John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre)

I sat on the syndicate desk of a global investment bank from the dot-com crash through the global financial crisis. We had to do a lot of media work to promote deals. One day I asked our Global Head of Communications why the media was so gentle with us. He laughed: “Because we’re one of their biggest advertisers.” That explains a lot of the media’s treatment of Elon. Tesla is so successful, its ad spend is effectively zero, or ~0.01% of the $40 billion global auto advertising market. No ad dollars = no protection. No one knows this better than Big Pharma. They don't make confusing and enigmatic ads to sell you product; they make the ads to control the media.

The UK Treasury quietly scrapped its numeracy test because basic math was a "hurdle" for minority candidates. Let that sink in. The people in charge of the nation’s money, debt, taxes, and economic policy decided that competence in numbers was problematic. This isn’t diversity. This is institutional self-sabotage.

This is a classic meme. But it's not the entire picture: 1) Most of the grift and graft happens at the NGO level with overpaid liberal midwits outsourcing to outsourcers, just so they can go to Davos and present themselves at cocktail parties. 2) None of these people have moved the needle in decades. 3) It's patently dishonest to blame Elon for the deaths of people in Liberia or anywhere else as a result of demanding accountability for how we spend the tax dollars of hardworking Americans. 4) If the solution is so simple, MacKenzie Scott, Laurene Powell Jobs (friend of Ghislaine Maxwell), or Nancy Walton (owner of a $300 million mega yacht) could snap their fingers and solve the problem. This entire anti-Elon, media driven narrative is so obtuse and contrived. Anyone who buys into this is intellectually captured. Foreign aid creates dependency and props up failure. Real progress comes from property rights, rule of law, trade, entrepreneurship, and stable governance, not blank checks. Stop repeating the same failed experiment and expecting different results.

I went to a prestigious prep school (Choate). By default, I know way too many people who slid into the USAID grifter circuit. It’s way worse than you think: nauseating buzzword-filled circle-jerks on Zoom calls, business-class conferences in Zurich, private champagne dinners, and endless layers of outsourcing (each one taking their fat cut) - all on unlimited expense accounts. Saying 90% of the “aid” disappears into admin, overhead, and fraud is a gross understatement. And for what? So these con artists can LARP as humanitarian saviors, feign respectability, and send their kids to private school… …all on the backs of hardworking American taxpayers. It's a lifestyle racket. A facade. And the worst part is that we're all expected to hold these people in high regard.

Hollywood is cooked. Even Oscar winner Natalie Portman is out here doing luxury train promos like a mid-tier influencer. My kids and their friends haven’t watched a movie or TV show in years. It’s all YouTube. The entire industry is running on fumes.