wiebedevries

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

The world just paid $2 trillion for a rocket company that lost $4.9 billion last year. And the rockets are not why it lost the money. They are the only part making any.

SpaceX went public Friday, the largest IPO in history. Up 19%, a $2 trillion valuation, Elon Musk the first trillionaire. Then you open the filing.

Three businesses sit inside it. Starlink, the satellites, brought in $11.4 billion, 61% of all revenue, and $4.4 billion in profit. It is the only piece that earns a dollar. The rockets that land themselves run a small loss reinvesting in Starship. And the AI arm, Grok plus the app once called Twitter, folded in this February, lost $6.4 billion in a single year on $12.7 billion of spending.

Read that again. The satellites pay for everything. The AI loses more than the satellites make. And the AI is the part the market fell in love with.

It gets bolder. The prospectus claims a total market of $28.5 trillion, the largest any company has ever put in a filing. Larger than the GDP of the United States. That is the number underwriting a $2 trillion price tag built on a division bleeding $6 billion a year.

Now the structure. About 4% of the company trades. That sliver sets the price for all of it. Musk is locked up for 366 days and holds roughly 80% of the votes. The public bought a company they cannot steer, priced on the one segment losing the most.

This is the whole year in one ticker. The profit is satellites. The story is AI. The market bought the story.

The rockets were never the risk. The risk is a $2 trillion price resting on the one bet that has yet to make a cent.

[Andy Boenau @Boenau]

This is so important for Americans to understand.

[wiebedevries @whdevries]

@umichvoter Bofinger

[Heleen Hüpscher @helena_is_here]

Wat een verhaal. Bellingcat ontdekt dat de vrouw (Tamara Harema) in het interview dat De Telegraaf met haar had niet bestaat (AI foto) en dat er ook geen vluchten gepland stonden. #Dubai #evacuatie

https://t.co/AIshEHdtfL

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

BREAKING: CBS refused to air this Colbert interview with Democrat James Talarico, who is running for Senate in Texas, after being intimidated by Trump’s FCC rules.

Trump is worried that democrats are about to flip Texas.

SHARE EVERYWHERE!!

[Majority Democrats @MajorityDems]

WATCH: This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see: Stephen Colbert and James Talarico.

After intimidation from the FCC, CBS refused to allow Colbert to air this. We need to make sure everyone sees it.

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see.

His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert.

Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

It’s important that you understand what happened last night.

Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue.

In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired.

CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.”

In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump.

But censorship always backfires.

Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.

[Daractenus @Daractenus]

With about 60 days left before Hungarians head to the polls, I figured it is the perfect time to revisit Orban's achievements by comparing Hungary to Romania, just to show how inefficient Orban's authoritarianism is even when compared to a far from perfect democratic state.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Immigration enforcement, my ass.

Bondi's letter below—essentially offering to stop attacking and murdering citizens in Minnesota in exchange for the state's voter rolls—shows what Trump, Miller et al. are really after:

They want to fuck with the nation's elections so that they never have to cede power and never have to answer for their crimes.

Trump needs to go. He needs to be impeached and removed. Now.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Remove them. Defund them. Abolish them. Prosecute them.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

The deadly shooting in Minneapolis today was a straight-up execution of a protester by Trump's federal brownshirts.

The thugs wrestled him to the ground. They pistol-whipped him, then shot him multiple times. They murdered him.

The videos don't lie. A man is dead, killed in cold blood. There is no conceivable justification for this intentional homicide. And make no mistake, that intentional, unjustified homicide was committed on behalf of Donald J. Trump.

Trump's militarization of Minneapolis and other parts of our nation isn't about illegal immigration. It's not about enhancing public safety. It's about destroying any sense of that safety—to intimidate political opponents, and to punish dissent. It's about a corrupt, out-of-control regime's effort to provoke citizens in order to justify the violence it desires to commit against them so that it can expand and retain its power.

That is fascism. It is tyranny. It is governmental criminality.

And the ultimate legal check the Framers of our Constitution provided to stop this kind of tyranny and criminality in the executive branch is impeachment and removal of the executive.

Congress needs to do its job.

Now.

Before it's too late.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Fixed it.

[Maarten Hopman @maartenhopman94]

Denmark changes Greenland’s name to Epstein Island so Trump will stop talking about it.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Also: I don't see how any intelligent and lucid person could watch this press conference and conclude that the president of the United States has anywhere near sufficient cognitive ability to properly execute the duties of his office.

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Even though Maduro is an evil criminal who stole an election, and is probably guilty of the charges in the indictment, the operation to seize him brazenly violated domestic and international law.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Piet Lekkerkerk @PietLekkerkerk]

Speciaal voor alle fans van @wierdduk: de man is een uiterst rechtse prutser en een van de grootste schandvlekken van de Nederlandse journalistiek.
Met dank aan Mathijs van der Loo.

https://t.co/GWX5saXm55

[wiebedevries @whdevries]

@RossKneeDeep And today?