The Daily Beast Podcast - What If Elon Musk’s Twitter Grab Is All ‘a Big Fugazi’?

Episode Date: May 13, 2022

“Despite being the richest man in the world,” Elon Musk doesn’t have enough cash to buy Twitter for $43 billion, podcaster and CNBC contributor Dan Nathan tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, so he’s selling Tesla stock to get some of that cash in hand and then bringing in private equity and venture capital to cover the difference. Plus, Molly and co-host Andy Levy go in on another week full of conservative fuckery, and Daily Beast senior editor Matt Fuller explains how “the abortion landscape really has changed” after the leak of the draft opinion doing away with Roe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Info. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objective. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a great show we have today. First, we're going to talk to Dan Nathan, who you of course know from the On the Tape podcast and OK Computer podcast, as well as being a contributor to CNBC's Fast Money. And he's going to talk to us about his thoughts on what the economy looks like right now.

Then we're going to talk to Matt Fuller, senior politics editor at The Daily Beast. and he's going to tell us about what the hell is going on with the Senate races and the abortion bill in Congress. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly, Johnfest. One of the favorite conversations that members of the intelligentsia, I'm using that ironically, on the right like to have, is instead of talking about overturning row, which is this enormous paradigm shift that's super unpopular, They want to talk about protests and how the left is out of control.

I mean, I feel like this is the fight they want to have, is that the left is protesting too much. Now, these protests largely are women chanting. You know, there are no guns. I mean, it's not like, these are not like January 6th. Not that that should be the measure, but I feel like when you have the conversation about protests, You are literally giving a gift to these conservatives who are doing radical policy. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I guess the thing is I'm not really mad at the people on the right who are doing this because it's exactly what you say.

That's their playbook. And what I'm mad at is the people on the left and the center left who go along with it. And that really, really pisses me off. I mean, what we've got going on now is we've got 100% peaceful protests in front of some of the Supreme Court Justice's homes, not on their property, outside their property, and being 100% peaceful. You've already got people up to and including like Jen Saki saying this is not a good thing and we need to back away from this. And it's like, no, be quiet. Like, this is not a problem. You can argue, and I might even agree with you, that the protests are meaningless,

like in the sense that they're not going to, no justice is changing their mind because of these protests. And I think the protesters know that. They're, you know, they're not stupid. But regardless, no one is being hurt by these protests, unlike, as you pointed out, January 6th or Charlottesville, remember very good people, very fine people on both sides? Right, on both sides. Yeah. Jews will not replace us. Right, exactly.

No one is chanting the equivalent of Jews will not replace us. No one is storming a building while armed and beating up police or whatever. This is literally people gathering peacefully and peaceably outside of a home on public property and chanting. I mean, who cares? Well, there's also chalk gate. Well, okay, but that's different. Chalk is violence. And we need to pour one out for Senator Susan Collins who had chalk written on her sidewalk across the street from her house in Maine.

And then when she complained, somebody went to her second home, her D.C. home and true in chalk in front of that home. Poor Susan, I assume she's concerned, perhaps troubled. She's definitely concerned. And she has concerns. I know that at the very least, none of the protesters have lied to Susan Collins the way that Kavanaugh and people like that did, which she also has concerns about. But she has equal concerns about the fact that people lied to get on the Supreme Court and people drawing on a sidewalk across her home. She is equally concerned about both of those things. And that's why you got to love Susan Collins.

She can find the concern in any issue. My favorite thing about Susan Collins is nothing. Again, it's not a surprise that, like, Tom Cotton wants the people demonstrating outside the justice's homes to be arrested. Jailed, murdered, sent to get mo. The only surprise is that he has yet to call for the military to do it. Yeah, he loves that, yeah. I was actually a little surprised to see that there were a couple of Republican senators who were like, no, we can't do that.

Mike Braun of Indiana, Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming. They're like, we got this little thing called the First Amendment. But again, it's not a surprise. Like Tom Cotton doing this, that's the playbook.

And look, they also, they're doing this for a reason. The fact is, most of America does not like protests. And you could say the same thing about the Freedom Riders or anything that happened in the 60s. You know, any poll from back then showed that.

that they didn't like the protesters. At any point, it's like, fuck you. You don't like protesters? Well, that's the point of protesters is to make you realize that there are things going on that you don't want to care about. And, you know, as a short-term political strategy,

it's not bad because you put the focus on the protesters who a lot of Americans don't like, and maybe you get a lot of those Americans who are probably more liberal or more about abortion rights than the, Republicans are to focus on the protesters and to think, well, I don't like what they're doing with abortion, but look at these Democrats. These Democrats are chanting in front of a home.

You know, I got to vote Republican. Do you remember when the right was so into the trucker protests? That was like two months ago or as we now know it, 57 years ago. But when the right was so excited because these truckers took over an entire town in a small city in Canada to protest. Nobody knows. Still no one knows. I'm just saying the right flips back and forth on protests pretty fast. Yes, but they liked the truckers because they were protesting in Canada. Right.

It's true. That's right. That's a good point. They weren't here. So they weren't. Once the protesters came to D.C. And the protests completely fizzled, there weren't a lot of Republicans out there supporting them

the way they were when they were in Canada. Supposedly they're coming back, the protesters. I know, I heard that. Yeah, they were mad that they didn't get the kind of respect. Maybe they figured out what they're protesting. No, probably not. I can't imagine a world where they figured out where they're protesting. Yeah.

When it's the Tea Party stuff, the right likes it, et cetera. Obviously, I'm fine with protests from the left, but there are times when the protests on the left annoy me. Usually at the point when there's a drum circle, that's when I tune out. Well, that's your moral failing because I personally, as a child of the 1970s, I love a drum circle. Look, I don't want to pull rank here. Late 1970s. I don't want to pull rank here, but I was put on academic probation my freshman year at Columbia

for being part of the divestment protests. And we chained the school, the main. classroom building shut. Wow. So you don't come at me, Molly Youngfest. It's John. Whatever it is. And you don't, you know, I've been there.

I've been there. I've been in the trenches at an Ivy League school. Yeah, I didn't even go to an Ivy League college, so I get it, man. I didn't even go to college at all. Well, yeah. We'll talk about that later. Yeah, exactly. This Roe Opinion leaks, again, we still don't know who the leaker is.

It's funny because a member of the far-right industrial Twitter complex was like tweeting out the name of a clerk of one of the liberal justices as like proof that it was from the liberal side. You saw that, right? I did. I think it was one of Sotomayor's clerks, but I could be wrong. And so he was like, I have no proof of this, but here's her LinkedIn page. Swarm her with death threats. And he's like, I have no inside information. I was like, oh, well, there you go.

But it's interesting because then there's, you know, a whole school of thought which says, like, actually, this was a conservative who leaked this. In my mind, it makes more sense for a liberal to leak it because it's such a big deal. But, I mean, there are some theories that a conservative might have leaked it. Well, that was my, the night that it happened, I sort of tweeted about this. And I don't know. But everyone that night was assuming it was someone from, you know, on the liberal side. And I was like, you know what? I don't know what the liberal side gains from this, whereas the conservative side, what it does is it shores up.

It makes sure if there's any wavering votes. Like, they're not going to be seen as caving to public pressure. So they're going to stay in the five-four majority. So that, to me, is the theory. That's why it could be someone on the conservative side. I also realized I don't really give a fuck. yes, let's, you know, find out who did it. I understand that it's important to the court to find out who did it.

They're very mad. I mean, that's the best part of this whole thing. The only good thing that has come out of this court's decision to overturn Roe is that it's made them completely crazy. Yeah. And it's sort of, you know, I mean, look, John Roberts has not exactly been the strong, I think, is the word. Like, I don't think the Roberts court, he's not going to go down in history as like someone who had a strong hand on the court, I don't think. No, for sure.

And I think this just sort of gets to that. Like, I have a feeling, you know, if there had been a different chief justice, this might not have happened. But again, ultimately, like, yeah, I get that it's important to the court to find out who the leaker was. I just don't get why that's particularly important to me or to the American people. Like, you know, it's far, what the decision is or what this, you know, uh, draft. opinion is is far more important to me than who leaked it. And this goes back to like, you know, Snowden and stuff like that, where it's always, the people who don't like it are always focused on the leaker. Right, all right. I never think that the important part for the American people is who the leaker was.

And I get why it's important for the institution, but not for, not for me. And that's, you know, and that's, again, with the protests. Like, I don't care if protesters want a protest in front of a Supreme Court Justice's House, they're not harming anyone. They're doing absolutely, even if you don't like them, they're not doing any harm to anyone. So stop focusing on that. And again, I'm talking about people on the center left, like forget the right. Of course they're going to focus on that. But the people on the center left who are like, and here's what really gets me is they keep saying, well, if you're okay with them doing this, just think how you'll feel when the right starts doing this. Excuse me? The right has been doing it forever. And worse.

The right has been violent. Again, as you said, the right has been chanting, the Jews will not replace me. Like, that, that ship is, is pulling up in Madagascar right now. And the idea of saying, but this is the Democrats, this is what they do. Well, if we do this, then the right will, but the right's been doing this. You know, this was the always argument. Well, if we get rid of the filibuster, then the right will, well, guess what? The right gets rid of the filibuster when it suits them.

And the right does whatever it wants when it suits them. And they don't do it because the left did it first. They do it first. Right. No, no. That's certainly true. It drives me nuts because it's the same thing every time from like the people on the center and the, you know, the concerned liberals and whatever, however you want to. I feel like you're just trolling the bulwark here.

We can tag Charlie. But I like those guys. I like the guys. I like those guys too. But they're wrong about the protest stuff. They are. They are. They are.

Yeah. But they're also not Democrats. Right. I mean, so, you know, I'm talking here about Democrats. I'm talking about the Jen Sockis and the people in Congress and the pundits and whatever who consider themselves Democrats and are out there saying these things. And it's just like, you don't even, you don't even have to say read a history book. You just look at a newspaper from the last couple years. You know, just they've already done everything you're afraid they're going to do.

Yeah. No, I'm for sure. true, for sure, for sure. So Elizabeth Warren, I love her, and it annoys me when people criticize her, but I really like her, and I think she's really tough. And one of the things she has is the judicial ethics and anti-corruption act, which has a lot of different provisions. But my favorite, because it's my obsession in life, is she wants to ban these judges from

stock trading and, you know, making money on the public market, which, again, Again, also the House voted on. And of course, the Senate will never vote on because, God forbid, Republicans and also Democrats have been quite shitty about this, too. Don't make money on the fucking stock market. Yeah, because, I mean, that's why you serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. I mean, come on. Doesn't this make you crazy, Andy? It makes me crazy.

It does. And you're right. Like, if you sent a stool sample on this issue to a lab, it would come back by, partisan because both sides suck on this. And, you know, from Nancy Pelosi on down, it's just... It's unbelievable. And it's like such an easy win. Like, most people don't want their representatives making money off of their jobs, which are to serve the public. Right. And basically, trading off their insider status, knowing what bills are coming up. I mean, it's common, it's, it really is. It doesn't get any more common sense than that. And so Elizabeth,

Elizabeth Warren and Primalogiajapal have introduced this bill, and part of it would ban federal judges from doing the same thing, from trading individual stocks and stuff like that. I agree with you. That's great. And that, again, should be a no-brainer. So there's another part of this bill that I really like, too. And it says that when someone who's a litigant before the Supreme Court requests the recusal of one of the justices, the judges or the whatever would have to issue a written recusal decision. So they would have to put in. in writing why they agreed with it and someone should be recused or why they don't agree that a justice should be recused. And given what we've learned in the past several months about Justice Thomas' wife's involvement in a lot of the January 6th stuff, this is obviously a very important issue. And Justice Thomas has famously recused himself from precisely none of the January 6th. related cases that have come before the Supreme Court.

Why? It's a mystery. It's hard to understand. And it's hard to understand also why, like, if you see polling on the Supreme Court that, like, most of the country has no faith in the court. Way dropped off. Over the last 20 months, it's down 40%. But who's counting? Yeah.

Right. Exactly. Who's keeping track? But look, again, so that also, to me, seems like common sense. Like, if Clarence Thomas is not going to recuse himself from a case that, you know, But he knows, like he knew before we did how much his wife was involved in this stuff, whether he claims he didn't or not. Of course he did.

And if he's not going to recuse himself, then he would now have to put in writing why he's not going to recuse himself if the litigant says, hey, Justice Thomas, you've got to recuse yourself. Or we think you have to recuse yourself. So I think both of those provisions are excellent. And again, they're common sense. Like, they're absolutely common sense. Elizabeth Warren is like has a moral compass.

We are Democrats because we want our leaders to act in a moral way and make moral decisions. I mean, so the hallmark of Trumpism was just this sort of like narcissistic kind of lack of morality and lack of interest in doing the right thing. And like this is the right thing. Yeah. I completely agree. I mean, I like Elizabeth Warren. on two. You know, there's occasionally she does something where I think she's dead wrong, but that's okay. I overall, I like her. And I agree. I mean, we spent, you know, we spent four

years of Donald Trump, who was not at all about the public interest and all about self-interest. It would be nice if we could contrast that. Joe Biden is whatever, but I don't think anyone thinks Joe Biden is doing what he's doing to. Right. It's out to make money. Right, exactly. There is a definite contrast there. And the problem is that when you have things like this, like you said, like when both sides fell to act on a thing like, you know, members of Congress or their spouses are holding stock, you lose part of that contrast.

And it just looks like, why should I bother voting for any of these people all they care about is themselves? Yes, exactly. You're losing the moral high ground when you are doing the same fucking sleazy shit that the Republicans are doing. way. Dan Nathan is the host of Market Call on the tape podcast, OK Computer Podcast, as well as a contributor to CNBC's Fast Money. Welcome back to the new abnormal Dan Nathan. Molly Jong Fass. It's a sincere pleasure to be back with you. I'm so happy you're here. I'm honestly so happy you're here. Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I think I know why I'm here. I think that it's kind of, I've been trying to figure this out on pods of late.

can kind of get it right here is like are we defcon one or defcom five it just seems like you know we're going back is which is the bad def con but the good news is no one knows yeah no one knows but as it relates to like markets right now it's the one where we're close to global thermal nuclear war it feels like that right now yes i want you first to talk about inflation because we had some good good and i'm putting that in quotes because good is relative inflation numbers yesterday right and can you explain that to our listeners. Let's go back to the first time I was on the new abnormal. I think it was it was kind of mid to late January and you basically said I need someone to kind of lay out why inflation all the sudden is bad. You're like the Fed for years prior to the pandemic was hoping that inflation

would go higher than where it was right. And so we talked a little bit about it because we had all of these weird dynamics because of pandemic because of supply demand because of broken supply chains, because of de-globalization, because of tariffs, the list went on and on and on, right? So goods and services, the prices of, just started going up precipitously. And the Federal Reserve, which really kind of moderates interest rates, right, in their effort to kind of do two things, right? Their dual mandate is stable prices and full employment, all right? And so they almost got back to the full employment, but the problem is that prices became

very unstable because, and I think the war with Russia invading, you can. Ukraine really made all of that much worse, right? So all of a sudden now, we have the prices of commodities, right, are just going skyrocketing. That started with oil, but ended up moving to wheat. Ukraine is like a very large producer of wheat. Correct. So one of the big issues right now is Ukraine and Russia for that matter. And so all the sanctions on Russia are going to hurt their ability to kind of supply other parts of the world. So there's real fears right now that there's going to be massive of food shortages, you know, six, nine, 12 months from now. Some of the wealthy countries are hoarding.

There's probably some of these food stuff, that sort of stuff. So it's creating, you know, higher prices. And what happens is when you have higher prices for, you know, these sorts of goods or commodities, you know, you just start to see demand destruction. And so one of the big worries right now is that you would have on the back of this a slowing economy. And so a term that we haven't heard much economists used for a very long time is the idea of stagflation, right, where you have a slowing economy and then you have prices that remain

persistently high. And that's the sort of scenario where through the lens that I look at all this stuff, through the stock market or through risk markets in general, that's a real bad scenario for risk assets. So stagflation means, just explain it one more time for those of us who weren't paying attention. Sure. Think about it this way, right? So the Federal Reserve just made their first half a point rate hike, okay, in 22 years. All right? They did that last week at their Fed meeting. The last time they did that was May of 2000.

They did it in May of 2000 because they were worried about an asset bubble. Remember the dot-com thing? They were worried about that. Now what they're worried about is price, like inflation, okay, like going really high. But back in 2000, what they didn't know, they thought the economy was really strong, which is what they think right now. but they were hiking rates into a slowing economy, all right? So if the economy were to slow because interest rates go higher, which is really what they kind of want to do.

Basically the only arrow in this sort of container of arrows. Yeah. For lack of a better word, is interest rates because raising interest rates. Isn't that a quiver? That's right. Is raising interest rates because raising interest rates is the only way that the Fed can slow inflation. Right. but it will most certainly slow down economic growth, right?

So let's put those things together. So you basically have, you know, the stag is the slowing economy. The inflation is the higher prices. And therefore, you have a period where, you know, you have a lot of business uncertainty. You have a lot of consumer uncertainty. It's likely to be matched up with a recession. The word recession sounds scary to a lot of your listeners here because they think it means bare market.

And the stock market, they think it means job losses. They think it means lower wages. think it means, you know, like higher prices at the pump. And those are all bad things. And when that sort of gets into the psyche of consumers or the psyche of like the C-suite and corporations, they mean they start spending less. Then consumer spending goes down. Yeah.

Correct. I want to just like go back to last month's number, economic numbers, were actually negative. Right. So the GDP, gross domestic product for the Q1 was a negative print. It was explained away by a lot of economists, right, who were basically, you know, who are basically think that we're going to come out of this okay. But a recession would be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. All right. So if we had another one in Q2, which we are in right now, we're basically halfway through that, then we would be officially in a recession.

Nobody knows we're in a recession until after the fact, right, until the data is out and is parsed, that sort of thing. So, again, I think that the word recession, the R word, is a bit more psychoism. psychological than anything else, but there are potentially negative knock-on effects once we actually acknowledge the fact that we had a recession. I want to go back to Q1 for a second because I think this is important. A lot of Republicans have sort of said that the inflation, and again, this is not true, but until it's debunked, it's not debunked, have said that this inflation is caused by social spending. They've implied it. Some of them have said it. But if you look at the Q1 numbers, one of the reasons why it went negative was because the government was not spending. Can you explain that a little more?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, again, I mean, so the government had been spending a lot on fiscal stimulus for the two years during the pandemic. And all of that started rolling off, right? So you have really difficult comparisons, right, as it relates to their spending. And so I think another important point is that in Q1, a lot of that spending actually had been diverted to doing things like, you know, like supporting Ukraine, right? We're spending tens of billions of dollars doing there. So we've seen a little bit of stuff moving from here to there.

That's a bit of it. And I think that, you know, you mentioned the point Republicans, right? So for the balance of this year into the midterms, you know, almost everything that happens on a fiscal standpoint with the Dems having the House and the Senate and the White House is obviously. going to be to blame, you know, like the Democrats. I mean, it's just really simple. But I think it's really important to remember that during the 2016 campaign, Trump, you know, used to yell and scream about what the Fed was doing, artificially keeping interest rates low so the economy could keep going, which would benefit Democrats, right?

And as soon as he got into office, so he was saying the Fed used to raise interest rates. So as soon as he got into office, you know, in 2017, what did he do? he was browbeating the Fed to stop their intent to raise interest rates, right? Because it doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. The Fed is trying to normalize interest rates right now because they are worried about runaway inflation at a time where we're likely to see an economic slowdown after all of the monetary and fiscal stimulus that we've seen over the last two plus years during the pandemic. And really, they're walking a tightrope here.

The idea is how do they get to a soft landing? how do they basically tamped down commodity prices, right, tamped down inflation, keep demand strong enough where the economy doesn't collapse, right? And then they're in a position where if we do have a really difficult patch, I think it's really important to also understand this is not just domestic, large parts of China are shut down right now, okay? And China is a really important engine to like the global economic picture, right, from a demand standpoint. So, you know, this is like really orchestrating a soft landing for the global

economy, I think behooves all of us right now. We have a inflationary problem in America, but it's also in Europe, in Asia. I mean, this is not like the Republicans are calling it Biden inflation, but that's not actually true at all, right? Well, I think that it's, what I would say is one of the stickiest parts of inflation. You'll hear this a lot is wages, Right. Once they go up, it's really hard to go down. And if you think about that, you know, the Trump tariffs and the just this push towards de-globalization really caused wages to start going up here, which you can say politically is pretty good. But an American business, an American consumers made a deal with the devil some 50 years ago about offshoring. You know what I mean? Like all of these manufacturing jobs that we didn't want to do in return for cheap consumer goods, right? So we already made that trade. That happened decades and decades ago, right? So now all of a sudden, I think it's kind of interesting that it could sound like really

patriotic to bring a lot of these jobs back to the U.S., but a lot of Americans, A, don't want to do a lot of these jobs, right? And B, these jobs are going to be automated. Like, that's the thing. Prior to the pandemic, what did we hear about? We heard it about wage deflation, automation. We had lots of politicians considering things like universal basic income, right? You know what I mean?

So I think a lot of this was set in course during the Trump administration as it relates to the stickiest parts of inflation. We know commodities will come in. They will mean revert, right? Because there's only so long we can have the sort of disruption that we have in Europe. Sooner or later, a lot of these embargoes, you know, about, you know, Russian oil, that sort of thing. We'll figure other places to get that in natural gas for Europe. But the real risk right now, I think, is that Europe goes into a recession, okay?

And that won't be good for the globe. And then if China continues with their zero COVID policy, you know, that's a big issue, right, on both levels, imports and exports. And so it really does run the risk of just basically putting the global economy in a position that is not something that central bankers, to your point before, are equipped to deal with. Because when you have slowing economies, both here and abroad, most central banks ease monetary policy. They cut rates, but rates are so low right now. and prices are high, so you have negative real rates right now, and there's really not much they can do. So they could take the rate down again, but that would just bring inflation back. Yeah, and the Fed also has this situation where they have to worry about credibility,

because one of the biggest transmission mechanisms they have to their policy is their ability to convince, right, corporates or consumers or, you know, financial institutions that they mean what they say, right? And they do it about face, bringing this back to the stock market. when Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed, who was appointed by Donald Trump back in 2018, was on autopilot raising interest rates, a quarter point. I think every other meeting or so, the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield in Q4 of 2018 got above 3% for the first time in a very long time. The stock market, Molly, went down 20% in a straight line.

So what did the Fed do? They took their pedal off the metal. They said, we're going easy. And the stock market started to rip. They can't do that right now. They run the risk of losing all credibility as it relates to one of their mandates is to maintain stable pricing. So the next thing I want to talk to you about is crypto. What the hell is happening with crypto?

By the way, Mac Greenfield, my long-suffering spouse, just bought a bunch of crypto. I was like, I don't think you timed this quite right, but yes. If he just did, he's timing it okay. I mean, here's one of the things I would say about markets in general. And, you know, crypto is like, you know, one of the newest, like, trillion-dollar markets, right? Right. And it's only been around for, like, 10 years. And I will say this is that some of the smartest people that I know in finance and tech think this is the next big thing.

Okay. The way that a lot of the smartest people in tech thought the Internet in the early to mid-90s was the next big thing. The problem is, is that, you know, the major bull cases for it continue to get knocked out. And there's, crypto is a really wide. reaching sort of thing. There's Bitcoin, right? It was meant to make this kind of store of value and alternative sort of currency, but people don't use it as a currency. Then there was other layer one protocols like Ethereum, which are smart contracts, which a lot of the stuff that you hear about NFTs, decentralized finance, this is built on top of smart contract layer ones like that or

Solana. And those things have a lot of utility, right? But they've also been used as a currency, whereas Bitcoin, people just hold as a store of value. The problem is right now, if Bitcoin was supposed to be this amazing inflation hedge, okay? We are at 40-year highs for inflation expectations, and since the Fed pivoted saying that they're going to battle inflation, this was back in November of 2021, Bitcoin has gone down 50, I don't know, 56, 60% or something like that. So it hasn't proven to be a great inflation hedge. And the store value argument with a thing down 60% is down year over year also doesn't seem to be playing out here. So crypto's in a tough spot. And then there's all these things about stable coins, which you're probably reading about. One of them just

broke the buck. There's a lot of people think it's a big Ponzi. And so, you know, I think in bear markets like this, you're going to see some of these scams come out. I also think that you probably recall all of these celebrity influencers jumping on board the crypto train earlier this year. That probably didn't bode particularly well for this asset class. So. Okay. Last question. Elon Musk. Everyone tells me I'm stupid and I'm wrong. But like I look at. all this Elon Musk stuff, how does he get to $45 billion to buy Twitter? Well, he can't. I mean, one of the things that became very clear that despite being the richest man in the world and having, you know, a massive stake in Tesla, which he's the CEO

and chairman of, he still couldn't come up with the $44 billion that he said that he was going to pay for Twitter. And one of the reasons why is that he doesn't actually have that cash. It's in Twitter, which is in Tesla stock. So we started selling Tesla stock and Tesla stock started going down a lot. Tesla stock traded as high as $1,200. There's over a trillion dollar market cap in the fall. And right now, the stock is trading at $744. So it's about three quarters of a trillion dollars. So for him to raise the capital, he has to sell Tesla stock. So then he had private equity and some VCs come in that were basically reducing his equity component of it. But the problem here, very simply, is that the

stock is not worth $43 billion. Okay. So at the end of the day, when all of its public comps are going much lower every day in a NASDAQ that's careening lower, that's down about 27% of the year, it makes absolutely no sense to pay that unless he thinks that if he can take it private and have some really smart co-investors with him and retool this thing and it comes out as a $100 billion business. But here's the problem. Okay.

VCs. Can he float the capital until that happens? now? Well, he has to leverage his holdings and then he has like bank or private equity firms like Apollo have come in and pledged a bunch of equity alongside it. But the thing is without Elon, if he is no longer interested, if Tesla goes too much lower and Twitter's value sticks out like a sore thrum being way over exposed, all of those private equity in VC people who've lined up to co-invest with him will be gone if he's not there. Okay. If he can't commit to doing what he says he's going to do, part of the allure is riding his coat tails, right? People think he's a genius,

and he'll be able to fix all the big problems. My big issue with this, I think it's all a big Fugazi. I think that he's used it as a big ruse as an excuse to sell a lot of Tesla stock, which he has done. Okay, he started selling last fall. He put out a tweet saying, should I sell Tesla stock to pay taxes? Then he put out a tweet a couple months ago. Should I sell Tesla stock to buy Twitter stock, right? And so the stock has gone down. The stock was trading at 1150 a little more than a month ago. And like I said, right now it's about 745. That's hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap that's gone. If it goes much lower, he will not be able to buy Twitter. And I think he used it as a big excuse to sell Tesla stock. And I also think he's

massively convicted. His company Tesla cozy's up to most one of the most repressive regimes on the planet, if not the most repressive. They don't believe in free speech. But he's buying Twitter to fix it because he thinks free speech is broken here. Again, I think it's a bunch of BS. We don't know for three months, but you think this thing doesn't go through in the end. Well, first of all, he said three months. If anybody who's been following Tesla over the last 15 years knows Elon Musk is not particularly good at forecasting timelines here. So the longer it goes, the less likely it is to kind of close because the value, and not only that, you see this all the time in M&A, Molly, where when companies are locked up in these sorts of battles, there's nobody within Twitter.

who's particularly excited about, you know, Elon buying it. He said he's going to be the CEO. So think about how unmotivated all those employees are right now. Right. So the business is going to continue to get worse before it gets better. Advertisers, which they make most of their money on, are going to continue to look at other places before there's a clear. And Angelo told us that they couldn't sell any ads,

that they had a big ad problem because of the Elon buy, that that, like, really undermined the whole business. Well, he's been undermining their management, their whole plan. You know, there's some very smart people there. I mean, let's be very clear. I've been very critical of this company and the management. And I don't think they've done a good job. They under monetized.

They're not growing their user base. It's a very complicated user interface. I think you are easily, easily one of the most adept at using that platform. But there aren't many. You know, when you think about it. Like, you know, think about how many power users there. And it's not a really particularly attractive place for advertisers. Because think about what goes on there.

It's just literally hand-to-hand combat all day long, you know. Yeah. And I think there's too much controversy for advertisers. But there certainly would be a way to monetize it. I mean, Twitter Blue is a really good service. Like, you could build that out. I mean, there are people I know who would just pay to have tweets that delete, right? I mean, there are like little services that you could tack on that you could pay for that would probably make a lot of money.

No, this business in the right hands, I think, retooled. you know, it comes out of better business. I just think that, you know, Elon, I think this is a vanity thing, too. I think that pull up the biggest Twitter accounts. I think he wants to be the biggest. And he's what, about $85 million or something? And here's a guy, I think who just needs a hug. I just think that, like, honestly, I think, like, I think he looks at stuff like that.

I think he looks at all of his replies to. I do. Right. No, definitely. And he really takes him in. And so here's a guy who's trying to fix some of the biggest problems on this planet and trying to get us to another planet. And yet he's dicking around

with Twitter in the name of free speech. It just seems like a bunch of bullshit. And then the fact, and he's also Trumpy as fuck as far as I'm concerned. He's so scorned in some way. Like he's going to let that political terrorist back onto the platform where, you know,

I got to be honest with you, they waited until people died. Donald Trump routinely broke their terms of service on trust and safety for five years. And Jack Dorsey, finally on January 6th, when people died, when Trump used it as a way to kind of instigate a violent insurrection on our nation's capital because he didn't like the outcome of the election. Okay.

Then they kicked them off. Really? Then they kicked them off. So listen, Molly, you got me all hopped up here. You got me all hopped up. And Nathan, you are the best. Please come back. You're my hero.

All right. Thanks, Molly. I appreciate it. Matt Fuller is a senior politics editor at the Daily Beast. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Matt Fuller. Thank you, as always for having me. I wanted to talk to you because there's a lot going on. Yeah. But particularly now. What the fuck? I mean, I don't even know where to start. I feel like I want to talk to you about this vote yesterday in the Senate that Schumer had where he, set up a vote that was going to fail. Explain to our listeners what the thinking here is. Yeah. Well, this is, as you said, he's very hot on this. This is a very common Senate tactic.

Basically, it's a show vote. It's meant to show voters where people stand. And Democrats, when you have the votes, you want to vote on stuff. But when you don't have the votes and and, and, uh, but voters would like those things, you want to show where the opposite party is at. Um, so this women's health Protection Act went down 49 to 51 on party lines with Joe Manchin joining Republicans. Susan Collins and Lisa Rikowsky, who say they support abortion rights, voted with Republicans against this bill. They do have a narrower bill. They're writing.

They had some objections to this particular Women's Health Protection Act, but the bill that they would do would basically just codify the protections of Roe v. Wade. And this particular bill had some other items in it that they felt went a little bit too far. particularly there's this other bill, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which basically allows certain organizations, health care organizations, like say a Catholic hospital to not provide abortions. And this bill would make it so that any health care provider has to provide abortions. And also they had a lot of complaints about this bill. Yeah, they had a lot of complaints. But there's some other things that this bill did. It would have done away with some of the

mandatory waiting periods that are in some states, gotten rid of some of the bias counseling that some people have to go through in some states the two trip requirements, mandatory ultrasounds, those weird restrictions that have cropped up over years in red states. Yeah. The reality is this bill was never going to pass. You need 60 votes, not 50 or 51. They're well aware of that. And they're just showing voters that, hey, these Republicans that you love and think the world

of on the economy or whatever are also truly the ones who are saying, yeah, we should get rid of Roe v. Wade. Right. Let's talk about this idea for a minute because there was a good editorial. about this in the Washington Post this morning, that Paul Kane, I think, wrote about how that this used to be a kind of brilliant strategy that would work and that would get voters

to be able to see that the people who are supposed to be taking care of them really don't care. But now that in a sort of post-Trump world, partisanship is sort of more important than how a senator vote on a particular bell? I think that's true to an extent. Certainly everyone's hunkering down and their familiar partisan positions and going with the party. And I think there's probably less of a backlash now for some senator, you know, voting with their party on this particular issue. But I do want to

emphasize that I think the abortion landscape really has changed. This was not a top 10 issue before this draft opinion leaked. Right. And if this actually happens, and I think we have every seems like it well. Yeah, every reason to believe that it's going to happen. This is a fundamental change in America. And I think there's going to be a lot of pissed off voters, a lot of women who are rightfully outraged about this whole thing. And they're going to look to their senators and say, what are you doing about this? And at that point, you know, these races very well could come down to abortion. Certainly there's, you know, there's good reason to believe that like Glenn Yonkin in Virginia, right, he narrowly won the governorship. Yeah, that's a really good example. Yeah. And, you know, he is a strongly anti-abortion Republican. I don't think he would win in this sort of climate with, you know, what's happening right now with Roe v. Wade and this Dobbs decision.

Right. I mean, there's just a ton of Senate races, too, that you could look at and say, this really could move the needle. New Hampshire, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arizona, even Ohio. This really could shape the balance of Congress. next year and certainly could be an issue that Democrats run very strongly on. 100%. I think that's a really good, really, really good point.

But I thought was interesting, and I want to talk about this, is that this Roe decision leaks. It's like 10 days now since it leaked. And then Republicans go instead of like just sort of not touching it because it is actually, right, Roe is very popular, 70%, right? Don't, want it overturned. So like, you know, there are nuances for sure on this issue 100%, but like ultimately it's extremely, you know, this is like almost, there's almost nothing that's as popular as like just leaving this fucking thing alone. So instead of Republicans just being quiet on it, they immediately went and said crazy stuff. I can talk about that. Here's the thing. They're trying to reshape the debate because, as you said, most people very strongly believe that

row should stand. So there are other polls out there, right? And basically, each side is trying to paint the other one into this corner. There was a Pew poll that said, I think it was something like 19% of adults said abortion should always be legal. Right. Okay. So there's this very healthy majority that says, yes, some restrictions should apply. Right. At the same time, there's just 8% of people said it should always be illegal, right? So an even more overwhelming majority believes that there should be abortion. Abortion should exist in some cases. So each side is saying, you know, the tactic is, and we saw this with like Peter Ducey at the White House trying to paint Joe Biden or really Jen Sacky into this corner of do you believe that there should be no restrictions on abortion, right?

And somehow that's the Democratic position. And just the same, you know, I think that voters are smart enough to realize that we're not debating whether or not there should be some restrictions on abortion. We're basically saying, you know, yes, abortions are going to exist. even if this case decision comes down as we expect, there will still be states that have abortion. And of course, there will still be illegal abortions, okay, as we've always known. But I think there's a very healthy majority voters who understand that the changes that Republicans are trying to make, that the court will make, and a lot of these red states have already made and have been prevented from making because of Roe v. Wade. Those are coming into effect. And these are going to be real restrictions that will touch women's lives. will touch everyone's life.

I mean, it's going to make abortion much harder to get. That is absolutely true. And yes, it's true that there will be states, you know, if you're in California, your day-to-day life probably won't change much, and your access to abortion probably won't change much. But there are a lot of states out there where, by the way, voters are going to the poll and deciding Senate seats and every house race is up for, you know, votes every two years.

They're real people who are going to be looking at this and going, huh, wow, you know, I suddenly can't get an abortion. Right. Or I can't get a DNC in the state of Texas. Right. Or, you know, who knows what, I don't even know what the Louisiana laws are at this point, but they certainly seem insane. And I think there's definitely a race among Republican states to implement even tougher or stringent draconian laws on abortion and doctors providing abortion. I think it's going to be very scary for a lot of people in red states. And I think women are going to feel this very immediately and know that, like, at the very least, it's going to be me traveling, you know, say a few hundred miles or in the case of Louisiana, 600 miles to get an abortion.

Right. A right that I had six months ago has disappeared seemingly overnight. These are very real questions. And it's not just some sort of theoretical debate for these people. And I do think that's going to move voters at some point. And frankly, we can watch Republicans try to paint Democrats into a corner, but I think voters are pretty smart about this and that it's a real change. It's not some theoretical bill that Congress is debating. This is very real to a lot of people. And those things usually do move voters.

What's on the agenda right now? So Roe is going to be overturned. There's only one draft that's leaked. I thought that was an interesting data point, too, that there's only one draft. Can you explain to our listeners what that means that there's only been one draft leaked? Yeah, I mean, typically you might have the Supreme Court justices go back and forth and change things and say, well, I want it to go, I don't want to go this far. Maybe we can scale this back, whatever. And you sort of find a consensus there. Right now, we've seen that the only draft that's circulated is this one draft. It has five votes, meaning that's how the decision will come down unless one of those five justices changes their mind. It seems like Roberts wants to write his own opinion, which would uphold the Mississippi law but not dismantle Roe. There's all sorts of theories about who leaked this and why. But essentially, the news that there's only been one draft means that this seems like it's going to be the actual decision.

Now they may change a few words here or there, but certainly they've found a consensus on the court that this is what they want to do. And this is a very extreme opinion. This, you know, I think a lot of people expected them to maybe uphold the Mississippi law but not dismantle Roe v. Wade. And this is the, you know, this is the full Monty here. They've really, really gone aggressively after this. And I think they've set up cases in the future to go even further after the like so-called

rights to privacy that have been established elsewhere. Right. Well, that's the question is then privacy becomes what comes, you know, if we if we don't have the right to privacy, do we have the right to same-sex marriage? Do we have the right to this? Do we have the right to that, right? Right. Right to IUDs.

Right. Exactly. All questions are swirling out there and are going to become very real for voters very soon. Okay. Let's talk about these Senate races. There are a lot of vulnerable seats for Democrats, right? And let's talk about that. I mean, it seems like Cortez is the scariest in Nevada.

That's Nevada. Right. You know, and New Hampshire is another one that definitely a pickup opportunity for Republicans. So nobody knows who's running in New Hampshire. I was talking to my cousin who lives in New Hampshire and I go, like, is there a Republican challenger? And they were like, we don't think so. So I feel like that's not a great son for Republicans. Yeah.

I grew up in Maggie Hassan's town, went to school with her son. So I'm also for me, I'm sure. Yeah. Certainly she got an advantage when the governor, Sununu there, did not run. Right, for sure. Because that would have been the end of it, I think. Yeah, it probably would have been. But Nevada, probably Adam Laxalt versus Cortez-Maso.

She's very strongly in favor of abortion protections. Adam Laxal is very strongly against them. He's very conservative, right, out of Laxal. extremely conservative, a fringe conservative, someone who, you know, was really on the outside of his party. And, you know, these people have run very successfully in primaries because they're so conservative. And by the way, we're seeing this play out in Pennsylvania in a big way, too. Yeah, I want to talk about that next. These candidates are running and they're running right now in primaries.

So you always run to the right and you spout off about, you know, how we need to eliminate abortion. And then come general election time. You hope everyone forget. Yeah. It's not exactly a winning strategy to take positions that are very strongly supported by a majority of voters. And again, this is going to be very real news, very real changes to people. As much as Republicans want to talk about inflation or the economy or whatever, which those are real issues, but also by and large, I think people individually are doing pretty well for themselves. It's going to be less real of an issue, I think, than abortion.

is for many other voters. And there's a lot of voters too who, the 2018 backlash we saw against Trump, a lot of suburban, affluent, educated women, the so-called country club Republicans. We want those protections. And where they might have gone for a Republican again, that there's some distance from Trump and it's Democrats who control everything are suddenly like, wait, no, Adam Waxall, like I'm going to vote for this guy. You know, I think it's a real challenge for many of these people. Blake Masters in Arizona, another good example. Certainly the Pennsylvania race is a good example. Let's talk about that Pennsylvania race

because in Ohio, Trump went in and he endorsed J.D. Vance and J.D. Vance won against Josh Mandel, even though Josh Mandel completely degraded himself and ruined himself in every way and almost had a fist fight during the thing. But now

in Pennsylvania, we have Trump endorsed odds, we have and but it's like not enough. And so explain this situation. Yeah. So you have Trump endorsed Dr. Oz, who I think is still probably the favorite. You have the traditional Republican, the quarter zip Republican, David McCormick, a just a very rich guy.

And then you have this outsider who has just kind of come out of nowhere, Kathy Barnett. This is a black woman who's running. She ran unsuccessfully for her house seat a few years back, really out of nowhere. She's being outspent like a million to one. I think it's actually something like 358 to one. And she has come out as truly the most conservative option. And then again, in primaries, you know, you have David McCormick who's running with those very traditional Republicans, the very, the Republican light sort of mantra.

You have Dr. Oz, who himself, you know, he was pro-choice up until a few years ago. He was at least speaking about concerns he had about, you know, women getting illegal abortions and whatnot. and now he's, you know, he's this gun-toting Republican and whatnot, but certainly he is not, he's being outflanked on his right by Kathy Barnett, who says she's the product of her mother was raped when she was 11. Her mother had her and she basically doesn't support abortion in cases of rape. And she's hammering Oz and McCormick on this particular issue and she's finding traction. I mean, Republican voters there, the people who show up on primary day are very pro-life, are very conservative. and she's someone who, you know, has spoken positively about January 6th, and she's out there.

Democrats' favorite person to win. They would love Kathy Barnett to be the nominee. I read an interview yesterday or the day before that Selena Zetow, not known for her anything good. And I've seen other in the Washington examiners also going after this candidate that they can't get her military service records. And they also, she won't answer any questions about where she grew up or. or, you know, other sort of things that might be pertinent to her becoming a United States senator. Yeah, I mean, I think she's avoided a lot of the scrutiny that frontrunners usually get. I believe she grew up on an Alabama pig farm.

That's part of her allure. But, yeah, I mean, she is out there. And she's kind of peeking right at the right time because she's getting to get the surge and all this momentum towards Election Day without that scrutiny that would come if you were, you know, the frontrunner for months. So it's going to be very interesting. I still probably expect Dr. Oz to win. We have noticed that the Trump endorsement, certainly it was the case in Ohio with J.D. Vance. The Trump endorsement does matter. It happened a couple nights ago in West Virginia.

Except in Oklahoma. Yeah, right, right. I mean, there are instances where there are exceptions to this rule. In Oklahoma, that candidate had inless sexual harassment allegations against him. Yeah. Again, there are always exceptions to this rule, but we have definitely seen that Republicans by and large are sticking with Trump. They're voting for his candidates.

It'll be interesting to see what happens here because McCormick and Dr. Oz are both sort of targeting the same voters and Barnett probably eats into more of Oz's people. So it really is a three-way race here. Either way, you're going to have a Republican candidate who supports a lot of restrictions on abortion who probably is saying,

yes, I support the Supreme Court's decision. And that's not going to be a particularly popular position in Pennsylvania. I mean, you saw this yesterday, Bob Casey, right? His father is the Casey and Planned Parenthood versus Casey. He voted for this abortion, the Women's Health Protection Act. So there's a bit of a sea change here. And I think anyone who is on the opposite side of saying we need to dismantle Roe,

I think that's a tough position for any politician at this point. Love to hear it, man. I mean, thank you, Matt Fuller. Not what I read on my newsletters, but I'll take it, man. Well, you know, these things change fast. I think the whole idea that things don't matter is nihilism that doesn't serve anyone, but probably Donald Trump and maybe Vladimir Putin. Yeah, I think there's some definite truth to that. Thanks, Matt Fuller.

Andy Levy. Who is your fuck that guy today? My fuck that guy is someone we almost never talk about on this podcast. Tell me more. He's the governor of the great state of Florida. name is Ronald the Santis, I think is how it translates. Is that how I pronounce it? That's how I pronounce it.

It's Ron DeSantis, very much known for saying he doesn't want school kids to be indoctrinated by their education. He is very, very upset about critical race theory being taught to nursery schoolers, which apparently is a thing. That never happens anywhere. And also about pre-K kids being turned trans by their teachers. which is apparently also a thing that happens. Never anywhere. It's a little interesting that he has now signed into law a bill that designates November 7th in Florida as victims of communism day. Which makes a lot of sense for Florida because you have all of these people from Cuba who you desperately want to pander to.

Absolutely. But the interesting thing about this bill is there are a handful of states that have similar legislation. but Florida is the only one that mandates school instruction about this on that day. So again, this is the guy, remember, he wants politics, he wants all of that stuff out of the classroom. He doesn't want, you know, your kids being indoctrinated. Except when it comes to communism, which is he does. All of a sudden, he kind of does want your kids indoctrinated. And look, I'm not saying that, you know, learning that Joseph Stalin was bad is a bad thing.

And I kind of get the sense that you learn that from your history classes anyway. I don't know that you need a special day for it. Like, I can't imagine walking out of a history class and thinking, that Joseph Stalin, he was misunderstood. I don't think that's happening. It's just very interesting that suddenly he is all about indoctrinating kids when that's been his big thing the whole time. So fuck that guy. Well, he's also just pandering, right? Of course.

He is running for re-election in a state that has. as a large number of Cuban people who are displaced by Castro and ergo hate communism. By the way, I still think like it's political malpractice that Democrats don't say they're also against communism because like what does that even mean? It means nothing, right? Like, are you against Castro's regime? Obviously, you're against Castro's regime. People are dying.

They don't have, you know, basic things. Like, obviously, this is one of these like dumb wins that. Santas will get that Democrats won't get because Democrats can't say they're against communism, which is like there is no, you know, where is there communism? There's no communism. Like, are you for like social programs? Yes. But are you for like communism? Not really. I mean, except that there are people who think social programs are communism. So basically all Republicans think that. But ultimately, like, I don't understand why Democrats don't just take the win in Florida. be like, we're against communism too.

I mean, they are. They're against Castro. He sucks. I mean, this is not rocket science. No, but this is one of those things where Democrats can never win. Like, it's like, you know, again, we've talked about this and everyone's talked about this. Like, you can't nominate Bernie because you'll get called socialists and then you nominate Joe Biden.

And all you hear is about Joe Biden and his socialist agenda. So it's like, it's one of those dumb things that like, it's just, it's going to happen anyway. Yeah. Before we run out of time, I just, I want to know who you're a fuck that guy as. We spent a lot of time talking about my fuck that guy. Coincidentally, my fuck that guy is also Ron DeSantis. Oh, well. For his blatant pandering, he's been able to sort of do all of the kind of Trumpy stuff.

In my mind, he's more dangerous than Trump because he's like Trump, but he's very disciplined. And he's very focused, but he uses these same culture wars things. And I'm not sure that he's more, like with a lot of these Republicans are not a lot. But with some of these Republicans, you really feel that they understand the status quo and want to maintain it. So even if they'll do crazy stuff, they're still not going to like stay on if they lose an election. Whereas with DeSantis, it's not clear to me that he's not, that he wouldn't do something like that. DeSantis made a new map for these congressional districts. You know there's redistricting going on. And a Florida judge, one of his judges, said that,

I find that the enacted map is unconstitutional under the Fair Districting Amendment because it diminishes African Americans' ability to elect representatives of their choosing. And DeSantis called the map race neutral, even though it makes it harder for North Florida voters to elect a black member of Congress in the 5th District. Of course it does. And for that, Ron DeSantis gets a hearty, fuck you. Amen. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

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