The Daily View 2/19/2023: Tesla Car Crash, the Creator Economy and Exiting From the System, and Bitcoin Crash Soon

1 Dead After Tesla Slams Into Fire Truck on I-680 in Walnut Creek:

California Highway Patrol Officer Adam Lane said it was not clear whether the driver may have been intoxicated or whether the Tesla Model S was operating with automation or driving assistance features.

So from what we know so far, it has nothing to even do with automatic driving. It’s only newsworthy because it involved Tesla. No one would care if it were a Ford or any other brand of car.

Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb have a similar problem in which anything that goes wrong is amplified by tons of press. Hardly anyone in the media cares about bad Chipotle, Disney, or McDonald’s working conditions, but it’s huge news when Amazon has poor working conditions.

America’s Culture Is Booming. Really.

The New York Times, by comparison, has just 9 million subscribers. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to MrBeast, who runs more than a dozen YouTube channels with an estimated 200 million aggregate subscribers—and now has his videos translated into Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian.

Yeah, but the NYTs also has a newspaper and a website. As low of an opinion I have for the NYTs, let’s not pretend that Mr. Beast has a bigger influence. It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison.

The success of Rogan, Mr. Beast, Elon Musk, Andrew Tate and other creators and entrepreneurs is evidence of the popularity of non-woke/leftist brands and individuals, when people are given choice. It shows there is a huge market for counter-narrative content, but the problem is, the left are still gatekeepers in almost every other respect of life.

Unless you get lucky and can break out as a content creator in the digital economy, you’re stuck. There is tons of money to be made in the creator economy, but the problem is the odds of success are so low, too. It’s like a lottery.

Boring white collar jobs have better, more consistent pay. Then you take your paycheck, invest in the stock market and or real estate, and ‘exit’ from the system in a few decades ‘Fat Fire’ style. This is what a lot of people are doing now.

No need to waste time with videos, crypto, or entrepreneurship when the blueprint to success is obvious. The biggest of tech companies will only get bigger: invest in them and ride the wave.

From David Gerard, who argues that the inability to redeem BUSD is propping up Bitcoin:

Customers who can’t redeem their Binance BUSD are using them to buy bitcoins or tethers, or whatever liquid coin they can get their hands on. This is why bitcoin is pumping again and is now bouncing around the $24,000 range.

This does not make sense. If someone wants to redeem their BUSD but cannot, they can just swap to USDT, USDC, or any other stable coin, and then redeem that. There is no need to buy Bitcoin. People are giving their theories as to why Bitcoin is pumping. It’s just a dead cat bounce after a 77% crash in 2021-2022, there is not much deeper meaning than that. It was oversold, so some bounce is inevitable.

One thing I do know: It will be short-lived and the gains will be gone soon–it’s as close to a 100% guarantee as you are going to find in life. Bitcoin has a long history of suddenly falling, like the ‘died suddenly’ vaccine meme on Twitter. The failure to break above $25k portends to $17k soon, likely.