July 18, 2026 - The Week in Review
Posts from the week of July 13 - 18
This is the week where we finished up the second season of the Billionaire Victims Club, but there were some other posts.
Monday, July 13: After getting the shitbird Billionaires out of the way, there were two posts on the rest of the ecosystem. This post is a dive into the PayPal Mafia, and how that one startup that was purchased by Ebay created a class of dirtbags (the Whampoa Military Academy was a Chinese Military Academy that spawned the likes of Chiang Kai Shek and his cadre of leaders, apt comparison).
Geoff Anderson
Tuesday, July 14: There's a thread in the Never Trump ecosystem that post Trump, the hoardes of Republicans who are quivering in their damp drawers will rise up and retake the Republican party, and return it to – well something anyway that can be rational.
I did some digging into history of factions in US political parties, and I found that this faith that something will be done with the MAGA wing and unicorns will prance around, pooping ice-cream with sprinkles has no precedent:
Geoff Anderson
Wednesday, July 15th: A companion piece to the dive into the PayPal Mafia. Sure, that one exit created a class of fucking tool billionaires (Musk, Thiel, and Hoffman). And when there is that much concentrated wealth, societal, and political power, there are a cadre of yes-men and hangers on. I start with the All-In podcast fuckers, and I am particularly proud of the comparison of David Sacks as the exemplar of "The Barnacle Archetype".
Geoff Anderson
Friday, July 17th: Ok, not quite done with the Billionaire Victims Club. Elon Musk recently became the first trillionaire (ok, not anymore, it is totally delish to watch SPCX fall like a lead zeppelin) and while that makes him the wealthiest person ont he planet, and in history.
I decided to do a comparison of Elon Musk against the apex predator of the Robber Baron era, John D. Rockefeller.
Originally, I wanted to do a comparison because Rockefeller and Standard Oil tossed off a LOT of cash, and Musk's wealth and value of his companies is mostly tied to the mystique of Musk, and in particularly in the case of TSLA – a middling at best auto maker – is valued as a meme stock not as a quality business.
Geoff Anderson
If you have missed some of the Billionaire Victim's Club, you can catch up on all of the installments here:
That other site (The Shitpost Dude) had a good post or two. I will share one of them each week. Go there and subscribe to help me build an audience (and test a hypothesis around Substack's internal promotion algorithms)
Jeffery Lebowski
