Elon Musk is not having a good day. Social media platform X has been crashing all day, I take it. And this is happening worldwide. Musk is blaming a “massive cyberattack.” No word yet on who might be behind this.

Musk also may have blown a big Starlink contract with Italy. The Financial Times is running a story headlined Elon Musk seeks Italian presidential meeting to salvage Starlink deal. Which I can’t read because it’s behind a paywall. But this Daily Kos post provides the story, I believe.

Over the weekend, following the lead of the Trump administration, he [Musk] threatened Ukraine with pulling its access to Starlink—the SpaceX internet service powered by a constellation of satellites, that has given Ukraine the ability to closely coordinate combat activities in the country’s front lines. 

“I literally challenged Putin to one on one physical combat over Ukraine and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” he tweeted. Nice Starlink you have there. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it. 

This infuriated Europeans like Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who tweeted, “Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.”

Classy as ever, Musk responded, “Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”

Except maybe there is. A French company called Eutelsat is seeing its stock value go through the roof because investors are betting Europe is going to replace Starlink with Eutelsat. I don’t believe Eutelsat has quite the same capabilities, but maybe it’s close enough.

Anyway, back to the Daily Kos post —

Italy was about to ink a deal to spend $1.6 billion for its own Starlink network. After threatening Ukraine with the loss of the service, that deal is now seemingly dead. A desperate Musk is now begging Italian President Sergio Mattarella for a meeting to salvage the deal. How do we know he’s desperate? Look what he tweeted: 

“It would be an honor to speak with President Mattarella.”

Quite the far cry from “be quiet, small man.” Musk may not care about a $50 million Polish contract, but oh, now he would be so “honored” to meet with the Italians given a $1.6 billion deal has been pulled. 

Now that Trump has stabbed Ukraine, and NATO, in the back, and withdrawn all U.S. support from Ukraine, Europe is looking for al alternative satellite communications provider to Musk’s Starlink system. Maybe Starlink will suffer a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” which is what Musk calls his rockets blowing up. I do think the Europeans need to replace Starlink if possible, as soon as possible, because Musk really might just turn off Ukraine’s access. I wouldn’t put it past him. Note that Ukraine’s Starlink contract is also being subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense, not just Poland. That could be terminated any minute now, too. See also US threatens to shut off Starlink if Ukraine won’t sign minerals deal, sources tell Reuters.

Yesterday the New York Times published an op ed headlined Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst. The author, Mihir A. Desai, is a professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. So he may be fairly bright. Here’s just a bit —

It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.

The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.

I take it the professor is not that impressed with Musk. Anyway, now that Musk is so much more visible, in our faces every day, his iconic status is slipping. And his business empire is cracking up. Starlink is one of his few companies that’s really making money right now, which may be why he’s frantic to not lose the contract with Italy. The professor goes through Musk’s businesses and shows the many ways they are not doing well. You’ll want to read this.

See also Paul Krugman, The Paranoid Style in MAGA Policy.

Until very recently most CEOs and large investors were bullish on Trump. But Trump’s dizzyingly erratic moves on tariffs may have finally delivered the message to the oligarch class that the Musk-Trump duo have no idea what they’re doing.

You can see this dawning revelation in stock prices. Let’s be clear: The stock market is not a good measure of how the economy is doing. It is, however, an indicator of the mood of people with a lot of money to invest. Now that reality has begun to set in, the market has given up all of the “Trump bump,” the stock gains that followed Trump’s election victory.

The stock market is not having a good day, either, btw. “After falling more than 1,000 points in afternoon trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended at 41,911.71, down 890 points, or 2.1%,” CBS reports.

Krugman tells us that MAGA is blaming all kinds of conspiracies — George Soros gets mentioned frequently — and Trump claims the stock market declines are the fault of Trump-hating globalists. “I think it is globalists that see how rich our country is going to be and they don’t like it,” Trump actually said. They aren’t gong to adjust their policies no matter how bad things get, in other words. They’ll just blame somebody else.

And if you didn’t read America Is Trapped in a Burning Tesla the first time I linked to it, here it is again.

What is wrong with people?

Oh, please, Mr. Unelected Guy who has no legal authority to do squat, let the Congress elected by the American people have a say in what you are cutting that we already appropriated. Bleep. Here’s a link to the article, if you want to read it.

Regarding Elon, I have read comments here and there accusing him of being on drugs. But this Atlantic article is the first thing I’ve read that explains it. His drug of choice is ketamine, for which he says he has a prescription. Ketamine tends to dissociate people from reality. This explains a lot.

Anyway — at WaPo there’s an article about the meeting between Republican senators and Elon,  in which Elon offered them a more direct way to contact him so they can express their concerns about whatever he’s done. He’s not allowing them to have any say beforehand. Josh Marshall has a critique of this piece, in which he says,

The gist of the whole story is that DOGE is making these guys nervous. They’re hearing from constituents who are upset. They don’t really know what’s happening. So they’re worried about more and worse surprises. The Senate and kinda the House is saying this is ultimately our choice. They’re kinda sorta trying to assert control. But not really.

See also Paul Krugman, who explains how Trump is setting up a cryptocurrency scam of world-shattering proportions.

There was a lot not to like about Trump’s speech yesterday, but some folks are pointing to this post-speech moment as the absolute nadir:

“Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it,” Trump says while shaking the hand of Supreme Court Justice John Roberts after the State of the Union.

[image or embed]

— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) March 5, 2025 at 12:18 AM

Yes, it’s Trump deeply thanking Chief Justice John Roberts. For what? Keeping him out of jail?

Trump may be less grateful today. The Supreme Court sided with a lower court, 5 to 4, that at least some frozen foreign aid had to be unfrozen.

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Wednesday reinstated a lower-court order for the Trump administration to release frozen foreign aid, but it was not clear how quickly money would start flowing.

By a 5-4 vote, the court rejected an emergency appeal from the Republican administration, while also telling U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to clarify his earlier order that required the quick release of nearly $2 billion in aid for work that had already been done.

Although the outcome is a short-term loss for President Donald Trump’s administration, the nonprofit groups and businesses that sued are still waiting for the money they say they are owed. One of the organizations last week was forced to lay off 110 employees as a result, according to court papers.

Justice Samuel Alito led four conservative justices in dissent, saying Ali lacks the authority to order the payments. Alito wrote that he is stunned the court is rewarding “an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”

So Alito (and Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh) think it’s outrageous the government must pay for contracted work that has been completed? I know stiffing the vendors has long been central to Trump’s business plan, but I didn’t know it was okay for the government, too. Especially since the 14th Amendment says the public debt of the United States must not be questioned. Anyway, Roberts and Barrett sided with the three liberals and said the debt cannot be dismissed. Whether it’s paid any time during this decade is another matter.

Just to show how clear-headed and decisive the executive branch has become — yesterday the General Services Administration released a list of 443 office properties that were being put up for sale. The announcement said these spaces were “vacant or underutilized.” Reuters:

The list includes the headquarters for several major government agencies, including the Veterans Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

GSA’s own headquarters were also on the list.
The list includes skyscrapers in Chicago, Atlanta and Cleveland, as well as several Internal Revenue Service hubs that process tax returns.

The list also includes the J. Edgar Hoover building that houses the FBI, although there have been plans to replace that building for a long time. But it hasn’t been replaced, yet.

That was the plan early yesterday, anyway. According to several reports, by yesterday evening all the D.C.-area properties had been removed from the list. And then this morning the entire list disappeared, to be replaced on the Web with a note that the list of properties would be “coming soon.”

Likewise the infamous tariffs may be off again, or not. I take it today the markets are bounding around like a yo-yo on word that Trump may be rethinking some of his tariffs. Or not. Most of these stories seem to be coming from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who appears to be trying to mitigate some of the damage. Lutnick says Trump will make an announcement today, but he hasn’t yet. Maybe he’ll exclude some products. Maybe he’ll pause the tariffs another month. Maybe. But, yeah, real decisive. Real clear-headed.

Summing it all up: Do read Paul Krugman’s latest, America is trapped in a burning Tesla. Apparently some of our tycoons of industry and the stock-market players haven’t fully realized that Trump and Musk have no idea what they’re doing. Something major is going to break, and probably sooner rather than later. And Krugman thinks Social Security is the most likely candidate.

Oh, and DOGE plans to leave a massive nuclear waste site unattended.

The world has only one working deep geologic repository for nuclear waste — and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is trying to close down the 90,000-square-foot building in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where workers are tasked with directly managing the radioactive site.

Two sources confirmed to NOTUS that the General Services Administration is trying to end the government’s lease for the Skeen-Whitlock Building in Carlsbad, where at least 200 people work to supervise highly radioactive waste from the U.S.’s nuclear defense activities.

Maybe Elon thinks he can just sell it “as is.” Charming property! Needs some TLC and cleanup!

Tonight is Trump’s annual speech to a joint session of Congress, usually called the “State of the Union” but not when the POTUS is new. I have no intention of watching, because I’d rather get root canal than listen to Trump give a speech.  I will follow commentary on the web instead. If you want to come here and make comments yourself you are welcome to do so.

Dems have been debating whether to attend, or not. House Dem leader Hakeem Jeffries has been telling members to attend, but bring guests who are being hurt by Trump’s policies. Oh, and he’s telling them to behave; no unruly outbursts. I think if I were in the House I’d stay away.

Trump picked today to kick off his tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and to increase tariffs on China. The stock market is tumbling.

Regarding the tariffs, do see Trump’s Most Inexplicable Decision Yet by Rogé Karma at The Atlantic. It begins:

If you were setting out to design a trade policy that would harm the American economy while undermining political support for its leadership, you might come up with something like the tariffs that Donald Trump just imposed on Canada, China, and Mexico.

I’m not seeing any opinion pieces on the tariffs that think they’re anything short of a disaster for the U.S. economy, and possibly the global economy. But they aren’t really “inexplicable.” Trump thinks they’re a brilliant idea because he’s a moron and he has no clue what he’s doing. There’s your explanation.

J.D. Vance touched off much outrage in Europe over remarks he made on Fox News. The BBC:

The US vice-president has sparked a row with his comments about a potential peacekeeping force in Ukraine.

UK opposition politicians accused JD Vance of disrespecting British forces after he said a US stake in Ukraine’s economy was a “better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

The UK and France have said they would be willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of a peace deal. …

… Vance’s comments came as the US paused military aid to Ukraine, following an explosive spat between President Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last week.

Zelensky left the White House before a proposed deal on sharing Ukrainian minerals with American companies could be signed.

Speaking about the proposal, Vance told Fox News: “The very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine.

“That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”

Sir Keir has said US security guarantees – such as air cover – will be needed to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine again, if there is a deal to end the war.

However, Trump has so far refused to pledge this, instead arguing that US workers in Ukraine as part of a minerals deal could provide such assurances. …

Conservative shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge pointed out both the UK and France deployed forces alongside the US in Afghanistan, adding: “It’s deeply disrespectful to ignore such service and sacrifice.”

The whole “minerals deal” thing is dishonorable, IMO. Not that Trump or Vance understand the concept of honor.

Some of today’s news — This is in Rolling Stone — FAA Officials Ordered Staff to Find Funding for Elon Musk’s Starlink:

Elon Musk’s satellite business Starlink may not have officially taken over Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract with the Federal Aviation Administration yet to upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. However, on Friday, FAA officials ordered staff to begin finding tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal, according to a source with knowledge of the FAA and two people briefed on the situation. 

The sources note that these internal directives have mostly, if not entirely, been delivered verbally — which they say is unusual for a matter like this. The source with knowledge of the FAA tells Rolling Stone that it appears as though “someone does not want a paper trail.”

And this is from The Hill: White House backs Israel blocking aid to Gaza. I guess if the Palestinians won’t voluntarily get out of the way of Trump’s luxury real estate development deal for Gaza, they’ll have to be starved out.

And here’s another, from Politico EU — Russia celebrates US foreign policy that now ‘coincides’ with Moscow’s worldview. Of course it coincides with Moscow’s worldview. When Trump’s lips move, that’s really Putin’s voice you’re hearing.

The latest I’m hearing on Ukraine is that European leaders are still meeting in London to come together on a plan to aid Ukraine and stop Russia. From the New York Times:

Gathering in London at the invitation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, the leaders vowed to bolster support for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine after his bitter clash with Mr. Trump last week. But several also expressed hope that the two could repair their breach, underscoring Europe’s reluctance to cast off a trans-Atlantic alliance that has kept the peace for 80 years.

“We are at a crossroads in history,” Mr. Starmer said after the meeting. “Europe must do the heavy lifting,” he declared, but added, “To support peace, and to succeed, this effort must have strong U.S. backing.”

I can tell them right now that Trump isn’t going to agree to anything that Putin doesn’t like.

Update: Here’s another one. Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia