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#10 | Posted by dutch46 at 2025-03-31 12:07 PM
As I read the headline, the image of a snake devouring it's own tail instantly came to mind.
Ouroboros. Interesting visual, but analogy is not incongruous, especially in financial engineering.
As I've said here before, Musk's purchase of "X/Twitter" entity was never planned to be stand-alone, but rather a leveraged stage 1 for merger with another platform, most likely with financial or sales component - trying to emulate the Chinese all-in-one apps/ecosystems like Tencent or Alibaba.
X/Twitter was never going to go public, but xAI most likely will, at high enough valuation (Musk "proposed" the combo of xAI and X is now worth ~$80B) - not bad for a glorified search engine chatbot, trained on X-"wisdom" and disinformation. For comparison, OpenAI just closed a round of investment at valuation of $300B.
Guess what happens when xAI goes public - all personal debt Elon assumed with the purchase of Twitter will become debt of public company shareholders, allowing Musk to participate in public company riches while "sharing" the huge debt with people buying the common stock.
This is EXACTLY, only on much larger scale, the scam Donald Trump pulled when he used his [father's] name and reputation for ~$1B in personal loans for 2 casinos that he was certainly going to default on, then folded one into DJT / Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts public company, then did the same with another one... and poof, his personal debt disappeared and became "property" of the unsuspecting suckers aka DJT shareholders.
www.congress.gov - As its stock collapsed, Trump's firm gave him huge bonuses and paid for his jet - WaPo, June 12, 2016 [PDF, 5 pgs]
|------- It was promoted as the chance of a lifetime: Mom-and-pop investors could buy shares in celebrity businessman Donald Trump's first public company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Their investments were quickly depleted. The company known by Trump's initials, DJT, crumbled into a penny stock and filed for bankruptcy after less than a decade, costing shareholders millions of dollars, even as other casino companies soared.
In its short life, Trump the company greatly enriched Trump the businessman, paying to have his personal jet piloted and buying heaps of Trump-brand merchandise. Despite losing money every year under Trump's leadership, the company paid Trump handsomely, including a $5 million bonus in the year the company's stock plummeted 70 percent.
Many of those who lost money were Main Street shareholders who believed in the Trump brand, such as Sebastian Pignatello, a retired private investor in Queens. By the time of the 2004 bankruptcy, Pignatello's 150,000 shares were worth pennies on the dollar. ...
Trump said he "made a lot of money in Atlantic City," adding, "I make great deals for myself." ... -------|
This is also what current DJT Media and Technology stock is - worthless vessel to "make deals" and transfer money into Donald's pockets, not to mention his family "legitimate" crypto ventures and meme coins to "create" and launder money.
The scam is repeatable. Ouroboros indeed.
Money for nothing and kicks for free
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www.thedailybeast.com - Fox Biz Expert Warns Trump's Tariffs Have U.S. on Brink of Recession | The president's "weak negotiating hand" has left markets "on edge" - 2025-04-25, TDB
|------- Donald Trump's tariffs have left the U.S. teetering on the edge of a recession, with even Fox News hosts voicing their concerns about the president's import levies.
"We need people to buy our debt, and China supplies us with a lot of cheap goods," he said. "We can see inflation rise up dramatically. And Xi [Jinping] knows this."
... "Beijing has also warned countries not to do trade deals with the U.S. that exclude China - or else. ... Beijing's threat has resonated in a way that it never previously did. U.S. diplomatic sway is ebbing."
... Meanwhile, big box CEOS have warned Trump that his trade policy will result in "empty shelves" unless his dramatically changes course in the coming weeks.
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"Winning"? Art of the Bulls**t is not working with the big boys in the real world.
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nypost.com - How Team Trump is working overtime to close face-saving trade deals - 2025-04-25, NYP
|------- Team Trump is looking for a face-saving off-ramp in its global trade war, and they're ready to announce a deal-in-kind with at least one trading partner...
How that manifests itself is unclear, but my sources are led to believe that actual deals - i.e. signed agreements even with the most friendly of trading partners caught up in the Trump maelstrom - are probably not happening anytime soon.
What is more likely is a series of public announcements...
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nypost.com - Trump team needs a trade deal to stop investor panic - 2025-04-21, NYP
|------- About 10 days ago, an increasingly confident Scott Bessent began telling Wall Street executives that he was on the verge of removing the big dark cloud hovering over the US markets and economy: The Treasury Secretary said he was making significant progress in cutting trade deals with India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia...
But that was last week, and there are still no deals...
The trade war wasn't supposed to go down this way.
... "The White House needs trade deals done quick with a negotiation path established with China..."
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nypost.com - Start talking trade deals, Mr. President - and end the tariff meltdown - 2025-04-07, NYP Ed. Board
|------- Mr. President, take "yes" for an answer.
... "We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
It's exactly the sort of agreement that would make President Trump's tariff wars a success ...
But is the administration even answering the phone?
... Peter Navarro... and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggest that these overtures are for naught.
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** Charles Gasparino's book "Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors" (2005) - en.wikipedia.org - highly recommend for the budding investors who don't quite understand what the roles of different "financial analysts" are on Wall Street and in the financial "infrastructure" layers and hierarchy.
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