Tag: Elon Musk

The FAA Has Held Up SpaceX Too Long: Government is holding the human race back from going to Mars

Just a little memo for everyone out there, especially those who thought compliance with government authority was going to be the future trend, they were wrong.  I’ve listened to complete idiots tell me for more than two decades now that compliance with government authority was only going to increase year by year, and I have argued with them to the contrary.  COVID destroyed people’s tolerance for government pinheads forever.  Government power had been abused, and people were finally pushed too far.  And that’s why Elon Musk was on stage with President Trump in Pennsylvania, cheerleading on a Republican administration that promises to cut down on government red tape dramatically.  Musk is not a Republican or a conservative.  However, the FAA process denying him approved applications for his next space flights for Starship 5 has pushed him into Trump’s corner.  Just as they have with many Democrats who have now crossed over and joined supporting Trump, a common theme has emerged.  The government has become too big and has all the wrong values, and people are tired of interrupting their lives needlessly.  That is certainly the case with Elon Musk, who has to file a lot of permits for the launch of each of his Starships which he is working through his company, SpaceX, to prove the landing of the largest vehicle to ever enter space and return to earth.  What the Starship 5 mission proves to do is re-land the Super Heavy Booster rocket back at Boca Chica with their chopstick system.  From there, refueling and reentry into space will become a common occurrence.  But first, SpaceX has to stick the landing of the Superheavy rocket to prove the whole capture system works.  So, there is a lot of urgency to increase the innovation rate to meet the missions’ needs because Starship is a key to NASA’s programs of returning to the moon, and this application process with the government is holding everything up needlessly. 

To make matters worse, and to my point, you can’t put the heads of lazy people in compliance authority to the genuinely heroic efforts of manufacturing.  It was never a math problem that would work, and Elon Musk has tried to play nice his whole life.  And the Federal Aviation Association did pretty well with SpaceX until the second part of 2024 when Elon Musk formally endorsed Trump for president.  Two iconic photos tell the complete story of the 2024 election cycle and precisely, this problem.  The first is the attempted assassination of President Trump, where he is pumping his fist in the air with blood running down his face after just being shot in the head.  Within moments of that picture hitting the public, Elon Musk formally endorsed President Trump for president, stepping away from years of supporting Democrats such as Joe Biden and Barack Obama.  Elon Musk is hardly a conservative.  But then again, neither is President Trump traditionally.  But what they all have in common is the difficulty in dealing with government bureaucracy where entire groups of worthless people get mall cop authority over the titans of industry with the stroke of a pen.  From there, the FAA stopped approving Musk’s applications for SpaceX flights, as if to punish him for supporting President Trump in any fashion.  It all essentially started with that photo of Trump right after the assassination attempt, which has backfired massively in the intention of getting rid of Trump.  Instead, it solidified him into the world’s consciousness in ways no political campaign could have done otherwise. 

The other photo to come out of all this is when Trump returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, to finish what he started, which was interrupted by that assassination attempt.  This time, Elon Musk came on stage to speak on behalf of President Trump.   And Trump was in the picture standing at the podium calm and resolute, in the same spot where an assassin’s bullet had narrowly missed him just a few months earlier.  And there he was, standing boldly to the possibility of death.  Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and one of the smartest who has declared himself to the task of carrying human civilization to space to colonize other planets, was jumping around on the stage like a little kid, excited about being there.  The picture that was instantly famous is of Musk jumping in the air with joy at the prospect of Trump winning and deregulating his industry to the point where it has crippled his efforts in a way government pinheads only can.  The joy is evident on Elon Musk’s face, the empowerment of taking back the government from the hands of the truly terrible, the people who are worthless in life and have only defined themselves as demanding that good people adhere to some government mob. Otherwise, punishment will follow.  If you look across the world, especially across the regulatory industry, this communist push to make centralized government appeased has gone too far.  And now there was proof that even the friendly and compliant Elon Musk would be punished if he didn’t support the tyrannical mob in government to the point that they would stonewall the permit process for his life’s work.  That is why you can never give the government too much power over you; they always abuse it. 

https://twitter.com/collinrugg/status/1843376787973366154?s=46

We’re not talking about making the world unsafe.  There will always be a need for the government to provide some regulatory bumpers to hazardous conduct.  However, the lesson everyone has had to learn is that capitalist practices are a far better regulator than government pinheads.  Market conditions are far more potent because failure has a more significant impact than some regulatory committees.  The case of the FAA holding up the next Starship flight has to do with concerns over the water system used for fire suppression having an environmental impact on the local wildlife.  People have had it with this EPA argument.  The earth serves humanity’s needs, not limit them to appeasement like a bunch of primitives sitting around a campfire throwing sticks at every noise in the dark.  And that is what the government has been offering with its ridiculous rules centered around EPA concerns, which has just turned out to be a cover story for outright communism.  And the mob mentality of the government these days who put their political opponents in jail and deny permits as punishment to those who don’t support them politically.  Over the last four years, Biden has pushed too far and tyrannically, and his relationship with a former supporter, Elon Musk, has shattered.  Musk was so happy about the revelation that he was glad to be on stage with Trump and put his entire support behind electing the President back into office so that he could get his company, SpaceX, moving again and not sitting around like a bunch of idiots waiting for the FAA to approve their launch application.  If the permit process for these launches takes more than a few hours, it’s too long.  And that holds in every industry.  More compliance to senseless mobs of government power is not the wave of the future—quite the opposite.  When Trump wins, he will put Musk in charge of improving the government’s work, including the ridiculous permit process holding SpaceX back.  Elon Musk will finally be able to solve that problem directly.  And he is jumping for joy, literally.  And who will there be to blame in the end, the government that pushed too much and too far to advance tyranny and compliance to a bunch of worthless people who should have never been part of the process, to begin with?  They will only be able to blame themselves for what they did.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Government Losers are Holding Up Starship 5: The trillions and trillions of dollars of lost opportunity that the Biden administration is costing American industry

For context, Starship 5 has not launched yet. This is the mission from SpaceX that will prove the landing of the booster rocket, Super Heavy with the Chopsticks in Texas upon reentry. The FAA has stalled the application for launch due to some ridiculous concerns over the water fire suppression system impacting the environment.  This is not unique to SpaceX and likely has more to do with why Elon Musk has become in 2024 a very fervent supporter of President Trump because he knows what a bunch of nonsense all this environmental talk is.  A year ago, he was a left-of-center World Economic Forum type who was the poster boy for “saving the earth.”  But trying to perform this Starship program, to which he has dedicated his life in partnership with the government, has proven to be a ridiculous proposal.  I can say with great authority that this is not unique to SpaceX.  But because they are such a great company, and they have done such a great job of engineering, this Starship 5 launch has exposed the government radicalism in ways that even bleeding heart liberals are now questioning.  And it’s why we are on the precipice of doing something very unique: for Trump to put Elon Musk on the efficiency board to make the government work better by cutting away all that fat that is getting in the way.  Starship 5 has been ready at StarBase in Boca Chica, Texas, for over three weeks and was set to launch at the start of September 2024.  All the mechanical issues are fixed; all that everyone is waiting on are a bunch of useless government pinheads from a Biden-led government that is upset that Elon Musk no longer supports the Democrats.  So, they are delaying the application process for purely political reasons by using the government’s power to impose political compliance on people at the expense of integrity. 

Yes!

Many people in government and behind the greenie weenie movement are not participating in environmentalism from a rational, scientific perspective.  Many were running around like drug-induced losers with their clothes off, acting like rabid animals at Woodstock just a month after man landed on the moon.  These people do not want humanity to go to space or to advance beyond their control.  They want as a government bureaucrat to preserve their useless jobs with fat pensions paid for by the taxpayer and to retire at age 55 and buy a condo in Florida so they can socialize with similar losers with a latte in the morning and a stiff mixed drink in the evening talking about nothing at a bar going nowhere.  They do not want people like Elon Musk changing their lives with all this going to space stuff.  They want a lovely, comfortable death after a long retirement to satisfy their lazy souls.  Because they are so lazy and worthless, they get jobs in government so they can have power over people like Elon Musk and others trying to do big things in the world.  We saw this conflict with the Woodstock music festival and its media coverage once Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins returned from the moon’s surface.  We could look at almost every industry and show this process of eroding innovation when it is asked why Boeing is struggling with its space program, as everyone is; it’s because of this essential desire of government types to expand government into this environmental religion and impose on the world its limits that have nothing to do with science, but the preservation of laziness by the bottom dwellers of the global economy. 

Most companies in the United States have overloaded their staffing with these compliance terrorists who serve no purpose at all but to stall out economic development, and President Trump has identified that he will be targeting this very aspect during his next term.  I think it is fair to say that this scam of government costs America trillions of dollars in opportunity costs each year and is bankrupting many companies, as we speak, from dried-up revenue waiting on the approval of application processes, which is what SpaceX is currently experiencing.  For years, there was a kind of polite cooperation between these two forces: those who wanted to go into space and invent and those who wanted a government job so they could take off their clothes like a bunch of animals and wallow in the mud like a pig, like what we saw with the Woodstock festival, and thousands like it since then.  The excuse of using unscientific environmentalism as a bureaucratic stoppage of work to control the pace of that work has been purposefully crippling and is one of the greatest dangers to our modern economy.   And I think putting Elon Musk in charge of dismantling that massive government machine would be the best thing that could be done, once and for all, in American business.  The rate of invention is critical to the survivability of the human race.  But of course, there are a lot of bottom feeders in government who could care less and are digging their graves happily, day after day, toward that latte sipped in early retirement.  I think the entire federal government needs to be cut down by 80%, just as Musk did with Twitter when he turned it into X, which works much better after he took over.  And that is one of the fears with Trump returning to the White House and putting people like Musk in charge of government efficiency.  Most of them will find they are out of jobs, which is terrifying.  But it’s what we have to do.

Speaking from personal experience, getting patents from the patent office is not like it was back in Edison’s day when he was getting them approved every week for most of his life.  Most people at the patent office work banker hours and are highly inefficient throughout the day.  The process takes way too long, and it forces you to deal with losers who are terrified of the natural world and seek refuge behind a government job with all the excessive benefits.  As a company, you can hire the best people to do all the right things for new inventions, but eventually, because you have to deal with the government, you’ll have to deal with some slug along the way that is slow and cumbersome and to get through them, you’ll have to throw millions of dollars of inefficiency at them to get through their opposition to your project.  And that is essentially all SpaceX is experiencing: a complete shutdown of their Starship launch ability because of political activism and a strategy imposed on the human race that essentially goes back to the Woodstock response to the landing on the moon.  They let Elon Musk play at launching Starships into space, but after that fourth launch, SpaceX achieved most of its technical milestones, which meant that the human race was close to leaving Earth forever and colonizing the solar system.  That would put human beings out of the reach of the government, which would terrify them.  How can governments live off taxpayers if they can get into a Starship and fly off to Mars?  Who is going to fund their early retirement then?  But that’s what we are dealing with, and with the election of Trump, we can expect dramatic changes in this crazy environmental application process in many industries.  And it can’t happen fast enough at this point.  It has already cost us trillions of dollars in lost opportunity costs.  And suppose we don’t dismantle this government machine. In that case, it will bankrupt us all with trillions of dollars more shortly and keep humanity chained to a jealous Mother Earth like a bunch of slack-jawed losers, lacking enough ambition to get up out of bed in the morning and do anything bold than stuffing our faces with useless food to fuel a worthless life.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

RFK Jr. Endorses President Trump: Never Forget, COVID was a created bioweapon, and we have to fix what happened

They killed innocent people. We can’t just move on.

Notice for the first time since Trump started in politics that nobody is talking about Never Trumpers?  I saw this coming long ago; I could tell by reading his books.  However, the RFK Jr. speech endorsing President Trump was a history-making dream come true for me.  Not because the big tent party of the Republicans was opening the door to more liberals in it, but that there was a lot of good with Kennedy that perhaps only President Trump could unlock.  The ability to work with people who do not think exactly like you is a powerful skill.  One of the things that Trump has been able to do over the years that made him the most successful was getting people who don’t think like him to do what he wants them to do.  Usually, when rival presidential candidates step away and endorse someone, we never hear from them again, but in the case of RFK Jr., that would be a shame because he has done so much good with the Children’s Defense Health network.  Trump is not a micromanager and in many ways; under the Trump Administration umbrella, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will get the opportunity to do more good that he has dedicated his life to than he would have ever imagined otherwise.  For a radical Democrat to come into the Republican tent and endorse President Trump on the first Friday after the DNC convention was quite bold and a magnificent strategic move.  And one that makes it very easy for other Democrats to support Trump, too.  After the Kennedy endorsement, several actors and sports figures have done the same, which is good.  But any fear that Never Trumpers were not going to vote for Trump and that they would empower Harris by some other means is now long gone.  There are plenty of Democrats who are crossing over and voting for Trump.  In every category, Trump is winning and bringing the country together for a common cause in a way that has not been seen since Lincoln and reconstruction after the Civil War. 

Kennedy’s books, The Real Anthony Fauci and The Wuhan Cover-up are serious legal arguments for creating the bioweapon Covid and how it was unleashed upon the world, and they deserve severe public policy scrutiny.  Trump sees the need to include Kennedy in his administration which says everything about what’s possible with this upcoming White House, which is the exact opposite of what we have been experiencing.  I have talked about those two books extensively over the past few years, and I proposed that Kennedy join Trump as a VP in the future because of them.  But at that time, nobody knew what was going to happen to Trump, let alone Kennedy who positioned himself as a severe threat to the established order, especially with his resistance to vaccinations.  For all the people who feared Big Pharma running our government, which was obviously a problem with the Biden administration when they mandated vaccines for Covid, or that the World Economic Forum already had America divided up and the assets sold off to banking interests, suddenly things look a whole lot different on the battlefield.  We have not forgotten about what they did with COVID-19 to us all.  But it’s a much larger problem than even that.  To have Kennedy in the Trump administration as the head of Health and Human Services would be a significant step in correcting severe issues that have been occurring for many years and it’s harming people in terrible ways.  I’m a supporter of capitalism, and I generally like corporations, but I don’t like what happens to them under government partnerships and a lack of competition.  And to that point, that’s the problem.  If they poison our food and give people too many drugs without competitive alternatives, they have too much power over our lives, which is what we have been seeing, and it’s making people miserable. 

Think of some of these dream team participants coming into the Trump administration, not just to mention Kennedy but Elon Musk.  Vivek Ramaswamy could also be involved in economic recovery.  And a Vice President in J.D. Vance and all that comes with that.  And some of these senators who are replacing the old guard, specifically Kari Lake, and in Ohio Bernie Moreno, we are looking at an optimistic administration and other branches of government that can support it and give people something we have never had in America.  It will be the opposite of what we’ve been experiencing, which has been dismal.   But first, we have to get rid of the resistance of the Administrative State, which has been working for a global Deep State for a long time.  We have to have the guts to cut them off and put them out of control over our government. We certainly know that Trump is willing to do that, but now, with people like Bobby Kennedy in on the effort with Elon Musk, all former Democrats, we are talking about a process that we likely had to go through in America to get to the good stuff.  Until people realized just how bad it was, this combination of forces that we see behind Trump would never have happened.  People needed to see all this for themselves before there was ever any serious consideration of joining together to solve real American problems. 

It was never an option to walk away after all the bad things that were done in 2020 to Trump and the rest of us.  Just as I called the need for Robert F. Kennedy to be involved with the Trump team years ago, especially after reading The Real Anthoney Fauci, I said on day one of the COVID crisis that it was a fake bioweapon.  Nobody else wanted to admit to it, so I compared it to an attack on America similar to Pearl Harbor.  It was an act of terrorism like the Oklahoma City Bombing and 9/11.  It was an overt assault of globalism against us all, and our government got hoodwinked.  Trump was in office when it happened, and he certainly learned his lesson.  And few people have worked as hard to expose the invasion as RFK Jr.  So yeah, there are a lot of bad guys who are going to be very worried about Trump joining forces with RFK Jr. and other Democrats who are stepping away from Kamala Harris and stepping into the big tent of the Republican Party.  Trump is the kind of executive who can work with people who don’t agree with him on everything but do great work in their specified fields.  And under no other circumstances would a partnership like this be possible.  In a lot of ways, a spell is being broken that has hindered our nation for many years, and the poverty hostilities we have seen by Democrats and global communists over the past decade have set the table for these extraordinary events.  Before people could understand it, they had to see how bad it was out there, and we have now.  People have seen what the world would look like under the rule of globalists at the World Economic Forum.  And they are ready to reject that world.  And they are also bolder than ever to embrace a much more productive world that is coming together under the Trump administration for history as it has never been seen before.  And there is a lot to be excited about.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Elon Musk’s Highly “Unscientific Poll”: Deregulating the world under a new Trump administration

Let’s talk about Elon Musk’s highly unscientific poll on his “X” platform, which had nearly 6 million real people voting for President Trump or Kamala Harris.  This is why the Democrats at their convention are obsessed with beating President Trump because the internals, the cross tabs of all the national polling are pointing in the same direction.  However, this is the power of Elon Musk’s endorsement and his support of Trump on “X,” formally known as Twitter.  The poll showed that 73% of “X” users wanted Trump as President instead of Kamala Harris.  Now, I would not call “X” a right-wing platform.   And I would not call Elon Musk a right-wing guy.  Only a few years ago, he was the face of the World Economic Forum and a spokesman for globalism and climate science concerns.  Heck, his main revenue stream is in making electric cars.  He wants to power the earth with solar panels.  Well, something incredible is happening that is worth taking note of.  And it all started with that assassination attempt on Trump.  Elon Musk has been leaning toward Trump, especially after all his experiences with the Biden administration’s regulatory burdens.  Even a few months ago, when I was reviewing Elon Musk’s most recent book, it seemed unfathomable that Musk would endorse Trump for president.  Musk was a DeSantis guy, a recent development for one of the wealthiest people on earth.  So for Musk to buy Twitter and turn it into an actual free speech machine, essentially destroying the long-held gains of media control by a centralized government, a lot more than just a political stunt happened, and it came unleashed during a “Spaces” interview that Musk did with Trump that was spectacular.  When the smoke clears from this 2024 election, it will be “X” as a platform that shows the natural way of the world with true consumer sentiment.  The government propaganda that is the push behind Kamala Harris never had a chance. 

I thought the “Spaces” interview that Elon Musk had with Trump was one of the most important things to happen in the world at any point in history.  If you’ve ever been to Hyde Park in London, England, there is a tiny part of the park called Speaker’s Corner, where open debate and free speech are somewhat encouraged to take the edge off protestors and social discontent.  But most of the world is under the thumb of some bully administration of government that suppresses the expression of free ideas.  Not so suddenly, Musk bought Twitter and turned it into “X” to solve many of the problems of tyranny in the world.  Twitter was an asset to the various intelligence agencies seeking to control free speech and gather information on people who might cause them trouble.  I am still heavily shadow-banned on the “X” platform, even with Elon Musk owning it.  But listening to that 2-hour interview with Musk and Trump just talking to each other was remarkable, and it was shattering many thousands of years of oppressive government regulation in multiple cultures.  And the beauty of the American Constitution played out in how it was designed.  Having that conversation, unregulated and free of burden, was remarkable.  And it was the game-changer in this election.  Yes, it started with Truth Social.  If Trump hadn’t built that social media platform from the ground up, it’s highly likely that Elon Musk never would have bought Twitter and turned it into “X.”  But now that he has, the world’s governments have lost control of their gains by controlling free speech in a way that the world has never seen.  And those polling results are precisely what terrifies them and have Democrats horrified of President Trump, which, after all they have done, they should be. 

There is no more powerful news media company now than Elon Musk, who controls the “X” social media platform.  And as I’ve been saying for a long time, this conversion of Musk to Trump didn’t happen overnight.  Elon Musk didn’t just decide yesterday to become a conservative.  This is a transition that has come over time and experience.  Out of necessity, Musk dedicated his life to taking humans to Mars, and there was only one way to get there.  And I’m not talking about rockets.  Humans can build just about anything.  Invention is not the problem.  The problem is that humans also penalize themselves with timidity, so we give governments too much power by default.  And we allow them to create too much regulation, which is currently the world’s biggest threat.  Elon Musk sees through Trump a path to solving that problem by making himself the head of the Department of Government Efficiency with a President Trump appointment.  Under Trump, the thing that has to happen is massive deregulation and a shrinking of government in every way possible.  All those ridiculous government jobs that are out there need to be private sector positions, so a massive transition has to occur, and Trump is the best way to get there.  And Musk knows it’s in his best interest, given his dedication to the cause, to help Trump. 

We’re seeing the same thing going on with RFK supporting Trump.  When Democrats are moving into the GOP tent, that’s a good thing.  We may not be all ideologically aligned.  There is a lot with Elon Musk that I would say is way too progressive for my way of thinking.  But I can deal with people who disagree with me.  What I can’t deal with are people trying to destroy my country and attempting to kill or control the entire human race.  We have seen just such characters at the World Economic Forum.  Thinking back to an old friend at Clear Channel Radio in Cincinnati, Darryl Parks, he predicted that someone like Elon Musk would come along and change how radio broadcasts were done.  Through “X,” radio has changed forever through its “Spaces” utilization.  That interview between Musk and Trump reached over a billion people 24 hours after it happened, which is phenomenal.  But it’s also the way of the future.  As humans colonize space, it’s through communication through “X” that people will keep up with media and exchange ideas.  It won’t be the traditional print and FCC-controlled wave broadcasts.  Hosting a podcast on “X” is far more potent than being booked as a guest on a cable news station.  I learned that myself years ago after I did a stint on CNN.  My blog platform reached many more people over a long period than the bits you can do on traditional television.  Now, Musk owns that formula for perpetuating the human race into a change state that will make human beings interplanetary.  Musk has spent billions of dollars making his vision for humans migrating into space possible.  And at this point, the only thing standing in his way is the Democrat party and their governments of global communism and stifling regulatory burdens.  And with Trump back in the White House, Musk can play a substantial massive role in making the government less intrusive, as he has done with his management style at Tesla and “X.”  And I think it’s inspiring and fascinating, the complete opposite of what we have been seeing out of government.  And it is more than within reach, according to that “unscientific” poll, which looks far more accurate than anything else.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Trump Interviewing With Elon Musk on “X”: Without control of the narrative, Democrats and communists are just like East Berlin

Of course, Trump has been loyal to Truth Social.  If not for Truth Social, Elon Musk probably wouldn’t have bought Twitter and made it into what it is now, an excellent social media platform that is the number 1 news source in the world.  This is good news because Elon Musk is undoubtedly a person who supports free speech.  So it’s good to have a guy like him who is championing free speech, one of the wealthiest people in the world who the siren song of global communism has not seduced.  Musk might have been thinking in that direction in the past.  But where he is now is noticeably on the free speech, pro-capitalist market.  If anything could be said to have changed Musk’s mind, besides the trouble trying to work with the Biden administration, it was the excellent book by Johan Norberg called The Capitalist Manifesto.  I read that book shortly after Musk suggested it and saw a change in Musk.  Sometimes it takes people a while to figure things out, even if they are the wealthiest person in the world.  But logic, if applied, usually ends up becoming the destination of the intelligent.  So It’s a good time for Musk to buy Twitter and turn it into “X”.  And it’s an excellent time for President Trump to be able to control his own message with Truth Social.  And it’s an even better time for the two of them to interview each other on “X” and for Trump to consider restarting his account there.  I don’t think he really needs to.  Truth Social has been enough.  But then again, why not put your message everywhere so that as many people can see it as possible? 

When the smoke clears from the election season of 2024, it will be the new “X” platform, the media game changer that mattered most.  The communist playbook capturing traditional media was their entire plan for a win.  However, in 2024, the traditional media was not relevant, whereas new media such as “X” and TikTok were how people received their news.  And Trump thrives in both of those environments, whereas Harris and their global communists don’t and can’t.  They cannot step away from a very tight message that is state-controlled.  So in a free election society, people are not going to select Harris as a president.  For her to win anything the Democrats would have to have control over the election process, and that looks less likely in 2024 than it was in 2020.  “X” as a media platform is West Berlin to the communist East Berlin.  Or Cuba to Miami, Florida.  Where there is a clear choice, people do not pick communism.  Communism can only thrive in an environment where they control the message completely.  In East Berlin, they shot people who were trying to flee over into West Berlin.  But that didn’t make communism stronger, it weakened them dramatically.  And in the end, they never had a way to grow their political base with better ideas.  All they could do was play a game of keep away from the truth, which is why, outside of traditional media, Harris can’t compete.  In a free market of ideas, her ideas of global communism will always be rejected by choice.  That is why Elon Musk bought up Twitter formally and turned it into “X,” which was essential and will become a game changer.  Trump started that changing of the game by creating Truth Social as an alternative to Twitter.  And because of his actions, he forced the sale of Twitter to Musk, who bought it up more as a dare than a logical business transaction.  But, it worked out for him and once the smoke clears, it will turn out to be one of the most valuable assets in the world as a news service social media platform that is a real game changer.  

With banned personalities returning to “X” from when they were exiled from Twitter, Trump being one of the big ones, the fall of communism taking over global media essentially ended.  What we see in the wake is the communist media going through their motions, but the effectiveness of their message is just as useless as shooting people from trying to flee East Berlin for West Berlin or people fleeing Cuba for America on a boat made out of water bottles, was.  The plan was for America to fail.  But for that to happen, they would have to control free speech to keep anybody from getting any other news from anybody else.  Essentially, the East Berlin model.  The interview between Musk and Trump on “X” will be seen by more people than ever who would have interacted with that material in traditional media, and it will be far more powerful.  It reminds me of my old friend Darryl Parks at Clear Channel Radio, who predicted all this years ago.  And he was right.  When people have an alternative to the standardized version of the news, they will take it.  I used to love WLW radio overnight during the Truckin’ Bozo show, and I thought that was the best radio in the country, with Paul Harvey coming on every night with the news of the day at 3:30 AM.  But these days, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “X,” Truth Social, Gettr, and others are producing much more content at a much more furious rate, far outpacing the traditional media with their built-in capacity problems.  Traditional media can’t fulfill the need for news saturation that a free market demands.  And they are paying for it with irrelevancy. 

I would say that Twitter was at its height a few years ago regarding effectiveness.  And it was, as everyone had been saying, an intelligence agency asset, just as Facebook was.  But from 2020 to just four years later, in 2024, they are much different now, and Musk repackaging “X” for a media change state has positioned it to take over all media outlets in coverage and diversity.  And one way or another, whether Trump officially posts on “X” or lets people take his posts from Truth Social and carry them to other media platforms for him, the communists behind the Harris campaign cannot compete with free-market ideas.  And Trump is better at the free market than Harris, and “X” reveals that in a competitive market of ideas.  When given a choice, people will always flee to West Berlin, away from East Berlin.  And “X” has given people that choice.  And they are taking it happily.  Which Trump understands all too well.  He didn’t come all this way to lose.  And the communists do not have control of Elon Musk.  He has endorsed Trump and now has the most influential media platform in the world at his disposal.  The message will be sent out whether or not anybody likes it.  This, of course, points to the more significant issue of global communism.  With the purchase of Twitter, Musk ended their empire’s control over traditional media and gave people a choice.  Which was like opening the door to East Berlin and telling people they could cross over without being shot to death.  And, of course, people would take advantage of it, and the results would always be noticeable.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Trouble with ‘Visibility Filtering’: If Twitter wants better ad revenue under “X,” it could do much better by removing that practice

A term called “visibility filtering” goes on all over the internet, and I am specifically a target of it.  That is probably more than most of anybody out there, even celebrity pundits.  There are people online with millions of followers, and the talk has been that many of them are bots or purchased in some way.  Every day, I get offers from online tech helpers to help me expand my followers and visibility.  The trick to the sauce on these helpers is that they know when a name or account has been weighed down with “visibility filters.”  And for a price, they can remove some of the causes of that filtering and expand your online visibility.  For a long time, this practice has been called “shadow banning,” and is what the intelligence agencies were doing to people they thought were provocateurs.  The reason I have been a specific target, and this goes back well over ten years to the early days of the Tea Party, is that I am very dangerous because the manipulators aren’t sure how to deal with me.  So, they might shadow-ban an online account and eventually ban them, such as what happened on Twitter to people like Alex Jones and President Trump.  They aren’t sure what to do with people who aren’t so overt with the rules and are not motivated by the sense of popularity, socially, for which they control.  When Elon Musk bought Twitter, a central problem he had to deal with was the practice of visibility filtering.  He could claim that Twitter, now “X,” was a free speech platform, so people like me weren’t banned by the content they exhibited.  But they could put serious visibility filters on a person so that nothing they produced would go viral and reach tens of millions of people.  They might allow the content to be on their platform, but they weren’t obligated to help make it visible to anybody who didn’t come to find it shoved over in the corner where they hope nobody will see it. 

This is largely a liability thing, with Elon Musk, Twitter has been better.  But once the word is out on a person, like me, then everything they are involved in gets tagged with visibility filtering.  I’ve told people for years that this was the case with me.  While my blog gets millions of hits per month, I can see the activity on my administrator side, so I have known what’s been going on for a long time.  But interaction with me or my content has been very frustrating to all but those who deliberately seek out what I produce.  You indeed won’t find it on a Google top search if it’s the only thing made with the keywords specified.  The internet was never free and built to control the human population.  Not to free it with the intentions of free speech and open elections.  The intent of the internet was the other way around.  Most of the world is a socialist or communist hell hole, and the internet has been perfect propaganda for their political movement; it has been the menace of globalists for sure, especially those acting as domestic enemies within the United States.  But my motivations don’t fit nicely on their profile sheet, so they don’t know what to do with me.  So my name, associated with anything Rich Hoffman, “overmanwarrior,” or gunfighter, has a lot of visibility filtering on it to frustrate people from finding my content.  Even with all the restrictions, it is still worth doing what I do because a lot of people do see the material, and it provides context to what they would otherwise observe in mass media. 

I have the same problem with Truth Social and Gettr as with YouTube and Twitter.  I have been completely removed from Truth Social at least five times as editors on their server have been alarmed by my content and removed me for liability reasons.  Elon Musk is challenged with the same legal premise.  How do you provide free speech to just anybody?  What is the social media’s responsibility to constitutional concepts when dealing with a global exchange of ideas?  To avoid these complicated legal parameters, the safest thing for them is to reduce visibility and provide free speech but do everything they can to ensure that nobody sees it except those who seek the information out deliberately through that user profile.  You can see the evidence of this by looking at my YouTube account, which I hardly ever use anymore.  I have videos on there that have been up for over ten years with less than 100 views on them.  While the same type of content put up on my Rumble account has that many views in just a few hours.  Twitter has been really bad about it.  And Elon Musk has been happy to extend that criteria under the advice of the lefty lawyers that are part of all law firms these days.  However, he has been torn about the practice and has supported characters like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.  However, they are known celebrity commentators who have a free speech parameter that stays within the intelligence agency safe zones.  What they say might be dangerous, but it falls within the controls of the specified groups that can be monitored more easily by the FBI and CIA.  My stuff often goes many steps further and is just too controversial to roam free all over the internet.  So, it is visibility filtered heavily. 

Many of these social media platforms were never supposed to be profitable, so these controls are how they operate with content restriction while still being a fly trap for radicalism that the lazy intelligence agencies can monitor from the comfort of their office cubicles and corner offices.  However, Musk bought Twitter to make it a profitable enterprise and quickly converted it to “X” to facilitate an online presence that he had been thinking about for a long time.  And it’s a pretty good idea.  However, like all things free market-driven, the social controls that exist in the background, the “visibility filtering” that has been going on so aggressively, is holding back the ad revenue Musk is seeking.  When woke corporations make up most of the advertising dollars these days because they know the social controls are the driver to visibility, so they all play by the same woke rules; if Elon Musk doesn’t operate “X” the same way that BlackRock is running the boards of all their other companies, then ad revenue can choke out the business model forever for “X” and ownership will continue to be a drag on Musk, forever.  Which is the game that is played and how they get everyone to follow the rules.  But of course, there is a strategy that can make “X” profitable, and I would point to MMA fighting as the model everyone could follow.  The fewer restrictions on a social occurrence, the more people want to see and participate.  If “X” eliminated the practice of “visibility filtering,” more real people would be attracted to its use, breaking the ban from advertisers and forcing everyone into woke criteria.  The advertising would indeed be market-driven based on the need for authentic content.  Not social media editing.  People want to show up to see a fight and enjoy advertising supporting that consumption.  But suppose all the rules are the same woke garbage. In that case, people are indifferent, and advertising is greatly restricted within the funnel of woke social rules and global goals of communist centralized authorities of state media, such as Russia, China, Cuba, and most other places all over the world experience—just some friendly advice.  I don’t care; I’ll do what I do regardless.  But if you want social media to be profitable, get the “visibility filtering” out of the business and watch how quickly things change for the better.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Importance of Musk Buying Twitter: A plot caught in time to save America

I wasn’t sure what it all meant then, but when Elon Musk bought Twitter, the anxiety caused was a bit baffling.  I didn’t really know the story. I had a Twitter account, but when they started banning anybody with the kind of Chinese-style censoring standards that should never be possible in America, I simply stopped using them as a news source or for participating with my input.  I could take or leave them, I was not a Twitter fan.  But, they were a private company, and I figured they could do what they wanted to do.  As a consumer, I could decide whether or not to utilize them.  And those were the ground rules.  But to the Deep State globalists and the communists ruling in the background through finance who were essentially using companies like Twitter to capture American minds into conversion from capitalism to communism with the China model in mind, Twitter was much more than a social media platform.  I never knew the whole story of it until I read the latest Walter Isaacson book on Elon Musk, which spent about a tenth of the book talking about just the “Twitter Deal.”  I had a lot of questions as to why Musk would even waste his time with Twitter, and it started as a kind of gag with Musk putting one foot into the political world out of concern that he was dealing with a Biden administration that had shown its teeth to industrialists like him.  If you didn’t do what “they” told you, you would be ripe for a target of destruction. Twitter’s construction was far worse than what people thought it would be, and the deeper Musk stumbled into it, the worse it got. It was too late, and the truth was realized.

I was perfectly happy to move my attention to other social media platforms, especially Truth Social.  And most of my news these days comes from Gettr.  I interact with Gettr most of the business day and over the weekends.  They have great streaming content and much better news offerings than where you could even hope to get on cable news, or network news.  To have the ability to get information straight from President Trump, Truth Social became his official platform, which I have said will turn out to be the most important aspect of the 2024 election.  It has already doubled his wealth at a time when the Deep State ran straight from the captured asset of a White House has been trying to do one of their famous strategies, and that is to drain people of financial resources through the courts so they could destroy Trump and everything he has built over a lifetime because they can’t beat him at a ballot box.  But Twitter was the social media platform of progressives, which turned out to be just a new name given to hide what they really were, Karl Marx communists.  And it didn’t hurt my feelings at all to not think about Twitter in any way.  If they were run by a bunch of Deep State losers from San Francisco, well, they could choke on it as far as I was concerned.  So when Musk talked about buying Twitter, I thought it was a gimmick at best.  But when the writing was on the wall from other competitors, such as Truth Social, the pressure was squeezing out the previous owners of Twitter, mostly in a desire to keep your enemies close kind of way, to control them, until the whole bottom fell out in the courts and the desire to drain Musk with a failing asset became lucrative, and they forced the sale of Twitter to Musk with the same kind of lawfare we have seen applied to Trump and others recently.  And Twitter was a drag, being subsidized by the Deep State; it was not profitable by itself. 

What Musk inherited was a piece of garbage, a workforce built like most of the World Economic Forum companies were poised to do, progressive workforces, gender neutrality, short work weeks, essentially a company run by government subsidies, where people were paid not to work.  This falls in line with the government’s desire to provide people with a “living wage” not based on merit but statistical suppression, where more money was given to the down and out to incentivize them into power and purpose where a merit base society would otherwise reject lousy behavior and choices.  A government that wanted to topple the “American Spirit” obviously wanted to attack this premise aggressively.  And the headquarters in San Francisco was an example of the worst of American companies falling to open communism with a globalist thrust behind it.  Twitter was a company that was being supported as the typical corporation in America.  Because they existed, other companies felt they had to emulate them with ESG standards and EID values, which led to severe economic and social problems.  Twitter was a snakepit full of vipers oozing with venom. This is precisely why Biden’s administration reacted unfavorably when they heard that Musk would be the new owner.  It is an accident on many fronts that the courts, in their short-sighted efforts, wanting to hang a big loser of a company around Musk’s neck, hoping to destroy him in some way because they don’t really understand what real value is and why he’s rich, to begin with.  It’s the standard court model they use with everyone: bankrupt people into compliance or throw them into jail.  There is entirely too much communism in our courts these days, which is yet another designed strategy. 

“X” under Musk is much better than Twitter ever was.  Musk prioritized free speech for several reasons.  He needed free speech to make humanity an off-planet species.  And the governments of the world who want to cripple that effort actually wanted a Jim Jones kind of communist global community where social media platforms served their needs in editing social content, and it made dependents out of employees until they could no longer think for themselves but could only function in a massively progressive environment like Twitter.  That has been the model of all the Larry Fink radicalism from BlackRock and the World Economic Forum gang, which would then force a universal wage rate and complete communism on a global scale because all companies would be equally wrong and subsidized by governments that the World Economic Forum controlled.  It was a pretty sinister plot that unraveled for many reasons, some of which Elon Musk accidentally stumbled into.  But as history will view it, it was a good accident.  One thing that needed to happen was for Elon Musk to influence the direction of free speech worldwide significantly.  I do like “X” under Musk’s ownership.  I am still heavily “shadow-banned” on most internet interactions, which is tied to many bad guys having too much control over the internet.  But control was why the internet was created in the first place.  So, it’s just a new battlefield in the exchange of ideas.  It’s nothing to cry about or declare unfair because it isn’t.  But it’s better under the ownership of Elon Musk, and what was learned in the wake was that the Deep State had control over our society in genuinely maniacal ways that many didn’t realize until Musk bought Twitter and saw what a designed mess it was.  And in that undoing, a lot was saved that will be realized.  But the depth of that mess was genuinely terrifying and lends weight to the argument of divine providence where an unknown future is undoubtedly leaning more toward self-empowerment and anti-communist sentiment globally. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Elon Musk and President Trump: Coming over to the right way of thinking

If I were recruiting people in my life who only thought just like me, I would never speak with anybody.  So, I am always open to giving someone a chance to get it right and to come around to the right way of thinking.  Not all people come to the right way of thinking the same, but in a competitive exchange of ideas, some things are revealed that are universal truths.  So, I am always open to people discovering those truths, even if they come from a background where their thinking has steered them down the wrong path.  And that is the case with President Trump.  I wouldn’t have cared to speak one word to him twenty years ago during the height of his Apprentice show on NBC.  Unevolved playboys never interested me.  But people who make fortunes and then want to do good things with those fortunes do.  And that is the trajectory of Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people, trading back and forth with Jeff Bezos for that title.  But without question, Elon Musk is one of the biggest influencers on planet Earth.  There have always been aspects of his character that I have liked, particularly the kind of guy who would appear on the television show Rick and Morty and be associated with the Babylon Bee podcast.  However, I was not interested in the guy who loved Barack Obama and the idea of climate change and globalism—and managing supply chains in China.  However, I noticed a change in Musk’s political interests about a year into Biden’s first term.  I wouldn’t say I liked how stand-offish Musk was toward Trump during his first term, so I had a lot of questions about Trump and Musk’s relationship, which was put into context in the recent book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. 

It’s exciting to see in that book that the author, Walter Isaacson, was uncomfortable with Musk’s relationship with President Trump over the time he covered him.  This book project is a Simon and Schuster New York thing, and they are all part of the Trump-hating group who find the concept of the President as revolting because it’s a serious disruption to their plans for global communism China style.  So, Walter would look for ways to demean Trump in the text, even though Elon Musk has been moving toward Trump over the last several years.  A couple of things happened to Musk by Biden’s administration that set things in motion for which Musk and many others took for granted in the pre-Covid world of Trump successes.  The biggest thing is that Biden had a big event at the White House to celebrate the EV car market, and there simply isn’t any bigger name in the business than Tesla.  So Musk should have been the feature guy.  But Biden made it all about union labor, and Tesla isn’t unionized and has no plans to become so.  So Tesla was cast out of the White House spotlight, which, from then on, changed Musk politically, and he took a hard turn toward defending free speech and conducting a less rules-based society centrally run by big government bureaucracies.  The Elon Musk of the last three years or so is not the same political Elon Musk from the Obama period going into Trump’s administration, and that is consistent with my observations and what I have said about Musk’s political transition.  Like I said, I don’t hold people to previous assumptions.  As people learn things about the way the world works, I expect people to come around toward a big tent party, so it does not surprise me that Musk is now supporting Republicans rather than Democrats, which many of Musk’s friends find apocalyptic, best expressed in that book by Larry David who thought Musk was casting off a responsibility toward Democrats that he played a central role in.

As I have said for years, there is no way to become a human civilization going to space under a communist flag with mixed societies of socialism as part of the process.  The more capitalist space endeavors are, the more successful they will become.  And that is certainly the case with what Musk wants to do with SpaceX and the Starship program.  Math is math; the more accessible society is, the more opportunities there are for the human race to get into space and still support a positive culture on Earth.  The more socialism and communism there are politically in those systems, the more failure is introduced into all the assumptions. And now that everyone has seen what kind of world a third term of Obama looks like, through the inserted President Biden, people have decided that China-style communism is not their thing.  And people like Musk have moved toward the direction of a big tent version of the Republican Party that is fighting for personal freedoms, starting with free speech.  Musk had been supporting softer versions of Republicans like Ron DeSantis, and as I have pointed out, I have been on presentations online where Musk participated in conversations with Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance.  So Musk has indeed transitioned into a supportive Republican understanding that America will not survive if the global communists get their way.  Now that the game plan is relatively straightforward, these intentions are no longer a “conspiracy theory.”

There was a part of the Elon Musk book where Walter was disturbed by Musk’s father, a Trump supporter who would send messages to his son indicating that Biden didn’t win the last election, which was stolen from Trump.  Walter writes about all this as if Musk’s father, Errol, was “one of those people,” a conspiracy theorist with one foot into insanity.  The emphasis on the many mistakes Errol had made in his life was something that Walter wanted to make prominent, such as having children with his stepdaughter and Elon Musk and his brother being so upset that they refused to have continued relationships with their father.  But there is more to the story; intelligent people can’t ignore the evidence.  You can’t have corrupted software in society and expect everything to run right. The obvious problems with COVID and the 2020 election converted Musk to a less authoritarian government in America. He is now deeply committed to that pursuit, starting with the purchase of Twitter.  However, the definitions of success are the same, even if the means of getting there are varied.  And when people like President Trump are willing to put everything on the line to preserve our culture, and Elon Musk is signing up to be on your side of things, you open the door and let them in.  You open the door for them wisely, not linger on their past mistakes.  Be happy they have seen the light and are now on your team.  Logic dictates that people will discover the truth if only they can access it.  But it’s what happens after they find out it that matters most, and Elon Musk is now a tremendous advocate for a more capitalist society led by the United States and companies that are distinctly American, like Tesla and SpaceX.  And now, with Twitter being converted to Musk’s “X,” there are many opportunities for greatness that weren’t present before.  But they are now, which will impact the growth of the human race in the months and years to come.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Danger of Cost Plus Contractor Mentality: Elon Musk and his fantastic views on work ethic

I discovered things I liked about Elon Musk in the recent book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which transcends politics and other sentiments and strikes at the core of all human concerns.  As I read many books, I do not often get to read one like the Isaacson book, where we talk about a character who is essentially a real-life Thomas Edison.  But we’re not talking about him 100 years after his death, but in time, up to the moment.  And as is usual in books like that, there was a lot that I didn’t like.  I have a much different outlook on personal interactions than Elon Musk, and I would say that has caused him many problems, many things that cause him great turmoil. However, regarding manufacturing and productivity measures, I found that Elon Musk is a refreshing and essential character that reflects my core values.  And he’s great for American business.  There are things Americans have adopted from around the world that absolutely disgust me, especially regarding work ethic.  And if there is one reason that I hate, even despise globalism, it is because of its fundamental nature toward Marxism, which I want absolutely nothing to do with.  Elon Musk hates it with equal disdain, even if it took him most of his life to figure it out.  His work ethic was defined while building Tesla, and he has transitioned to SpaceX.  But after reading of his many toils in building those companies and confronting what I would call the vast evil of globalism, I have a lot of respect for him as a person I didn’t have before reading the book.  And it’s something that our government has committed great sins to promote and attach themselves to, and that is the concept of Cost Plus Contracts. 

Cost plus contractors have had it all wrong, all along

The stigma was most noticeable for Elon Musk when President Biden invited EV car makers to a White House event but did not mention Tesla because Musk does not use unionized labor.  And everything about the government points companies they associate with toward cost-plus contracts, which is essentially the anti-business model that has been destroying the world.  The government has no care for reducing costs in anything they do because there is too much power in brokering access to more money for them to apply, which they then transfer to private businesses for the exact control mechanisms.  And that concept has rotted out the core of American capitalism in dangerous and horrendous ways, infecting every aspect of modern American business.  The shell game they play is that costs are always going to overrun, and when they do, you go back to Congress and get more money, or you print more money with Modern Monetary Theory and then apply the extra cash to labor contracts, inflated budgets, and lack of performance.  If something isn’t getting done, Cost-plus Contract entities always throw more money at the problem rather than actually solving the problem.  This is a common issue in most aviation companies, such as Boeing, which has been cultured into accepting a Cost Plus Contract existence for many decades, where essentially, they get paid not to innovate.  But they find themselves in the modern world under the pressures of great competition where Cost Plus Contracts are not the mode of operation for their competition.  And they are drowning in that level of competition presently, to disastrous effect, because they weren’t built for that level of global competition. 

That is essentially what Elon Musk has been facing with his largest companies, Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter.  For any company to work right, the first thing they must get under control is the concept employees have been taught by modern Marxists that costs must be managed, and that process never happens if the game is played to turn to government for perpetually more money. This is why I have always been against school levies for public schools; they are all Cost Plus Contracts by their very nature and purposely by those intending to game the system, such as labor unions.  Marxists wanting to crush the American way of life and productivity have advocated this nonsense to the detriment of our economy, and I take it very personally.  I have very strong opinions about this problem, and until I read that Elon Musk feels essentially the same way I do about it, I didn’t know many people who did.  This game of government subsidy, such as we see applied to farmers, is horrible, and it has undoubtedly destroyed the American work ethic.  In companies that are Cost Plus Contractors, there is never an incentive to do anything because they are paid to be failures, to work only to always ask for more money perpetually.  This is why NASA could essentially never get back to the moon.  And more innovations in aviation have not occurred over the last three or four decades.  All the great innovators are snuffed out of the system to make way for more Cost Plus Contract bureaucrats who are as worthless to payroll as a dirty toilet bowl in the local bathroom.  But because of the government’s attachment to perpetual funding, nobody does anything about it, no matter what work is performed, because they get paid to be failures. 

I would say that Tesla and SpaceX are successful because they fought the temptation to become Cost Plus Contract employers.  They are profitable in the old-fashioned way through productive output, cost controls, and delivery expectations.  But they are very much alone in the world of manufacturing these days.  However, it is good to see someone keeping the American spirit of productivity alive on a scale such as what Musk is functioning from.  People can say a lot about the many mistakes in his past and the downfalls of his lifestyle.  I have always liked Howard Hughes for the same reasons that I like Elon Musk.  I can deal with personality traits that many people find uncomfortable.  However, when a person has the kind of work ethic and productive output sensibilities that Musk has, forgiveness is deserved.  And I am thrilled to know to what extent Musk has fought against the connection of Cost Plus Contractors.  That may well be his most significant contribution to the human race.  To stand up against it and win.  Most companies in the world could be successful if they did as Musk has done at his companies and rejected the Cost Plus Contract model.  Of course, the government doesn’t want the manufacturing world to do such a thing because it takes control away from them.  All the colleges teach such a relationship, so most people are lost in dealing with such assumptions.  It’s undoubtedly one of my biggest concerns in the world and has been for a long time.  However, Musk, gaining the ability to bring his work ethic to mass manufacturing on a large scale, has done more to challenge the concept of Cost Plus Contractors than anybody else has currently.  I am thrilled, and my opinions about Elon Musk are much more respectful than I had previously expressed.  His political evolution may have been a moving target, but I like him more now than I would have ten years ago.  But his work ethic is something I greatly admire.  And it transcends political sentiment in every case for me. Additionally, I would say that anybody with a work ethic like Elon Musk was bound to share political opinions eventually.  As most logical people do once they step away from a Cost Plus Contractor’s view of the world. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Secret to Elon Musk’s Success: An obsession with risk and the management of its destructive elements

It’s certainly worth a discussion, although I had been avoiding reading the book Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, mainly because it was a Time Magazine view of the world, and I tend not to enjoy books like that very much.  I’ve read other books by Isaacson and enjoyed them enough to learn new things.  In this case, Isaacson was given access to Elon Musk for the last few years to study him and learn all he could.  So, it was worth reading about the daily life and details of a person who is often the wealthiest in the world and runs some of the most successful companies.  But politically, I think of Elon Musk as a Barack Obama fanboy and a global greenie weenie.  But I do admire how he built Tesla.  I’m certainly not a EV fan of electric cars, but Tesla has carved out a nice little niche for themselves that I think is valuable.  SpaceX is an incredible company that is doing wonderful things.  I’m a tremendous fan of the Starship program and what has been done with Falcon 9 and the Dragon program.  I appreciate them for what they are, and I think Musk is just a unique personality to continue healthily pushing society places it needs to go.  I think of him as a great case of “dynamic intellectualism” that I talk about with the Metaphysics of Quality and the philosophy of Robert Persig.  But Elon Musk smoked pot on the Joe Rogan Show and wanted to put fart apps into his very expensive Tesla cars, so he’s not my kind of guy and people like Isaacson tend to get the surface qualities of his subjects, but not the real intellectual gist of their value.  However, after reading Elon Musk by Isaacson, the unavoidable trait of the secret to success did emerge without question, which is why I kept hearing about the book from friends and respected business leaders. 

Since the book came out in the fall of 2023, I have had at least someone once a week asking me if I had read the book since I usually read everything that comes out.  But I typically avoid the trendy stuff and lean more toward big-picture things.  I wasn’t interested in another get-rich book by people fascinated with wealth creation viewed through a popular cultural lens.  But so many people were getting the book and passing it out to their management teams, looking for some secret sauce that Musk obviously has.  So when I was at dinner with some very important people at Son of the Butcher at Liberty Center in Ohio, and under great encouragement from those people indicated that I would love the book, I left that dinner, stopped by the bookstore, and bought it just before Barnes and Noble closed for the night, and I promised them the next time I would see them, I would have read the book and told them what I thought of it.  That was on a Thursday night, so by Monday, when I would see some of them again, I had read the book, it’s a pretty big book with a lot of details in it.  Many people had bought the book, but they hadn’t made it very far through, and they wanted to know my opinion on whether to continue slugging through it.  In truth, it was a good book; Walter did a good job for a Simon and Schuster publication intended for static society audiences.  And I would say it’s one of the most important books of our time, for a lot of reasons, which I’ll spend separate articles covering.  But the secret sauce, yes, it was there and in all its glory.  I understood it, and it’s something I relate to. 

Throughout the book, I couldn’t help but think of President Trump when I think of Elon Musk and how wealth has been projected over time.  Trump’s Art of the Comeback from 1997 was about knowing influential people, supermodels, wives, exotic cars, and tall skyscrapers.  And in the part of the book where Elon Musk went through his period of wealth acquisition, Walter Isaacson seemed to be on comfortable ground.  However, in the cover inserts were exciting value changes for Elon Musk.  The things that Musk thinks are successful and what Trump thought was successful have changed a lot over time.  Musk had exhibitions of massive engineering feats displayed in his book, where Trump featured the building of skyscrapers and the New York skyline.  But while the things that wealth could buy as a value may have changed, getting there had not.  Most wealthy people have some prevalent traits they share in common, which is the concern of Walter’s books, especially with Steve Jobs.  What makes successful people successful?  And everyone talking to me about the book wanted to know this.  “If I read this book, will it make me successful?  Can we pass this book on to our super managers and sales teams and learn something from Elon Musk to help us be more successful?”  The answer is yes.  However, knowing how to be successful doesn’t mean most people have the guts to do so.  You can’t cheat that, even though that is what causes most of the corruption in the world—the desire to take the easy way to wealth to have the benefits without the downside. 

The downside with Musk and Trump, along with many others who have done similar things, even Jeff Bezos, is that they are addicted to risk and obsessed with it.   Elon Musk is a classic riverboat gambler who loves risk.  But has the unique personality to be very intelligent enough to know when and how to mitigate risk.  But yes, he is an obsessive gambler who would play Texas Hold ’em’ by pushing all in for every pot, blowing a lot of money in the process.  But in so doing, he would also get the biggest jackpots.  And that’s clearly how he achieved success at the level he did.  Anybody wanting to succeed would have to learn to bring more risk to their lives to have the success that comes from winning big.  A gambler like that might spend a fortune on betting.  But mathematically speaking, people like Musk and Trump know that eventually, things will swing in your direction.  What separates them from everyone else is how much you can take until you fold up on yourself, broke and destitute.  Musk certainly has a personality that could be homeless and poor beyond any reasonable scale because he is a person obsessed with risk.  I get it; I have many of those same traits.  It’s not the money someone like him is interested in.  But its success in risking and surviving, that is.  And without that risk, there would be no success.  Elon Musk would be just another person with Asperger’s and too much brain power, applying it to a static society that is not interested in risk.  They wanted everything safe and predictable and would push themselves by nature as far from the Elon Musk types as they could, to maintain their safe lives.  That’s what makes Walter’s book so good because it indeed chronicles this risky behavior in ways that the public usually doesn’t get to see in people.  But just buying the book wouldn’t make people successful by itself.  What it could do, though, was let people understand that risk is critical to business and how risk is managed is the key to all successful enterprises, which is my general opinion of the book.  Yes, people should read it.  However, they should learn from it how to put more risk into their lives without becoming destructive.  Because there is no way to cheat risk, you either develop a healthy relationship with risk or get standard, predictable results that stagnate and rot you and your culture from the inside out.  Luckily for us, there are people like Elon Musk out there who are making things exciting.  But, there should be a lot more, and maybe yet, there will be.

Rich Hoffman

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