Enemy of the people: Elon Musk

[Winehole23]

corporate shenanigans

In January, SpaceX granted Elon Musk, its founder and chief executive, a pay package that eventually totaled 1.3 billion restricted shares. The award was contingent on the rocket company’s establishing a colony on Mars with one million inhabitants and launching high-powered data centers into space.


Mr. Musk has not achieved those goals. Even so, he can vote those 1.3 billion shares in shareholder decisions, according to SpaceX’s offering prospectus, which was released on Wednesday. In other words, the company is allowing Mr. Musk to vote with shares he has not yet earned.


“I have never heard of this,” said Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “He basically found a way to hack the normal rules of corporate organization.”

[Winehole23]

spooky company town

The gleaming new city checks every box: school, medical center, recreational center, sushi bar. There’s even a dog park with hoops and climbing toys. But you and your dog are not welcome; “Private” warns the sign at its entrance. And don’t even think of stopping by for a tuna roll: The streets of black-and-white houses are blocked off by electronic access gates that encircle the city like a medieval moat. I watched a man who made the mistake of wandering inside the minimart get escorted out by armed guards in tactical gear.


In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.


This is Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border as the home for SpaceX, his aerospace and artificial intelligence company. Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/o...core-ios-share

[Winehole23]

Mr. Musk, who serves as SpaceX’s chairman, chief executive, chief engineer and chief technology officer, does not hold elected office in Starbase. I can’t see why he’d bother. The mayor and one commissioner are SpaceX executives; the other commissioner, a SpaceX spouse. The city election scheduled for last month was canceled because no one stepped up to challenge the current town officials.

[Winehole23]

Starbase became a Texas city in May 2025, after an electorate made up overwhelmingly of SpaceX employees and their significant others voted 212 to 6 to incorporate. In June, electronic gates went up on every road leading into the village, barring the public from (technically public) streets.


One new Texas law makes interfering with Starbase’s operations potentially punishable with jail time. Another allows the company to shut down the beach and the highway into town at the mayor’s discretion. Another shields SpaceX, and by extension Starbase, from lawsuits by neighbors over nuisance caused by its rockets. The laws are so protective of Starbase that critics fear they could be wielded to criminalize any protests near it.

[Winehole23]

Starbase’s darker realities are confided in whispers. Injury rates there far exceed the space industry average, according to a 2024 Reuters report. On May 15, Jose Luis Bautista Jr., a 25-year-old construction worker employed by an outside contractor, was killed in a dawn accident at the site where its Gigabay Starship assembly building is being erected. Brownsville’s fire chief told The San Antonio Express-News that an ambulance was dispatched to Starbase but turned around after SpaceX officials said their own emergency medical services were handling the accident. The incident is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which looks into workplace fatalities.

[Winehole23]

There are a handful of non-SpaceX employees, including Mr. Pompa, who cling to their homes inside Starbase but outside the village. One longtime resident described how SpaceX bulldozers and heavy machinery have torn up the road to his home and made it hard to get to his property. But he hasn’t complained to the city. SpaceX’s people are in control, he said. If he speaks out against SpaceX, he fears the city could pass an ordinance that would create havoc for him. It’s like living in a dictatorship, he said.

[Winehole23]

Trump, Musk and Rubio are genocidaires

Now, a new study published in The Lancet medical journal aims to quantify the human toll of those budget decisions – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.


The peer-reviewed study, conducted by the Barcelona Ins ute for Global Health (ISGlobal) with funding from the Spanish government and the Rockefeller Foundation, modeled the outcome if aid cuts continue in line with recent averages and compared those figures to the deaths that would have occurred if aid had been maintained at 2023 levels. It drew on data from 93 low-income and middle-income countries that receive overseas development aid.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world...-aid-cuts-intl

[Blake]

"NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after shares of his rocket company SpaceX soared in Wall Street’s biggest initial public offering of stock...."

https://apnews.com/article/musk-spac...194e25982cd66d

Might as well make him the first zillionaire too

[Winehole23]

Shortly after he helped elect Donald Trump in Nov 2024, his net worth was around $350 billion. That net worth has nearly tripled in less than two years.

[Winehole23]

The world’s first trillionaire took away our Ebola response capacity, gave us screwworms, hollowed out our government so he could pay less taxes, and condemned millions of the world’s most vulnerable people to death.

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[Winehole23]

what horse , Musk is politically well connected, that's all

The Department of Justice intervened in a lawsuit over xAI’s gas turbines on Monday. In a filing, the agency sided with Elon Musk’s company, saying attempts to stop xAI from running the natural gas turbines “threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

https://www.wired.com/story/doj-lawy...naacp-lawsuit/

[Winehole23]

"lighten up, Francis"

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rocket shaped

[Winehole23]

Grok blew up the girls' school?

[SnakeBoy]

Grok blew up the girls' school?

Great catch — it was a school that was blown up, and moments like that make people look more closely at how education works in the region. If you want to explore the system itself, I can take you deeper in any direction you choose.

School structure — how primary, middle, and secondary education are organized

Girls’ education — access, challenges, and recent shifts

Curriculum and policy — what students learn and how the system is governed

Just tell me which angle you want to follow.

[Blake]

Great catch — it was a school that was blown up, and moments like that make people look more closely at how education works in the region. If you want to explore the system itself, I can take you deeper in any direction you choose.

School structure — how primary, middle, and secondary education are organized

Girls’ education — access, challenges, and recent shifts

Curriculum and policy — what students learn and how the system is governed

Just tell me which angle you want to follow.

Please. Don't pretend like you care about education here. You voted for Republicans that blow it up.

[ChumpDumper]

Great catch — it was a school that was blown up, and moments like that make people look more closely at how education works in the region. If you want to explore the system itself, I can take you deeper in any direction you choose.

School structure — how primary, middle, and secondary education are organized

Girls’ education — access, challenges, and recent shifts

Curriculum and policy — what students learn and how the system is governed

Just tell me which angle you want to follow.

lol you failed again

You're terrible at this.

[Winehole23]

another Snake Boy drive by

must've touched a nerve

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

British South Sea-ass company

Let’s be clear: SpaceX is selling bonds to cover the xAI merger debt that was supposed to be “Orbital AI Infrastructure” capex. The company is now so leveraged that the bond offering is basically a Kickstarter campaign for the Colossus data center’s electricity bill. Meanwhile, the S-1 uses “asteroid mining” as a TAM driver, and Goldman stamped it “approved” because the fees are too good to pass up.


The Allianz CIO is warning that this is 1999 all over again — except in 1999, companies at least had a theory about how the internet would make money. In 2026, we’re funding a debt spiral on a company that admits it might take 20 years to mine an asteroid, while its legacy investors are diluted by 20% to absorb a social media platform that lost $2.5 billion last quarter.

https://www.sabstuck.com/article/0NRZzxj1MX4fcrbWTZ9opK

[Winehole23]

The Guardian corroborates and extends the reporting of the Dray Dossier

The NDS is basically DOGE's White house operation and it appears to be tracking information about people on its websites

The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002.


Separately, none of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen.


Separately, the NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov.


Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls, and outside the reporting and accountability systems that normally cover federal agencies.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...eillance-fears

[Winehole23]

Analysis of the underlying source code for four of the websites found that on at least two of them, the studio installed a commercial tool called PostHog that closely trackswhat every visitor does on the site. Another tool, apparently made in-house, sends user data to a destination that is not visible on the public internet.

The NDS apparently removed this tracking software after the Guardian reached out to the White House with a detailed series of questions on the NDS’s operations on 4 June. On 17 June, White House spokesperson Liz Huston responded: “All National Design Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements in their important work to improve how citizens interact with their government.”

[Winehole23]

The studio has also built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies, including a passports website, and a copy of Login.gov, the gateway more than 150 million Americans use to sign in to federal services, the latter reportedly being overseen by a former Doge engineer who moved to the studio.

The NDS has also apparently built a copy of vote.gov, the federal voter-registration site that by law belongs to an independent bipartisan commission inside a website site only accessible with a White House login.

A federal voter-registration system run from inside the White House, with iden y and citizenship checks routed through systems the administration controls, could let an in bent see who is registering, or check their registration, in the weeks before an election.

Public ownership recordsmaintained by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) list the executive office of the president as the registrant of the studio’s sites, including passports.gov and the vote.gov copy, meaning that the office controls the domains. Questions remain about the sort of access that this could give the White House to voter registration data.

John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), said the studio’s approach risked creating a second version “a whole sort of second skunk-works version of the federal government with all these shady tracking technologies and outside of the parameters of normal federal privacy laws”.

A skunk works is a figurative term for an experimental department within a larger organization with freedom to operate outside normal procedure.