'Russia is the role model': Business expert nails 'kleptocracy' push by Trump and pals
During an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday morning, Professor Scott Galloway of NYU's Stern School of Business ripped into Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to pull the plug on fact-checking and moderation on Facebook. He then included Donald Trump and Elon Musk as he raised red flags over the country's direction.
Speaking with the co-hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Galloway described in detail how much billionaire Zuckerberg will personally profit from shutting down the vital Facebook department, before pointing out billionaires are rushing to jump on the Trump train which is barreling towards turning the U.S. into a kleptocracy much like Russia.
"With this decision, the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg gets kind of a two-fer," he began. "He gets to placate, at least temporarily, the president who threatened to put him in jail the rest of his life, and he gets to save maybe upwards of $5 billion, which is how much they spend on their [Facebook's] safety and security department –– and a price/earnings ratio of 30, that's potentially $150 billion increase in market capitalization."
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"Mark Zuckerberg owns 15 percent of the company, so you have what is effectively a get-out-of jail-card potentially from someone who appears to be an oligarch threatening to put people in jail, and add $15 to $20 billion to his net worth," he added.
"The greatest trade of 2024 –– it wasn't Bitcoin, it wasn't Nvidia -- it was Elon Musk investing a quarter of a billion dollars directly into the Trump campaign," he explained. "And when Trump won, since the election, Elon Musk's worth has gone up $140 billion. So that's effectively, I believe, about a 56,000 percent return on investment."
"So we've gone full kleptocracy," he bluntly stated. 'We can never, in my opinion, wave our finger at Russia again when the president, the elected president is taking public trust and public authority and weaponizing government and doling out capital and market share and contracts and threatening to use regulatory action against the competitors who don't give money to his inaugural committee or don't kind of bend the knee; we are effectively in a kleptocracy."
"This is –– Russia is the role model. We are becoming more like Russia every day, that's where we are," he added to the stunned hosts.
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