| | | | | | | Presented By The Boeing Company | | | | Axios AM | | By Mike Allen · May 21, 2022 | | Hello, Saturday. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,198 words ... 4½ mins. Edited by TuAnh Dam. 🇦🇺 Breaking: Australia's center-left opposition party toppled the conservative government after nine years in power. Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded defeat. - In a victory speech, Prime Minister-elect Anthony Albanese promised sharper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Get the latest.
| | | | | | 1 big thing: Party's over for rich |  | | | Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios | | | | It hasn't been a great year for the 0.00001%, Axios chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon writes: - The fortunes of Russian oligarchs have been frozen ... crypto fortunes have been destroyed ... and five billionaires — Bernard Arnault, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Changpeng Zhao — have each lost more than $50 billion this year alone.
Why it matters: Even the most chipper tycoon might feel a pang of humility upon seeing an 11 (or 12)-figure sum evaporate from his personal balance sheet. What we're watching: In good times, billionaires enter into a friendly (or not-so-friendly) competition over who can have the biggest and most expensive toys — yachts, castles, art, islands, jets, that kind of thing. - But during times like these, such competition is replaced by a desire to preserve wealth, rather than spend it.
Even the richest man in the world can start to feel constrained after his wealth has fallen by an astonishing $124 billion since early November. - Musk has a legally binding obligation to buy Twitter for $44 billion. But the markets don't believe it's going to happen, with the price of Twitter stock implying a probability of only about 65% that the deal will go through at full price.
- It won't be easy for Musk to find the cash he needs to buy Twitter — and he can't just walk away and pay the $1 billion breakup fee. Twitter's board would sue, asking a court to require him to pay the agreed-upon $44 billion. A judge would almost certainly side with the board.
The bottom line: The U.S. economy is still running hot — but the markets aren't. Those of us who work for a living are broadly fine. Those who don't need to are feeling a bit of a pinch. |     | | | | | | 2. 🎢 Markets fall for 7th week |  Data: FactSet. Chart: Axios Visuals A dramatic late-session rally yesterday kept the S&P 500 out of official bear-market territory, "but the index still sank for a seventh straight week "in a stretch of weakness not seen since 2001," Bloomberg writes. - It's the S&P 500's "longest losing streak since the dot-com bubble burst more than two decades ago. It's just its fourth streak of seven or more weekly losses in the post-World War II period."
| | | | | | | | 3. Tweet of the week: Elon Musk (R) |  | | | Via Twitter | | | | After declaring he's a Republican, Elon Musk clarified that he doesn't plan to put big money behind the party, either for the midterms or to back a possible opponent to President Biden in 2024. - "I have no plans to create a super PAC," he told CNBC in an email. "No super PAC anything going on."
Go deeper. | | | | | | | | A message from The Boeing Company | | Find your purpose with Boeing | | |  | | | | At Boeing, our employees are engaged members of their communities. In 2021, our employees donated nearly $36.5 million and contributed 290,000 volunteer hours to charitable causes. Get involved: Join us today and help humanity take flight. | | | | | | 4. 📷 1,000 words | | Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP Ukrainians remove belongings today from their house, ruined by Russian shelling in Irpin, near Kyiv. | | | | | | | | 5. ðŸ‡ðŸ‡¹ Story of the day: "The Ransom" | | Haitian revolution of 1791. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images How Haiti got locked into a path of poverty and underdevelopment, 200 years ago: In 1791, enslaved Haitians ousted the French and founded a nation — the modern world's first successful slave revolution. - "But France made generations of Haitians pay for their freedom. How much it cost them was a mystery, until now," the N.Y. Times reports:
"[R]ich French colonists continued to press to reconquer the territory, and they found another sympathetic ear [in] the Bourbon monarchy." As a result, Haiti "became the world's first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid reparations to the descendants of their masters — for generations." - The ultimatum to Haiti: "Hand over a staggering sum in reparations to Haiti's former slave masters, or face another war."
"Haiti's president, eager for the trade and security of international recognition, bowed to France's demands." - "It is often called the 'independence debt.' But that is a misnomer. It was a ransom."
- "The amount was far beyond Haiti's meager means. ... But that was the point, and part of the plan. .... This became known as Haiti's 'double debt' — the ransom and the loan to pay it."
Haiti's slave rebellion of 1791. Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images "The New York Times spent months sifting through thousands of pages of original government documents, some of them centuries old and rarely, if ever, reviewed by historians," the article continues. "We scoured libraries and archives in Haiti, France and the United States to study the double debt and its effect on Haiti, financially and politically." - "In what leading historians say is a first, we tabulated how much money Haitians paid to the families of their former masters and to the French banks and investors who held that first loan to Haiti, not just in official government payments on the double debt but also in interest and late fees, year after year, for decades.
- "We found that Haitians paid about $560 million in today's dollars. But that doesn't nearly capture the true loss."
Keep reading ... Interactive: "Haiti's Lost Billions" ... "How a French Bank Captured Haiti" ... Bibliography (all subscription). | | | | | | | | 6. 🎓 1 tale to go: Chickens and graduations |  | | | Rowena Ravenclaw. Photo: Ben Montgomery/Axios | | | | Ben Montgomery of Axios Tampa Bay writes that he has a beautiful slate-gray Blue Star pullet that really doesn't like him: I don't know what I did to offend Rowena Ravenclaw. But she and her little Barred Plymouth Rock sidekick, Helga Hufflepuff, spend their days trying to escape the beautiful world I've built for them. - Why it matters: In her garden pen, she has shelter, food and water. She's safe. Outside the pen, she's in constant danger.
Threat level: An osprey perches on a nearby power line, and the neighbor's cat creeps around at dusk. Flashback: Her predecessors — Lil' Pat, Hope Solo, etc. — learned the cost of adventure. Reality check: Rowena Ravenclaw only wants to be outside the coop. The latest: She has learned to fly. - When I turn my back, she furiously flaps over the 4-foot fence.
What I did: Grabbed scissors and held her close, splaying one wing out so the last and longest feathers — the flight feathers — were exposed. It didn't hurt the hen. And you only have to do one wing to keep the bird grounded. The rub: As Rowena scrambled away, cursing my name, the power of the paradox hit me. - One benevolent snip kept her home, safe. It also stole her freedom, and any chance she had of seeing the outside world.
The big picture: It's commencement season for lots of us — caps and gowns and family in town. We mark time by these days. A few blinks ago, the kids were squeezing our hands as we met the kindergarten teacher on the first day of school. - Now look at them. So many new flight feathers.
- My daughter graduates from Hillsborough High on Tuesday, then heads to Harvard in the fall — 1,400 miles from Tampa.
The bottom line: I'm scared to death. Maybe you are, too. - We've had them in the coop for 18 years, safe and sound. But it's their time to fly. Let's put the scissors down and help each other through this.
Share this story. | | | | | | | | A message from The Boeing Company | | Committed to our communities | | |  | | | | Through the Employees Community Fund of Boeing, one of the largest employee-managed funds in the world, Boeing employees donated more than $8.3 million to charitable causes in 2021. Discover more by visiting the Boeing Global Engagement Portfolio. | | | | 📬 Invite your friends to sign up here to get their daily essentials — Axios AM, PM and Finish Line. |  | It's called Smart Brevity®. Over 200 orgs use it — in a tool called Axios HQ — to drive productivity with clearer workplace communications. | | | |
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