Happy 100th to John!!

🤔

Sept 9th, 2020 - Lake Merritt, Oakland. Apocalyptic day.

Think I’ll end my Kinks run on a high note

Might as well continue the trend…

Keeping it rolling with more Kinks

Time for some Kinks!

In 2016, Trump was asked why he had repeatedly attacked the press. His answer: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.” When someone tells you exactly who they are and exactly what they’re doing, pay attention. Believe them.

This is the most OUTRAGEOUS deal I've seen in my 45 years on Wall Street. SpaceX just disclosed Musk's new compensation package: He gets up to 200 million super-voting shares if SpaceX hits a $7.5 trillion valuation, establishes a permanent human settlement of at least ONE MILLION people on Mars, and deploys roughly 100 terawatts of space-based computing power. Let me put the 100 terawatts in perspective: The entire electricity generation capacity of the United States is around 1.2 terawatts. The comp plan asks Musk to build more than 80x America's entire power grid... in orbit. This is a science fiction screenplay that somehow landed in front of the SEC. But here's why it actually matters for your portfolio... The S-1 reportedly claims a $28.5 trillion total addressable market, with over 90 percent attributed to AI. CapeFearAdvisors flagged this one cleanly: when Palantir went public, it disclosed a $119 billion TAM and the SEC reviewed and accepted it. SpaceX is claiming a market roughly 240x BIGGER. Now let's talk about what is actually being sold here: Reported 2025 revenue is approximately $15.5 billion. Starlink delivers around $11 billion of that with healthy margins, and the launch business is genuinely dominant. The problem is xAI - the AI piece doing all the heavy lifting in the trillion-dollar valuation pitch. xAI generated just $210 million of revenue in the first 3 quarters of 2025 while burning through $9.5 billion in cash. Ben Brey and Rupert Mitchell - a former Fidelity portfolio manager and a former head of equity capital markets at Goldman and Citi between them - ran a serious discounted cash flow on the actual operating businesses and arrived at roughly $400 billion. Lawrence Fossi covered their work recently and the math holds up. The IPO is being marketed at $1.75 TRILLION. The gap between what these businesses support and what Musk is asking the public to pay is roughly $1.35 trillion of pure narrative. Then layer on what we just learned last week... The New York Times investigation revealed Musk personally borrowed $500 million from SpaceX between 2018 and 2020 at rates as low as 1%, while bank prime rates sat around 5%. The same SpaceX has been used to bail out SolarCity, prop up Tesla during cash crunches, and absorb xAI when the AI losses became unmanageable. This is the same playbook he's run for two decades. Use a privately controlled entity as a personal piggy bank, and when the bills come due, find new investors to absorb the losses. The IPO is structured to keep that game going FOREVER. The Texas reincorporation strips away Delaware's fiduciary protections. Controlled-company status on the Nasdaq eliminates independent board requirements. And retail is being offered up to 30% of the offering (3x the normal allocation) because the institutions who actually do the math are quietly stepping away. Here is the part that finishes the case for me: Roughly $40 billion of the IPO proceeds are already spoken for before a single dollar reaches operations. About $23 billion retires SpaceX debt. Another $17 billion retires the high-interest debt sitting on xAI and X. This raise is not funding the future. It's just plugging existing holes that retail investors will now own. In my 45 years I've never seen a deal where the comp hurdle is colonizing another planet. I've never seen a disclosed TAM that exceeds verified comparables by two orders of magnitude. I've never seen a company asking the public to fund the retirement of debt incurred by separate private entities controlled by the same individual. Every red flag I've watched precede a major bust over four decades is sitting in this prospectus, in plain sight. The Tesla mispricing is being repeated on a far larger scale. And this time the bag is being handed directly to retail. Don't be the one holding it.

I’m looking forward to having a real country again with intelligent adults at the helm.

Spotted at Land’s End

Spotted at the Sutro Baths

Here’s how badly Citizens United damaged our democracy: In 2024, the maximum individual donation per candidate was $3300. Elon Musk donated $277 million, just to Trump in 2024, because of the loopholes Citizens United created for billionaires to buy elections.