I know we’ve been a bit Elon-centric here of late, but the latest developments should prompt us to look to some of the core challenges behind what we now call social media. The Musk saga is comparatively simple: a middle-aged buffoon on one-half midlife crisis, one-half power trip running roughshod over everything. But outside such extreme cases there are more basic challenges. The essence of the social media business proposition is to be the venue for literally everyone talking about everything while managing the venue through automated processes which keep the staff capacity and costs low. Put a different way, success means scale: revenues growing exponentially while costs grow arithmetically.

A minor point. But TPM Reader BR points out that that the private jet at the center of the latest Twitter fracas is not precisely Elon Musk’s. It appears to be a corporate jet owned by SpaceX, the space launch company which along with Tesla is one of two companies on which Musk’s fortune is based. (Unlike Tesla, SpaceX remains a private company.)

BR flagged this Business Insider article that notes that Musk’s fleet of three Gulfstream jets is owned and registered to a company called Falcon Landing LLC, which BI says is “a shell company with ties to SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters.” The corporate listing for the shell corporation says it’s located at the same address as SpaceX and it’s agent and manager are also SpaceX. Among the corporation’s inactive directors and officers are SpaceX, Elon Musk and Gwynne Shotwell (president and COO of SpaceX), along with the corporate service company.

You’ve likely seen a lot of write-ups about Elon Musk having a temper tantrum last night and banning a group of journalists. It’s gotten a lot of attention in part because he banned ones that were in some sense covering him and his acquisition of Twitter, and because he banned reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations in the country, including CNN, the Times and the Post. In most cases (it’s hard to know because there’s been no clear explanation of why any of this happened) the bans were based on tortured readings of a new rule Twitter put in place the night before based on a different temper tantrum on Wednesday. Perhaps fittingly enough for a neo-Gilded Age tale, the episode starts with Musk’s private jet, a 2015 Gulfstream G650.

On the issue of whether Trump is “done,” as I put it below, the primary itself really isn’t the question. There seems little doubt that another Republican could defeat Donald Trump for the nomination, though I’m skeptical of whether that person is Ron DeSantis. The more operative question is what you do with Trump after you beat him. Normally you have a primary battle and one candidate comes out on top. It may be a cakewalk or a brutal slog. But one candidate gets the most delegates and the others fall in behind that candidate.

It’s very difficult, though, to imagine Donald Trump losing a hard fought primary struggle and then just gracefully falling in line as a surrogate for the guy who beat him. In fact, it’s basically impossible to imagine that happening.

I’ve treated it as a given that Trump is the nominee in 2024 if he wants to be. But today’s “Major Announcement” from Trump, which ended up being a new set of NFT playing cards with Trump in a bulging Superman suit, crystalizes my growing doubts about whether he still has the juice to go another round. We’ve also seen a couple polls this week which show a clear majority of self-described Republican primary voters prefer Ron DeSantis over Trump, albeit with DeSantis continuing Trump’s policies. But polls can change. Nor does a poll more than a year out from the first primary capture all the kinetic dimensions of an actual primary battle. What is less changeable are the growing signs that Trump is just a loser.

One of the most bracing, bizarre aspects of Mark Meadows texts with members of Congress is the fact that many truly seemed to believe the most absurd claims and conspiracy theories. This wasn’t just red meat they were tossing out on Fox and Newsmax. They were saying this stuff, in earnest, in the privacy of text messages with longtime colleagues. But even this, I would say, isn’t the heart of the matter. There’s something else we see in the very first texts, before the TV networks called the race but when the writing was clearly on the wall. It can most easily be summarized as: Trump can’t be allowed to lose. On Nov. 6, 2020, Rep. Brian Babin tells Meadows that they “refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R) of South Carolina tells local press that his January 17th, 2021 call to place the United States under martial law to keep Trump in office — first reported yesterday by TPM — came from “frustration.”

One of the most consistent findings of years of audience research at TPM is that people in education and especially higher education (college and graduate) are our largest single audience. That’s certainly true of representation vs the population at large but it’s also true (though definitions became more complicated here) in absolute terms. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that the site was founded by a lapsed academic. But among many other things it means that there are quite a lot of physicists among you. And you’ve been helping me with lots of feedback about this fusion announcement apparently coming shortly from the Livermore Laboratory.

For the non-physicists and innumerate among you, everything I’ve heard confirms the gist of my second post on this from this morning: this is, unfortunately, not a game changer for the possible future of fusion as a source of population-level power generation. The key is to distinguish between two questions: a breakthrough achievement in scientific and engineering terms? Yes. A breakthrough in terms of fusion produced energy being any more part of your future than it was a week ago? No. Sadly, no. But still no.

Now all the rest of the American media is reporting on this apparent breakthrough in fusion research at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. Courtesy of TPM Readers and a bit of reading on my own I’ve had a bit of a crash course on what this news means. Unfortunately, I think it means less than it may seem. I’m not going to try to explain or discuss the science. But from what I can tell the following is true: This is an important breakthrough in fusion science. But for most of us the question is whether this is a breakthrough on the road to fusion as a viable source of clean and abundant energy. From the conversations I’ve had, the answer to the latter question is no.

I’m not sure what to make of this but The Financial Times is reporting that scientists at the Livermore laboratory in California believe, according to preliminary results, that they have achieved a net energy gain with a fusion reaction. Though the practical immediate impact would be very limited, the historic impact of such an achievement is great. In theory a controlled fusion reaction holds the promise of essentially limitless clean energy. The fuel is simple hydrogen. This, if true, is simply getting slightly more out of a fusion reaction than that used to create it. But this is certainly a key milestone on the path to that. The article claims that Energy Secretary Granholm will make some announcement on Tuesday. There was a fusion announcement a couple decades ago that turned out to be bunk. So I can’t help but be skeptical about this — honestly, very skeptical. I also have some question why the news is appearing first (and only, so far as I can tell) in The Financial Times. Still, if it were true the future would change dramatically.

Late Update: Having seen so little press pick-up besides The Financial Times and getting some more reader feedback I’m inclined to think this is a more incremental step in the process than is presented in the article. So I think my skepticism was merited but more on the significance than the accuracy. Do you know the science of fusion? Let me know what you think.