AMERICA’S HIDDEN VALUE
AMERICA’S HIDDEN VALUE
Regretfully, I did not invest in Tesla when it was down to $220. I flatly did not have the money.
At the time, at Tesla’s recent low, my wife who works foundation management with deep pocketed financial types, said during a drive one day that the stock was still, at its low, overvalued. Perhaps she was right. She’s probably still right. A lot of the market is plainly speculation, rather than a healthy evaluation of actual and potential value.
Have you ever met a basic finance guy? They’re not generally brilliant people. One of my best friends from high school is a vice president at a firm on Wall Street. He’s functionally illiterate. Jamie Dimon certainly has brains, but aggression and balls are the spine of Wall Street.
In any case, my wife’s assertion shot me into orbit.
“I hate to disagree with you here, but … ”
In one particular way I agreed with her: If Tesla were simply cars, it’s way overvalued. Except it isn’t. Cars are decidedly not what makes Tesla valuable. The actual value in Tesla is threefold: Autonomous AI, long-term energy storage (batteries), and robots.
This week in Saudi Arabia, Elon Musk revealed that his Tesla robots can dance. They did the Trump dance. Beyond that, they did ballet. They demonstrated a level of poise and dexterity that was legitimately mind-blowing. During an interview, he subtly outlined a vision of a robotic future that would go to the benefit of all mankind. He foresees an order of magnitude global GDP growth as a result of burgeoning autonomous, intelligent robotics.
“Sometimes in AI they talk about Universal Basic Income, but I like to think of it as Universal High Income, where basically anyone can have any good or service that they want,” he said.
Now, I’m quite sure we won’t all get to have Zuckeryachts, but he’s not wrong, in my opinion. (And, yes, I do plan to pony up for some stock even though it’s 100 pts higher now than its recent low. I’m long, baby!)
But Elon’s prophetic vision of the future will likely go down as the most subtle and missed moment of the entire event.
More directly: It’s hard to make a splash when you’re with a guy like Donald Trump.
His speech at the Saudi-US Investment summit will likely blot out everything else. Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent, for what it’s worth, outlined the most detailed and realistic vision of trade “re-balancing” with China that actually made the last three months seem not so insane.
(When it comes to markets, it’s good to be long, eh?)
Nevertheless, the Trump speech in front of the entire assembly will likely go down in history as a hallmark presidential moment. In it, he outlined how the ultimate cure for strife, war, famine, terrorism, bigotry and all other human ailments was simply peace and prosperity.
If it seems almost cliche, or too simple, or too damned ideal, then I would certainly agree. For some reason, however, I believed it coming from Trump (of all people, right?).
Read this, emphases mine:
“In other cities throughout the peninsula, places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat, the transformations have been unbelievably remarkable. Before our eyes a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other out of existence. We don’t want that. And it’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way. It’s really incredible what you’ve done.
In the end the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly, and it’s something only you could do. You achieved a modern miracle the Arabian way. That’s a good way.”
Now is all this correct? Are they really abandoning terrorism or the sponsorship of it? Slavery? Certainly not currently, and likely not even shortly, but in the long-term?
I’m reminded here of the time, one of the times actually, that my head football coach in HS cracked me over the dome with his clipboard.
We were installing a double reverse pass play. I’m standing in the backfield. I started on defense, but they had me slotted in as TE2, so I had to learn the offense.
“It’ll never work,” I volunteered, like an a**hole. “It takes too long to develop.”
*crack* came the clipboard.
“Goddamnit, Ingersoll, you’ve gotta believe to achieve!”
It’s crazy how much that moment has echoed through my life. As a writer, clichés and cute little truisms are the death knell of good writing. And yet there it is, both at once, reverberating through my life. Believe to achieve. One before the other. You have to believe it’s possible before it is possible and then after that it’s actually happening.
While war and hegemony can be profitable for a select few people with the means to exploit those two things, for the many, they’re utterly wasteful endeavors. Until now, the people wielding those things have kept us at bay with a subtle promise that hell and chaos, possibly more expensive foreign-made tchotchkes are on the other side. For decades, we believed it, and they were able to achieve previously unimagined levels of wealth and power.
Abandoning this worldview is a herculean task because everyone who controls everything depends on keeping up the ruse. Like the ineffectual liberal NGO’s that hand towels out to starving kids depend on taxpayer money to exist, many of the elites in Washington depend on sustaining the interventionist Western savior complex that’s animated decades of foreign policy.
It’s also resulted in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent lives lost and, as Trump said, trillions wasted. It’s all such a waste. Nobody more than Trump, who will still launch rockets if you get out of line, believes only the dead see the true end of war.
The hidden value of America is not in vaunted concepts like freedom, democracy, or free speech. It’s not in expensive puppet shows aimed at teaching Arabs how to love the gays either. And, even while it’s helpful in a bind, it’s not in pointing guns at people.
It’s in prosperity, peace, and productive collaboration. Those are the true global influencers.
I dinged Trump just this week for getting his family involved in massive deals in Qatar. I hold to it. It dirties his message. In a perfect world, Trump would leave office poorer than he started (but still quite wealthy).
But that’s not Trump. That’d be like telling the tiger not to bite. While Trump makes deals for America, he’ll almost certainly make deals for himself. I’m not excusing it, but when a tiger bites someone, who’s surprised?
Earlier this week, Trump claimed credit for stopping a brewing war between India and Pakistan. He says he did it with appeals to economic deals. I’m sure there’s more to the story, but like his speech, even a few staunch liberals had to give him credit. Two nuclear powers stopped shooting each other because they took the time to believe in something else.
I’m long on Tesla, but not because of cars. I’m long on Trump, but not because of bluster or bullying. I’m long on America as a leader toward a new age of prosperity, but not because we have aircraft carriers.
Will Trump’s vision of the future take too long to develop? Will we blow ourselves up before it ever happens? Will Musk bring on the robot apocalypse?
Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps a universal global prosperity can be achieved without watching our respective cultures diluted into gender neutral neo-liberal oblivion. Perhaps one day we’ll all have our own robot.
You gotta believe to achieve, Ingersoll.
I believe that’s one cute little truism you can take to the bank.
AUTHOR
Geoffrey Ingersoll
Editor at Large.
WHAT I’M READING
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Let’s play a game called is it legal or just wildly unethical?
Alan Dershowitz Breaks Down If Trump Can Legally Accept $400 Million Qatari Plane
Obviously.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.
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