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Inside Elon Inc.
Musk’s Next Move, SCOTUS Shock, and the End of Peak TV  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 
The Daily Courant

Musk’s Next Move, SCOTUS Shock, and the End of Peak TV

Welcome back to the Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to what’s new at Puck.

Today, Teddy Schleifer reveals how Elon Musk’s lesser-known history of financial brinkmanship allowed him to lever up his stake in Twitter—and what it would take for it all to come crashing down.

Plus, below the fold, Matt Belloni explicates the real problem with Netflix doom-scrolling. And Tara Palmeri joins Peter Hamby to discuss the looming reversal of Roe v. Wade, what it means for the midterms, and whether there’s anything that Democrats can do to stop it.

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Elon’s Eccentric Empire
Elon’s Eccentric Empire
With ingenuity and insane leverage, Elon Musk has created one of the world’s most unconventional financial concerns. Maybe the Twitter deal, against that backdrop, actually makes perfect sense.
THEODORE SCHLEIFER THEODORE SCHLEIFER
For all of Elon Musk’s eccentricities—smoking a spliff with Joe Rogan, tweeting about a boner-killing Bill Gates—it is his financial quirks and contradictions that are most predictive of his Twitter endgame. The world’s richest man is famously illiquid, undiversified, and was largely uninterested, until last month, in operationalizing his assets in nonindustrial domains, such as Gates has done in philanthropy, or frenemy Peter Thiel in politics, or Steve Ballmer in sports. And yet even more than those other billionaires, the definitive feature of Elon’s extraordinary wealth creation has been a preternatural tolerance for risk, honed over the years by his messianic certitude, titanic successes, and near-failures.

Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, and the mega-confident impulsiveness with which he pulled together the financing, is the latest example of this trademark chutzpah. My partner Bill Cohan has written about the extraordinary risk that Musk is taking on, leveraging his Tesla stock so close to the bone in order to finance $12.5 billion of his Twitter bid. This fits a larger biographical pattern of economic cliff-jumping, often without looking: at the age of 27, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Musk took $12 million of the $22 million in proceeds that he got from selling his first company, Zip2, and immediately funneled it into starting his second, what eventually became PayPal. A few years later, Musk took the $180 million he made post-tax from selling PayPal and immediately flipped $100 million into starting SpaceX. As one Musk friend told me last week, “He’s doubled and tripled down on his prior companies when it was financially imprudent to do so.” This bet-the-farm mentality has only added to his legend.

Legend doesn’t pay the bills, though...
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT
Peak TV's Plunge
Peak TV's Plunge
Matt and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw break down the rapidly approaching end-times for peak TV.
MATTHEW BELLONI
Post-Roe Nuclear Fallout
Post-Roe Nuclear Fallout
Puck’s Tara Palmeri joins Peter to discuss the stunning revelation that the SCOTUS is poised to overturn Roe.
PETER HAMBY
The A.I.-I.P. Supernova
The A.I.-I.P. Supernova
Will robots eventually replace us? Who knows. But either way, they're going to learn how to create superhero movies.
ERIQ GARDNER
Elon's Eject Button
Elon's Eject Button
Musk essentially only bought a $1 billion call option to buy Twitter, but various market moves suggest things are lining up.
WILLIAM D. COHAN
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