Mike Murphy

Contributor: California can fix Trump’s EV mistake latimes.com/opinion/story/…

President Trump, his cabinet, members of Congress, and all federal officials cannot bet on prediction markets tied to U.S. policy or military action. This can be done by an executive order, but we know that won’t happen, as Donald Trump has normalized corruption in the White House - something we should have a zero tolerance policy for. We can’t have young kids from Peoria, Illinois, and Platteville, Wisconsin, risking their lives while a bunch of nepo babies from Palm Springs and Palm Beach are risking their daddy's little inheritance. Washington needs a good power washing. It’s time we stop betting against America.

Best video I've seen in a long while. 🥺❤️

February -- and this was pre-Iran - was a big month for EV car sales in Europe. Full EVs up 20% from 2025; plug-in hybrids up 32%. 28% of cars sold had a plug. Slow-motion demand destruction for petroluem as transport fuel. acea.auto/files/Press_re…

"As we saw with McCain, Donald Trump (who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War era — including one for bone spurs) seems to hold a particular animus toward 'adversaries' who are widely recognized as patriots and war heroes." @JohnDalyBooks open.substack.com/pub/bernardgol…

It's interesting how a president obsessed with unfair foreign trade is helping cede America's electric car industry to China lnk.thebulwark.com/4bMU9br

One of the biggest potential 2028 storylines in plain sight: NH will still likely go first and @PeteButtigieg probably has a floor in the low 20s there. Which means he will almost certainly finish in the top 3 in a crowded NH field

This would take Pixar 3 years to make. With AI it took us 3 hours.

Battery packs fall below $100/kWh threshold for EV cost parity, as oil jumped to $100/barrel. "The dominant lithium-iron-phosphate variety now costs $81 per kilowatt-hour, against $97 the previous year and $120/kWh at the end of 2021." EV is way out! bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Get an Electric Vehicle and You Can Stop Worrying About $5 Gas nytimes.com/2026/03/23/opi… via @NYTOpinion

Gas hitting $4 a gallon, Chinese manufacturers rolling out new battery innovations to set the world market And Trump is doing everything he can to kill the domestic EV industry This makes America great? thebulwark.com/p/trump-electr…

Something to ponder as you bleed cash at the gas pump this week… It is the best time ever to get an amazing deal on a low mileage used EV coming off lease. Plus dealers have plenty of new EV‘s in stock and they’re ready to deal. #SmartBargain

Gas prices are creeping toward a threshold that makes the EV math impossible to ignore. autoblog.com/news/when-gas-…

Dr. Schake, one of the most respected and genuinely liked scholars in national security, was scheduled to give a talk at the Air War College on civ-mil relations. She was uninvited. This is the talk she would have given. Gift link theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…

An 8-mile LA bike path from a 2016 voter-approved tax hasn't broken ground, may cost $1.2B, and won't be done until 2031. In California on Your Mind, Hoover's Lee Ohanian asks what $1 billion in transportation improvements would have looked like instead: hoover.org/research/la-an…

Congrats @BobShrum on your retirement from @USCPolFuture! I’m personally grateful for your kindness, wisdom, humor, and mentorship. What’s his legacy? Our @CNNTheStoryIs tribute includes @SpeakerPelosi, @GaryPeters, @HardballChris & more.

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

Great pod about Ford’s impressive internal crusade to build a profitable, world competitive affordable next gen EV! Directly Current: The EV Politics Podcast / Ford's Alan Clarke on Building an Affordable, Next-Gen EV Pickup Truck audioboom.com/posts/8874963-…

NEW at @BulwarkOnline Trump has done his best to kill America’s EV industry Now he’s given us $4/gallon gas, showing just how much we need it thebulwark.com/p/trump-electr…

Meanwhile, our President is celebrating the death of a decorated Marine while declaring a bureaucratic/Congressional war against American clean energy technology; esp EV’s, wind and solar. China should give him a medal.

The hilarious thing is this Bessent jamoke thinks these are clever answers and he’s actually good at this…. Meanwhile the answer is no because these Trump lackeys are worse irresponsible spenders than the Democrats, yet again totally betraying actual conservative principles.