by John Walters
Haven’t We Seen This Movie Before?*a.k.a. “Citizen Jeff”
Born in the Mountain Time Zone region. From a poor family but his mom finds a way to raise his stake in a better future. Preternaturally brilliant, he builds an empire in a newfangled industry from scratch. Marries a gorgeous brunette as he becomes the world’s wealthiest man. Divorces the brunette for a cheap floozy in the entertainment biz. Steps down from an everyday role in the company he built. What’s next?
For Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), it was political aspirations, namely, governor of New York. What will Jeff Bezos, who is only 57, do next?
Here’s the curious twist: Kane was a newspaper magnate who then had everything imaginable shipped to his dream palace, Xanadu. Bezos is a shipping magnate who used some of his fortune to buy one of the nation’s two most respected daily newspapers, The Washington Post. If he makes a political run, how will his own paper cover it?
Here’s an idea: Bezos announcing he’s running for the House in AOC’s district and promises everyone who votes for him $1,000 $10,000. He could easily afford it.
Queens Gambit
We’re only now catching up to this insane Axios story, by Jonathan Swan, about what was transpiring inside the Oval Office as Donald Trump (from Queens) listened to pitches crazier and crazier from minions and sycophants. to overturn the election. A MUST-read. Cannot wait for the movie.
The money quote (among many): “When Rudy’s the voice of reason, you know the meeting’s not going well.”
My Pillow Talk
Last weekend Saturday Night Live attempted a My Pillow bit on “Weekend Update” (with Beck Bennett as CEO Mike Lindell). It was okay, but nowhere near as funny as the actual Lindell’s appearance on a Newsmax program last night. As someone noted on Twitter, the utter irony of Lindell appearing in a segment about his right to speak freely (on Twitter) and then having his mic volume turned down because he was uttering crazy talk on that very segment
My Pillows may also be used to muffle mouths, no?
Right On The Mark
Yesterday morning CNBC had billionaire Mark Cuban (likely still smarting from his team’s second straight home loss to the Phoenix Suns, the latter on a Devin Booker three with 1.5 seconds to play) on to talk the GameStop saga, etc.
Cuban said something that was so self-evident to this “retail investor” and yet seemed to take co-host Jon Fortt and whoever else was on air for CNBC by surprise. Cuban’s point, and I entirely agree, is that the idea that there’s an inherent value in a stock is almost entirely myth. Yes, sure, technically one could own enough shares of a stock to find a seat on the board and influence policy, but no one you or I know is ever going to be in that position.
I’m trying to quote Cuban as closely as possible here, but what he said was this: “A stock only has two points of value. One is the dividend, which many companies don’t even offer. The second is what you can get someone else to pay for it (above what you did).”
BOOM. Yes. Fort challenged Cuban, asking about fundamentals and balance sheets and P/E ratios and basically asking, “So you’re saying all the homework that we all do is meaningless?” And Cuban said, “Um, yeah.”
And I agree. You MAY do all that homework if you like. And technically, you’re correct. But here’s how the stock market is different than, say, analytics: If 99 of 100 people say 2+2= 5, your knowledge of arithmetic is enough to declare that they are wrong. And you, the one, are right with your answer of 4.
However, if in the stock market 99 people say 2+2= 5 and you insist on it being 4, well, they’ve moved the needle to it being 5. And they’ve made money while you stood there shouting into the abyss.
Honoring Brian Sicknick
President Biden took a few moments after most men his age’s bedtime to ride down to the U.S. Capitol and pay his respects to the Officer Brian Sicknick, who was killed during the January 6 insurrection. His body is lying in state there.
As he did so, this screen grab compares what CNN and MSNBC and C-SPAN were covering live with what Fox News was.