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13thpythagoras · 2 months ago

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Lending Elon Musk Money Was A Very Bad Bet

(Wall Street Journal, Aug 27, 2024) When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he borrowed $13 billion dollars from several banks to complete the deal. Now, it looks like the banks may not get all their money back. WSJ’s Alexander Saeedy on what the banks didn’t take into account when they made those loans.

Further Reading:

-Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis

-Elon Musk’s Hard Turn to Politics, in 300,000 of His Own Words

Further Listening:

-Elon Musk and Silicon Valley Turn Towards Trump -Tesla’s Multibillion-Dollar Pay Package for Elon Musk -Why Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Losing Advertisers

00:00 / 14:351x

Full Transcript

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Kate Linebaugh: My colleague Alexander Saeedy covers banking and finance, and last week he and I were talking. And what's one of your favorite things?

Alexander Saeedy: Talking about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and the debt he borrowed to pay for it.

Kate Linebaugh: Let's cast our minds back to 2022 when Elon Musk bought X, or Twitter as it was called at the time. The drama began in April when Musk revealed he owned a big chunk of Twitter stock.

Speaker 3: Elon Musk has bought nearly 10% of Twitter for an investment of around $3 billion.

Speaker 4: Do you think that Elon Musk has greater plans to become a little bit more actively involved in Twitter?

Speaker 5: The world's richest man set off a firestorm by revealing his bid to buy Twitter for over $43 billion.

Speaker 6: The deal is done. Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk.

Kate Linebaugh: Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. A lot of that money came from him, but not all of it. For much of the rest, he turned to a group of banks who provided loans to make the purchase, $13 billion worth. Two years later, Alex has been looking into what happened to that debt. What has your recent reporting revealed about Elon Musk's loans?

Alexander Saeedy: So the $13 billion that Elon Musk had X borrow to buy Twitter is now considered the worst deal in merger finance that banks have participated in since the 2008 to '09 financial crisis.

Kate Linebaugh: Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Tuesday, August 27th. Coming up on the show, how financing Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter turned into one of the worst banking deals in history. To complete his purchase of Twitter, now X, Elon Musk needed $13 billion. In short order, a group of seven banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays, pulled together the loans. For these banks, this was a chance to get the richest man in the world as a client.

Alexander Saeedy: The allure of banking Elon Musk, providing capital for him to buy a company, not only would reward them handsomely if things went according to plan, but it would also put them in the good graces of the world's richest person who also controls a number of valuable companies that are capital intensive and need banks to help.

Kate Linebaugh: By working with Musk to buy Twitter, these banks could have an in to working with his other companies like Tesla and SpaceX. The deal had some risks because Twitter wasn't always profitable. And to account for those risks, the banks charged a high interest rate on the loans. That meant Twitter would potentially pay the banks over a billion dollars a year in interest payments according to the terms of the loan. But the banks also didn't think they would hang onto the loans for long. Their plan was to sell the loans to investors. Investors like Fidelity and Vanguard, who would then get to collect those annual interest payments.

Alexander Saeedy: There's a famous adage in the business, which is that banks are in the moving business, not the storage business. This is supposed to be another loan that they just moved. So banks really don't think of this risk as a long-term risk, it's really supposed to be a short-term risk.

Kate Linebaugh: Okay. So I'm Elon Musk and I give an IOU to the bank and then the bank takes that IOU and sells it to someone else?

Alexander Saeedy: Exactly.

Kate Linebaugh: It's like a hot potato. I'm just like-

Alexander Saeedy: Exactly. They're middlemen.

Kate Linebaugh: They're middlemen.

Alexander Saeedy: They're middlemen. And like all middlemen, they want to capture a little fee between the buyer and the seller, the borrower and the lender.

Kate Linebaugh: Why are these outside investors interested in buying this debt?

Alexander Saeedy: Well, usually in instances of corporate takeovers, they are rewarded handsomely for doing so. So the appeal of making that much money has drawn investors into this market for a long time. The high returns they can generate for asset managers who are investing pension money or endowment money is very appealing, and that's why they typically invest in deals like these. When it works well, it is a giant moneymaker. When it doesn't work well, it is a disaster.

Kate Linebaugh: And in this case?

Alexander Saeedy: You can certainly say things have not gone according to plan. The company's finances took a nosedive almost immediately after he bought it. It got so bad to the point where Musk said the company appeared to be near the verge of bankruptcy. At the same time that the company took on $13 billion of debt, advertisers fled the company, they did want to advertise there anymore.

Speaker 7: Audi's leaving. GM is leaving, Pfizer is leaving. Really big names are leaving.

Speaker 8: Advertising giant IPG has recommended to its clients, which include American Express, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and others to temporarily pause advertising on Twitter.

Speaker 9: He was just messing around but Stephen King, the famed author, Michelle, tweeted, "Pretty soon they're going to have nobody left, but-

Alexander Saeedy: It didn't feel like it was a safe place to advertise because of some of the attitudes of its owner. So a lot of people pulled their money from the website at the same time that the company had to find an extra billion and a half every year to pay the banks.

Kate Linebaugh: So then the banks go to offload this debt, to sell it on investors. What happened?

Alexander Saeedy: Well, that didn't even happen because Musk had days to close the deal. So the banks didn't even have time to try and syndicate out the debt. But interest rates had risen so fast over the period of the summer that it was clear that the banks would've had to sell the loans at a steep discount and incur hundreds of millions of dollars of losses if they wanted to sell it. And we reported that at the time. So instead, the banks decided, "We're going to wait to sell." They said, "We're going to wait it out, wait for the company's finances to be established under new ownership, take that story to investors and hopefully sell it in early 2023." And then that didn't happen.

Kate Linebaugh: And now in August of 2024, there still hasn't been a good time for the banks to sell the loans because X's business is still struggling.

Alexander Saeedy: The company itself is worth less than half of what it was when Musk bought it less than two years ago. WSJ's most recent reporting shows that the company was valued at around $19 billion as of the end of last year. It was bought for $44 billion. It's a pretty remarkable amount of value destruction in a short period of time.

Kate Linebaugh: After the break. What all this value destruction has meant for the banks who loaned the company $13 billion. Without investors buying the loans, the banks behind Musk's Twitter takeover were in a tough spot.

Alexander Saeedy: The banks had to pony up the money to let Musk be able to buy the company. But because they couldn't find enough investors who would be willing to pay the amount that they were asking, it's stuck on their balance sheets. And it's been that way for almost two years now.

Kate Linebaugh: So these banks went into this transaction thinking that they'd agree to a $13 billion loan, swiftly offload it to investors, make a bunch of money in the process?

Alexander Saeedy: Correct.

Kate Linebaugh: But that didn't happen.

Alexander Saeedy: Right. And we reported that they've written down the estimated value of the loans by hundreds of millions of dollars each because they don't necessarily think they're going to get all their money back.

Kate Linebaugh: And holding onto this debt has created other problems for the banks. That's because when banks have a lot of risky debt, they're required by regulators to set aside funds and reserve in case those loans go bad.

Alexander Saeedy: And we know that the regulators scrutinize bank balance sheets regularly, especially when there are high risk deals on their balance sheet. Regulators don't want banks to have really risky debt on their balance sheet whose value fluctuates a lot and might not be recovered. So it's a real problem. The losses are a problem, the scrutiny from regulators is certainly a problem for the banks, and as we reported out, it's had consequences even for staffing in the investment banks.

Kate Linebaugh: When banks have to put more funds in reserve, it means there are less funds for other things, like employee bonuses.

Alexander Saeedy: So we reported that at Barclays top investment bankers on the mergers and acquisitions team were told at a New York dinner in early 2023 that compensation for everyone in the room at the dinner would be cut by at least 40% from the prior year. The bank had several deals that were hurting its performance, but X was by far the largest. Once those bankers were paid their bonuses around the beginning of the year, around 50 of Barclays' more than 200 managing directors left the firm. So it impacted compensation, which made people want to leave. It also forced some banks to reallocate how much man power they're putting on these teams because if they can't extend new loans or new debt, then there's no reason to have people working on these teams.

Kate Linebaugh: Have the banks tried to talk to Musk about the situation?

Alexander Saeedy: They have. And this is an interesting wrinkle in the story, is that we reported that the banks actually put together a plan to try and alleviate some of the burden on them and also some of the burden on the company. There were talks about a deal where maybe there would be a slight pay down of some of the loans and in exchange they would give X some relief on interest rates. But X was not interested and didn't follow through on that plan. And so the banks are stuck with the debt as is on their balance sheet to this day.

Kate Linebaugh: Okay. But they're still making interest off of these loans?

Alexander Saeedy: Correct. That is one of the saving graces for this deal is that they now collect the high interest rates on the loans.

Kate Linebaugh: Okay. But they also got involved in this because they want to be banking Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world. It's like a relationship play. Has that benefited them at all?

Alexander Saeedy: It would not appear so. Musk's other companies have not been as capital intensive in recent years as I think some of the banks had hoped. There haven't been huge bond deals or other loan deals that would help bring in fees. And that relationship that they built from the Twitter deal hasn't quite transferred into the lucrative stream of income that I think some had at least hoped they would make. So no, that has not really played out either.

Kate Linebaugh: So basically, even if Musk pays back these loans in full, and he might, this bet hasn't really worked out for the banks the way they wanted it to?

Alexander Saeedy: Absolutely. In some ways it appears to be a real failure of risk evaluation, which is pretty much the main thing banks are supposed to be good at. They didn't fully appreciate the risk of the individual in question here, Elon Musk, and how he single-handedly could alienate a whole company's relationship with large swaths of the advertising industry. And while this story is not over, we'll see where the banks wind up. But right now it looks like they could definitely lose hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, agreeing to finance this deal.

Kate Linebaugh: That's all for today, Tuesday, August 27th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Dana Mattioli. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

reposted from: Wall Street Journal: TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2024

#lol #musk #news #financial times #elon musk steals $13 billion

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wisteria-falls · 2 years ago

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Nearly thirty years ago, two love-struck witches returned to their Northern California hometown and opened a bar with the change they’d saved up from a half-decade of working dead-end restaurant jobs. The bar didn’t last, but their romance did: three businesses and three kids later, Courtney and Phoebe Brannon have built a life that unites the pride they hold for their magical ancestry with the affection they feel for the town that’s supported them through it all.

Hidden along the coast of the Pacific-Northwest, Wisteria Falls is an amalgam of artisanal leanings, sequoia tree weather, magical secrets, and small town personality. Its storied past is rife with accounts of fairies, fey, witches, and werewolves, all of which are considered folk tales by the locals. Most of them, anyway.

There’s a story told by the residents of Wisteria about a raven-haired girl floating across the sky on a bicycle made from the bones of ravens and frogs. The bike wasn’t made from ravens and frogs, of course; just a broom spell gone wrong, conjured by a pair of first-time parents, that lead to a shrieking girl learning to fly over the Wisteria coast. Oona is introverted, sardonic, and a bit overly reserved, with a penchant for books rivaled only by her middle-sister.

Stories of the supernatural often center around sites of extreme density: ghosts in crowded cities, fairies in overgrown forests. Often, though, the most chilling tales stem from the most open oceans in the world. Sirens who haunt the sea, kraken making widows of a ship’s worth of spouses. People have generally decided that these rumors are little more than myth, but that doesn’t stop the coastal towns from which those ‘myths’ originated from celebrating those stories and becoming popular tourist destinations as a result.

Years ago, a coalition of town government officials and local entrepreneurial-types bought up a string of businesses and buildings near Wisteria’s town center with the hopes that the location, aided by Wisteria’s breathtaking forest and coastal views, might become a popular tourist destination, should the right shops and restaurants be installed there. Their efforts proved fruitful, and said part of the town is indeed popular with tourists. There was, however, one holdout amongst those businesses that received a buyout offer, which is why a small, multi-generational electrician company is still residing on that block.

Wisteria is famous for the miles of dense forest that surround it. Though a few trees are cut down every year to make room for new residents, roads, and radio towers, the forest nonetheless maintains its air of whimsical, fog-filled enigma. One building, however, pierces the veil of leaves that lines the forest: the home of Courtney, Phoebe, Oona, Sorcha, and Aoife Brannon.

Close to the center of town is a cafe owned by a wife-and-wife duo who, along with the three daughters who help them run the place, seem to know the name of every first-time customer who walks in. It’s little more than an urban legend, of course, but the Bel, Book & Bistro has long thrived on much more than rumor alone: specifically by offering a good cup of coffee, nice food, and a relaxing place to read in.

A few months ago, two students at Wisteria University encountered each other in the halls of W.U.'s English building and struck up conversation. A dozen dates and many kisses later, Connall and Sorcha are known around town as the golden couple of Wisteria Falls. Though their families have resided in Wisteria for generations, they’ve adeptly avoided meddling in each other’s business (both literally and figuratively) by occupying opposite sides of the town’s cultural and geographic spectrums, meaning that when our story starts, neither Connall nor Sorcha is aware of the other’s magical origins.

Alexander ‘Art’ Kunst was meant to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a well-respected, highly-paid doctor of medicine. Instead, Art dropped out of Wisteria University and made a bet with his parents: he’d open a small book shop and cafe in Wisteria using part of his trust. If it failed, he’d go back to school and become a doctor. If it succeeded, he wouldn’t. It’s been a little over a year now and in spite of some hefty competition, Art has yet to step foot on W.U.’s campus. The fact that his bookstore, Chaucer’s, is on a block of Wisteria famous for its artisans is purely coincidental.

With the eyes of the town focused on their elder siblings, Ellie and Aoife have managed to keep their troublesome misadventures under everyone’s radar, which frequently proves to be a problem when their activities become magical, overwhelming, and dangerous. Luckily, a certain cat-and-dog duo seem to have a supernatural sense for when the girls are getting into trouble, and frequently end up saving them from their self-inflicted peril.

Few things in life are as comforting as watching a coastal sunset from the tranquility of your bedroom, with a nice warm drink in hand, and a furry pup or cat resting alongside you. Sometimes Sorcha will convince Connall to fill in for a furry friend, but most of the time, it’ll be Lysander and Jinx helping them relax away the stress of their everyday. If they aren’t at their owners’ sides, then the pets are usually accompanying the youngest Dempsey and Brannon sisters while they explore the town or get into trouble in the surrounding forest.

For over one hundred and fifty years, the Wisteria Township Tribune has covered the politics, gossip, and supernatural folktales whispered around Wisteria Falls. Still in print today, tourists and residents alike can conveniently grab new issues from inside many local businesses, such as the Bell, Book, and Bistro, Chaucer’s Cafe and Books, and the newspaper’s neighbor across the street: The Albert Museum of Wisteria History. Staffed almost exclusively by Geoffrey Alexander Giles, a professor of history at W.U., the museum holds many artifacts important to the town’s history, as well as many aged articles written by the Tribune.

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fxdltc88 · 2 years ago

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Strohs Brewery 991 Gratiot Ave

Stroh Brewing Company started with Johann Peter Stroh in 1775 in Kirn, Germany. Johann and his family lived in a house with an adjoining brew house attached, and ran a local inn that served meals and their family’s recipe for Bohemian-style Pilsner Ale. Johann had three sons and one daughter. His second son, Georg Freidrich Stroh, inherited the brew house. Georg’s youngest son was

Johann Bernhard Stroh (known to the world as Bernhard), who was born in 1821. On February 22, 1848, revolutions erupted across Europe. With all the turbulent violence surrounding Europe in the mid-19th century, and with his father Johann’s death and his elder brother Georg inheriting the family business, a 27 year old Bernhard Stroh, who had learned the brewing trade, immigrated to the United States.

Bernhard Stroh arrived in the United States in 1850. He immediately started his own business. Stroh opened a brewery at 57 Catherine Street…He developed a market for a new light lager beer among the larger German immigrant population, and names his new company Lion’s Head Brewery, adopting the Lion’s Crest logo from Kyrburg Castle in Kirn, Germany.

The company uses this same crest as their logo to this day. With only an investment of $150 (in 2016 dollars, this would amount to $4,409.53) that he provided himself through working for the family inn back in Germany, Stroh had to be very frugal in his spending. By 1860, Stroh’s customers had a desire for Stroh to start bottling his famous beer so they could enjoy the Bohemian-style Pilsner Ale at their homes.

Bernhard Stroh would have his sons personally cart small kegs of beer to his customer’s homes and business by wheelbarrow.

Stroh’s would not only become Detroit’s largest brewer, but the third largest in the country.

This massive, million-square-foot factory at Gratiot near I-75 grew as the company did, with buildings dating from the 1860s to 1914. In late 1890, the firm Spier & Rohns was hired to make extensive additions and improvements to the Stroh campus, including building a 25-foot-by-70-foot fireproof stockhouse, a 60-foot-by-100-foot bottling works, and a new ice-machine plant. These additions made the brewery the largest in Michigan and formed some of the most visible parts of the plant.

By 1956, the Detroit brewery was pumping out 2.7 million barrels of beer — 83.7 million gallons.

he 1970s and 1980s were very productive years for the Stroh’s; sales continued to increase with the acquisition of Goebel’s, new leadership came in 1967 with John Stroh becoming CEO and Peter Stroh, Gari Stroh’s son, became President. The duo expanded the company to its greatest height throughout the two decades with new marketing and aggressive advertising strategies. With increased sales, the Stroh brewing company was able to match the big three car companies in terms of salaries and benefits. Early in the 1980’s, Peter Stroh started looking to take Stroh’s to the national stage, and made a bid on the Schaeffer Brewing Company and Schlitz Brewing Company. Schaeffer started to go into debt in the late 1970s and early ’80s, making the buyout from Stroh’s all too easy in 1981. Schlitz accepted a buyout offer of $17 a share. Schlitz became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Stroh Brewing Company, making Stroh the third-largest brewery in the United States. With all this expansion, Peter Stroh, now CEO at this time, realized his company was overextended. By 1985, Peter Stroh recognized his company was operating with excess capacity, On Feb. 8, 1985, Stroh’s announced it was closing its Detroit facility, calling it too costly to run and too inefficient compared with newer facilities it had acquired. The plant was shuttered that May, bringing an end to 135 years of tradition and costing 1,159 Detroiters their jobs.

The factory was imploded in two phases -- on April 13, 1986, and July 13, 1986 -- with the land soon redeveloped as Brewery Park.

In 1999, the struggling company was imploded, too, split up and sold to Miller Brewing and Pabst.

#detroit #michigan #detroit michigan #beer #lager #michigan history

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dynared · 1 year ago

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When we last left Paramount, fresh off pushing Sonic and The Transformers as their big releases for fall and winter 2024, they were negotiating with longstanding partners Skydance to buy the studio outright after having ignored a cash buyout from Apollo Global Management, an asset management firm. However, while the exclusivity window for Skydance is still present till May, insiders have claimed the company has hit numerous snags on buyout terms.

Now Sony, famous for describing themselves as an “arms dealer” in the streaming race and controlling most anime in North America via Crunchyroll, is making their own bid for the beleaguered studio with Apollo as a minority owner in a prospective deal.

#Sony #paramount #paramount+#transformers #Sonic

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years ago

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Charters were an easier sell at the end of history. The neoliberal consensus had gone bipartisan, and the “new economy” talking points in Doerr’s remarks were sufficient for almost everyone, with a few paeans to diversity thrown in for sentimental liberals. But eventually that got a little stale, and the industry began leaning more heavily into the aesthetic of racial justice to validate its goals. Just this year, NSVF announced that it would add an entire “Racial Equity” category to its core areas of investment:

People [of color] have suffered disproportionately from COVID’s impact, from police violence and hate attacks, from threats to their jobs, housing, health and more. All of this is a result of America’s structural and institutional racism.

That’s why we’ve created a new Racial Equity investment area…There is rich, hard-won wisdom in communities of color — and we trust it. We’re ceding power…We don’t pretend to have all the answers; instead, we’ll help you bring powerful, imaginative ideas to life that reach toward a racially equitable education system — a bedrock of American antiracism.

But who exactly is ceding this power? And how did they get it in the first place?

On its website, NSVF gives the names of 38 donors who contributed to the fund from 2018-2021, and notes three more who are anonymous. Among those whose identities are public, at least 16 are billionaires or the personal foundations of billionaires.

Bill Oberndorf is a major Republican donor and chair of the American Federation for Children, the pro-charter lobby group led by Betsy DeVos until Oberndorf took over in 2017. Charles Schwab is another top GOP donor who’s given tens of millions to far-right candidates, and helped bankroll Donald Trump’s legal defense. John Overdeck dropped a quarter million to help Republicans keep the House in 2016.

But don’t think it’s only the GOP looking to invest in anti-racism. Oil and gas barons Lynn and Stacy Schusterman are major Democratic donors (though they also support a bevy of right-wing Zionist organizations). NSVF founder John Doerr has given millions to Democratic candidates for federal office, and so has Sheryl Sandberg.

And let’s not forget the ultra-millionaires who support NSVF. Jesse Rogers is an investor who made a killing by suckering low-income borrowers into car loans they couldn’t afford, and gutting companies like Payless Shoes through leveraged buyouts. He dropped a quarter million of his own trying to elect Mitt Romney in 2012. David G. Bradley is the former publisher of The Atlantic, notorious for his lavish parties popular with famous journalists and politicians. He organizes seminars for corporations like Citigroup and AstraZeneca, which pay him for access to his influential friends.

As it turns out, the project of anti-racism in education is being advanced by fortunes built on the exploitation of the working class, the immiseration of communities of color, the destruction of the environment, and the erosion of democracy. That begs the question: what exactly do they mean when they say they’re committed to anti-racism?

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inapat14 · 4 years ago

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Tex Avery, the Warner Bros. And – Looney Tunes

From the early days of the 20th century to its prolific forms today, Animation has always been a wonderful creative genre, pushing aside both – technical and – creative boundaries. But when we think about animation and cartoons from our childhood, we will often first mention Disney: the stories, drawings and perfectly identified characters.

When it came to other names, we know them all, but often not as well. The graphics, - credits, - expressions and the characters rocked part of our childhood but it is often difficult to know where, when or how exactly. Less well ranked, they nevertheless deserve to be mentioned with respect, like their creators, true artists of the genre who have succeeded in giving life to their imaginary world.

For this first article and to put things in order, let’s talk about – Looney Tunes and their not-so-famous flagship creator, Tex Avery. And let’s begin by a little bit of background :

In 1923, the Disney studios were created. But at the same time they are not the only ones. All the big majors embarked on the adventure and quickly established a partnership or an animation department in order to broadcast their creations to the cinema alongside newsreels.

That is when the Warner Bros. set up a partnership with Leon Schlesinger, founder of Leon Schlesinger Productions, a studio rich in talents and creations that have become cult. It is in these studios, at the end of the 1930s, that – the Looney Tunes characters were created. Absurd characters, cunning, rather clever (sometimes diabolical), overflowing, unpredictable. Characters in total contrast to the sensible characters created in the previous decade like Mickey Mouse or Popeye. Tex Avery has been hired by Leon Schlesinger Studios in 1935. He led a team of ultra-talented artists: Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Bob Cannon, Virgill Ross and Sidney Sutherland. Together, they collaborated on the Looney Tunes series in black and white, then on Merrie Melodies in technicolor.Originally, Fred Avery (who will take the pseudonym Tex Avery in tribute to his home state, Texas), wanted to work for comics. He couldn't find a job there and decided (luckily for us) to fall back on animation, "time to… ». He will become the masterful innovator of midcentury cartoon humor.

Avery will only stay 6 years with Leon Schlesinger and will even leave the studio before the total buyout by the Warners Bros which marked the beginning of the Warner Bros Cartoon. But even if Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck had already been drawn a few years before being taken back by Tex Avery, he was the one who shaped them.

This slender gray rabbit who spends his time nibbling carrots and playing with his enemies ? Avery is the one who gives it his cult line, drawing inspiration from his own teenage expressions: "Hey, what's up, doc? ". The great specialty of Avery and its teams was to infuse characters with an irreverent personality. He developed some of the kinkiest, weirdest cartoons ever made but also modeled legendary characters. Today Bugs Bunny is an iconic figure in the Warner Bros. Animation. His popularity even led him to become a mascot for the company Warner Bros.

The Tex Avery style can be summed up in one word: wacky. Everything is crazy about his work because he sought to break the codes. He dismantled the period fairy tale animations into something funny. He tackled all of Walt's taboo subjects: sex, politics, the fourth wall ... The characters are the masters of cartoons and it is often thanks to their hateful flaws that audiences tend to love them.

Unfortunately, this freedom of tone has not always been well received, which isn't going to help Tex Avery get easy recognition. In addition, the gag-man was modest and did not set up his own studio despite his many successful creations.

He nevertheless obtained 6 Oscar nominations between 1940 and 1956. Gradually and during the second part of the 20th century, his professional peers recognized his importance. Many films and animated series have been inspired by his work, such as The Mask or the Animaniacs.

Of course Bugs Bunny or – Looney Tunes are not the only interesting part of Tex Avery’s work (quite the contrary, he is also the father of Droopy for example…), but it would take more than one article to talk about all his genius ! But if all of this made you want to know more about Tex Avery, I would recommend – seeing the King Size documentary : Tex Avery and the Looney Tunes Revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=III4mVWV_2I&t=647s

But Warner Bros and Looney Tunes are also back in the news today !

First because of The film Space Jam: A new Legacy which should be released next July, and put some Looney Toon’s characters at the heart of the debate ! Indeed, the character of Pépé Le Pew was edited out of the sequel to the cult film bringing together the Looney Tunes and the stars of the NBA, because he was accused of perpetuating -- « rape culture ».

On the other hand and if all of this just made you want to dive back into the animations: be aware that that the legendary crew is back! 200 new Looney Tunes shorts have been created and are currently showing in the US on the HBO Max platform. -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nalw1XRAiMI Mathilde Agaisse

#cartoon #tex avery #looney tunes

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pokemoncoloursplash · 5 years ago

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I was reading back on old mod questions, and I noticed that Dragonis name-checked Belfast as the birthplace of the Olympic instead of, you know, the Titanic. What makes the Olympic special to you, Fakemon Master?

You have no idea how happy this ask has made me. I’m the Fakemon Master AND I get to talk about boats? This made my day.

The Olympic, though most often forgotten today, was the most famous of the Olympic-class trio in her day. She had a career that lasted over twenty years, esteemed war service, and consistent passenger praise that earned her the nickname “Old Reliable”, and reliable she was.

The greatest ocean liners, in my opinion, were the Mauretania, the Imperator-class trio, the Normandie, and the Olympic. The Mauretania was fast, and held the record for the Blue Riband for 19 years. The Imperator trio were massive, holding the record for largest liners in the world for 23 years. Normandie was luxurious, possessing a 305 foot long dining room, regulation-sized open air tennis court, and massive gardens that required the services of full time gardeners.

Olympic had none of these. She was never the fastest, she was only the largest for a year, and she wasn’t as luxurious as the likes of Normandie or Aquitania. But Mauretania lacked luxury, Imperator has a limp, and Normandie never made a profit. Olympic, meanwhile, had reliability. She may not have been a master of any trade, but she was a jack of all of them.

And she survived.

When Titanic hit an iceberg, Olympic sailed on. She proved that her steel wasn’t weak. She survived.

When Britannic hit a mine, Olympic sailed on. She rammed a U-boat and ferried 200,000 people. She survived.

In the end, it wasn’t an iceberg that claimed Olympic. It wasn’t a mine. It was time. She wasn’t built with the changing times in mind. She didn’t have enough private bathrooms for her passengers, she didn’t have the honour of being the largest ocean liner in the world, she wasn’t luxurious enough to be a cruise ship. Her lack of mastery was sadly her undoing. She was scrapped alongside her old rival, Mauretania. It was during the Depression, when Cunard and White Star, the respective parent companies of Mauretania and Olympic, merged due to a Cunard buyout. The Old Lady, as her chief engineer called her, though far more sound than liners such as Aquitania, met her fate long before Aquitania.

In the end, Olympic made 257 round-trip crossings of the Atlantic, transported almost 500,000 peace-time passengers, and traveled over 3,000,000 kilometres.

Olympic deserves to remembered as more than Titanic’s older sister. She deserves more than crackpot conspiracy theories saying that an impossible switch of the sisters happened.

She deserves the name “Old Reliable”.

#discussions with dragonis #long post #rms olympic #random question hour

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aranciafiamma · 6 years ago

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Price of Popularity

A Kingtama fanfic loosely based off Pride and Prejudice

King didn’t want to be here. He really didn’t want to be here. But the universe, fate, some yet unnamed cosmic power had collectively decided to ignore him. His opinion never counted for much lately, not that a lot of people asked for it.

And now, he got roped into this mess. They ambushed him. Or he would have fled long ago. They had staked out his apartment and the moment he showed up, they dragged him to this. He spent the ride over with his heartbeat getting louder. The driver and his escorts started weeping. So busy begging for his mercy, they never told him that it wasn’t a fight. There was no monster to vanquish, no villain to slay.

Then he walked into the room, his “engine” thundering loud and clear, and he figured it all out. It was a ballroom - high ceilings, chandeliers, polished floors - the works. It was filled with people, clad in suits and party dresses - a small band played in the corner. Heroes were milling about, eating fancy cheeses and sipping champagne - the S Rank scattered through the crowd. It was some kind of soiree.

He almost sunk to his knees - his legs turned to melted sugar. That’s how relieved he felt. Except.

Everyone stopped. The band stopped playing. The people stopped chatting. The S Rank heroes all turned to look. At him. And his heart rate sped right back up.

“It’s King -”

“Rank 7 in the S Class - ”

“I heard he - ”

Murmurs broke out. They all kept a good distance, eyeing him with the caution of someone who found a stray dog in their dumpster. A rabid, filthy dog with blood on its teeth. They spoke of him but no one had the guts to really come close. So King took the chance and performed his ultra special move. He ran.

They closed the doors behind him - big doors, heavy and solid oak that he would never be able to push open. He couldn’t leave. He just settled for lurking in a corner, not looking at anybody. The good news is it could be worse. The bad news is it could be better. He really wants to go home.

He sighs and tries not to slump. He’s gotta be King now. And King doesn’t slump. But maybe he crosses his arms. That’s a classic, tough guy pose. King crosses his arms, frowning a little harder. There. Now he looks stoic and intimidating and definitely, not at all intimidated. He hopes.

“King! There you are!”

For real?! He seriously has the worst luck. Maybe if he doesn’t answer, Silverfang will go away.

Silverfang does not go away. He actually walks a little closer. He even pats King on the shoulder. “I was surprised to learn you came. You don’t seem like a party-type.”

Well. At least some things stay true no matter what.

Silverfang doesn’t seem offended or discouraged by his silence. He goes on. “I’m not really much of a party-person myself. But it’s nice to be out every now and again.”

“What’s so nice about it?”

It’s official. The universe is trying to screw him over. This is a dedicated campaign to really mess him up. It’s like a cosmic DdoS attack.

Tatsumaki floats down from wherever she was hanging around. Literally looking down at everyone, he guesses.

“This is just some cheap gimmick to get the Association some money!” she announces right into his ear.

“That may be. Still. There’s good food. And music. A perfect time to ease up.”

“The cheese is stale. The music is bland. And if I wanted to relax, I’d be at home.”

She’s right. About being at home. She’s so right. If King could, he’d be nodding so hard. But King doesn’t really do that - willful expression of emotion. He’s an aloof bastard, that King.

Silverfang ignores Tatsumaki, turning to face him more. He has no reason to. It’s not like they were having a conversation of any kind. Silverfang would have a better time talking to a wall. Why is he still trying with him? Why?!

“King, you really should socialize more. It’s a waste of your youth, just watching the world go by.”

He’s perfectly fine with that. The world could pass him on the street and he’d barely give it a glance. It never gave him much to offer anyways. Of course, he can’t just say that. To Bang.

“Oh please! As if there’s anybody worth talking to in this dump. Can you believe the Association? The only real waste here is the waste of our time!”

“I think it’s good for the S Rank to mingle a little more.”

“You just want more students for that trashy dojo of yours.”

“The thought crossed my mind. But we weren’t talking about that. We were talking about King here.”

No. Please. Continue talking about that. King tries very hard to phase through the wall. It doesn’t work. They turn to him.

“Well how about it, King? Why not chat with someone?” Bang looks around. “Oh! Saitama’s here, I see. And he doesn’t seem too busy.”

“Caped Baldy?” Tatsumaki squawks. “You want King talking to that B Rank nobody? Have you finally gone senile?”

He breathes in a fast, shallow breath. He tries to open his mouth but his lips stick together. He feels his pulse speed up, the beat a little muffled but not for too long.

“They could become great friends! We certainly won’t know until King talks to him.”

“Of course, we’d know! What kind of company -”

“So how about it, King?”

“Hey, don’t ignore me!”

His pulse is now audible, very audible. He clenches his hands, trying to calm down. It feels like his skin shrunk, suddenly two sizes too tight. He’s vaguely aware of Bang and Tatsumaki shrinking back.

“I have. Better things to do. Than make small talk. With someone. I’ve never heard of.”

King risks a glance. Bang is frowning. Tatsumaki is grinning.

“I expected better from you, King. I thought you wouldn’t buy into the whole S Rank ego nonsense.”

“And why shouldn’t he? Sure, the S Rank are a bunch of clowns. But at least King can be competent! We’re above the sort of - Hey! Where are you going?!”

They opened the doors. Party’s over. People are heading out. King ignores the screeching behind him and follows the crowd. Tatsumaki’s annoyed with him but she’s always annoyed. He can’t bring himself to care now that he’s on his way out. His pulse even slows down.

Halfway to the exit, a glint catches his eyes. It’s an animal reflex, really. Something shiny, something moves and humans look. It’s for a second, maybe even half of that. But King turns and sees - wow. He really is completely bald. His name is Caped Baldy, sure. So it’s not like a surprise. But King was expecting some middle-aged dude with a receding hairline or like a really big bald spot. But no, this guy’s scalp is totally bare, absolutely naked. His head’s so shiny, it’s reflecting light which caught his attention.

Then he abruptly realizes the bald guy is also looking right at him. Their gazes lock for all of one second. But it’s enough to send King scrambling. The guy definitely noticed him staring. Like a weirdo. Oh man. He quickens his pace. His heartbeat gets a little excited and people start clearing a path for him. He’s out the door within a minute.

He must’ve seen like such a jackass. There’s definitely weirder people to stare at. For crying out loud, Watchdog Man wears a fursuit 24/7. And he’s over here eyeing some guy just ‘cuz he didn’t have any hair. C'mon, dude. Lots of people are bald. This guy shouldn’t be so special.

Except. King can’t help but feel a sort of deja vu. Like he’s met this guy before. Like there’s something important he’s forgetting.

It really shouldn't bother him. He's not famous. Saitama knows that. It's the whole reason he went pro. It's the reason he's at this fancy, little shindig eating weird cheeses and mini hotdogs. No, wait. Rich people like to call them sausages. Whatever. He pulls another snack off a passing tray. Seriously, these things were so small. Rich people can buyout a literal buffet but they always serve such small plates. He'll never understand. What was he thinking about again? The doors open. The band finishes their song. It looks like the party's over. He turns, searching for wherever Genos went. The guy chased after some poor waiter because Saitama said something about wanting a drink. Man. That guy really needed to chill. His eyes pass over the room. He doesn't see Genos. He does see this tall, blond dude. It's kinda hard not to. The dude is that tall. And in a hurry, it seems like. The guy is pushing through the crowd and then turns to glance over his shoulder. Saitama meets his eyes for like a second, maybe half of that. Oh. That's right. Popularity. Fame. Recognition. Just even a little bit. Sure, he didn't become a hero to be like a superstar. But he thought, you know, after everything he's done maybe people would... Man, he doesn't know what. But it makes sense - or at least, he thought it did - that people should know him by now. He's not much for bragging but he's done a lot... Hasn't he? "Hey Genos, what do you think I'm doing wrong?" Genos walks up to him. He's dripping. Something is splashed all over his face and hair and shirt. Genos doesn't seem bothered by this, triumphantly holding up a glass of fizzy stuff. He hands it over to Saitama. "Here, Sensei! I got you that drink!" "Aa. Thanks." Now Saitama feels bad. Genos definitely looks like he got into some trouble getting this for him. "I don't think you can do anything wrong." "Hmm? What?" Saitama looks up from eyeing his drink. "You asked what you were doing wrong," Genos explains. "And I don't think you can." "Sheesh, dude. Quit trying that with me." Saitama takes a sip, just to have something to do that isn't looking at Genos. So intense, this guy. "I was just thinking about... Stuff, I guess. Is it weird to assume people have heard of me?" "No," Genos replies, quick enough that Saitama glances back at him. There's no hesitation in that reply. "I have seen the feats you perform on a regular basis. Each far exceeded the capacity of any known hero. Your obscurity is not just strange - it's an outright absurdity." Wow. He's. Confident. Like, it's good that he's saying that. So maybe Saitama isn't so crazy thinking that stuff. But also like, Genos can get pretty biased when it comes to him. And it's not like Saitama knows enough about the other heroes to compare himself. "Why do you ask?" Saitama blinks at Genos. "Hmm?" "Why do you ask?" "Oh. Nuthin'. Just some guy.”

“What guy? Did he insult you-” Really. It's so weird that he's hung up on that. He doesn't usually care about the things people say. He for real doesn't. Except, you know, it's like... Something he's been thinking about lately.... It's the timing, that's all. Someone says the stuff on your mind. That can screw anybody up. A loud whirring noise catches his attention. He turns to Genos to find him steaming - as in literally steam is rising from his shoulder plates, his arm guards, even his synthetic hair. And it's a bit unfair, he thinks. Cyborgs don't need hair. So Genos must have specifically asked for it. But there's nothing wrong with being bald! Oh wait. Genos is still talking. "-burn them! I will incinerate their ashes and their ashes' ashes." "Okay. Whoa. Slow your roll there, buddy. It's cool. You know I don't really care about that sort of thing." Genos pauses. His incinerators stop charging up. "Sensei." Saitama braces himself for another compliment. He is never gonna get used to that. "Yeah?" "You're a terrible liar." "Sure, you..." Wait. "Huh? Huuuuuuuh?!"

The party ends. The days pass. He stops thinking about it.

Okay, well, he tries to. A lot of stuff happens and he gets a pretty harsh reminder. Some fish-man - merman? - thrashed a whole bunch of heroes. And Saitama is sure they tried their best. But their best wasn’t enough. And the day still needed to be saved… so he saved it.

He just made everybody else look like chumps. And that’s… That can’t be helped. The gap between him and everyone else… He knows it’s that wide. But it didn’t use to bother anybody except him. And then the whole… That jerkface with his snide little - He didn’t need to go rubbing it in like that. As if Saitama didn’t know. As if standing there, still wet from the rain, with the corpse of yet another monster at his feet, as if he wasn’t fully aware of how…

...

Anyways. He lied. He laughed and he lied and he looked up at the clear, blue sky. And a small, soft part of him - tucked away someplace dark and forgotten - wished they didn’t believe him so easily. But they did. And now, he’s a villain.

That’s fine. He can’t say it’s too drastic of a change from how things usually are. People always think he’s some kinda troublemaker - a no-good kid all grown up into a no-good guy. Whatever, okay! The day is saved. That’s what matters.

It wasn’t all bad. He met someone new. He did get some thanks. That was nice. Oh and he got a promotion which was cool. And hey, maybe if he got really high up there, then he might get fans. There’s no way a fake can get into the top, right? He can show them all.

So, okay. He really has been thinking about the whole “popularity” thing. He’s thought about it more than he ever did before. But then, there hadn’t been like this system he had to follow. He thought his strength spoke for itself. Guess not. Geez, being a hero didn’t use to be this much work.

But he’s got nothing better to do. That’s why he followed Genos to this S-rank meeting. He probably shouldn’t be there. And by “probably”, he means definitely. Two steps in, and he’s already getting dissed. Not even a minute later, he’s dissed again. Does the S stand for the sticks up their asses? Sheesh.

So of course, Saitama is not super surprised to see that tall, blond dude again. And yes! Fine! He still remembers what the guy said in that party ages ago. It just figures that he would be S-rank. He certainly had the right attitude.

Saitama tries to ignore him. But… The dude just keeps staring at him? Like his eyes are just fixed on Saitama. He wanted to look back, just lock eyes with the guy, maybe start some shit? He doesn’t know why else the dude would pay him so much attention. He figured he must’ve offended the guy. He doesn’t have a clue how except that he did. But like, so what? Some blond, S-rank stuck-up disliked him? He can get in line.

#kingtama #opm #one punch man #saitama #king

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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Randall Lane is a fucking bastard capshit shill that should shut his idiot cockholster.

I was in the library the other day and sitting on a shelf was a stack of Forbes magazines, the facing issue featuring some dickhead grinning smugly at me beneath the headline

Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change

I knew that I was going to hate whatever I found on those pages, but I had to read it anyway. It was intriguing for two reasons: capitalists actually acknowledging the fact that systemic changes need to be made is something in itself, something which should make people extremely nervous, and it’s never a bad idea to read enemy propaganda. Of course Forbes is capprop par excellence, and I was morbidly curious in regards to what they thought needed to be changed and how. The most surprising thing about its suggestions was just how unsurprising they are in their tepidity and belief in their own perverse self-assured reaction, with the usual capitalist mythologizing mixed in.

Sitting in a modest room in New York’s immodest Peninsula Hotel, the richest person in the world for most of the past 20 years ponders an existential question suddenly in vogue among the left’s confiscatory set: Should he even exist? “It is fascinating,” says Bill Gates, “that for the first time in my life, people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?’ ”

Dispassionately, he begins to unpack that thesis. “I’m afraid if you really implemented something like that, that the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose. Now, that sounds self-interested, so who’s the neutral witness on this one? … We need somebody who’s not wealthy to say that in some cases allowing people to be wealthy is okay.”

Allow me to raise my hand. For the past year, I’ve had one-on-one discussions with no fewer than two dozen billionaires, including face-to-face meetings with the three richest people in the world—Jeff Bezos, Gates and Warren Buffett—touching on various aspects of capitalism’s future. It comes at an urgent moment: You’d have to go back to the 1960s, or maybe even the 1930s, to find a time when the primacy of the free market system was so widely questioned.

Just 56% of Americans say they have a positive image of capitalism, according to a Gallup poll last summer, compared with 37% who said the same thing about socialism. In a Fox News poll during the same period, 36% of adults approved of a shift in the U.S. “away from capitalism and more toward socialism”—a huge increase from 2012, when just 20% said so. Among Millennials and Gen Z, free market skepticism is actually the majority view. In Gallup’s poll, 51% of those 18 to 29 had a positive view of socialism—albeit the largely fuzzy Scandinavian/Bernie Sanders version rather than the Soviet/Berlin Wall hard stuff—compared with 45% for capitalism. That finding was echoed by a Harvard survey of young adults in which 51% said they did not support capitalism and only 19% said they “identify as a capitalist.” These sentiments come amid an economy that by all traditional measures is booming, with full employment and 3% growth. So far, 2019 has offered only reinforcement of these views, as tech companies have continued to bleed credibility, Howard Schultz turned himself into a cartoon and a slew of tax-the-very-rich proposals garnered surprisingly high support. “This has been brewing for years, accelerating in the last few months and again in the last few weeks,” says Steve Case, the AOL founder who now runs an investment firm, Revolution. The hedge fund titan Paul Tudor Jones adds: “I think we need to acknowledge that we’re at a crossroads, with massive social fissures.”

And those were just some of the billionaires willing to speak on the record. Virtually everyone I talked to acknowledged the need for change. Some incremental and many systemic; some spoke in whispers, many in full-throated pleas for “reform” or “a reboot.” The rock star Bono had perhaps the most poetic suggestion: a reimagination.If such a term conjures Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, two of capitalism’s visionary saints, so be it. Entrepreneurial capitalism remains, objectively, the best system ever invented to create and distribute prosperity, and if you look at the billion-plus people in China, India and elsewhere who were lifted from extreme poverty in the past two decades, it remains easy to sing its praises. The dynamism remains true in the U.S., too. Of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, 67% are self-made and 11% are immigrants. “America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,” Buffett says.

Since too many Americans don’t feel that way, the time is ripe to reimagine a system that addresses them. Pick the brains of some of the greatest-ever manifestations of the American Dream, and an AAA-version of capitalism emerges, one more authentic, accessible and accountable—and perhaps, in an age of uncertainty, one that’s built to last. The stakes couldn’t be higher, as forces gather to threaten the greatest prosperity engine ever built.

Reimagining Capitalism as...Authentic

The French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels across America in the 1830s coincided with the emergence of socialist theory back in Europe, a movement he presciently and stridently criticized. For Tocqueville, the balanced capitalism he witnessed compared favorably to the options back home, such as ceding power to the government or a more feudal system “managed by a few rich and powerful individuals.” “The inhabitants of the United States almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow citizens,” he observed. Tocqueville’s musings inspired Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and filtered into the very first issue of Forbes, printed during Russia’s Revolution, when the magazine’s founder, B.C. Forbes, famously declared that “business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions.”

Milton Friedman was another 20th-century admirer of Tocqueville, particularly for his focus on political equality as a driver of prosperity. But Friedman famously held that among all the constituents of business—the customer, the employees, the community—just one ultimately mattered, the shareholder. The only social responsibility of business, he declared, was to maximize profits. If shareholders wanted to spend their profits on altruistic projects, great, but that was at their sole discretion, with the assumption they were buying something of value—perhaps social approbation or the assuaging of guilt.

This maxim gave us LBOs, private equity deals and employee buyouts. And to many of the world’s most successful capitalists, it also created many of the current ills. “How wrong I was about Milton Friedman—most of us were,” says Jones, who built a $5 billion fortune exploiting market opportunities, including shorting the 1987 market crash. “It came at great cost to other corporate stakeholders and eroded the trust on which companies, and civil society, depends.”

In an era when consumers crave authenticity, the Tocqueville version, which sees profits as a by-product of business rather than its singular mission, offers a natural strain of capitalism that’s already hugely popular, especially among younger Americans. For Millennials, according to a massive Deloitte survey in 2018, the bottom three priorities for a business should be profits, efficiency and sales. The top three? Generating jobs, improving society and innovation.

Authenticity explains why Americans, while disliking Wall Street and big business, continue to love entrepreneurs (87% approval, per Gallup) and small business (96%). And why purpose-driven companies like Patagonia and Warby Parker are wreathed in halos, no matter what they’re selling or how rich the founders get.

“When we’re acquiring companies, one of the things I look at very closely is ‘Are the founders of a company missionaries or mercenaries?’ ” Jeff Bezos told me several months ago, before revealing the answer with his famous braying laugh. “It’s actually very easy to tell—missionaries make better products and services.” They also engender the one authentic trait that’s ultimately the most profitable: trust. That word, says Bezos, “is what allows you to expand the business.”

Of course, trust is a double-edged sword. As Facebook treats user data as a chit rather than a covenant, the company’s reputation—and Zuckerberg’s—has tanked. (In the realm of extremely unlikely outcomes, it’s now easier to envision him in the Big House than in the White House.) It’s also why Wall Street remains about as popular as big tobacco.

But even in finance, roots of authenticity shoot up. Impact investing, long dismissed as a niche for do-gooders, has emerged as a growth area, with some $35 billion committed in 2018 to fund businesses that carry societal benefits without sacrificing returns. “We’re talking about solving problems using innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Nancy Pfund, who founded DBL Partners and has raised $625 million in three venture funds. Her flagship, with investments in Tesla and SolarCity, has ranked in the top performance quartile across this decade. “When you just look at the super-short-term shareholder, you’re not taking advantage of innovation—and you’re cheating the future.”

The numbers are getting larger: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by a consortium of billionaires such as Gates, Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson and Jack Ma, has pledged $1 billion for startups that promise radical solutions to carbon emissions. A similarly platinum-plated tycoon cohort, including Bono, Laurene Powell Jobs and Jeff Skoll, has backed the Rise Fund, an arm of private equity giant TPG that has deployed $1.8 billion in 25 investments they think will have significant impact on society. “People are rightfully asking, ‘Is the system working?’ ” says Bill McGlashan, the CEO of the Rise Fund. “We believe that capitalism is a better servant than master.”

Reimagining Capitalism as...Accessible

For those who rightly still believe in America as the land of opportunity, a Fox News survey from just a few weeks ago should offer pause: 42% of Americans do not think “the way capitalism works in the U.S. these days” gives them “a fair shot.” Even more troubling: In a country that has always held true to the premise that you could make it through hard work—or at least your children could—18% thought that the American Dream is out of reach for their family.

And there are ample stats to back up the sentiment. In the U.S. the top 1% of workers, collectively, earn vastly more than the bottom 50%. “The market system as it gets more specialized pushes more money to the top,” Buffett explains. “The natural function of a more specialized market economy is to divert more and more of the rewards to the top. That’s something I don’t think we’ve fully addressed in this country.”

But the situation is actually far worse than yawning income disparity. Americans have historically viewed the superrich as heroes, not villains, for a simple reason: “We all thought we could be like them,” Jones says. It’s the accelerating lack of upward mobility that’s fueling much of this populist anger. For all the anecdotal success stories, if you’re born in the wrong Zip code, to the wrong parents, the road to The Forbes 400 has never looked longer or narrower.

Take venture capital, the clearest starting point to a billion-dollar fortune over the past 20 years—a door the vast majority of Americans have no way of opening. Just 15% of VC money goes to women founders, 1% to black entrepreneurs and less than a quarter to anyone who lives outside California, New York and Massachusetts. Yes, a far more global, diverse pool now has access to those funding meccas, but that’s little comfort to a parent whose kid goes to a so-so public school in a city or region that’s been left behind.

“It needs to be a national priority to level the playing field,” says Case, who for the past few years has conducted a Rise of the Rest bus tour, traveling the country and putting millions into more than 100 companies that aren’t in Boston, New York or the San Francisco Bay Area. To Case, it’s both civic duty and opportunity, as brilliant minds lie fallow in low-cost areas desperate for high-growth hope.

Pfund actually counts women leaders before investing in a firm—almost two thirds of the companies in her funds have a woman at the CFO level or higher. She also pushes her portfolio to spread the opportunity, through profit-sharing plans, living-wage commitments and encouragement to hire in underserved areas.

All these efforts are on the margin, short of a commitment to create educational opportunities for those with ambition and then a track for them going forward. “We will have the resources,” Buffett says. “The question is, will we in effect pull everybody in who’s able-bodied and willing to work 40 hours a week so they can make a decent living, raise a family?”

Reimagining Capitalism as...Accountable

Something unusual happened a few hours after my sit-down with Bill Gates. Fresh off pondering the future of billionaires, he went on Stephen Colbert’s eponymous show with his wife, Melinda, to a crescendo of cheers. In accepting his new role as the world’s second-richest person, he quipped, “We’re trying to give it away faster”—and the audience swooned. From their call for higher taxes on the superrich to the obligations of the successful to the empowerment of women, the applause kept coming. By the end, Colbert was playfully goading the Gateses to run for political office.

Compare that with the Bronx cheer that echoed through New York later that week, when Amazon announced it was pulling out from its HQ2 plan in Queens. The math-challenged politicians who killed the deal took justifiable heat from pretty much everyone except their base. But Bezos was bloodied just as badly. He’s worth over $130 billion (at least until his divorce settles), and Amazon is worth $800 billion. Why extract a measly $3 billion in corporate welfare from New York? In the truest Friedman sense: because he has shareholders—and he could.

The dueling reactions underscore an American truth as timeless as Astor and Cooper and Rockefeller: Americans expect their meritocratic royalty to remain accountable to the public that helped create them.

Traditionally, that means philanthropy, an aspect of extreme success (there are now 137 deca-billionaires in the world) that no longer feels optional, albeit one that still engenders cynicism. Says Gates: “The attack that ‘Why should you even have a say in setting the agenda?’ That has a certain resonance to it.”

For Gates, who within our lifetime will likely be regarded as the greatest philanthropist ever, accountability starts with framing the role: “picking novel ideas” or “off-the-wall theories,” as he says, and then proving that the concepts work, or don’t, taking the kinds of risks that no taxpayer-funded government—or shareholder-dependent corporation—could justify.

But in this era, Gates also recognizes that motives will be questioned. “If we come and improve math class,” Gates says, “then people are like, ‘Hey, you didn’t do the band.’ ” For this reason, Gates tries to hold himself publicly accountable through transparency, including a public letter from the foundation that he and Melinda write each year. It’s also the driving reason for the Giving Pledge, in which 189 of the world’s wealthiest people have affirmed, for all to see, that they will give away at least half of their fortunes, most much more.

A Giving Pledge signatory, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff has similarly shifted from anonymous giving to putting his name on two hospitals, in part to be a role model for emerging tech billionaires and in part because “it sent a message that we’re supporting the community in a tangible way.” And he does the same thing with his company, which pioneered a “1, 1, 1” model that placed 1% of the company’s equity in a trust, along with a pledge to donate 1% of its software products and 1% of his 35,000 employees’ time to volunteer work. It’s a combination that’s generated $260 million in grants and 3.8 million hours for civic causes.

Rather than rely on such voluntary munificence, Jones, who cut his philanthropic teeth founding the innovative Robin Hood Foundation in New York, has focused for the past several years on holding corporate America directly accountable for better capitalism. He founded Just Capital, which has surveyed more than 80,000 Americans in order to get a precisely calibrated take on what makes a good corporate citizen. America’s older workers, it turns out, aren’t so different from its youngest, desiring companies to pay and treat their employees well, put out good products that have integrity, and care about the environment and the community.

Just Capital ranks every major public company across its 36 criteria, from best to worst, proffering a Good Housekeeping-like seal to the top companies, in order to spur better corporate citizenry. (Disclosure: I’m on the Just Capital board, and Forbes publishes the annual Just 100 list each fall.) “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Jones, who also helped Just launch a $200 million ETF in June 2018 that has so far outperformed the S&P 500.

Measurement has also been driving McGlashan at the Rise Fund, which has a hard time justifying billions in investments in social good when no one can define what “good” is. To that end, Rise incubated and then recently spun out Y Analytics, a firm devoted to measuring this impact—a key step in making capitalism still more solutions-oriented.

Such remedies are urgent. “Unless we find a market-based solution to the exponential growth in inequality, we will end up with populist legislation that creates a hammer to go after every nail,” Jones says. He’s right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-touted 70% income tax bracket displays a stark lack of understanding how fortunes in this country are built—through ownership, not earnings. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth surcharge would require an army of appraisers. “Here’s the problem with all of those,” says the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. “There is international mobility.”

Virtually every billionaire I spoke with acknowledged that higher taxes on the billionaire set are inevitable; most even saw them as beneficial, if correctly applied. According to Gates, Buffett, Khosla and others, the correct way to levy taxes on the superrich is at a transaction point. Either an estate tax without the loopholes that currently render it useless or a higher capital gains tax applied only on extreme fortunes, to avoid suppressing growth.

And better yet, the tax code can be refined to encourage growth and spread it around more evenly. The launch of opportunity zones, engineered by the Facebook and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, has already been put in motion, offering tantalizing tax breaks in needy areas of all 50 states. Adjusting corporate tax rates based on jobs created—more jobs, lower taxes—is another worthy idea.

The eternal beauty of the free market is its ability to evolve. Leave it to the most admired capitalist in the world, Warren Buffett, who has lived through more than one third of this country’s history and who bought his first stock in 1942, at a moment when it was conceivable the U.S. could lose World War II, to make a prediction: “The luckiest person that will ever be born in the world to date will be a baby being born in the United States today.” Bet against Buffett, and capitalism, at your peril.

Some socialists poo-poo periodicals like Forbes or The Economist for being bourgeois rags, and they’re right. This whole piece is trash not fit for wiping one’s ass. It’s nothing but a puff propaganda piece for capitalists to tell other capitalists about how great they are, how essential they are, how right they are by virtue of being billionaires and how the jealous little people should just bootstrap themselves into wealth and plenty like they did.

It’s thanks in part to pieces like this that make class warfare and violent revolution ultimately necessary. These cretins delude themselves in a comfortable fantasy, a narrative myth about their own greatness meant to reassure themselves that the innumerable interlocking apparatuses which produce and secure their wealth are in fact benign, that the human suffering it produces is incidental rather than inherent. Randall Lane, this stupid fucker, praises Benioff for doing nothing. Nothing! He himself doesn’t do anything for charity except give away a tiny fraction of other people’s stolen money and forces his employees to do “volunteer work.” But that’s praiseworthy in their degenerate minds. Other people do the work, and they get all the credit.

“Opportunity Zones.” Reading the words made me want to vomit. Orwell, who these bastards have the temerity to quote in the back of the magazine, sandwiched between Sappho and Ayn Rand, would have a field day.

Forbes is a valuable resource for any socialist. We should thank the capitalists for being so considerate in compiling in one place so much information on these criminals and their crimes. All in all, a tremendous compilation of evidence for each of these loathsome worms’ cases before the people’s tribunal. Masturbatory passages will be read aloud to the millionaires and billionaires and their subhuman frontmen like Randall, and will be the last thing they hear aside from the hissing sound of metal on metal before the People’s Razor delivers the results of their “market-based solutions.”

#capitalists #capitalism #jeff bezos #bill gates #randall lane #guillotine bait #propaganda

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chrishsu-hongkong · 2 years ago

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Did You Know These Amazing Facts about Chris Hsu from Stanford?

Chris Hsu Hong Kong is incredibly famous around the world because of his success and positivity. He is well known for his incomparable transactions and deals with the most prestigious managers and business owners. With his caliber, he made all impossible things possible and became the most successful advisor and investor in the world.

Born in Taiwan, Chris Hsu started his career’s height right after completing engineering in management science at Stanford University. Gradually, he established Kilometre Capital and signed lucrative deals with many other well-known companies such as Spotify, SpaceX, etc. Currently the CEO of his firm, Kilometre Capital, he puts forth his best effort to make his clients reap the intended benefits from their investments. This is why Kilometre Capital holds a suave recognition among the most successful firms in entire Asia.

Chris Hsu Hong Kong has managed and maintained all his firms in the best way by using his positive attitude and pleasing personality. Afterwards, he became the advisor of the world’s best private equity, Chris Hsu Hedge Fund, and other buyout transactions. In addition, he became the foremost cross-border negotiator and dealmaker as well.

Let’s know how he has reached the success cliff and what qualities he possesses to establish all his firms, including Kilometre Capital. Please scroll below:

Determination:

Expressing due determination to the work holds the key to success, and Chris Hsu from Stanford adopted the same policy in his life. Immensely successful in all fields, he has attained a top position among all the other businessmen. He failed sometimes, but then his determination encouraged him to stand up again and make strong decisions. Indeed, he did fall, but his determined personality made him keep trying until he reached success.

With this practice, Chris Hsu Hong Kong stood strong in all aspects and established a strong business empire. This has happened only with strong determination and nothing else.

Honesty and trust

Winning the trust of business partners and stakeholders can help you win any deal effortlessly. It is the same with honesty. By exhibiting true honesty in business, one can cross all complicated paths effortlessly. With due honesty and inculcating the trust factor among his stakeholders, Chris Hsu did the same thing. Today, he is one of the most honest and trustworthy partners, and it becomes evident in his various business deals, including the profitable ventures he has embarked on with his globally acclaimed business partners via Chris Hsu Hedge Fund.

Highly Committed

Chris Hsu Hong Kong is a positive attitude person and is committed to all his deals, which in turn has helped him to build such a huge empire with success. He made various commitments and fulfilled them with sincerity in all ways with his hard work.

Gave value to all imaginations

Everyone indeed has his own dreams and imagination to accomplish. But only a few of them have the courage to achieve them. With Chris Hsu Hedge Fund, he has set a commendable example for those who just dream. He gave value to all his dreams and imagination and courageously achieved them without failing. That is why he is popular as a flourishing business owner across the world.

Clear out all distractions.

In the way of success, distractions and obstruction are normal. But, instead of tottering, Chris Hsu from Stanford University stood firmly and faced every complex situation. Negativity makes people weak and poor, but it is not the same with Chris Hsu. He made up his mind to be determined and stay away from all this negativity, criticism, and distractions with his positive mind.

Focus on physical fitness.

All your plans and decisions will come true only when you are fit and fine. Chris Hsu focuses on his physical fitness, too, along with all his business deals and transactions. Being physically fit is the primary key to becoming the most successful in the world.

Calm mind

No doubt, a calm mind can solve various complicated problems, and Chris Hsu Hong Kong adopted the same policy to stay ahead in the game of success. It kept his mind calm and relaxed while making important deals with their clients. This is one of the main reasons for his success, as he chose to be calm rather than going furious. To be calm and build smooth relations is a part of his life, and he loves it.

Summary: Chris Hsu Stanford is a positive, confident, strong will-powered person. He made various decisions with a calm and focused mind. This is why all his dreams came true, and he became highly successful in his life. His company Kilometre Capital is nowadays the most prestigious firm in the investment industry. He also supported Spotify and SpaceX firms and contributed heavily to both deals.

#Chris Hsu #Chris Hsu Hedge Fund #Christopher Hsu Hedge Fund #Chris Hsu Hong Kong #Chris Hsu Kilometre #Christopher Hsu Kilometre #Chris Hsu Kilometre Capital #Christopher Hsu Kilometre Capital

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christopher-hsu-hong-kong · 2 years ago

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Know About Chris Hsu and The Achievements of His Space

Christopher Hsu has a well-established investor and adviser and is uber-famous among his competitors. His company, Kilometre Capital, oversees the buyout of Spreadtrum communications and its merger in a strategic combination with RDA Microelectronics. Moreover, Chris Hsu Kilometre Capital has taken the responsibility of acquisition of a majority interest in Hewlett Packard china H3C.

#chrishsukilometre #chrishsuhedgefund #christopherhsu #chrishsukilometrecapital

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is6621 · 6 years ago

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Social Media’s Affect on the Capital Markets by Matteo Valle

The efficient market hypothesis is a theory that states that in financial economics “asset prices fully reflect all available information.” In today’s world we receive our information from all different outlets. One of the major modern fountains of information is from social media; it keeps us current on what’s happening real time on the account. People are using social media for all different reasons, but one of the things that really caught my eye from my internship on a trading floor this past summer was the use of social media. When people are trying to figure out the most recent news regarding a company whose securities they are trading, they would quickly open up twitter to see the most recent updates.

If the efficient market hypothesis states that asset prices reflect all the available information, then it is critical to use social media’s information in order to make effective trades in the markets. I specifically remember shadowing a utility trader who was selling Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s securities and him scanning through the company’s account and hashtags on twitter to figure out the severity of the California forest fires. It was a major factor as he had to act swiftly and receive the most current information as quickly as possible, and ultimately the company’s tweets influenced his trade decision. The more transparency you have into a company the better you are able to predict the direction in which the security is headed, and there is no doubt that social media has given investors a great deal of transparency. Although there are several benefits from the information that social media poses, there is are also significant risks.

The things people say on social media are not always true. Whether it be the CEO of a company or a famous celebrity, what they say on their social media accounts doesn’t need proof or evidence, even if they are false statements. What happens when your audience doesn’t know that you are joking?

Well, this past summer Elon Musk decided to tweet out that he considering taking tesla private at a huge premium and that funding was secured.

The Tesla stock was trading at a price of $342 when the CEO decided to make that tweet stating that funding was secured at $420 per share. That’s almost a premium of $100 per share. Now if you don’t know how this effects the stock price— Musk was saying that the company would be bought out at $420 per share meaning that every stock that was currently trading was now worth closer to $420. After Musk made his tweet the Tesla stock rallied to $387 per share and his tweet was all over the news.

The $45 increase in the stock price increased the company’s market cap by over $8 billion (increased company worth by $8 billion). His statement had major implications on the Tesla stock, but even affected Ford, Honda, and Toyota’s stocks; not to mention the impact of that tweet was felt in the S&P 500, proving that just one tweet affected the Capital Markets as a whole. However, after markets quick response to the tweet, the day after investors were now curious to know who was funding this buyout as he mentioned that funding was secured. Because of the tweets serious impact, the Department of Justice decided to look into his statement. The investigation concluded that the statements were false and that funding was not secured, causing the stock to sell off below its original price. Moreover, Musk apologized for his tweet claiming it was a joke while he was high and that that’s why he said the price was $420 (4/20 is national marijuana day).

Another major market reaction that we mentioned earlier in the semester was from Kylie Jenner’s tweet regarding snapchat.

After social medias biggest influencer said that she stopped using Snapchat to her 24.5 million twitter followers the Snap Market Cap lost over $1.5 billion in value.

Lastly, the individual who has created the most market volatility from his tweets is of course… Donald Trump. As the president of the United States anything he says on his twitter account is considered as a personal statement, and thus, has major implications on the Global Markets. Trump’s impulsive behavior on social media has created a great deal of volatility and has had serious consequences. Every one of his tweets whether it’s fact or fiction creates a butterfly effect felt around the world.

... Companies and the figures who represent them must be extremely careful about what they say on their social media accounts as they have the power to even create a financial crisis.

Sources:

http://time.com/money/5399842/elon-musk-net-worth-funding-secured-tesla-tweet/

https://www.financemagnates.com/forex/bloggers/social-media-affects-markets/

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/22/17040332/snap-stock-price-kylie-jenner-tweet-snapchat-1-billion-market-loss

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/trump-tweets-market/

#is6621

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