You have heard about Trump’s Art of the Deal. The sequel could be Elon Musk’s Art of the Grift. A sample chapter might be devoted to the way Musk – through his Tesla EV grift – reportedly made billions, in part by selling devices produced by his Tesla EV grifting operation to other Tesla grifts, such as Space X and xAI, which is his artificial intelligence grift.
For example, Tesla reportedly “sold” 1,279 Cybertrucks to SpaceX during the fourth quarter of 2025 and a grand total of one out of every five Cybertrucks Tesla made during the 2025 model year. Musk’s xAI grift, meanwhile, also bought a bunch of Tesla Cybertrucks, too – to the tune of $430 million, which constitutes the lion’s share of the $573 million Musk raked in from SpaceX and xAI.
One hand washes the other, as they say. It’s especially nice when you own both hands.
The beauty of this grift is that we paid for it all. Via the taxes we pay that go to pay for SpaceX and xAI in the form of government “contracts,” which provide the wonderfully fungible revenue stream that is then used to purchase otherwise unsellable Cybertrucks from Tesla. 
This grift is institutionalized – legalized – thievery. It is (morally) far worse than the old-timey grifts that merely tricked people into handing over their money, which they did freely (if foolishly). A multi-level marketing grift, for instance, requires persuading the marks assembled at the Holiday Inn that they’re going to make a fortune if they get in early. If they “invest” in the scam. It is of course not openly called a scam. That would be telling. It is important to the success of the scam that the scammers and the scammed all pretend together that – somehow – this is all a legitimate sales operation, though of course all that’s being sold is a new crop of marks. The point is that no one is forced to go to the Holiday Inn to listen to the spiel, much less “invest” in this “opportunity.” There is a degree of moral sanitariness in this – in that when you choose to “invest” in “opportunities” of this type, you know (after you’ve lost all your money) that no one made you “invest.” You also probably know, deep down, that the whole thing was a scam. The dictum about it being difficult to cheat an honest man comes to mind.
Musk and his grifts are morally unsanitary to an extreme degree because they embroil (and fleece) honest people who want nothing to do with any of this – and who are aware it’s a grift – but who are nonetheless forced to “invest” via the taxes they’re compelled to pay and more than just that. To cite one specific example of the etiolating shit-tide, the cost of everyone’s car (and home) insurance has increased because of the actual and potential losses incurred or risked by EVs, including spontaneous combustion. It is true that just about every other vehicle manufacturer also makes EVs but it was Tesla that (effectively) forced them to make them. It was either that – or pay Tesla for “carbon credits” in lieu of making them. Tesla legally blackmailed the so-called “legacy” vehicle manufacturers, who were effectively compelled to bankroll Tesla (and line Musk’s pockets).
The costs imposed by Tesla’s so-called “self driving” technology are another example of this wealth transfer. Who do you suppose pays for the damage (and death) arising from “self driving” Teslas? Why, we do! Once again, in the form of spread-out costs (via mandatory insurance) we all have to pay.
Musk’s social media grift – Xcrement – is yet another scam. It is the only “free speech” platform that requires people to pay for “reach” and even when they do, their “reach” is subject to arbitrary throttling by an inscrutable algorithm. Xcrement now openly admits the platform is all about the money. About “monetizing” the marks who buy into the scam. They are encouraged to believe that if they pay for a “boost” they will get “reach” as well as “revenue.” That they will make a fortune via “influencing.”
What this has to do with free speech is something along the lines of what being compelled to buy health insurance has to do with enjoying good health.
Finally, there is DOGE – the ballyhoo’d Department of Government Efficiency? Does anyone remember this scam? In particular, the promise made to the marks that all the “efficiency” gains achieved by DOGE would result in rebates for the American taxpayers who were forced to pay for all the “inefficiencies”?
Where’s are those $5,000 rebate checks? Well, they’re in the same room where you’ll find Trump’s 2024 campaign promises that energy prices would be cut in half if he got re-elected.
. . .
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[…] https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2026/05/06/the-art-of-the-grift/ […]
Elon is a grifter, but I have such mixed feelings about him. I have worked in both aerospace and automotive sectors, and the dude has advanced those fields tremendously. SpaceX is pure genius from a vertical integration and efficiency perspective, Tesla basically created the modern EV (yeah, I know), Neuralink is doing things nobody thought possible a few years ago, and Space X’s Starlink is something straight out of sci fi. Respect. Shame on you, but also Respect, Elon.
It’s all, delicate crap.
Wasteful, often non-productive (counter-productive, even) non-durable crap.
‘Why We’re Helpless When Things Break Down’
“We think they’re robust because they work so well within their boundary conditions, but the narrowness of their boundary conditions makes them extremely sensitive to failures in critical components. This fragility is invisible until the system breaks down.”…
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay26/boundary-conditions5-26.html
Tesla has not advanced the automotive sector tremendously. On the contrary, Tesla has been around for nearly a quarter of a century, and yet it still hasn’t managed to develop technology that can compete with the performance of a tank and a pump (!).
Tesla’s MO is to ignore the basics and go all-in on gimmicks, hence why their EVs have lots of bells and whistles (and repeated empty promises of future full self-driving), while something as basic as recharging in the same time it takes to refuel is still not something they seem able – or willing – to fix.
But Musk has advanced his own automotive sector grift tremendously, and it is impressive that he has managed to do so using a type of technology that was deemed obsolete a century ago, and still make it look like progress to some people…
Hi OL,
I don’t see it. What has SpaceX done, exactly? I know about sending stuff into low earth orbit and resusable rockets. I understand there have been some improvements; but have they been epochal or just incremental? I’ll be impressed when he actually does send a man to Mars.
I’m from the aerospace world, too, mostly on the NASA deep space exploration/science side but have worked on a few orbital programs.
When they first started SpaceX was kind of a clown show with their move fast, break stuff mentality but I have to be honest, they got their act together. They’ve driven the cost of launches down and significantly ramped up efficiency. In a year they’ll put more into space than NASA in a decade and annually they launch around 75% of everything that goes up globally. No one is even close individually.
You do have to find going to space worthwhile as a basis, though. If you don’t see value in space then there’s nothing they’re doing then. To give you a rough comparison it cost about $55,000 per kilogram to lift your payload on the Space Shuttle (that in 20 year ago money, now it would be 2x that in 2026 money) while now to get it to LEO on a Falcon is about $2,500 per kg.
The Chinese cost about $5,000 and the Europeans about $10,000 now. For domestic military and even some NASA payloads their competition is the ULA, which is also around $10,000/kg and they’re losing money at that price (heavily subsidized with government money) while SpaceX is making a profit at their price.
Yeah, and what about the utter fiasco that is ‘Starship’?
Billions down the drain, according to the original schedule (and promises) they should have landed on the moon 2 years ago, and yet they can’t even get any cargo to orbit.
Refueling in space?
Reusing the upper stage of the rocket?
Flying to Mars?
Yeah…no.
It’s also very interesting to look up just how Musk and SpaceX got the initial foot in the door – despite having zero experience or track record in the space industry.
How did the then NASA director end up working for him shortly after?
Starlink is good, but I for one am quite convinced there’s quite a lot of involvement behind the scenes by both the military and the spooks. Which means that just like his other enterprises, it never needs to actually be profitable.
Neuralink?
What exactly have they achieved, apart from Musk’s – yet more BS – comments about how paraplegics will shortly be walking again? Which is about as likely as the Tesla Roadster being ready in 2017, or the Optimus robot in every household any time soon.
The enormous amount of BS, outright lies and market manipulation Musk has been able to get away with over the years, makes me convinced there’s a lot more behind that ‘scammer with a Dunning-Kruger affliction’ than at first meets the eye. And no, it’s not his brains.
Now that said, they are crazy far behind on their Moon lander program (Starship HLS) to the point that NASA was going to reopen the contract. It seems that SpaceX (and Blue Origin for that matter) don’t really care about non-commercial aspects of space.
The argument is economic whether we should even do opened ended exploration like going to the Moon. You’ll get no argument from me philosophically on the libertarian aspects of space, although I think humanity exploring isn’t worthless I’d like to see a free market rather than the NASA/DoD corporate welfare model that it is now.
However throwing welfare money at NASA at least boomerangs back with useful advancement in math, science and technology. It is too tightly tangled with military spending, which is why I’m in the position I am now. We’re a sub who only does education and commercial payloads so we’re mostly helping universities build microsats. Which is of course mostly grant money, so it’s back to the circular firing squad argument. At least I can pretty safely say I’m not working on the spying or killing side of space programs.
The transactions between what are essentially related entities is well tried and tested by Elon.
Remember his ‘acquisition’ of SolarCity by Tesla, the main purpose of which was to bail out his brother Kimball?
That was supposed to lead to all sorts of ‘synergies’ – like running the entire Tesla plant via solar panels.
Yeah, that was utter BS too. Just like everything of Elon’s.
But in today’s ‘modern capitalism’, everyone is doing it. The entire ‘AI’ ecosystem is a multi-billion dollar circle jerk.
It only shows how useful the ‘regulators’ really are.
Add to that the ‘professional financial analysts’, who keep suggesting Tesla is a ‘Buy’ because [insert Elon’s next fairy-tale here] and you may be forgiven for suspecting the entire system is hopelessly and utterly corrupt.
OT: Good news!
Ted Turner takes the dive into the eternal lake of fire.
https://www.dailymail.com/media/article-15795449/ted-turner-dead-cnn-jane-fonda.html
Billionaire Ted should burn in Hell for giving us Captain Planet.
Hi Chris,
Was Ted Turner one of those billionaires pushing climate change hysteria, which too many people who claim to hate billionaires nonetheless bought hook, line, and sinker?
Yes he was. Captain Planet was a propaganda cartoon aimed at kids during the 90s pushing what’s now called “climate change”. Plus Captain Planet was a lame super hero. You can throw a banana peel at him, and he’s as weak as a kitten.
I’ve never watched Captain Planet when I was growing up. From what I could tell, the whole cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change thing has become little more than a secular religion like vaccines has. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same billionaires (many of whom are with Big Pharma) were pushing the narrative that vaccines equals health, and the more vaccines people receive, the healthier they’ll be. However, the opposite ended up being the case over the past few decades.
Climate change is real, but NOT in the way that billionaires & fake environmentalists would have us believe. It has existed LONG before automobiles existed, but don’t you find it interesting how billionaires pushing cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change hysteria often tell us that WE must drastically reduce our lifestyle to “Stop cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change”, while THEY continue flying in private jets to elite meetings or sailing around in yachts.
I agree. But let’s ignore how hypocritical the billionaire elites and the politicians they own are. Let’s ignore the chemtrails they spray in the air every day. Ignore the fact that they are clearing whole forests for solar panel and wind mill farms and carbon capture plants. Ignore the chemical industry creating lab grown products that they call food, and the mass poisoning of our food supply. Ignore the fact that the tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, media companies, and banks are all connected to each other. And climate change is nothing but earth worship.
The billionaire elitists even cleared a whole section of the Amazon rainforest last year to build a highway so they could drive (EVs I’m sure/ sarcasm) to the COP30 summit on what else? Cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change. If ordinary people tried to do something like that, they’d have likely been thrown in jail for “Committing an environmental crime”.
I have always hated Musk and Tesla for these very reasons. Ditto for Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s first profitable year was 2018 after starting in 1998, because of a government contract), Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt and royals. But if you earned it from scratch, I celebrate your success and appreciate you for pushing me with your achievement. The government (or rather its owners) has also obviously taken over the major motion picture industry. Studios are not ‘going broke for going woke’, although obviously very few are watching them. It seems the studios no longer need ticket sales to be profitable. Record labels enjoy sales-free profitability too now.
When you see an all-cash business, and customer traffic isn’t reflected in their stated revenue, I always wonder if I’m looking at a money laundering operation (and usually it is).
If you look at the history of both Hollywood and the music industry, you’ll soon realize you’re looking at Jewish organized crime and massive money laundering – and this probably hasn’t changed much in a century. They just stopped putting any real effort into hiding it, because the same people own law enforcement, too, now.
WHat the Hell does this mean? “When you see an all-cash business, and customer traffic isn’t reflected in their stated revenue,”
Are you promoting the control grid? It seems so.
“What the Hell does this mean? . . . . Are you promoting the control grid? It seems so.”
Maybe you, should not draw conclusions from something you admit you did not understand?
So, imagine you see a mid-range restaurant, single location – an all-cash business, or nearly so. Maybe they see a hundred customers a day, on average. Their average sales should be somewhere between $2500 – $4500 per day. However, maybe their books indicate they have 1000 customers a day (more than their capacity to serve), and average daily sales between $25,000 and $45,000 per day. This raises red flags, and it suggests money laundering.
Hollywood and the music industry have done similar things, but on a far larger scale.
An acquaintance stepped into an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn to make reservations for a corporate luncheon. The maître d’ opened up a leather-bound appointment book and pointed to a completely blank page.
“We’re all booked up — SEE?”
$139 fill up. Fuck Trump. Fuck israel. Fuck Christian zionists
So then, where do we go from here?
‘The Battle of Ideas Paves the Way for Radicals and Revolutionaries’
“… This is when …”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/05/ryan-mcmaken/the-battle-of-ideas-paves-the-way-for-radicals-and-revolutionaries/
A county in Utah just voted to approve an AI data center that would take up 40,000 acres despite mass opposition from residents. Such data centers could be coming to a city near you…will AI & these data centers being built all over the country be the next grift for the Elon Musks of the world?
https://www.technocracy.news/utah-just-said-yes-to-a-data-center-the-size-of-a-small-city-and-residents-are-furious/
What could possibly require 40k acres?
John, it looks like they want to put in microsized data centers in peoples backyards also. Either way you’ll be taking cold showers, eating cold processed “food” and riding a bicycle to work as AI needs all the electricity out there.
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/tech-bros-aim-sidestep-local-resistance-installing-mini-data-centers-homes
One of the farms Bill Gates bought and wants to use to make the lab grown and 3D printed frankenfood he wants the masses to eat?
Internment camps (FEMA or otherwise).
Or perhaps internment camps for those pesky humans who REFUSE to be “assimilated” into the Borg like transhumanist future envisioned by the technocrats?
Today, aside from the servers, that might mean some kind of power generation (maybe solar + battery + gas standby), and cooling ponds or towers if they water cool the data center which is much more efficient than AC. American DC capacity today is limited primarily by power.
RE: “and cooling ponds or towers”
… 40k acres?
… 40k acres?
Your efficiency comment, is disturbing.
Have to agree that Eloon takes the gold medal for grifting. The whole “carbon credits” scam is a masterpiece, getting his competitors to subsidize his company. The only thing DOGE did was vacuum up every person’s private information from every government database there is, who knows what nefarious purposes that will be used for going forward.
The Orange Douche remains the King of the Grift. It was not such an issue more than a decade ago when he was just fleecing the marks with Trump Steaks and Trump University as they had some culpability in buying into his BS but now he is grifting the ENTIRE COUNTRY in a way no flim-flam man could ever have imagined before.
Elon may second but I would put the tech bros: Karp, Ellison, Zuckerberg and company in the same conversation. We unfortunately live in a country where EVERYTHING is a scam and which actually may be worse than in the dying days of the USSR.
I hope you are wrong, “We unfortunately live in a country where EVERYTHING is a scam and which actually may be worse than in the dying days of the USSR.”
I hope I am wrong too but the people during the dying days of the USSR:
1. Were not at each others throats over differences of opinion
2. The vast majority were aware that their government was lying to them and had learned how to “read between the lines” to get an idea of what was really going on.
3. In spite of the propaganda their education system was not complete shit and students actually learned useful things
4. Practice forms of barter to make up for things that the government was failing to provide, and
5. Their leaders were corrupt but were capable of acting like rational adults and would at least engage with other countries without throwing childish tantrums.
I don’t see ANY of the above in the USSA which is why is suspect we are at a point that is actually WORSE.
Thank DOGE for centralizing all government information on you.
It’s simplified the process of tracking you and harassing you for what you say or buy.
And you can bet DOGE flat out ignored federal law and recorded all your firearms purchases on that central database as well.
That information is useless if it’s not reliably correct/accurate.
If you can’t stop them from collecting it, take advantage of the fact they collect it. Make it not make sense.
Didn’t ‘they’ neuter DOGE?
Why would you even be mentioning a neuter dog?
It’s one, and done.
Print Baby, Print!
Hi Flip,
Elon Musk is a billionaire technocrat who also supported (and possibly still does) another scam known as CARBON TAXES. People who’ve bought into the whole cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change nonsense probably supported them as well, thinking that carbon taxes will “Stop cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change”. However, IIRC, there were studies done showing that such taxes would have virtually NO impact on “The climate”. And from what I’ve learned about the whole cliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimate change nonsense from elsewhere, elite groups like The Club of Rome, along with super wealthy elitists like John Kerry & Al Gore who’ve been pushing the scam and the narratives for decades, have made TONS of money off of it.
Absolutely Musk is a grifter. That is obvious.
Have to admit that SpaceX provides at least one product in Starlink that the market seems to want. I have it at my place and it’s infinitely better than Hughes.
That said, Tesla is a scam. Much of AI is a scam. Musk as a person has a history of scams going back to PayPal.
On the fire point, data indicates EV cars are less likely to catch fire than ICE. Statistically worst is hybrid.
Believe it. Or not. Who knows what’s real, what’s fake, what’s truth or lies.
One fact that is nearly indisputable is that the news lies most of the time. But it does not lies all of the time. Sometimes it tells the truth.
If you base your assumption that EVs do catch fire at higher rates on what newspapers report then it’s probably wrong.
If you base your assumption that EVs do not catch fire at higher rates on what newspapers report then it’s also probably wrong.
It’s a Catch-22.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-coordination/climate-matters/EV-less-fire-risk
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/report-evs-less-likely-to-catch-fire-than-gas-powered-cars/
https://community.vinfastauto.us/driving/the-fire-rate-of-electric-vehicles-is-61-times-lower-than-that-of-gasoline-vehicles/
https://alliedworldinsurance.com/risk-management/electric-vehicle-fires-a-cause-for-concern/
https://www.blazestack.com/blog/how-many-ev-fires-in-2023-2024
https://web.archive.org/web/20230324191615/https://www.carsmetric.com/electric-car-fire-statistics/
In that article, it says a diesel car was the source of the fire…how did that happen? You can throw a match at diesel and it wont light, that’s why the army uses it. So was there a battery fire/electrical short? Or arson? It doesn’t explain. This article is by Allied World Insurance, owned by Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, run under Prem Watsa, a canadian billionare who is involved in the anti-car world economic forum. Data is only as good as the sample they tested and the people running the test. All I know is electric cars can and do spontaneously combust, while gas/diesel vehicles need something wrong to happen, like a spark or backfire through a leaky carb, or other fire next to it.
I agree, Anchar –
I am unaware of any incident of spontaneous combustion involving a non-electric car. Even the Pinto only caught fire if it was rear-ended severely.
Diesel vehicles can have electrical fires, too.
You’d have to really dig into the data granularity to put things into classifications. There’s no reason to assume all ICE fires involve ignition of the fuel tank. Neither does ever EV fire mean the battery burned either. It’s high level statistical report.
So if an ICE electrical system melts down is that really an ICE fire? No, probably not.
What fairly neutral groups say is it’s actually difficult to get the battery pack of an EV to catch fire. Not impossible. Spontaneous fires might account for EV fires but if that’s the case the probability is apparently low. At the same time my neighbor’s garage burned down years ago (long before EVs) because of fuel leak that was ignited when the motion sensor light triggered. The fire investigators are a lot more sophisticated than you’d think.
Take the NFPA, who has an agenda, sure, but at a 10,000 foot view is mainly interested in research into actual statistics of what apparatus a fire department needs and techniques they’ll need to use to prevent too many firefighter injuries or deaths.
Their data shows EVs aren’t any more likely to burn than anything else. The hybrid is the worse of both worlds, mixing high voltage with flammability seems to be the recipe for highest risk. When you limit the variables the manufacturers all seem capable of making inherently dangerous things (gasoline, lithium, hydrogen) reasonably safe but with the complexity of a hybrid the risks must be harder to engineer than the ability to keep costs down.
All I’m saying by posting that is that there is data to suggest the news is sensationalizing EV fires and ignoring ICE fires. I don’t stand by it as gospel and would be interested in data that disputes this. Please post such research. Not news articles, actual data. I don’t see how it’s in the insurance companies interest to downplay EV risk, which would presumably hold down rates.
What does seem to be true with EVs is the hidden handles and all the unnecessary complexity is bad. But is it really any different if you’re trapped inside a burning ICE due to the electric locks and windows? I’d argue not really. The problem there isn’t the battery but the idiotic lack of emergency exit provision.
“What fairly neutral groups say is it’s actually difficult to get the battery pack of an EV to catch fire.”
That seems to be true, as does the fact more ICE than EV cars overall do catch on fire.
But there is an important qualifier:
The overall pool of EVs is much younger than that of ICE. Nobody can yet tell what all those batteries will do after a decade or so of use.
Lithium is inherently flammable and while some battery technologies that utilize it are safer than others, overall the risk cannot be entirely eliminated. This was stated even by Stanley Whittingham, one of the inventors of said batteries.
The other problem is that gas/diesel fires need a spark to get going, while battery thermal runaway can happen spontaneously, without any obvious impetus.
And last, Li-based batteries are damn hard to put out, because they don’t need oxygen from the air to burn and can repeatedly reignite. Plus, the fumes are VERY toxic.
A lasting comment, “Nobody can yet tell what all those batteries will do after a decade or so of use.”
What about 2 decades, or 3?
Tick… tick… tick, like an aging airbag?
Do EV’s have those, too?
Double whammy?
Engineered obsolesce is the same as robbing people.
Well, this was good to read, ” I don’t stand by it as gospel and would be interested in data that disputes this.”
Does that mean you’re not a robot? I.d.k., but it seems likely you’re not.
May the facts win out & the odds be ever in your favor.
Also, I hope you have a great day today.
Let’s not forget that (Red Sea pedestrian) Larry Ellison coughed up nearly $2 billion for Elmo to FINANCE his purchase of X/Twitter. And some (likely) entourage wielding Saudi scumbag(s.) MuskRat is likely just the point man for god knows what.
Have to believe that data mining is majority part of the motivation.
But what else?
RE: “just the point man for god knows what.”
Perhaps, one of many?
See also, 5:44 on this video:
‘A Tale of Two PR Disasters: Blake Lively & Turning Point USA. | Candace Ep 333’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtjzXkQrsU