From TheHartmannReport: (I had never heard of this until today…)
**Elon Musk’s Billion-Dollar Bargain: Buying the White House, One Regulation at a Time.**
Elon Musk’s purchase of the government is already starting to pay returns. The largest part of the Muskrat’s fortune comes from Tesla, which he bought from its inventors years ago and was turned into a major enterprise by Barack Obama. (You may remember the [headline] from 2009: “The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it.
It’s one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded today to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today.”) And, since 40 of the 45 fatal crashes that have happend in cars with autopilot systems have involved Teslas, Musk has been on a crusade against the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which compiles and publishes those statistics.
Now it appears that Musk’s $277 million investment in purchasing the White House for Donald Trump is about to pay off big, as Reuters reports: “The Trump transition team wants the incoming administration to drop a car-crash reporting requirement opposed by Elon Musk’s Tesla, according to a document seen by Reuters, a move that could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety of vehicles with automated-driving systems.”
I’m not sure any amount of money would have swung it. Inflation is something that affected every single person in the country, and Biden got blamed for it. (Never mind that it was worse in every other country on the planet, and that the US recovered better than every other country as well. Those are details that are too abstruse to try to explain in a :30 TV spot.)
Warren Buffett has famously said if somebody gave him a billion dollars and told him to beat Coke he’d give the billion back, because you can’t do it. This was one of those: the mountain was too high, and couldn’t be won. My congratulations to the fools who think it’s better to tear apart the FDIC, FBI, CDC, CFPB, ACA, the Education Department, the IRS, HHS, State Department, EPA, DOJ, Bureau of Land Management, CPB, Appalachia Development Bureau, Chemical Safety Board, OSHA, NEA, and so many more…
…because it’s such a hell hole we’re forced to live in. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can get to be the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world.
You understand the difference between “informants”, who are often criminals who have been granted reduced sentences in return for becoming rats, and “Agents”, who are employed by the Bureau don’t you?
Not as funny as you would think … because Pepsi was founded around the same time as Coca Cola.
I think what Buffett means is that Coca Cola (and Pepsi, but Coke is the one he invested in for decades) has such a strong franchise that even a billion dollars couldn’t overturn the strength of that franchise.