#dish network corp

[crows-before-bros]

Order Dish today and get a free crow antenna.

#corvid #corvidae #crows #crow #bird pics #corvids #birds #bird #birdphotography #bird photography #dish #dishnetwork #dish network corp #crowsdaily #photographers on tumbr #original photographers #original photography

[cableguysblog]

via Yahoo! Finance: DISH News https://ift.tt/KXnL2Fr

#Dish Tumbles as Update on 5G Network Disappoints Some Investors (Bloomberg) -- Dish Network Corp. sl

[sweetbrier2908]

satan's random headcanons

• gives you kisses on knuckles and forehead because he's a charming prince who normally only exists in fantasy. but your fantasy turns out to be real life and now he's your prince charming.

• the most decent one in the family. the first time you realize he's actually a demon is when he talked about how he was going to tortune a lower demon.

• cat café date at least once a week. if there's a new cat? he goes there everyday for a week. friend with all the cat café owners in devildom, he also has share of some cat café since lucifer doesn't allow him to have his own cat.

• always says that he's gonna snitch to lucifer if his brothers do something wrong so he can trick them to tell him their secrets then blackmails them later. succeeds every time for 5000 years straight.

• actually the best cook in the house. from desserts to main courses. there is nothing that he can't cook, as long as he has his cook book with him. he learns recipes from every restaurant he goes, takes note of them, remembers what dish his brothers like and cook them later when he's on cooking duty (also remembers what dish lucifer dislikes and cook them later). if someone in the family says the dish he cooks today good, prepare to eat it for the rest of the year everytime satan's on cooking duty. yes, he LOVES to take care for his brothers though he never admits it.

• never organize his room unless lucifer angrily and strictly asks him to (which happened a very very long time ago since he casted a spell on his door to stop lucifer from entering his room). always says "it's messy in my own way", that's true, he knows where exactly to find this things. you need to borrow some books about devildom's history? shelf 1, row 2, number two from the right side. need some spicy romance book? on the floor, the whole stack at the left side of his armchair.

• knows some very good if not the best pick-up lines. first of all, he's closest with asmo. second, he reads romance books more than anyone in the three realms. always give you the most poetic love letters you've ever received.

• acquainted with all the high-status people in devildom. some random nobel? oh, he met they once in a art exhibition 1500 years ago, just grabbed a cup of coffee with them last month. some of the most famous corps in devildom or maybe human world? he's one of the shareholders. a businessman. literally a businessman. remember the chat where he said he introduced mammon to some perfume company so he could get 80% of the profit? yes, that's the businesman of the family.

• always befriends with people who benefit him and his family. mammon needs money? he can give his older brothers some modeling gigs. levi wants some limited merch? he knows someone in the company? beel wants to go to some restaurants? he can ask the chef to come to their house. no one knows how he expand his social network this much.

• loves to give you gifts. everything. from the most expensive scarf you can find in the whole world to a cat-shaped stone that he finds on the way home from RAD. gives you everything reminds him of you.

• always loves to try new thing with you. today you two goes to the drive-in cimema, the next day he will bring you to the ocean to go fishing. but if you want to go to the bookstore and then the cat café, he's happy to go with you, it's his most ideal date too! and if you don't want to go outside? he has some very interesting book you can try to read. he.will.never.bored.you.

• so insecure, always thinks of himself as the most avarage guy compared to his brothers, and compared to every guy you know. lucifer is always at the top, diavolo's right hand man and stuff; mammon is one of the most famous model in the three realms and known for his infamous reputation; levi is so passionate about his hobby; asmo is super popular and pretty and always the trend-setter; beel is the athlete, always loved by everyone; belphie is effortlessly smart, he's just straight-up the genius of the family and also a spoiled brat. and he, the middle child of the family, an avarage guy who will never be unique enough.

#obey me #obey me satan #obey me headcanon #obey me satan headcanon #obey me shall we date #om swd #some very random headcanon i made in my head abt our favorite cat boi #again no proof-head #it is very random but in a good way i think so #i love satan being the most caring decent sensitive brother #like he literally went to pick drunk asmo and mc at the end of s1 and before that he also went out with beel to buy food for belphie #he loves his brothers too much to admit it #aww your tsundere brother satan #idk what else to tag #om satan

[surveillance-capitalism]

Link without paywall:

And a copypaste for good measure:

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Typically, such a negotiation would be handled by the Pentagon’s acquisitions department. But Musk had become more than just a vender like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ” Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

The terms of the Starlink deal have not been made public. Ukrainian officials say that they have not faced further service interruptions. But Musk has continued to express ambivalence about how the technology is being used, and where it can be deployed. In February, he tweeted, “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” He said, as he had told Kahl, that he was sincerely attempting to navigate the moral dilemmas of his role: “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

Musk’s hesitation aligns with his pragmatic interests. A facility in Shanghai produces half of all Tesla cars, and Musk depends on the good will of officials in China, which has lent support to Russia in the conflict. Musk recently acknowledged to the Financial Times that Beijing disapproves of his decision to provide Internet service to Ukraine and has sought assurances that he would not deploy similar technology in China. In the same interview, he responded to questions about China’s efforts to assert control over Taiwan by floating another peace plan. Taiwan, he suggested, could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, an outcome that Taiwanese leaders see as ending the country’s independence. During a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was welcomed with what Reuters summarized as “flattery and feasts.” He met with senior officials, including China’s foreign minister, and posed for the kinds of awkwardly smiling formal photos that are more typical of world leaders.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,” Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Taoushiani recalled witnessing Errol “chastise Elon a lot. Maybe belittle him.” (Errol Musk has denied allegations that he was abusive to Maye or to his children.) Musk has also said that he was violently bullied at school. Though he is now six feet one, with a broad-shouldered build, he was “much, much smaller back in school,” Taoushiani told me. “He wasn’t very social.”

Musk has said that he has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of what is now known as autism-spectrum disorder, which is characterized by difficulty with social interactions. As a child, he would sometimes fall into trancelike states of deep thought, during which he was so unresponsive that his mother eventually took him to a doctor to check his hearing. Musk’s quiet side persists—in my own interactions with him, I have found him to be thoughtful and measured. (Musk declined to answer questions for this story.) He can also be, as he joked during a stilted “Saturday Night Live” monologue, “pretty good at running human, in emulation mode.”

Musk escaped into science fiction and video games. “One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason, was video games,” he said at a gaming-industry convention several years ago. In his early teens, Musk coded an eight-bit shooter game in the style of Space Invaders called Blastar, whose title screen, in a novelistic flourish, credits him as “E. R. Musk.” The premise was basic: “MISSION: DESTROY ALIEN FREIGHTER CARRYING DEADLY HYDROGEN BOMBS AND STATUS BEAM MACHINES.” But it won recognition from a South African trade magazine, which published the game’s hundred and sixty-seven lines of code and paid Musk a small sum.

Musk often talks about his science-fiction influences. Some have manifested in straightforward ways: he has connected his love of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, whose characters grapple with a mathematically precise prediction of their civilization’s collapse, to his obsession with insuring human survival beyond Earth. But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace Covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

In 1999, Musk stood outside his Bay Area home to accept the delivery of a million-dollar McLaren F1 sports car. He was in his late twenties, and wearing an oversized brown blazer. “Some could interpret purchasing this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he told a CNN news crew. Then he beamed, saying that there were only about sixty such cars in the world. “My values may have changed,” he added, “but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Musk’s fiancée, a Canadian writer named Justine Wilson, seemed more aware. “It’s a million-dollar car. It’s decadent,” she said. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats. That we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” The McLaren, she observed, was “the perfect car for Silicon Valley.”

Musk had moved to Canada when he was in his late teens, and met Wilson when they both attended Queen’s University, in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimbal founded a company that came to be called Zip2, an online city directory that they sold to newspapers. Musk has often described the company’s humble origins, saying that he and his brother lived and worked in a small studio apartment, showering at a nearby Y.M.C.A. and eating at Jack in the Box. (Errol at one point gave his sons twenty-eight thousand dollars. Musk, who has a tendency to fuss over questions of credit, has stated that his father’s contribution came “much later,” in a round of funding that “would’ve happened anyway.”) At Zip2, Musk developed what he describes as his “hard-core” work style; even after he had his own apartment, he often slept on a beanbag at the office. But, in the end, the company’s investors stripped him of his leadership role and installed a more experienced chief executive. Musk believed that the startup should have been targeting not just newspapers but consumers. Investors pursued a more modest vision instead. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for three hundred and seven million dollars, earning Musk more than twenty million dollars.

Justine and Musk married the following year. After their first child died at ten weeks, from sudden infant death syndrome, the couple dealt with the tragedy in very different ways. Justine, by her account, grieved openly; Musk later told one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, that “wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.” After pursuing I.V.F. treatment, the couple had twins, then triplets. (Musk now has at least nine children with three different women, and has said that he is doing his part to address one of his pet issues, the risk of population collapse; demographers are skeptical about the matter.) Justine wrote in an essay for Marie Claire that their relationship eventually buckled under the weight of Musk’s obsession with work and his controlling tendencies, which began with him insisting, as they danced at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” A messy divorce ensued, leading to a legal dispute over their postnuptial financial agreement, which was settled years later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.” (Musk wrote a response to Justine’s account in Business Insider, discussing the financial dispute, but he did not address Justine’s characterizations of his behavior.)

After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the PayPal saga happened at its outset. In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows. “This isn’t insured,” Musk told Thiel. Musk’s critics have used the story to illustrate his reckless showboating, but it also underscores how often Musk has been rewarded for that behavior: he repaired the McLaren, drove it for several more years, then reportedly sold it at a profit. Musk delights in telling the story, lingering on the risk to his life. In one interview, asked whether there were parallels with his approach to building companies, Musk said, “I hope not.” Appearing to consider the idea, he added, “Watch this. Yeah, that could be awkward with a rocket launch.”

Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk. Staff at SpaceX’s Starship facility, in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December of 2020 preparing for the launch of a rocket known as SN8, then the newest prototype in the company’s Starship program, which it hopes will eventually transport humans to orbit, to the moon, and, in the mission Musk speaks about with the most passion, to Mars. The F.A.A. had approved an initial launch date for the rocket. But an engine issue forced SpaceX to delay by a day. By then, the weather had shifted. On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.) The next day, Musk visited the crash site. In a picture taken that day, Musk stands next to the twisted steel of the rocket, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, looking determined, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. His tweets about the explosion were celebratory, not apologetic. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

Hans Koenigsmann, then SpaceX’s vice-president for flight reliability, started working on a customary report to the F.A.A. about the launch. Koenigsmann told me that he felt pressure to minimize focus on the launch process and Musk’s role in it. “I sensed that he wanted it taken out,” Koenigsmann said. “I disagreed, and in the end we wound up with a very different version from what was originally intended.” Eventually, Koenigsmann was told not to write a report at all, and a letter was sent to the F.A.A. instead. The agency, meanwhile, opened its own investigation. Monteith told me that he agreed with Musk that the F.A.A. had been conservative about a situation that presented little statistical risk of casualties, but he was nevertheless troubled. “We had safety folks who were very upset about it,” Monteith recalled. In a series of letters to SpaceX, Monteith accused the company of relying on data “hastily developed to meet a launch window,” launching “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ ” and exhibiting “a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture.” In its responses, SpaceX proposed various safety reforms, but also pushed back, complaining that the F.A.A.’s weather model was unreliable and suggesting that the agency had been resistant to discussions about improving it. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

The following March, Steve Dickson, then the F.A.A.’s administrator, called Musk. The two men spoke for thirty minutes. Like Kahl, Dickson was deferential, thanking Musk for his role in transforming the commercial space sector and acknowledging that SpaceX was taking steps to make its launches less risky. But Dickson, an F.A.A. spokesperson said in a statement, “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA rules.” Dickson had navigated such conversations before, including with Boeing after two 737 max aircraft crashed. But this situation presented a thornier challenge. “It’s not every day that the F.A.A. administrator releases a statement about a phone call that they have with the C.E.O. or the head of an aerospace company,” an official at the agency told me. “That kind of gets into the soft pressure, public pressure that you don’t do unless you are trying to change the incentive structure.”

The F.A.A. issued no fine, though it grounded SpaceX for two months. “I didn’t see that a fine would make any difference,” Monteith told me. “He could pull that out of his pocket. However, not allowing launches, that would get the attention of a company that prides itself on being able to iterate and go fast.” Musk has continued to complain about the agency. After it postponed another launch, he tweeted, “The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.” He added, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Musk has been fixated on space since his childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after his exile from PayPal. “I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go” to Mars, Musk told Wired, in 2012. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing.” In 2001, he connected with space-exploration enthusiasts, and even travelled to Russia in an unsuccessful bid to buy missiles to use as rockets. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles, closer to California’s aerospace industry, and ultimately he pulled together a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX, to make his own rockets. Private rocket launches date back to the eighties, but no one had attempted anything on the scale that Musk envisioned, and it proved to be more difficult and expensive than he had anticipated. Musk has said that, by 2008, the company was nearly bankrupt, and that, after putting much of his wealth into SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t far behind. “That was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.” SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and there was no budget for another. “I had no more money left,” Musk told Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, years later. “We managed to put together enough spare parts to do a fourth launch.” Had that failed, he added, “SpaceX would have died.” The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there—ending nearly a decade of American reliance on Russian craft for the task. SpaceX now launches more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen in orbit as of July, occupying many of Earth’s orbital routes. “Once the carrying capacity of an orbit is maxed out, you’ve basically blocked everyone from trying to compete in that market,” Bridenstine told me.

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies. “The U.S. government is in massive catch-up to build a more resilient space architecture,” Kahl, the former Pentagon Under-Secretary, told me. “And that only works if you can leverage the explosion of commercial space.” Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

Even Musk’s critics concede that his tendency to push against constraints has helped catalyze SpaceX’s success. A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy. “At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”

In early 2022, Steven Cliff, then the deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature that he found concerning. For years, Tesla has been working to create a totally self-driving car, a long-standing ambition of Musk’s. Now Cliff was told that a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, an experimental feature that lets the cars navigate with little intervention from a driver, permitted cars to roll through stop signs, at up to about six miles an hour. This was clearly illegal. Cliff’s enforcement team contacted Tesla, and, in several meetings, a surprising conversation about safety and artificial intelligence played out. Representatives for Tesla seemed confused. Their response, as Cliff recalled, was “That’s what humans do all the time. Show us the data, why it’s unsafe.” N.H.T.S.A. officials told Tesla that, regardless of human compliance, “you should not be able to program a computer to break the law for you.” They demanded that Tesla update all the affected cars, removing the feature—a recall, in industry terms, albeit a digital one. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Cliff told me. “Like, at midnight on the very last day, they blinked and ended up recalling the rolling-stop feature.” (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated. (He has spent years defending the formative nature of his role and was eventually, in a legal settlement, one of several people granted permission to use the term “co-founder.”) Musk was again entering a market bound by entrenched private interests and stringent regulation, which opened him up to more clashes with regulators. Some of the skirmishes were trivial. Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report. Nine days after the rolling-stop recall, the company pulled the noises, too. On Twitter, Musk wrote, “The fun police made us do it (sigh).”

“It’s a little like Mom and Dad and children. Like, How far can I push Mom and Dad until they push back?” Cliff said. “And that’s not a recipe for a strong safety culture.”

The fart debate had low stakes; the over-all safety of the cars is a far greater matter. Tesla has repeatedly said that Autopilot, a more limited technology than Full Self-Driving, is safer than a human driver. Last year, Musk added that he would be “shocked” if Full Self-Driving didn’t become safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he has never made public the data needed to fully corroborate those claims. In recent months, new crash numbers from the N.H.T.S.A., which were first reported by the Washington Post, have shown an uptick in accidents—and fatalities—involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Tesla has been secretive about the specifics. A person at the N.H.T.S.A. told me that the company instructed the agency to redact specifics about whether driver-assistance software was in use during crashes. (By law, regulators must abide by such requests for confidentiality, unless they decide to contest them in court.) Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, recently said that there were “concerns” about the marketing of Autopilot. Cliff told me he had seen data that showed Teslas were involved in “a disproportionate number of crashes involving emergency vehicles,” though he said that the agency had not yet determined whether the technology or the human drivers was the cause. In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said, “Multiple investigations remain open.”

Officials who have worked at OSHA and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult. The Biden Administration, which is urgently trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, has concluded that it needs to work with Musk, because of his dominant position in the electric-car market. And Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.” Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19. Soon after, he lost an initial fight to keep a factory in Alameda County—Tesla’s most productive in the U.S.—open. That April, after county officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a conference call with outside financial analysts. His rhetoric became nakedly political, to an extent that would have been uncharacteristic just a few years earlier. “I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,” he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. “What the fuck?” he added. “It’s an outrage. An outrage. . . . This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.” The pandemic seems to have sparked a pronounced shift in Musk. The lockdowns represented an example of what Hoffman told me Musk considered to be a cardinal sin: “getting in the way of the mission.”

The following month, Musk sent a series of vitriolic tweets, threatening to file suit against Alameda County, to move Tesla’s headquarters, and to flout the rules and reopen his factory, all of which he eventually did. The county essentially rubber-stamped the reopening soon afterward—a far cry from what Musk had invited. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he had tweeted, at the height of his frustration. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk has, for much of his public life, presented himself as a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal,” he told the technology reporter Kara Swisher in 2020. “And then economically right of center, maybe, or center.” He has said that he donated to Hillary Clinton, and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But, in recent years, the more radical perspective that characterized his diatribes about Covid has come to the fore. In March, 2022, Twitter restricted the account of the satirical Web site the Babylon Bee, after the site misgendered a government official. The next day, in texts later disclosed during the Twitter-acquisition process, Musk’s contact “TJ” (identified by Bloomberg as his ex-wife Talulah Riley) expressed frustration with the development and urged him to purchase Twitter to “fight woke-ism.” The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech and, in a phone call to the Babylon Bee’s C.E.O., joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April, 2022, he offered forty-four billion dollars for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to sue. After months of legal proceedings, Musk resumed the acquisition process, and in October he assumed control of the company.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

When Musk arrived at Twitter, he immediately gutted the company’s staff, reducing the number of employees by about fifty per cent. One person who kept his job was Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his mid-thirties, is gay, Jewish, and liberal. His department was responsible for determining Twitter’s rules; during the Trump Administration, he became embroiled in the culture wars. After the company began rolling out a new fact-checking policy that labelled two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation, Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s aide, went on “Fox & Friends” and read out Roth’s full name and spelled his username, adding, “He’s about to get more followers.” Trump then held up a New York Post cover mocking Roth, and Twitter users began recirculating tweets that Roth had written criticizing conservative candidates.

But when Musk took over he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October, 2022. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” That evening, Roth messaged Musk on Signal, thanking him. Musk responded, “You have my full support,” and, the next day, he followed up with a screenshot of a tweet from Roth that described Mitch McConnell as “a bag of farts.” Musk added, “Haha, I totally agree.”

But the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process. On November 10th, Roth sent a brief resignation e-mail. When his departure became public, Musk texted, asking to talk. “I[t] would mean a lot if you would consider remaining at Twitter,” he wrote. The two spoke that night, and Roth declined to return. Days later, he published an Op-Ed in the Times, questioning the future of user safety on the platform. (Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon afterward, Musk replied to a Twitter user surfacing a 2010 tweet from Roth, in which he’d shared a link to a Salon article about a teacher’s being charged with having sex with an eighteen-year-old student and asked, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“That explains a lot,” Musk tweeted in reply. Minutes later, he posted an image showing a portion of Roth’s doctoral dissertation, which focussed on the gay-hookup app Grindr and its user data. In the excerpt, Roth argued that such platforms will inevitably be used by people under eighteen, so they should do more to keep those individuals safe. “Looks like Yoel is in favor of children being able to access adult internet services,” Musk wrote.

The attack fit a pattern: Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism. In 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a cave, Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.” (Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, characterizing the harassment he received from Musk’s followers as “a life sentence without parole.” A judge ruled in favor of Musk, who argued that he hadn’t been accusing Unsworth of actual pedophilia, just trying to insult him.)

Musk’s tweet about Roth got nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets. “The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed,” Roth told me. “I spent my career looking at the absolute worst things that the Internet could do to people. Certainly, worse things have happened to people. But this is probably up there.” Roth and his husband were forced to flee their house, a two-bedroom in El Cerrito, California, that they’d purchased just two years earlier. “And then as we are, like, packing our stuff and leaving and getting the dog loaded into the car and whatever, like, the Daily Mail publishes an article that gives people more or less a map to my house,” Roth said. “At that point, we’re, like, ‘Oh, we’re leaving this house potentially for the last time.’ ”

This summer, Twitter’s cheerful blue bird logo came down from the roof of the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, and was replaced with a strobing “X.” The new entity is a marriage between two parts of Musk. There’s his career-long quest to create an everything app—integrating services ranging from communication to banking and shopping, and emulating products, like WeChat, that are popular in Asia. Sitting alongside that pragmatic goal is a newer, more confusing side of Musk, embodied by his desire to take back the town square from what he sees as woke discourse. Twitter has become a private company, so it’s difficult to assess its finances, but numerous prominent advertisers have departed, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter, and broke records for downloads. Musk threatened to sue, then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and C.E.O., to a cage match, pledging to live-stream it and donate the proceeds to charity. (Zuckerberg has accepted. Musk has delayed committing to a date, citing a back injury.) The illuminated sign atop X’s headquarters, after complaints to the Department of Building Inspection, came down as quickly as it had gone up.

Some of Musk’s associates connected his erratic behavior to efforts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends much of his time in a modest house in the wetlands of South Texas, near a SpaceX facility, confessed, in an interview last year, “I feel quite lonely.” He has said that his career consists of “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” One close colleague told me, “His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.” In the image, Musk highlighted the date and explained its significance. “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” the text read. “42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In the series, an immensely complex artificial intelligence is asked to answer that question and, after computing for millions of years, answers with Adams’s most famous punch line: 42. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is,” the computer says. Earth itself, and all the organisms on it, are ultimately revealed to be a still larger computer, built to clarify the question. Adams does not portray this satirical vision as positive. Musk’s announcement suggested more optimism: “Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.”

Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.) OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI’s: to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” In the first few years of OpenAI, Musk grew unhappy with the company. He said that his efforts at Tesla to incorporate A.I. created a conflict of interest, and several people involved told me that this was true. However, they also said that Musk was frustrated by his lack of control and, as Semafor reported earlier this year, that he had attempted to take over OpenAI. Musk still defends his centrality to the company’s origins, stressing his financial contributions in its fledgling days. (The exact figures are unclear: Musk has given estimates that range from fifty million to a hundred million dollars.) Throughout his involvement, Musk seemed preoccupied with control, credit, and rivalries. He made incendiary remarks about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind A.I. initiative, and, later, about Microsoft’s competing effort. He thought that OpenAI wasn’t sufficiently competitive, at one point telling colleagues that it had a “0%” chance of “being relevant.” Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI, one of the individuals involved told me. “Basically, he goes, ‘You’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ and he leaves,” Hoffman said. The withdrawal was devastating. “It was very tough,” Altman, the head of OpenAI, said. “I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, wondering repeatedly, in public interviews, why he hasn’t received a return on his investment, given the company’s for-profit arm. “If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted recently.

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who have co-founded businesses with Musk suggested that the arrival of Google and Microsoft in the field had made it a new brass ring, as space and electric vehicles had been earlier. Musk has maintained that he is motivated by his fear of the technology’s destructive potential. In a podcast earlier this year, Ari Emanuel, the head of the Hollywood agency W.M.E., recalled Musk joking about an A.I.-dominated future. “Ari, do you have dogs?” Musk asked him. “Well, here’s what A.I. is to you. You’re the dog.” In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter said. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI. He has said little about how the company will differ from preëxisting A.I. initiatives, but generally has framed it in terms of competition. “I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game of course,” he told the Washington Post. “That third option hopefully does more good than harm.” Through A.I. research and development already under way at Tesla, and the trove of data he now commands through Twitter (which he recently barred OpenAI from scraping in order to train its chatbots), he may have some advantage, as he applies his sensibilities and his world view to that race. Hoffman told me, “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” As humanity creates A.I. in its own image, Hoffman argued, the principles and priorities of the leaders in the field will matter: “We want the construction of this to be not people with Messiah complexes.”

At one point in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Adams introduces the architects of the Earth supercomputer. They’re powerful beings who have been living among us, disguised as mice. At first, they were motivated by simple curiosity. But seeking the question made them famous, and they began considering talk-show and lecture deals. In the end, Earth is demolished in the name of commerce, and their path to existential clarity along with it. The mice greet this with a shrug, mouth vague platitudes, and go on the talk-show circuit anyway. Musk isn’t peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show—or, better yet, to be the show himself.

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Published in the print edition of the August 28, 2023, issue.

#Elon Musk #Ronan Farrow #the new yorker #SpaceX #tesla #starlink #ukraine #twitter #lllllinks

[market-spy]

Feeding the Future: A Bite-Sized Look at the Global Online Food Delivery Market

Hungry? Well, you’re not alone! In a world where convenience is king, the online food delivery market is serving up a feast of options. Forget decoding and navigating the culinary landscape; let’s take a casual stroll through the delectable details of this industry that’s changing the way we dine.

The Buffet of Numbers: 

The Global Online Food Delivery Market, not just a small fry, but a whopping USD 200.81 billion in 2021, is predicted to grow to a lip-smacking USD 442.50 billion by 2030. That’s a CAGR of 10.38% for those who prefer their data with a side of acronyms.

Market Morsels: 

So, what’s cooking? Online meal delivery services are sizzling hot, thanks to their easy location delivery and on-time alternatives. The recent merger of Grab Holdings and Altimeter Growth Corp. valued at a staggering USD 40 billion is the cherry on top. As governments witness a growth spurt due to hectic work schedules, online food delivery services are becoming the go-to for family transactions.

Market Segmentation: 

More Than Just a Menu This market isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal. It’s segmented by type (Restaurant to Consumer and Platform to Consumer) and payment method (Cash On Delivery and Online). It’s like choosing between a fancy restaurant and your favorite local joint, but with the added convenience of online payment.

Paying the Bill: 

Online vs Cash On Delivery Online payments are the rockstars here, with a projected CAGR of 19.9%. It seems like wallets aren’t just for holding cash; they’re also helping with marketing and offers. But, hold on — Cash On Delivery (COD) is still in the game, with some customers playing it safe, believing internet payments are like ordering a dish without knowing what’s in it.

Type Matters: 

Restaurant to Consumer vs Platform to Consumer It’s not just about who’s cooking; it’s also about who’s delivering. Platform-to-consumer takes the crown with a predicted CAGR of 19.9%. This model involves listing nearby eateries, making it the perfect choice for those who like a buffet of options. On the flip side, the restaurant-to-consumer model allows you to get your favorite dish directly from the source — be it McDonald’s or the quaint cafe around the corner.

For More Information: https://www.skyquestt.com/report/online-food-delivery-market

Regional Spice: 

Asia-Pacific is leading the charge with a spicy CAGR of 19.80%, thanks to changing tastes and increased earnings. North America is catching up at a CAGR of 18.3%, driven by the shifting tastes of a busy populace. It’s not just about delivering food; it’s about providing live customer service and fostering growth in the local market.

The Dynamics of Delivery: 

Cloud kitchens are the unsung heroes, offering lower overheads and charging customers less. But, beware of the threat posed by massive delivery volumes. As more orders flood in, logistics becomes the unsolved puzzle for food delivery businesses.

Market Players: 

The Culinary Champions Uber Eats, DoorDash, Just Eat Limited, and more — these are the names spicing up the global online food delivery market. Partnerships and acquisitions are the secret ingredients for these culinary giants to enhance user experience and expand their restaurant networks.

Trends for Seconds: 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics are the special spices in this market’s recipe. Customized experiences, easy navigation, and attractive interfaces are on the menu, offering customers the best recommendations based on their past preferences, present choices, location, and reviews.

Conclusion: 

In a world where time is money and convenience is king, the online food delivery market is here to stay. With a dash of technology, a sprinkle of convenience, and a pinch of changing consumer preferences, it’s a recipe for success. So, whether you’re a foodie exploring new flavors or a business eyeing market opportunities, this market has a seat at the table for everyone. Cheers to the future of online food delivery — where every click brings a culinary delight to your doorstep!

About Us-

SkyQuest Technology Group is a Global Market Intelligence, Innovation Management & Commercialization organization that connects innovation to new markets, networks & collaborators for achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

Contact Us-

SkyQuest Technology Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

1 Apache Way,

Westford,

Massachusetts 01886

USA ([phone]

Email- [email protected]

Website: https://www.skyquestt.com

[sqinsights]

Feeding the Future: A Bite-Sized Look at the Global Online Food Delivery Market

Hungry? Well, you’re not alone! In a world where convenience is king, the online food delivery market is serving up a feast of options. Forget decoding and navigating the culinary landscape; let’s take a casual stroll through the delectable details of this industry that’s changing the way we dine.

The Buffet of Numbers: 

The Global Online Food Delivery Market, not just a small fry, but a whopping USD 200.81 billion in 2021, is predicted to grow to a lip-smacking USD 442.50 billion by 2030. That’s a CAGR of 10.38% for those who prefer their data with a side of acronyms.

Market Morsels: 

So, what’s cooking? Online meal delivery services are sizzling hot, thanks to their easy location delivery and on-time alternatives. The recent merger of Grab Holdings and Altimeter Growth Corp. valued at a staggering USD 40 billion is the cherry on top. As governments witness a growth spurt due to hectic work schedules, online food delivery services are becoming the go-to for family transactions.

Market Segmentation: 

More Than Just a Menu This market isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal. It’s segmented by type (Restaurant to Consumer and Platform to Consumer) and payment method (Cash On Delivery and Online). It’s like choosing between a fancy restaurant and your favorite local joint, but with the added convenience of online payment.

Paying the Bill: 

Online vs Cash On Delivery Online payments are the rockstars here, with a projected CAGR of 19.9%. It seems like wallets aren’t just for holding cash; they’re also helping with marketing and offers. But, hold on — Cash On Delivery (COD) is still in the game, with some customers playing it safe, believing internet payments are like ordering a dish without knowing what’s in it.

Type Matters: 

Restaurant to Consumer vs Platform to Consumer It’s not just about who’s cooking; it’s also about who’s delivering. Platform-to-consumer takes the crown with a predicted CAGR of 19.9%. This model involves listing nearby eateries, making it the perfect choice for those who like a buffet of options. On the flip side, the restaurant-to-consumer model allows you to get your favorite dish directly from the source — be it McDonald’s or the quaint cafe around the corner.

For More Information: https://www.skyquestt.com/report/online-food-delivery-market

Regional Spice: 

Asia-Pacific is leading the charge with a spicy CAGR of 19.80%, thanks to changing tastes and increased earnings. North America is catching up at a CAGR of 18.3%, driven by the shifting tastes of a busy populace. It’s not just about delivering food; it’s about providing live customer service and fostering growth in the local market.

The Dynamics of Delivery: 

Cloud kitchens are the unsung heroes, offering lower overheads and charging customers less. But, beware of the threat posed by massive delivery volumes. As more orders flood in, logistics becomes the unsolved puzzle for food delivery businesses.

Market Players: 

The Culinary Champions Uber Eats, DoorDash, Just Eat Limited, and more — these are the names spicing up the global online food delivery market. Partnerships and acquisitions are the secret ingredients for these culinary giants to enhance user experience and expand their restaurant networks.

Trends for Seconds: 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data analytics are the special spices in this market’s recipe. Customized experiences, easy navigation, and attractive interfaces are on the menu, offering customers the best recommendations based on their past preferences, present choices, location, and reviews.

Conclusion: 

In a world where time is money and convenience is king, the online food delivery market is here to stay. With a dash of technology, a sprinkle of convenience, and a pinch of changing consumer preferences, it’s a recipe for success. So, whether you’re a foodie exploring new flavors or a business eyeing market opportunities, this market has a seat at the table for everyone. Cheers to the future of online food delivery — where every click brings a culinary delight to your doorstep!

About Us-

SkyQuest Technology Group is a Global Market Intelligence, Innovation Management & Commercialization organization that connects innovation to new markets, networks & collaborators for achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

Contact Us-

SkyQuest Technology Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

1 Apache Way,

Westford,

Massachusetts 01886

USA ([phone]

Email- [email protected]

Website: https://www.skyquestt.com

[nelsonjerry]

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[hospitalitynews]

Amir Ahmed: Blending Sporting Spirit and Heritage into DISH EVP’s Journey

Amir Ahmed’s path to becoming the Executive Vice President for DISH TV, part of DISH Network Corp., was influenced by his early love for sports and his commitment to building strong personal relationships. His journey from a sports enthusiast to a business leader was recently shared in Asian Hospitality’s Leadership Series.

One of Ahmed’s responsibilities in his current role is overseeing DISH’s hospitality business. Under his leadership, DISH is introducing new technology solutions for hotels aimed at attracting guests and improving operational efficiency while reducing labor needs. The company’s innovative OnStream platform offers personalized services to guests.

Despite his success in the business world, Ahmed remains deeply connected to his heritage.

“I’m very proud to be Indian,” Ahmed said. “I think the upbringing, the competitiveness within the family, how the parents brought us up, my brother and I, it’s just go out there and put the best effort and work and then also treat your employees correctly and educate them and educate your partner.”

Early Experiences and Cultural Roots

Ahmed’s family moved from India to Canada in 1966, and he joined them in Chicago in 1972. His early days in Chicago were marked by his first experience with snow, a significant change from his upbringing in India. Despite living in the United States, Ahmed and his siblings continued to maintain strong ties to their cultural roots by visiting India during summers. He highlighted the importance of preserving his family’s cultural heritage, including learning the Hindi language and not becoming overly Americanized.

Guided by Family Values

Ahmed’s life and career have been profoundly shaped by his upbringing, emphasizing the importance of family, trust, and building strong relationships. He shared the valuable lesson his father imparted: “Everything being equal, a friend is going to buy from a friend.” This principle of trust and loyalty has been a guiding force in Ahmed’s professional journey.

Career with DISH

Amir Ahmed’s career with DISH began during the company’s early years. Over his 30-year tenure, he witnessed the transformation of the satellite TV industry from analog to digital dishes and the expansion of 5G networks. During this time, DISH has consistently provided innovative solutions to deliver high-quality services to customers at home and within various industries, including digital streaming, hospitality, and wireless communication.

DISH’s Focus on Hospitality

Today, DISH serves over 12,000 hotels with more than 1.3 million rooms across the United States. The company works closely with hotel brands, independents, and small businesses to provide tailored solutions that enhance guest experiences and operational efficiency. DISH offers a range of services, including linear content, OTT services, local services, customizable packages, and equipment to meet the unique needs of each hotel.

Introducing OnStream

In June, DISH Business introduced OnStream, a platform designed to deliver custom digital experiences for hotel management, staff, and guests. OnStream offers a user-friendly interface that allows guests to access services such as check-out, room service, housekeeping, and more directly from their TV screens or mobile devices. The platform not only enhances guest satisfaction but also reduces labor costs for hotels.

Amir Ahmed emphasized the central role of television in hotel rooms and how OnStream transforms the guest experience. It provides personalized content, welcomes guests with hotel information and offers, and even integrates with loyalty programs for tailored offers.

Future Growth

Looking ahead, Ahmed sees continued growth for DISH. The company remains committed to developing new products and solutions that simplify people’s lives and align with evolving technology trends worldwide. DISH’s focus on the hospitality sector and collaboration with hotel brands signal a promising future for innovative in-room entertainment solutions like OnStream.

In conclusion, Amir Ahmed’s journey from a sports enthusiast to a business leader reflects his dedication to building trust, fostering strong relationships, and preserving his cultural heritage. Under his leadership, DISH is making significant strides in the hospitality industry by offering cutting-edge technology solutions to enhance the guest experience. Source: https://www.asianhospitality.com/sporting-spirit-heritage-guide-dish-evp/

[whatisonthemoon]

Fishing for Respectability - on the Unification Church’s “Global Economic Action Institute”

Washington City Paper Vol. 13 No. 22 | June 11-17, 1993 Fishing for Respectability by Alan Green and Larry Zilliox Jr.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon has dominion over three separate worlds - the religious, the nonprofit, and the entrepreneurial. But in the Unification Church, worlds collide.

▲Sun Myung Moon and Rev. Yang Hur

Yamano Hana APPEARS to be no different than any other Japanese restaurant in Northern Virginia. It's in a nondescript strip mall on Leesburg Pike, halfway between Seven Corners and Baileys Crossroads. It has a sushi bar, a cocktail lounge, and a favorable mention from Washingtonian displayed out front. You can get salmon teriyaki there for $7.20, and among the chef-created specials is a crab stick and fried flower dish called the Full Moon. Lunch is served beginning at 11:30 a.m. Reservations are not required.

But if Yamano Hana is indistinguishable from other area Japanese eateries, one thing sets it apart: This restaurant is at the tail end of a vast, vertically integrated fishing operation whose components are all tied to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Identifying the players in this network is like trying to navigate without a compass - and that's obviously the way Moon's followers want it because they've taken great pains to obfuscate their ties to one another and, most important, to the church itself.

Dig deep enough, however, and this elaborate connect-the-dot game yields a picture with at least a few clear edges.

Annual reports and other corporate records show, for example, that Yamano Hana is owned by Hana Enterprises, a Maryland company whose officers and directors have all been affiliated with other commercial enterprises run by Unification Church members. As recently as 1990, Hana Enterprises' corporate secretary was a director of New Wave Seafood, a Beltsville wholesaler that supplies Yamano Hana with its fish. New Wave's treasurer was at one time an officer of U.S. Marine Corp., a commercial fishing company whose catch ends up at church-affiliated wholesalers. Among U.S. Marine's wholly owned subsidiaries is Master Marine, which builds the boats used by the church-aligned fishing fleets. U.S. Marine is, in turn, under the corporate auspices of One Up Enterprises, a Virginia-based holding company whose president, R. Michael Runyon, is a longtime Moon confidant and an officer of other businesses controlled by Moon's followers. Virginia state corporate records also show that Runyon's wife, another Unification Church member, is a director of Hana Enterprises.

Keep following the serpentine paper trail, and you learn that the Washington-area seafood operations are just one part of an umbrella organization that includes some 65 Japanese restaurants across the nation - including Niwano Hana, on Rockville Pike - and at least a dozen seafood wholesalers in such cities as Philadelphia, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Bayou LaBatre, Ala.

There's even the tax-exempt Ocean Church, supposedly created to give young Unification Church members the experience of spending time at sea. Not surprisingly, Ocean Church branches are based at commercial fishing businesses run by Unification Church members. One Ocean Church branch even lists its address as a Gloucester, Mass., restaurant whose owners are part of Moon's octopan fishing enterprise.

These operations - and other marine-related ventures - are collectively referred to within the Unification Church movement as the "Happy Group," which derives its name from Moon's large Japanese trading company, Happy World Inc. Not officially part of this conglomerate - but nonetheless part of Moon's business network - is the Happy Mind Shop at Home Service, a catalog company in the 3500 block of V Street NE that sells everything from hardware and over-the-counter drugs to produce and, not surprisingly, fresh seafood.

This agglomeration of interlocking enterprises is just one component of a gargantuan corporate empire that includes hundreds of businesses and organizations around the globe. Moon may be well known for having founded the Washington Times and Insight magazine, which have bled his bank accounts of perhaps a billion dollars over the last decade, but these publications are just two pieces of an expanding international media conglomerate that includes foreign and domestic newspapers and newsletters, book publishers, video production companies, and a major interest in an American cable network.

Moon and his associates own travel agencies and health food stores, real estate agencies and office cleaning services, an equestrian center, and a company that bottles ginseng soda. In addition, Moon has financed the creation of dozens of religious and political organizations, including two benign-sounding groups headquartered here: the American Conference on Religious Movements and the American Freedom Coalition.

In Moon's world, however, nothing is benign, nothing is as it appears. Privacy may be universally valued, but Moon and his followers are so intent on keeping their affairs shrouded that even something as commonplace as selling fish becomes mired in a clandestine web.

Trying to trace this corporate lineage is an extraordinary challenge. Interlocking structures make ownership and control of businesses run by church members nearly impossible to figure out. Those who work for these operations will say little, if anything, about them. And the landscape is further blurred by an entanglement of nonprofit organizations, whose finances are subject to less governmental scrutiny than their for-profit counterparts, and whose affairs are therefore even harder to decipher.

The affairs of the Global Economic Action Institute (GEAI) provide a telling illustration of this.

GEAI is a 10-year-old nonprofit organization whose creation was inspired by Moon, supposedly to foster cooperation among nations in their efforts to achieve a stable international economic order. Over the years, GEAI has attracted an impressive collection of politicians, economists, and business leaders. It has published position papers and hosted international conferences, with support from the likes of the United States Information Agency and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It has received virtually no media recognition - and in fact has never sought any - but from all appearances, it has helped promote the sort of dialogue that might ease the world's economic problems. Finally, GEAI has received financial support from a wide array of corporations, foundations, and other institutions - the Unification Church among them. But it has always been widely believed that the church's contributions were not particularly significant, its influence on the organization tenuous, at best.

In truth, documents obtained by Washington City Paper show that GEAI has been used by Moon and his associates to facilitate contact with high-level executives around the world and advance the church's political and business agendas. GEAI's key staffers - all Unification Church members - have used the organization's resources to run their own for-profit corporations. Documents also reveal how GEAI's employees tried to recruit more than 100 of the nation's wealthiest individuals - including some well-known Washingtonians - into supporting an operation that appears to exist primarily to further Moon's goals, rather than the noble policy objectives outlined in the organization's charter.

But GEAI and the guileful manner in which the fishing operation is managed are not aberrations within the Unification movement. Relationships seem to be purposefully obscured.

The convoluted ownership of U.S. Marine Corp. is typical. According to a Dun & Bradstreet commercial credit report, 83 percent of the fishing operation's voting stock is controlled by the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA) - the nonprofit, religious component of Moon's empire usually referred to as the Unification Church. That part of the ownership picture is simple and straightforward.

But the remainder of U.S. Marine's stock is controlled by One Up Enterprises, the Virginia-based corporation that controls Moon's fishing businesses. One Up is in turn a subsidiary of a for-profit, Virginia-based holding company called Unification Church International (UCI), which operates a slew of firms whose owners are also followers of Moon.

UCI is so closely affiliated with Moon that the organization's amended articles of incorporation list as its operational purpose "To serve as an international organization assisting, advising, coordinating and guiding the activities of Unification Churches organized and operated throughout the world." What's more, UCI shares corporate offices with News World Communications Inc., the Moon-controlled company that owns both the Washington Times and the McLean home that Moon occupies when in Washington.

Despite this, HSA spokesman Peter Ross insists that the church is entirely separate from UCI, GEAI, and other ventures Moon has inspired or helped fund. "Rev. Moon is the leader of a religious movement," says Ross. "But he's free to engage in all sorts of activities. He's a patron of the media. He's an industrialist. That's all true, but that shouldn't mean the Unification Church is involved."

Ross' statements notwithstanding, additional documents obtained by City Paper tell an entirely different story. These documents, which chronicle GEAI's activities for 1990 and part of 1991, show that church money was sometimes keeping GEAI afloat. They show that GEAI's staff members sought to control the organization. They show that these same staff members aimed to convince GEAI's leadership to accept Moon's vision for the organization. Finally, the documents reveal that the church was so concerned about GEAI, members were actually instructed to pray for its success.

Since his release from prison eight years ago, Moon has been a shadow of his previously public self. But if he's kept a low profile, the founder of the Unification Church has only stepped up his campaign to expand his worldwide influence.

From all indications, his efforts have been successful, although the self-proclaimed messiah is now facing trouble anew.

On June 1, 1976, the Unification Church took over Yankee Stadium for its so-called Bicentennial God Bless America Festival, the highlight of which was supposed to be an address by the Rev. Moon. At the time, Moon was endlessly portrayed in the media as a cultist who enslaved young people and used their free labor as a means to amass a fortune for his church.

The Yankee Stadium speech, delivered in Korean and translated by longtime Moon confidant.

The Yankee Stadium speech, delivered in Korean and translated by longtime Moon confidant Bo Hi Pak, did little to quell the anxieties of nonbelievers. A wildly gesticulating Moon laid down his own version of divine law: America had been invaded by Satan, and God had dispatched Moon here to set things right. Moon's disciples were clearly enraptured by this homily, but spectators by the thousands stampeded for the exits. There was pandemonium, as the inclined rampways behind the stands swelled with a descending tide. Halfway through the speech, the stadium had the look of a visiting-team blowout in the bottom of the ninth: Down the lines and in the upper decks, only the die-hards and dreamers remained in their seats.

It would be another 17 years before Moon would venture on another national speaking tour, his 12-city roadshow having rolled through Washington on May 15. In the interim, he increasingly de-emphasized his religious pursuits, instead focusing his attention on politics and profit-making ventures. During this time, church real estate holdings increased. Moon's tangled web of businesses, once located primarily in Korea, Japan, and the United States, took root throughout Europe and eventually began creeping into Africa, South America, and even the Cayman Islands.

For his troubles, in '78 Moon faced a civil lawsuit brought by the U.S. government, but he escaped unscathed. His luck ran out in May 1982 when a New York jury found him guilty of four counts of conspiracy, including conspiracy to obstruct justice and conspiracy to file false income tax returns. The felony offenses brought a sentence of 18 months in federal prison, and on July 20, 1984, Moon began serving what would ultimately be a 13-month term.

Since his release, Moon has rarely been seen in public. But behind the scenes, he's been all business. In fact, the aging industrialist has not only increased the pace of acquisitions by his front organizations, but he's tried to establish a business/religious/political foothold in Russia and China. He's even negotiated deals with the governments of Vietnam and North Korea.

These days, the 73-year-old Moon has lost any charisma he may once have had. His recent Washington speech, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, was a rambling, 75-minute patois that lacked the histrionics of years past. Moon delivered the address in halting, at times incomprehensible, English, repeatedly stumbling over words and stopping in mid-phrase, as if he were reading a phoneticized version of a text whose meaning he couldn't fathom. Occasionally, Moon almost seemed unaware that he was addressing an overflow crowd of nearly 3,000: Early in the speech, for example, he paused a full 10 seconds, and when he resumed, a mint in his mouth clacked against his teeth. The sound reverberated over the room's speakers, but Moon seemed either unaware or unconcerned. Instead, he just kept reading, poking at his eyeglasses every so often.

The speech itself, called "True Parents and the Completed Testament Age," amplified some of the same peculiar themes introduced in Moon's Yankee Stadium address - in particular, that America's role as a world leader hinges on its spiritual well-being, and God has dispatched Moon here to ensure that the country does not go off course.

"In these chaotic times," he told a rapt audience, which interrupted him with applause 25 times, "humankind is longing for a true direction and purpose, yet America and the churches have no confident answer. God has granted me an understanding of the forces involved in his providential history. Thus, I know the direction that humankind must go, and I, with the help of God, will lead the world there."

This time around, no one was fleeing for the auditorium doors. The room had been filled with invited guests instructed to RSVP. Business attire was required for admission. The audience was read letters of welcome from Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly and Sen. John Warner (R-Va.); a proclamation from Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer declaring May 15 "Family Day" in honor of the event was also broadcast to the crowd.

Moon slowly made his way through the lecture, as onlookers unable to comprehend his broken English followed along with a printed text. As the speech progressed, it became more muddled and self-aggrandizing. Moon chastised Korean religious leaders for failing to believe that he was the Second Coming of Christ. He blamed the Cold War on the failure of the United States and worldwide Christianity to unite with him after World War II. And the self-proclaimed messiah railed against the media and other detractors.

"Can anyone disagree when I say that Reverend Moon is among the most persecuted religious leaders in the world?" he asked.

Not far away, a process server lay in wait, hoping to heap yet more bedevilment on Moon. A day earlier, a suit had been filed in a California federal court alleging that Moon and his associates had concocted an unlawful scheme to gain control of cable television's Nostalgia Network. In essence, the suit alleges that Unification Church International, One Up Enterprises, and other related businesses are all secretly structured to achieve Moon's objectives.

These charges are similar to others that have been leveled against Moon, and in each instance, the church has dismissed them as further examples of the religious persecution that Moon must endure. But the affairs of the Global Economic Action Institute may suggest otherwise.

The Global Economic Action Institute was founded in the summer of 1983, ostensibly to help promote policies that would foster world economic stability. The organization was incorporated in Washington on Dec. 1 of that year, with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson among its board members. A few months later, the IRS granted GEAI nonprofit status—important for the organization because would-be contributors could be promised that their gifts would be tax-deductible.

Much of GEAI's initial funding came from HSA, the religious component of Moon's operation, although in recent years dozens of foundations and corporations have signed on as benefactors. GEAI's membership roster includes individuals in some 75 countries, among them former heads of state, members of national cabinets, academics, and business leaders. Only one person on GEAI's original board of directors—Mose Durst—was affiliated with the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, thereby creating the appearance of autonomy from Moon. Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy was even enlisted as GEAI's chairman emeritus.

GEAI's headquarters are in New York, and until last year, the group maintained a Washington office. Copies of tax returns provided by the IRS show that GEAI's 1990 budget was nearly $1 million, about 59 percent of which was spent on producing a series of national and international conferences.

These same 1990 tax returns show that GEAI's three highest-paid employees - all Unification Church members - were Garry Barker, Jeremiah Schnee, and Laurence Baer. Together, this trio ran GEAI's affairs.

But that's not all they ran.

The Unification movement typically portrays its involvement with nonprofit organizations under its control as that of a beneficent donor supporting worthy causes. Unification movement members insist that the church exerts no influence over groups such as GEAI - that Moon has no personal involvement in the direction of their operations, for example.

But documents reveal that the Unification Church was attempting to use GEAI to advance Moon's vast business empire. Other documents show that Barker, Schnee, and Baer conducted for-profit consulting work out of GEAI's Washington offices; in effect, the three men attempted to create business partnerships among GEAI contributors, for which they would receive finder's fees or commissions. The evidence also suggested that GEAI was not reimbursed by these for-profit companies for the use of its resources, as IRS regulations require.

Answers about GEAI's affairs were not forthcoming. Schnee, who apparently now runs the organization with one assistant, did not return phone calls. Durst, former president of the nonprofit Unification Church of America, who two years ago severed his affiliation with GEAI, willingly volunteered information about Moon's original vision for the organization but would say little else. Durst did insist that Barker, Schnee, and Baer never ran businesses out of GEAI's offices. He also maintained that he didn't own the building from which GEAI conducted its activities, then admitted that he "might have."

In fact, District of Columbia property records show that Durst was a longtime owner of the townhouse at 821 Massachusetts Ave NE that once served as GEAI's Washington address. Records from D.C.'s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and elsewhere also show that at least three for-profit corporations were conducting business from the Massachusetts Avenue address: RFR International, whose president was Jeremiah Schnee; Barker International Associates, headed by Garry Barker; and L.H. Baer International, run by Laurence Baer.

Although Barker, Schnee, and Baer were listed on GEAI's tax returns as full-time employees of the nonprofit organization - their annual salaries ranging from $36,049 for Baer to $57,251 for Barker - they were simultaneously conducting the business of their own companies. Internal memoranda obtained by City Paper show that the three men were trying to consummate more than 30 high-stakes business deals around the globe - from the sale of rare paintings to funding a Broadway musical to the sale of Nigerian light crude oil. In a number of instances, their would-be partners in these deals were the same people they had recruited - or were trying to recruit - for GEAI membership.

On Feb. 1, 1991, for example, Barker's daily agenda lists both GEAI activities and various for-profit undertakings, including a local real estate development project called Stafford Place that the GEAI staff had been trying to fund for at least eight months. The previous July, an internal memo describing the trio's ongoing business opportunities included an entry about Stafford Place and referred to a New York meeting with officials of some of Japan's leading banks. Among the banks represented that day was Fuji Bank and Trust, one of GEAI's corporate contributors.

A GEAI document detailing possible meetings in Washington on Aug. 1, 1990, once again lists both nonprofit and for-profit activities on the day's agenda. Among those whom GEAI staff members hoped to meet with that day was Richard Allen, national security adviser in the Reagan White House and now chairman of Federal Capital Bank, formerly Credit International Bank.

Allen was being actively targeted for a leadership role with GEAI, and the memorandum outlining the Aug. 1 meeting makes reference to discussing such a position with him. In addition, the memo says: "Explore likelihood of possible business ventures with Credit Int'l Bank customers."

The July '90 internal memorandum listing current business opportunities reveals that Barker, Schnee, and Baer hoped to include Allen in at least seven of their projects around the world. These included an overseas office/hotel complex, a European golf course, and a state-of-the-art jet-maintenance facility - a multimillion-dollar project that promised a 100 percent return on investment.

Other business projects that RFR, Barker International, and L.H. Baer were trying to develop from the GEAI offices included a Caribbean resort development, and the business opportunities memo notes that Abe Hoppenstein, a member of GEAI's international steering committee who worked for a New York investment banking firm, might be of help. Still, another project that GEAI's triumvirate hoped to involve Hoppenstein with was a Northeastern gold and ski resort. According to the memo, the investment banking firm was willing to give RFR a one percent commission. "Daiwabo director is interested and might want to visit," the memo added.

Sure enough, the Japanese textile firm Daiwabo was also a corporate contributor to the nonprofit organization, and GEAI's staff intended to take full advantage of their contacts. According to the July 18 summary of potential business opportunities, the Daiwabo connection was particularly promising: "Chairman Satoru Arinobe visited the U.S. in April. Likes [Jeremiah Schnee]. We get a 3% commission on the monthly volume of sales of the company's textiles. Possible Central American/Caribbean contacts. Possible buyers are Danskin, Fortunoff, Members Only, J.C. Penney, Phillips-Van Heusen, John Weitz Co., Donna Carron [sic]. Private arrangement where he helps us with Japanese companies and split commission 80/20 between RFR and Daiwabo."

Fortunoff's inclusion on the list of potential buyers was not just happenstance. Documents show that Elliot Mayrock, a principal of the Long Island-based M. Fortunoff of Westbury Corp., which manufactures such things as draperies and garden furniture, had pledged money for GEAI's upcoming conference in China.

This is the way Barker, Schnee, and Baer went about their business: Those who pledged money for GEAI programs were then targeted as potential business partners. According to a May 5, 1990, document detailing the fundraising efforts for "Campaign 21" - an effort by the staff to quickly raise $21 million - Mayrock had pledged $80,000 for a conference in China, $30,000 of which had been received. The memo notes that Mayrock had agreed to join GEAI's international advisory council as chairman of Fortunoff, and he referred his cousin, Josh Green, to Schnee.

Schnee was obviously glad to have such a referral. A document created by him and his two cohorts called "Individuals to Include in Various Business Deals" features this entry: "Children's Video/Animation. Josh Green. Connect him to animators in communist countries. RFR gets 50% of the difference in cost between U.S. animation costs and local costs."

John Haley, chairman of the board of Pace University, was another contact who Barker, Schnee, and Baer found valuable. A July 1990 confidential memo from GEAI President Lev Dobriansky to the organization's officers noted, among other things, that Haley had joined GEAI's international steering committee.

Other documents show that by the time Haley had been awarded his place on that committee, GEAI's staff had already tagged him as a possible participant in two business deals, including one involving a Midwestern chemical manufacturer. The chemical company's president was not only working with Schnee, Barker, and Baer on various for-profit schemes, including a Moscow office/hotel complex, but the three had also enlisted this corporate executive's counsel for GEAI's chairman search committee - even though he wasn't even a member of the organization.

There was a good reason why this person's counsel was being sought: Edward Kime, another member of GEAI's international steering committee, confided that the would-be business partner had "definitely decided" to give money for the organization's upcoming conference in Moscow. The May 18 documents detailing GEAI's fundraising efforts notes about this person: "Ed Kime says, 'The more active, the more $$.'"

And was he ever kept active. The July memo from Dobriansky to GEAI's officers reported that a delegation had recently returned from Moscow in preparation for the organization's upcoming conference there. Among the "prominent Americans" joining the GEAI group were this same chemical company president and J.B. Fuqua.

Fuqua is the chairman of the Atlanta-based sporting goods and garden products manufacturer Fuqua Industries. According to the May 18 fundraising memo, Fuqua was "very interested" in the U.S.S.R. and was looking for joint ventures there. The memo also states that the GEAI staff offered Fuqua the opportunity to be the international chairman of the organization's Moscow conference - for the sum of $75,000. According to this same memo, Fuqua's response when presented the deal was: "I'm listening."

And so it went. The men who piloted GEAI activity recruited high-level business leaders from around the world to make tax-deductible contributions to the organization. The next step was to get these donors to participate in GEAI's policy seminars. Finally, Barker, Schnee, and Baer tried to marry these same people in business deals, for which the trio was promised hefty commissions or finders' fees.

Such dealing raises questions about compliance with IRS regulations. IRS spokesman Domenic LaPonzina would not comment specifically on the activities of GEAI or its three employees, but he would say that, in general, the government requires that there be an "arm's length relationship" between nonprofit and for-profit activities and that individuals not receive "personal inurement" from their affiliation with a nonprofit organization. "Generally, if someone is benefiting personally from the equipment, facilities, or resources of a nonprofit, that's prohibited," said LaPonzina.

The law also says that a nonprofit organization may permit its employees to use the group's facilities for personal profit-making activities but only if those employees pay a fair market rental rate. If the organization doesn't comply, it can lose its nonprofit status - meaning, of course, it can kiss those tax-deductible contributions goodbye. In addition, there may be tax consequences for anyone who used those facilities and didn't pay for them.

There's little dispute that Barker, Schnee, and Baer ran their for-profit businesses from GEAI's offices. The address and fax number on both Schnee's RFR business card and Baer International's letterhead matched those on GEAI's stationery. Facsimile transmissions sent by the three are identified on the top as having been sent from GEAI's machine.

But if the three men were using GEAI's facilities to run their own for-profit businesses, there's no evidence to suggest that the organization required them to pay for these services. Neither is there evidence that the men voluntarily reimbursed the organization. Attempts to reach the three men for comment were unsuccessful.

An internal GEAI document detailing the group's finances for '90 and the outlook for '91 lists outside income from various sources, including corporate membership payments and rental income from a company called MVA. Nowhere in these documents are RFR, Barker International Associates, or L.H. Baer International listed as having made any payments to GEAI in '90, nor is there anything to indicate that GEAI anticipated income from the three firms in '91.

Related links and notes below

Chicago Tribune: Unification Church Invests Heavily Uruguay (December 1994)

Emperor of the Universe video ‘Privatizing’ covert action: the case of the UC / FFWPU

The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA)

C-Span videos of Global Economic Action Institute conferences and panels - one of these videos ("Foreign Trade and Domestic Subsidy Policy") features Most Durst

Moon on why he founded the Global Economic Action Institute:

I founded the Global Economic Action Institute to help distribute and re-invest inactive, or "sleeping" money to make it work for the world. A world-level bank is necessary to go beyond the boundaries of any one nation. This bank will not lend to individuals, but only to nations. The world is coming into unity, which means that independent governments will merge into one to be more operable on a global scale. Only global thinking and institutions can solve the world's economic problems.

#Global Economic Action Institute #geai #neoliberalism #capitalism #world bank #unification church #ffwpu #family federation for world peace and unification #1992 #1991 #laurence baer #garry barker #Jeremiah Schnee #members #unification church members #current members #moonies #washington city paper #mose durst #finance #economy #uc businesses #UC assets #front organizations #front groups #academia

[zoomtecnologico]

Amazon apunta a la telefonía móvil gratuita

Como parte de los esfuerzos por expandir sus servicios, Amazon está en serias conversaciones con diversos operadores locales para ofercer el servicio de telefonía móvil a bajo coste o gratuito a suscriptores del programa Amazon Prime. Amazon inició conversaciones con Verizon Communications, T-Mobile US Inc y Dish Network Corp, y pretende ofrecer planes y servicio de telefonía móvil por 10 dólares…

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#Amazon

[gadgetsforusesblog]

Why Dish shares are trading lower premarket today

DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ: DISH) reported a revenue decline in FY23 first quarter of 8.6% year over year to $3.96 billion, missing the consensus estimate of $4.06 billion. The net decrease was mainly due to the decrease in sales of the Pay-TV Wireless and Wireless segments. Net pay TV subscribers declined by 552,000 in Q1 compared to a net decline of 462,000 in Q1 FY22. Read also: Still no…

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[reveal-the-news]

Dish Network chairman-backed SPAC in talks to buy wireless business unit

Dish Network chairman-backed SPAC in talks to buy wireless business unit

Oct 12 (Reuters) – Blank-check firm CONX Corp ( CONX.O ), backed by Dish Network Corp ( DISH.O ) Chairman Charles Ergen, said on Wednesday it had begun preliminary talks to acquire Boost Mobile, Dish’s retail wireless unit. The special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) said it will appoint a special committee of independent and disinterested directors to evaluate and approve the terms of any…

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[cableguysblog]

via Yahoo! Finance: DISH News https://ift.tt/A60OrX2

#DISH announces conference call for first quarter 2022 financial results DISH Network Corp. (NASDAQ:

[bitcofun]

This is a viewpoint editorial by Mickey Koss, a West Point graduate with a degree in economics. He invested 4 years in the infantry prior to transitioning to the Finance Corps. While going over the blind areas of Bitcoin with another Bitcoin Magazine factor, we concurred that the absence of delineation in between Bitcoin the property, procedure and network might be among the most significant concerns keeping back higher adoption. The blind area I wish to deal with includes the 21- million hardcap meme, which is, in truth, a rounding mistake. I get it; it's memorable and beneficial, like the majority of memes are, however in such a way, I believe it's really holding Bitcoin back. The Bitcoin network imposes the bitcoin requirement on the bitcoin property. The difficult cap is really 20,999,9999769 bitcoin, with the 21 million being the limitation in a mathematics formula, not the optimum itself. Notification all the decimal points? As the majority of you understand, the satoshi (sat) is the tiniest denomination of bitcoin at.00000001 BTC. If you consider it, however, if bitcoin is divisible and the satoshi is not, is the Bitcoin network not imposing a satoshi hardcap? The Bitcoin procedure does not handle portions-- just entire satoshi systems. If you see it through that divisibility lens, it's constantly been satoshis. The effect of this specific blind area I see is twofold. It's enabling shitcoiners to utilize system predisposition, discouraging prospective adopters from even trying to leap on the life raft. Second, it's extending the shift from a speculative shop of worth to a system of account in the Bitcoin network's sluggish march towards worldwide reserve currency. Bitcoin Unit Bias Is Fueling Shitcoin Manias20,999,9999769 BTC, or 2,099,999,997,690,000 satoshis. The 21- million difficult cap benefits memes, great for marketing. It's succinct and primarily precise. The difficult reality, however, is that there simply isn't sufficient bitcoin to walk around. A typical stating is that the population of millionaires in the world surpasses the variety of complete bitcoin that will ever exist by more than an element of 2. The five-figure USD cost is an instant turnoff to the inexperienced however curious. We've all heard it prior to: " Bitcoin is too costly."" I can't pay for a complete bitcoin."" Why would I purchase a piece of a bitcoin when I can purchase 1000 of X shitcoin for the very same rate?" Unit predisposition is a big issue; one that altcoin online marketers like to utilize to lure the unaware into dishing out their hard-earned life energy. If Bitcoin exchanges like River, Swan and Strike started pricing BTC in satoshi terms as a basic rather of a choice, possibly it might assist put some pressure on the other exchanges to alter their requirements. We might begin to take some power far from the altcoin grifters that Bitcoin Maximalists like to dislike. Know thy opponent, and after that battle them with their own techniques. " Why would I wish to purchase shitcoin X, when I can get 4,300 sats for a dollar!" There. That's much better. Satoshis Are The Unit Of Account" That'll be.00001250 BTC please." It simply does not make a great deal of user-friendly sense. Decimal points with great deals of absolutely nos do not actually roll off the tongue. It likewise drives among the most cringeworthy expressions said by the unaware: fractional shares. People do not comprehend bitcoin as a currency story due to the fact that all they see is the huge five-figure number at the entire coin rate. How the hell are you going to spend for anything with a huge old hunk of twenty-ish thousand dollars? People see it as a portion of gold; an unattainable objective that they failed on. I acknowledge that there's no marketing department, however I believe we can do much better than this. Bitcoin is the meter; satoshis are the micrometer. The satoshi basic shifts Bitcoin into a financial metric system, standardizing worth measurements into a more simple and easier-to-understand system.

Even better, it is a more steady system than fiat currencies due to the fact that as all of us understand, there is no one to control the supply of dollars in approximate methods. By transitioning to the satoshi requirement we can assist turbo charge the Bitcoin system of account concept by transitioning Bitcoin into the financial metric system. Gradually however definitely individuals will start to comprehend the worth of having a hard-capped financial supply that no one can tinker. Organizations will start to require it. With just 2,099,999,997,690,000 sats to walk around and approximately 8 billion individuals on this world, that's just 262,000 satoshis per individual. Much better begin stacking. Bitcoin The Monetary Network, Satoshi The Monetary Asset Bitcoin is not a financial investment. Bitcoin is not equity. There are no expectations of returns based upon business method of the CEO and board of directors. Bitcoin is basically a cost savings innovation; a network of permissionless, peer-to-peer worth. Bitcoin is a financial network. The financial possession, the satoshi, is a method to save your wealth, your life energy, in such a way where it will not gradually bleed worth for many years to the covert inflation tax. In its existing prices plan, 1 BTC is an aspirational, yet unattainable objective for many people at this moment. At finest, the bitcoin requirement is permitting shitcoiners to make the most of the unaware by being an apparently less expensive alternative. At worst, it's extending the shift into an internationally acknowledged system of account. We require to make Bitcoin simpler for the typical individual to comprehend. We require to frame Bitcoin in a various method to facilitate its usage as a system of account. Through reframing and rebranding to a satoshi requirement, Bitcoin the financial network will be much better able to penetrate through society, doing what it does finest: demonetizing lies and shining the light of fact on the world. The life raft can't conserve everybody, and lots of will continue to denigrate the Bitcoin network as a Ponzi plan and grift. By making Bitcoin simpler to comprehend, by making the satoshi much easier to comprehend, we can assist many others conserve themselves from what is so apparent to the rest of us. Thanks to Mark Maraia for the partnership. This is a visitor post by Mickey Koss. Viewpoints revealed are completely their own and do not always show those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine. Read More

[digitaltrand]

Buzzing Stocks | Aurobindo Pharma, Sun TV Network, SpiceJet and others in news today

Buzzing Stocks | Aurobindo Pharma, Sun TV Network, SpiceJet and others in news today

Stocks to Watch: Check out the companies making headlines before the opening bell. May 30, 2022 / 06:37 AM IST Results for May 30. Jubilant Foods, Aurobindo Pharma, Campus Activewear, Coffee Day Enterprises, LT Foods (Daawat), DCM Shriram Industries, Delhivery, Dhampure Sugar, Dhani Services, Dish TV, Dixon Technologies, Dredging Corp, Eureka Forbes, Jindal Steel, Mawana Sugar, Mcleod Russel,…

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[schaeffersresearch]

GoPro Inc (GPRO), DISH Network Corp (DISH), and Ford Motor Company (F) will make cameos at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES)

#General