Tag Archives: Kara Swisher

Since He Obviously Can’t, Someone Has to Get a Grip on Elon Musk

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Bill Gates says Elon Musk was 'super mean to me' after Tesla stock feud | Fox Business

For what it’s worth, I would never count as a fan boy of Elon Musk. Even before this past year of reckless behavior — business and social media-wise — the guy was too much of a preening gadfly for my tastes. That said there is no question — none — that in terms of what he has created he is one of the most consequential characters of our era, and in a way that is unequivocally beneficial to human progress.

But good god man, get some help.

Not that he’s ever out of the news, (like The Great Orange Carbunkle Musk needs hourly affirmation that he still is everything he thinks he is), but with the new book from venerable biographer Walter Isaacson the chattering classes are again talking Elon with a vengeance. In particular, long time tech reporter-turned-podcaster, Kara Swisher, who has known Musk for several decades, interviewed him often and now with her typical bulldozer-like bluntness is declaring Musk a deplorable train wreck of a human being, and more critically, one the government urgently needs to get a grip on.

The first news out of the Isaacson book was that Musk ‘”turned off” his Starlink low-orbit internet satellite network over Crimea out of concern that Ukraine might use it to coordinate missile attacks on Russian facilities … and thereby set off… WWIII. That news was semi-voided when Isaacson corrected himself, saying he misunderstood a “nuance” of the story, namely that Musk simply didn’t turn it on. (The technical term for turning the system on and off is called “geo-fencing”, which acts kind of like those invisible dog barriers people dig around their yards.)

Whether he turned it off or didn’t turn it on, the very serious point is that this is one un-elected, demonstrably erratic billionaire with an endless number of financial conflicts of interest with outright American enemies (Russia) and serious rivals (China) deciding — on his own — how to fight naked aggression.

That ain’t right folks, and the story could get far more calamitous if China, where Musk’s Tesla car operation has both an enormous facility and consumer market, decides to invade Taiwan.

Swisher and her podcast partner, Scott Galloway, freely concede Musk’s entrepreneurial genius. Unlike say, the aforementioned Orange Carbunkle, who has never created anything of universal social value — thinking Trump University, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump ties or Trump mugshot t-shirts here — the electric car revolution, SpaceX and Starlink — are bona fide Henry Ford-level leaps forward in substantive human endeavors.

Unfortunately, with virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford in mind, Swisher and Galloway and others make the complaint about Isaacson’s book, (which I have not read), that while genius-level entrepreneurial functioning is often wrapped up in mercurial personalities, that is no reason to excuse the truly ugly, shameless descent Musk has taken in MAGA-like posturing.

If you missed his recent insinuation that the Anti-Defamation League was responsible for the shocking decline in X/Twitter’s stock valuation, it was rancid and straight from every crackpot anti-semitic fever swamp you can think of.

Those Jews, y’know, always jacking with the honest, hard-workin’ Aryans.

The action item to this rant is that clearly Congress has to get full control of Musk vis a vis his numerous defense contracts. Serious professionals with serious oversight need to make military decisions, not a guy who has no qualms about acting out like a raging 15 year-old at the slightest imagined provocation.

The other point Swisher and Galloway got in to on the same recent podcast was the overall tenor of Isaacson’s book — which Swisher had read and panned with a “meh.” Their point being that Isaacson, a genial, avuncular character with an impressive pedigree in professional journalism, never dares make a call — the call — on Musk.

To which Galloway correctly sniffs, “It all feels like upscale access journalism.” Adding that if Isaacson — who wrote the most prominent biography of Apple’s Steve Jobs, (a genius who was often an asshole but never a public racist) — did drop the hammer on Musk, his chances of access to his next high-profile subject would evaporate in an instant.

He spent months with Musk and Musk’s friends, family and foes and still, Swisher complains, the book left her — a very tough interviewer with a long history with Musk — demanding to know, “Ok, Walter, what do YOU actually think of this guy. Your opinion has value. What is it?”

Isaacson BTW is booked as a guest on an upcoming Swisher podcast.

Hollywood, On the Front Lines of the Fight with AI

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Marilyn Monroe Desktop 4K resolution High-definition television High-definition video, marilyn monroe, celebrities, computer, girl png | PNGWing

While it may not look like it ,I really am trying to reduce the amount of time I waste thinking about You Know Who and his cult of white nationalist paranoiacs. It’s summer in America and there are so many other villains worthy of my interest.

Take for example the on-going-and-now-getting-truly-serious strike(s) in Hollywood. Yesterday the TV industry announced the four million awards it will give out at the Emmys, a show which might not even happen because of the current writers strike. Then, last night, the Screen Actors Guild announced it too is prepared to strike, as early as today, which means that everything in movies will shut down. The two Guilds have never before gone on strike simultaneously, so it is, as Ron Burgundy likes to say, kind of a big deal.

There are all sorts of issues that are arcane and eye-glazing, many dealing with giving writers — aka the people who thought up and produced the idea for the show/movie — a fair cut of the dough that the movie makes as the years roll on. But, as everyone following the conflict knows quite well, the single issue that is most motivating writers, and now actors, is the looming threat of Artificial Intelligence. No bullshit /journalist podcaster Kara Swisher has plenty to say about the movie industry predicament re: AI, and of course Ezra Klein at The New York Times has been on a tear about AI in general for months.

Never mind that AI is very real, very much here already and increasing in sophistication practically by the hour. With Donald Trump and his MAGA morons sponging up 90% of the country’s attention, few are giving it the focus it needs.

But … Hollywood is. TV and movie writers, some of whom are successful and rich and many who are not, recognize the ease with which they can be replaced by computer programs, as long as the mission of the big company in charge of production, be it Disney or Amazon or Apple, is satisfied with what I’ll politely call “familiar” or “traditional” storytelling. AI, as it exists today, quite masterfully collects and collates themes, types of characters and styles of dialogue into scripts unrecognizable from what humans produce. So, “Why bother with all these pissy, whiney, expensive writers?” you might say if you’re the CEO of Amazon or Disney.

The hard irony here is that there is a logic to the boss’s argument, as long as all you want to fill your program schedule is the 2000th variation on “Two Broke Girls”, another re-re-boot of “Lord of the Rings”, the next “Star Wars” step child or any rom-com you can think of. All the elements for that, um, “familiar” type of programming is in the computer hard drive and ready for instant replication — with strategic variations — by, you know, Amazon or Netflix’ on board HAL 9000 computer.

Things are much different, and tough for AI if you tell it to produce a story with dialogue and ideas no one has ever heard before. (I wonder if AI could ever produce something like Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Mirror.) But, folks, it’s show biz. Giving the people what they want is just another way of saying, “Give them what they’ve already seen and liked before.”

So yeah, the writers are in a tough place.

But actors too are quickly realizing that they are replaceable as well. Imagine, for example, ChatGPT 9 in 2031, or whatever, commanded to collect, scour and digest every film and every interview Marilyn Monroe gave in her career and reproduce her in near perfect detail in an entirely new production, maybe opposite, say, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin in the supporting cast? Are you prepared to say something like that could never happen?

In my more macabre imaginings I think of Oliver Stone, or one of his acolytes, re-staging Dallas 11/22/63 with perfect AI-created doubles of JFK, Jackie, LBJ and the whole cast of historical characters, to the point the camera/audience is in the limo rolling through Dealey Plaza. Point being, AI will be able to create almost anything that can be imagined … and without a human actor or screenwriter to be paid $20 million per film plus residuals.

I have no idea how the Hollywood strikes will end. (Swisher’s Pivot podcast partner Scott Galloway believes the unions have been badly misled and lack and serious leverage.)

But as with several other vital cultural issues over the past century — anti-semitism, racism, gay rights, etc. — El Lay is at the tip of the spear fighting something that’s coming, one way or another, for all of us.

Porn Star Pay Offs, Inciting Insurrection, Sexual Assaults, Bank Fraud, Election Conspiracy and FoxNews v. Dominion. But Still … Not Even an Indictment.

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Can I see a show of hands on the question, “Do you believe no one is above the law in America?” Please. Hands? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Of all the lofty assertions of our exceptional nature, the claim that be they poor or be they rich and connected, everyone faces the same justice in this country is arguably the most transparently false. It’s a nice aspirational goal, but utterly without basis as we can all see day after day in the American legal system.

In the news today we have the grand jury in Georgia releasing an abbreviated, redacted version of its investigation into Trumpist meddling/fraud in the 2020 election. This plays with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s range of investigations into Trump’s hidden trove of documents at Mar-A-Lago, his incitement of a riot on the U.S. Capitol and other, um, lesser matters. Then there’s everything going on in New York, with very, very long-running investigations into Trump’s tax and banking frauds, his assaults on various women, his hush-money pay-off of a porn star. And elsewhere, but related, FoxNews’ battle with Dominion Voting Systems, and the revelation yesterday that all of its prime time hosts concurred that guests regularly booked on their shows were not only touting flagrant lies about Dominion rigging the vote for Joe Biden but were saying stuff that was, “mind-blowingly nuts.”

The point here being that we are now … years … after the fact in all of these cases (except the documents) and — exactly like Wall Street’s gamed-out trading of 2008 — no one of any significant status has suffered any consequence for outrageously obvious crimes. The kind for which you or I would have been indicted, tried, bankrupted and sentenced within months.

This point is emphasized/hammered on by Elie Honig in his new book, “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It.” A former assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, Honig is IMHO, one the better/least hyperbolic/more reliably credible cable news pundits. I caught him recently on Charlie Sykes’ daily Bulwark podcast.

(I can’t recommend Sykes’ show highly enough. Once the Jason Lewis of Wisconsin, Sykes looked at the Republican embrace of Donald Trump and essentially said, “These people are out of their f**king minds”, bailed on the party, has done multiple mea culpas for his role in enabling anti-constitutional idiocy to run rampant and now leads daily, consistently clear-eyed, rational discussions of where cult-think has led us.)

In short, Honig’s view of the likelihood of conviction in any of these cases is not encouraging. He firmly believes Attorney General Merrick Garland has lost his window for effective prosecution and is desperately looking for any way to avoid indicting Trump … on anything … preferring someone else, like Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta do the deed first and take him off the hook. Jack Smith may have a more “aggressive” attitude toward Trump, but he answers to Garland.

Furthermore, and this is where the rubber really doesn’t hit the road, is the matter of securing convictions. Good luck, says Honig, getting a unanimous verdict in New York, much less Georgia on any case where 30% of the possible jury pool remains convinced Donald Trump is not only innocent of anything and everything but sent from God on high to save them from woke liberalism. Point being, says Honig, no “buck stops here” prosecutor, like Garland, wants/dares a (super) high profile acquittal on their record.

But sadly, there is no “sure thing” in American court rooms, other than you know some black kid caught selling dope on a street corner.

Honig didn’t get into the Fox-Dominion case on Sykes show, but here’s tech’s Grand Inquisitor Kara Swisher on her podcast, (Also highly recommended.)

The takeaway there being that Rupert Murdoch has the resources and legal firepower to whittle Dominion’s $1.6 billion claim down to a rounding error for Fox, maybe even with the standard legalese of “admits no wrong-doing” in its final settlement. A settlement that will get no play on Fox and quickly disappear from public memory, much like Bill O’Reilly’s $32 million pay-out to one woman for whatever he did to her. (The “non-consensual sex” and gay porn angles are always worth a headslap.)

This stark, relentlessy reaffirmed double standard for American justice has no obvious resolution. (Honig argues for Garland to try the case against Trump for the basic Constititional demonstration that acts so egregious and historical must be publicly adjudcated, lone MAGA juror be damned.)

My only suggestion would be for pundits and legal experts to at least do us the courtesy of A: stop asserting that “no one is above the law” in this country and/or B: disclaim that assertion whenever someone else “wonders” if that is the case.

If Now Isn’t the Time to Assess Blame When Is?

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In every American crisis there’s a moment like the one after the 2018 Parkland High School slaughter. A woman found her way into an exclusive Republican fund-raising event on toney Key Biscayne across the water from downtown Miami. She wheedled her way through the crowd of politicians and big ticket donors until she found Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House.

Polite and deferential to start, she eventually asked Ryan if he was, “Here celebrating the death of 17 children.” At this point the silver-tongued Ryan waved her off saying that despite being the star attraction at a political fund-raiser he, “didn’t want to talk politics”. The line is a variation on the tried and true, “Now is not the time to talk [insert whatever the crisis of the moment is all about.]” (Here’s a few more examples of the same thing.)

There’s an amusing but deadly dark tussle going on amid the torrent of COVID-19 news. This, in case you’ve been distracted by the rapidly escalating death toll, the administration ordering thousands of body bags and dodging basic questions like when will it produce enough tests to moderate the near total lockdown of American society, is the matter of suing FoxNews and other key members of the right-wing disinformation network. For what? For their culpability in the spread of the contagion.

Sharp-witted and sharp-elbowed tech columnist Kara Swisher launched into Sean Hannity in her Tuesday column, using her 80 year-old mother, a Hannity super-fan as an example of the very high cost of the crap (a polite word) regularly spewed by Hannity to his millions of credulous listeners and viewers.

“Facebook was not my mother’s source of misinformation (in fact, the company has been trying to improve in this area). It was not the fault of Dr. Google, which has at least pushed out more good information than bad. And my mom doesn’t use Twitter. Instead, it was Fox, the whole Fox and nothing but the Fox. Many children of older parents have come to know this news diet as the equivalent of extreme senior sugar addiction mixed with a series of truly unpleasant and conspiracy-laden doughnuts.”

While a lawsuit over Fox’s role in feeding Donald Trump and TrumpNation ludicrously erroneous and arguably lethal misinformation, to the point that Fox-Trumpers continued on with activities that led to the infection and deaths of god knows how many others is a delicious thing to imagine. A kind of Scopes Trial for the Trump era. Another sweaty courthouse lawn somewhere. Perhaps Palm Beach in July. A trial of not just Trump, but the larger network of astonishingly cynical interests that have enabled and invested in him.

But that, as Swisher writes, isn’t going to happen. Modern America doesn’t work that way. Nevertheless, Hannity has gone ballistic, calling Swisher every name he can use on air (and Twitter) while – of course – failing to disprove any of the accusations of naked mendacity she posed against him.

He’s sweating. He can feel the first draft of history’s dim view of what he’s done.

TrumpNation is up on its arthritic hind legs, snarling and hissing through the few good incisors they have left that liberals are exploiting the pandemic to undermine Trump. It’s a more personalized, cultish variation on, “Now is not the time … to assess blame for how bad this pandemic has become in the richest and most technologically advanced society on the planet.”

But it very much is. Now is the time to make damn certain there is no doubt in a fat majority of Americans’ minds why this is as bad as it is, and why it could have been much less worse. Fewer infected. Fewer dead. Fewer livelihoods destroyed.

Given everything that is known and provable — just at this point in the crisis — of what Trump knew, what he was told by our intelligence agencies, by the likes of the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonier and what he then failed to do, what diametrically opposed “untruths” he told his gullible, credulous fan base about the likelihood and lethality of what was coming is nothing less than a catastrophic failure of character and duty.

And as much as I wish I could say that is hyperbolic. It’s not. Look around you.

Among the Usual Sage Heads of punditry and establishment media there’s this attitude that it’s est to wait. “This will all get sorted out once the crisis is over,” and “there will government hearings.” Please. As with any meaningful response to our weekly gun slaughter, “Now is not the time … ” is the all-important first step to … doing nothing. To letting the perps skate, and enduring the same tragedy all over again.

If you’re out there rattling your phone lines, your e-mail, your Facebook postings, your Zoom meet-ups, your Twitter accounts and your socially distant dog walks with your neighbors pounding the point that this is, verifiably and conclusively, the worst failure of an American president in the country’s history and that it is still failing, good on you. That’s informed citizenship. That’s a sonic wave with potentially critical vibrations.

In order to defeat the virus, fraud and incompetence have to be brought under control … now. Not a year from now in some musty D.C. hearing room with Devin Nunes cross-examining Anthony Fauci.

Governors and mayors and first responders have their hands (too) full because of Trump (and FoxNew’s) malfeasance and mendacity. Support them every way you can. But don’t mistake the importance, right now and for weeks and months to come, of seizing this moment.

What moment? The moment to write history. To establish beyond any doubt who fcked up and how badly. As you may have heard, history is written by the victors.