Steve Diamond

Read this review of @tab_delete’s new book and you will know why it should be required reading for every college trustee.

I read all 277 pages of SpaceX's IPO filing so you don't have to. Losses up 700%. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple. It's a trainwreck. Full breakdown below 👇

Whacky guy even then…no human will ever get to much less live on Mars. $spcx

@DeanBaker13 On what basis?

I assume SpaceX shareholders, especially the accidental ones in index funds (good time to get out), could sue NASDAQ for these rule changes.

The SpaceX IPO is the most brazen retail fleecing in modern market history. NASDAQ has REWRITTEN the index rules specifically for this listing. The 10% minimum free float requirement: gone. The 3 to 12 month seasoning period before index inclusion: cut to 15 trading days. Companies with small floats can now be weighted at 3x their actual float. Translation: every passive index fund, every 401k, every pension is about to be force-fed SPCX whether they want it or not. And what exactly are they buying? Class A shares carrying ONE vote each, while Musk holds 93.6% of the Class B super voting shares at TEN votes each. That gives him 85.1% of voting power on a 42% economic interest. He cannot be outvoted. He cannot be removed. CEO, CTO and board chairman simultaneously. For reference: Zuckerberg controls 61% of Meta. Buffett 35% of Berkshire. Musk: 85.1%. SpaceX is also claiming "controlled company" status, exempting it from needing a majority of independent directors. Shareholders waive the right to a jury trial. They waive the right to class actions. Mandatory arbitration only, courtesy of an SEC rule change pushed through on a party line vote last September. $1.75 trillion valuation. $80 billion raise. Largest IPO in history. The rules of the game were quietly rewritten so one man could extract maximum capital from retail while answering to no one.

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2 conta.cc/4wFIDrM

@Tyler_A_Harper This hullabaloo is all because the right wing knows it cannot ever acknowledge the democratic content of Marx’s core principles so it labels any form of authoritarian leftism as “marxism.”

On the academia is full of Marxists debate: it’s illustrative to look at Mellon, the largest source of academic humanities funding by orders of magnitude. Projects tagged w/ Marxism in their grant database? 0 Gender studies? 46 Black studies? 25 Social Justice? 42 Latinx? 451

@barttels2 @johnarnold @tab_delete Student paper not the book.

@Stephenfdiamond @johnarnold @tab_delete Yes. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/boo…

Highly recommend “How to Rule the World.” It’s the social commentary book of the 'fake it till you make it' era. Written by the 17-year-old who brought down Stanford’s president, it shows how a toxic mix of power, money, and hubris has transformed the school and SV more broadly.

@FrankConniff @WhitStillman Nothing says “journalist” like a loud Hawaiian shirt at a somber military ceremony.

The guy in the loud shirt standing just behind Truman as he pins a medal on his frenemy MacArthur is my dad, the OG Frank Conniff.

@barttels2 @johnarnold @tab_delete 21. Wikipedia: “He matriculated at Stanford University in 2022, when he was 17, and joined The Stanford Daily. He expects to graduate in June 2026 with a degree in history.”

@barttels2 @johnarnold @tab_delete No.

$SPCX is an utter travesty. The IPO, in its current proposed structured, must not be allowed to happen. Index funds and your 401k should not be the exit liquidity for this pile of garbage. I ask all lawyers of good conscience to please contact me by DM to explore what might be done to stop this IPO.

Of course the corruption of the CFTC started under Clinton and helped fuel the 2008 crisis….

Jürgen Klinsmann: “There were 70,000 people, we were warming up seriously. While ‘Live Is Life’ was playing, Maradona started juggling the ball. We stopped warming up, because there was nothing more we could do except watch him.”

This conversation is extremely annoying because I am not remotely invested in denying that academia is a left political monoculture and that this has caused problems, but words mean things and there just are not a bunch of Marxists or economic radicals running around the faculty.

@ProfDBernstein He did it to protect whites whom he realized were destined to be a minority at some point: Volume 50 | Number 3 Article 2 1-1-2010 Diversity 's Strange Career: Recovering the Racial Pluralism of Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Anders Walker digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview

Justice Powell in Bakke, instead of coming up with the diversity thing which has caused no end of terrible policy, could haved end the affirmative action debate by allowing, not requiring (and prohibiting accreditation agencies from requiring), institutions to have up to a 5% (or some such) quota for African Americans, limited to descendants of American slaves and not immigrants. The rationale would have been the special history of African Americans and the need to help ensure they don't lack representation in major institutions of American society, a compelling government interst. Totally ban the use of race or ethnicity of immigrant groups: no more preferences for Black immigrants, Hispanics, or Asian Americans (in government contracting). Carve out some special rules for the small % of self-identified American Indians who live on reservations. That's it. Historical note: In Bakke itself, most of the quota beneficiaries were Hispanic or Asian, not Black, even though the case was portrayed in the media, and by Justice Marshall in his eloquent dissent, as Black vs. White.

@WKCosmo Wonder what she would have said had she known what he was up to off screen

She's just so much fun to listen to. youtu.be/KcvuqHZcICE?si…

Camille Paglia is the counterexample to the idea that academic writing has to be impenetrable Butlerian sludge. She's insane, but she's a cracking good writer. thetimes.com/culture/books/…

@RichardSalsman3 not to mention the rise of collective corporate power….

Under a more individualist, purely capitalist America (1825-1925) there was a multi-decade decline in an already low level of mentions of INEQUALITY. Then came “progressivism,” collectivism, welfarism, envy, and a skyrocketing of print mentions of INEQUALITY, not because it was celebrated but because it was excoriated. The shameful, anti-capitalist anti-Americanism persists to this day, indeed getting worse this century. cato.org/policy-analysi…

@posta_octavian so you think the english and irish workers were correct in hating each other?

Marx struggled quite a bit with this. The basic assumption of communism is that there's a single, identical, collective interest of the global proletariat by virtue of their relation to capital (as propertyless individuals). The big question for communists then is why isn't the proletariat realising this collective international interest and why aren't they organising as such to pursue their interests as workers. In other words, why aren't they just thinking Rationally Enough to realise it? One problem for Marx was that the English and the Irish proletariat didn't unite or work together, mainly because the English proletariat sided with the empire and wasn't too keen to accept Irish nationalism and saw the Irish as competitors, and the Irish proletariat was on the other hand not too keen about being part of the British Empire. He outright says he expected them to work together, which then didn't happen. Look how he describes in a letter (first pic) to Engels that Irish needs to emancipate itself from the working class, so that the working class focuses on its struggle as the working class, but that he "cannot tell the working class" themselves. Basically, he, Marx, as the great intellectual, knows better than the working class themselves what's good for them, and his job now is to manipulate things in a way that is good for the working class themselves, even if they themselves are not aware of it. Basically he wants to be the catalyst for Hegel's Cunning of Reason. There's constantly all these factors that supposedly prevent the working class from thinking Rationally and doing what's Right (according to Marx). The classic "billionaires tell the English to hate the Irish to divide them" trope was actually thought of by Marx all the way in 1870. The history of communism is just a long, very long list of copes to try to explain why the proletariat is not thinking rationally and isn't coming to the "correct" conclusion of communist revolution. From Stalinist purges and de-kulakisation, to the Maoist cultural revolution, to Adorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry, to Gramsci's "cultural hegemony"... it's all this. Over and over and over. They simply do not want to accept that there could be genuinely rational and legitimate reasons to not do communist revolutions and build "international solidarity".