his land, his home, and the future he hoped to leave behind for his children.
He says he returned home one day only to find his property sealed off behind barbed wire, with men in black uniforms standing guard and refusing to let him step inside the house he once called his own.
In a single moment, he says, the life he had worked for was gone.
“It was the end of the world. The end of the world.”
“I felt imprisoned.”
“They took my freedom.”
“They took my livelihood.”
“They took my land.”
Elon Musk: At GM, there's a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla.
“I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line, I walked the line, I slept in the factory, and I worked beside them. So, I'm no stranger to them.
There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There are no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot.
At GM, there's a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla.
We give everyone stock options. Many people who are just working the line, who didn't even know what stocks were, we've made them millionaires.
And I just want to say that I'm incredibly appreciative of those who build the cars, and they know it.”
New York Times DealBook Summit, 2023
So far this World Cup has been a great reminder that we make too many assumptions about one another, and that the vast majority of humanity is awesome.
It's been pretty damn refreshing, honestly.
Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.
400 of them are now worth over $100 million.
These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.
Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.
Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."
The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.
Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.
Bragging that you dropped $250 million dollars worth of bombs on Iran IN ONE NIGHT, while people are starving and struggling to pay bills and can't get health insurance, is NOT the flex you think it is.
IT IS OBSCENE.
Buttigieg: We didn't know it, but we've all been trusting our lives to the restraint of whoever the president might be. And now we have a president who is completely unrestrained. And so the only answer to that is a functioning Congress.
It turns out we do not have a functioning Congress. The House of Representatives is not representative. One of the most important organs of our democracy is not democratic.
They say, "Oh, no. We're not manipulating the map to disempower black people. We're manipulating the map to disempower Democrats who happen to be black people.”
So, the time has come to make it impossible to manipulate the map for any reason and just have fair maps.