Scott Galloway to Anderson Cooper, roughly two weeks ago:

“The best trade of 2024 was Elon Musk putting $250 million dollars into Trump campaign. Since then the value of Elon’s company and his stake in the company is up by about $140 billion dollars. That’s about a 5600 percent return, and it has nothing to do with the company. Nothing to do with their operating margins, their innovation, their sales.

“It’s based on a general assumption that America has become a full kleptocracy like Russia…a general assumption that the deepest pocketed customer in the history of our modern economy is effectively now pay-to-play, and [that it] will shuffle contracts, money and impose regulatory punishment on competitors…companies that have not invested in the Republican party or in Trump’s inaugural pageant…this is evidenced by the fact that very few of these techbro executives invested in the inaugural fund for Biden, but they are all doing it for Trump.

“We have gone full kleptocrat, and if you don’t think that this hurts everyone…this raises prices, and [it hurts] the little guy and the companies that don’t want to engage in this kind of pay-for-play…it hurts them. It will increase prices and weaken our democracy. There is absolutely no difference between this and how Putin became [one of] the wealthiest men in the world.”

Henry Gondorff to Johnny Hooker: “Feds took their end without a beef, and it really stunk, kid.”