Here’s an interesting tactic for destroying billionaires: sue them for cheating. You can’t get that rich without stealing the money somehow, so if you find evidence of tax fraud, sic a bunch of ravening lawyers on them. Michael Saylor is finding that out.

Michael Saylor amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune, splurging to combine three Georgetown penthouses into a palatial 7,000-square-foot residence, snapping up a 154-foot yacht dubbed Mr. Terrible and throwing lavish soirees including one where he was draped with an albino python.

All the while, the tech titan did not pay income tax in the District for years and bragged about it to friends, anonymous whistleblowers allege. They said he told people they were “fools” if they did not buy a home in Florida as he did and claim to live there. The state has no income tax.

He’s rich. He flaunts it. He owns 5 yachts and multiple mansions. He doesn’t pay any taxes because he’s found loopholes, such as by buying a mansion in Florida (no income tax in Florida!) and then claiming that’s his primary residence. By enforcing tax laws, people can claw back a fraction of his ill-gotten wealth, at least.

The key to forcing a billionaire to cough up is to enable citizens to hunt him down and cut a bounty out of his hide.

All told, Racine alleges Saylor failed to pay at least $25 million in income taxes, but he could owe much more. D.C. law allows the city to collect triple the owed amount in damages, along with assorted interest, fees and penalties. Racine said in the interview he hopes to recover more than $100 million from Saylor. The whistleblowers would keep 15 to 25 percent if and when any money is recovered.

It’s all down to a new law in Washington DC.

These False Claims Act laws are modeled on a Civil War-era federal statute that has helped return billions to federal coffers, but the federal law bars action on tax fraud, and most states have followed that lead in their statutes.

D.C. switched that up with its new False Claims Act, which went into effect in 2021 and allows whistleblowers to pursue cases in which the alleged fraudster has income of more than $1 million and damages collected will exceed $350,000. At first it was little known outside wonky tax circles.

They’re going to have to work fast, though, because Saylor’s wealth is built on cryptocurrency, and has repeatedly vaporized. Crypto is currently facing its own reckoning, and Saylor lost $1.4 billion just recently. They might end up dragging a pauper into court.

That’s the real crime, not only tax dodging but making all of his money with this venal Ponzi scheme called bitcoin. That’s the greater crime, that crypto is a tool for scraping money out of gullible investors — and PENSION FUNDS???? Jesus. I would hope my pension isn’t being thrown away on something like that.

In October 2021, one of Quebec’s largest pension funds — the Caisse de Depot et Placement du Québec — invested $150 million into the crypto-lending company called the Celsius Network — which may now be facing bankruptcy.

That same month, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) announced its investment in FTX Trading Ltd, supplying at least $50 million into a meme-inspired fundraising round — raising $420.69 million from 69 investors. FTX hasn’t crashed like Celsius Network just yet, but the investment is putting teacher pensions in danger.

That quote is from July. FTX recently crashed, as expected. Sorry, Ontario teachers.

Curious minds want to know what he’s going to do with that extra electron. Probably gonna reduce something.

Uh-oh. Trump has lost Ben Garrison!

In the past, Garrison has always drawn Trump as a broad-shouldered, muscular macho man. Now the mantle has passed, and Ron Desantis is the one drawn with the beefcake bod!

That must sting.

They are especially unreal if their fortune was built on cryptocurrency and NFTs. One of the big players was this curly-haired guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, whose wealth has experienced a catastrophic roller coaster ride.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s fortune has been erased as his assets become essentially worthless, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.

And that came before FTX and its affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Friday.

At its peak, his net worth was $26 billion and still stood at $16 billion on Monday. But by Wednesday it had shriveled to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

By late Thursday, it was gone. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index put the value of FTX’s US business at just $1 — down from $8 billion after a January fundraising round — due to a potential trading halt. Bankman-Fried owns roughly 70% of FTX US.

In addition, his $500 million in Robinhood stock was stripped from his net worth figure after Reuters reported it was held by Alameda Research, the crypto trading firm he founded, and may have been used as collateral for loans.

Earlier in the week, Bloomberg had assigned a $1 valuation to Alameda. On Thursday, Bankman-Fried said he is shutting down Alameda.

That’s amazing. $26 billion just evaporated into thin air. He’d spent millions putting his company name on sports arenas and teams before everything went poof, and he had to have known the company was worthless. So much jiggery-pokery was going on to prop up an empty shell, and now it has all collapsed. It does my heart good.

Next billionaire on the chopping block: Elon Musk. He’s desperately flailing about, selling off Tesla stock to keep his latest acquisition afloat, and it should be obvious to everyone by now that he’s an incompetent businessmen, a bad clown juggling his inherited wealth clumsily to acquire an unwarranted reputation and an inflated net worth. The ongoing Twitter debacle is illustrating that in a spectacular fashion.

The bad news is that I can’t quit Twitter now. I have to stick with it to watch the final explosion, all while waving my cowboy hat and going “Yeeee-haaaww!”. It’s going to be glorious.

Then, after I get my next game life, I wanna watch Mark Zuckerberg fold with a piteous whimper.

I just discovered Liveuamap, a service that compiles ongoing reports from the war in Ukraine and plots them on a map. It seems to have a Ukrainian bias, which is OK, I guess, if you look at it as a representation of where the fighting is going on, but it’s also depressing when you’re looking at it and suddenly an icon of a bomb pops up with a label like “6 people killed as result of Russian missile strike at residential house in Mykolaiv”. What a godawful waste.

Ukraine does seem to be winning in the south, for now…where “winning” means lots of people on both sides dying in ferocious combat.

This is not normal, and I hate it.

I woke up this morning with a sense of dread, and glanced at the news only briefly. I have been conditioned to expect the worst the day after an election, when I will learn just how stupid and hateful my fellow citizens are, when I will discover that the shrieking losers will march their case to the corrupt Supreme Court to get their election overturned, when the newspapers and fucking 538 will babble excuses about how their efforts to manipulate, that is, “predict” the elections went awry, and we’ll see how much democracy has decayed. There is never any good news but that it is tainted with bad.

So I glanced. Then I closed the news and ran away.

What little I learned: ballots aren’t all counted yet, lots of elections are still up in the air. The “red wave” that esteemed newspapers like the NY Times never materialized — but then, I’ve learned that the media desperately wants a “wave”, and they never happen. We don’t know the final outcome yet, but the newspapers are still yapping about it. I can’t even imagine what the noise on cable news is like, and I’m not going to try to find out.

So my current assessment is short: not as bad as it could have been, not as good as it should have been. Give it a few days.

It’s election day, get out and vote if you haven’t already.

Today, I’m going to consciously avoid reading any news, since it’s entirely pointless. The votes will be cast, my staring fixedly at the ballot box will change nothing, the people reading the news have no idea what they’re doing anymore, and there are so many grossly stupid people running for office. It’s best to remain in ignorance until all the chaos has settled, and then I’ll whip off the blindfold to feel the full force of a corrupt system in decay all at once.

Inside Higher Ed covers that godawful conference.

One attendee of the conference, who asked to speak anonymously as not to run afoul of the event’s supporters or critics, said the room “was not simply full of right-wingers there to hear fringe right-wingers,” as “many from around the country are alarmed at intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum.”

“Both sides do it”. I’ve heard that somewhere before. Maybe they should have included a few people who weren’t fired for sexism or racism or misogyny to show off the Intolerant Left.

At the same time, the attendee said, the meeting “required no scholarly rigor or counterargument, rather it proved mostly a feel-good session for an unfortunate mix of many powerful public voices who deserve criticism, and a few brave people who take unpopular positions and actually deserve to be heard. Clearly, the conference organizers were trying to be provocative in letting the most outrageous be heard, but that undermined the seriousness of harm done to the less outrageous but equally censored speakers.”

The most hilarious comment comes from Jonathan Haidt.

Referencing Cochrane’s additional complaint that liberals had been invited to speak but refused, speaker Jonathan Haidt, Heterodox Academy co-founder and Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, said that there was nevertheless more diversity, more ideological and political diversity, in the room today than in probably any other room anywhere in any of America’s top 100 universities this year.

He is correct that diversity is underrepresented in academia. However, here is a candid photo of the attendees at the con:

I think most universities do better than that room full of old white men. Not better enough, but much better than that.

Also, yeesh, that was a tiny conference.

The news is full of ‘journalists’ who are doing nothing but placing bets on the horse race they’ve been reporting on. There is no information there, only last minute efforts to manipulate the vote. Ignore them.

Just go vote tomorrow. Vote your conscience.