Get it? "Revolting" is a double entendre! Anyway...
As the Trump administration continues to accelerate the flagrant disregard of "international law", we have seen various European leaders flock to China (alongside Canada), seeking deals. Some trips have been more successful than others - for example, Macron's was fairly dire despite his lavish reception by Xi Jinping, but Starmer's resulted in some actual deals and tariff reductions. The intent of this wave of diplomacy with China is clear: leverage.
Nobody should be fooled into thinking this revolt immediately benefits the developing world, of course. While a relative weakening of the US compared to Europe is progressive in a limited sense (insofar as the US is the locus of imperialism), every indication shows that, when it matters, the European consensus remains aligned in most respects with the US, such as with them and the Zionist entity against Iran, against national sovereignty in Africa (e.g. ECOWAS), as well as in Latin America (either in support or not sufficiently opposing American designs there against Cuba and Venezuela, to name but two countries). It is also unclear how long such a divide will last - perhaps Trump leaving office in 2028 and a slightly less bellicose leader in power will result in many cancelled deals with China.
Despite the very shaky initial steps over the past couple years, Europe still has many miles it must traverse to achieve sovereignty, let alone socialism. For now, it will cheer on the sanctions against millions of vulnerable people and incoming bombing of Iran and Hezbollah, though perhaps it will also share a degree of the economic/military retaliation.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
After Elon Musk's xAI acquired Twitter, SpaceX is now acquiring xAI. xAI was quickly burning money, at least $1 billion per month. Tesla gave xAI $2 billion just last quarter, but it looks like that was quickly burnt.
Both were private companies so no real public disclosure was necessary. SpaceX shareholders were probably happy with the merger because most of them are in the Elon Musk cult. Merging with Tesla will be harder to do since Tesla is a public company.
[edit] this merger happened very suddenly. At the same time, Nvidia pulled back their promised $100bn investment into OpenAI. Maybe Musk believes that the bubble is starting to burst and he needs to protect xAI by merging it with a bigger company.
Just to parse these events for sake of clarity:
In 2022, Musk purchased Twitter (then a public company) and took it private. He subsequently fired most of the staff, lost a huge amount of revenue, and rebranded Twitter to X, the everything app, aka X (formerly Twitter). The company was bleeding money, and Musk was liable for a large amount of the debt.
In an effort to get himself off the hook, his AI startup, xAI, bought Twitter for an undisclosed amount, with the rationale that Twitter’s data and userbase would be additive to xAI’s business. xAI, being an AI company, is hemorrhaging money, but because it’s an AI company, there’s been plenty of cash to burn.
The AI party is coming to an end as the industry runs out of cash, so Musk needs to find the next buyer for his failing businesses, so he’s having SpaceX buy xAI. As SpaceX is still a private company, the details of this transaction are also not publicly disclosed. SpaceX is planning to go public later this year. The rationale for the xAI purchase is that SpaceX will launch AI data centers into space.
The SpaceX IPO is expected to be valued at $1.5 trillion, making the xAI purchase, along with the Twitter assets, a rounding error by comparison. Musk likely wants to roll Tesla into the company, as well, but this will be much more difficult, not just because one or both companies will be public, but also because Tesla’s current valuation is on the order of $1 trillion, and so unlike Twitter or xAI, the cost to acquire it would be material to the transaction and wouldn’t simply be a matter of bundling smaller assets into a larger company to obfuscate their value. However, as noted, Tesla shareholders are generally Musk believers, in that they are either stupid and believe Musk is real-life Tony Stark, or they’re slightly smarter and believe that Musk will make sure that there will always be demand for his companies’ shares from retail investors.
It’s worth mentioning that SpaceX is probably the most “real” company in Musk’s portfolio, insofar as it has the greatest potential to achieve commercial success on remotely realistic terms. xAI is an AI company, and we have no idea if AI will ever be worth the current level of investment it’s getting, and Tesla is a company that will only justify its valuation if it can essentially replace all manual labor with humanoid robots and fully-automated cars. I find it unlikely that either will achieve success, as they’re not even market leaders in their respective fields, and their success depends on achieving what is essentially magic compared to our current level of technology.
SpaceX is a company that’s trying to reduce the cost of getting things into orbit, which, by comparison, is a fairly sane and valuable endeavor, and thy are currently the leader in that field. Whether they can justify a $1.5 trillion valuation in a reasonable timeframe remains to be seen, and if past performance is any indicator, Musk will soon need an even bigger and more absurd venture to justify buying SpaceX so that he can keep kicking the can down the road, or maybe space is a big enough category that he can continue to raise exponentially more money for ever-larger projects.
The question with Musk, as it’s always been, is how long he can maintain his trajectory before there simply isn’t enough money available to keep him going. What he’s doing isn’t technically fraud, insofar as he is doing what he says he’ll do with investor money and likely believes his own narrative, but it’s effectively the same as what Elizabeth Holmes did. The only wrinkle is that Musk’s companies technically make products and even achieve a degree of profitability, but their valuation is based on products and service that don’t yet exist and business models that may not be viable even if they did.
What Musk is doing is like if I were to buy a hardware store, then I went to investors and said “I want you to give me $50 billion to create the world’s first self-building house company, but I need to start by growing this hardware store.” Then I take my hardware store public on the basis that we’re going to have self-building houses in five years, but I just go and operated a normal hardware store business. Tesla and xAI and SpaceX are all just as real as my self-building house company. Nominally-real businesses with no basis for 400x P/E ratios, but because the potential for growth is technically there, and people are willing to buy in because they think some idiot will pay more for my shares tomorrow, the train keeps rolling.
This was longer than I thought it would be, but man, this guy is really something.
It was an all-stock deal, valued at $44bn, so the same price that Elon paid for it.
Good luck with that. I guess they might even try to launch something, one launch doesn't cost that much if you get a $250bn higher valuation in return from the investors.
Not really. The new SpaceX after the xAI takeover is valued at $1.25 trillion. Looks like the banks really couldn't swallow the $1.5 trillion valuation. The good news for Musk is that the split was 80:20, meaning that SpaceX was valued at $1 trillion (high) and xAI at $250bn (insanely high). And since Elon owns a bigger share of xAI than he does of SpaceX, his SpaceX share actually went up after the merger on account of the insanely high xAI valuation. SpaceX might do more raises before the IPO, so their official valuation could still go up.
Months ago, it was reported that xAI burns over $1bn PER MONTH in cash, but with the Twitter losses on top of that, it could easily be $1.5bn by now. SpaceX is claimed to make ~$15bn in revenue and $8bn in profit, but their definition of that is insane. Very likely that SpaceX is not profitable at the moment. So the same problem remains, huge cash burn. But the IPO should dump all of that on the retail investors, so who cares.
Thanks, all good points of clarification. The specific numbers aren’t really that important, imo, because this is all made-up nonsense anyway. Your last point is what matters, which is that all of this is about dumping the risk onto retail investors. Whether it’s $1 trillion or $1.25 trillion or $500 gorillion, the fundamentals are more or less the same. These companies are overvalued and no one seems to care because it was always just vibes.
Edit: To be clear, I do not in any way believe that space data centers are a real thing. I’m just repeating the pitch to investors. It is a very bad and practically infeasible idea that will presumably be abandoned in favor of whatever the hype machine comes up with next, but it serves the purpose of driving fundraising today.
Given this graph, indefinitely. The USA, hell the world's ability to launch things into space affordably and in high quantity is solely dependent on SpaceX. The biggest monopoly almost no one talks about. No one is going to piss off the guy who controls humanity's access to space. Musk will be allowed to get away with as many absurd adventures as he wants if SpaceX continues on this trajectory.
It would be as if you ran the towns only large hardware store, and had a bunch of wacky side projects. No one in the town is going to question the wacky side businesses as long as the hardware store keeps going.
"Objects" launched is a weird metric tho. Starlink satellites are small and SpaceX not only launches a lot of them, but they are constantly burning up in the atmosphere. On average, one or two Starlink satellites burn up in orbit PER DAY.
If you do it my mass, the results are even more in favour of SpaceX...
They just launch a lot of stuff into space by any metric.
Again, most of that is Starlink.
I have the "next spaceflight" app to warn me of launches since the sonic booms shake my home and scare the shit out of me all the time. The app mentions payloads and they carry tons of classified payloads as well.
It sucks that China is still at least half a decade behind on reusable rockets and starlink competitors. They have a lot of catching up to do but at least they have a good record of beating expectations with this kind of stuff.
Just as a point of interest, I don't think they're half a decade behind. This YouTube channel keeps up to date on China's space industry (kind of inactive now) but even 8 months ago they were moving pretty quickly. Dongfang Hour
based on past experience that means they will catch up in 2-3 years
When the wacky side business is proportional to scale and revenue way more expensive than the operations of the main business, is a massive cash furnace, and accrues colossal unplayable debt it becomes a bit more difficult to ignore. AI is more expensive than launching satellites by a huge margin (particularly when accounting for debt and depreciation) and basically impossible to profit off of at the moment.
Beyond that this is not because it's impossible for anyone else to launch satellites, it's mostly SpaceX launching a comical amount of starlink satellites and also their goofy ass pricing.
I don't think the feds are likely to eternally bail out the CSAM factory arm of Musk's operations (especially because it is likely to collapse at the moment the AI bubble bursts rather than before then), but there's plenty of deal making they could do to cut it loose if bailing out the SpaceX part was important to them.
think you meant public here
Elon can set his factories on fire and Tesla stock price will go up.
Indeed!