Musk Wants to Hire Your Plumber
Musk Wants to Hire Your Plumber
You think it’s hard finding a good plumber or electrician now? Just wait…
Huh… “Skilled trades”?
“CEOs behind the world’s hottest companies agree on one thing,” writes Eleanor Pringle at Fortune: “Among the most valuable workers in today’s labor market are engineers and skilled tradespeople who can build the infrastructure needed for the artificial intelligence boom.
“According to Pew Research, the U.S. is already home to more than 3,000 operational data centers, and more than 1,500 are currently in development.”
Never mind the “off Earth” part for the moment: The data center buildout needs people on terra firma right now.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said as much earlier this year.
“It’s wonderful that the jobs are related to tradecraft, and we’re going to have plumbers and electricians and construction and steelworkers,” he told BlackRock’s Larry Fink last winter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
SpaceX’s application process is more rigorous than Musk makes it out to be.
“Musk often uses this simple hiring rule for potential employees, but SpaceX doesn’t just hire anyone — it's truly looking for the best of the best,” writes Niamh Ancell at CyberNews.
The three bullet points? “These points must outline the potential employee’s ‘exceptional ability,’ clearly evidenced by presenting the most difficult technical challenges they’ve solved.
“Musk’s method shows a shift toward more obvious skill-based hiring rather than getting sidetracked by what a person may put on their resume.”
And when the time does come for Musk to pursue his vision of data centers in space… well, it’ll go without saying that relocation will be required.
Imminent Deal (Again)
Because no one believes Donald Trump’s imminent-deal-with-Iran announcements anymore… the task has now fallen to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
“There is a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the [Strait of Hormuz] and move toward a more normalized position in this conflict,” Bessent told CNBC this morning.
Asked whether Iran would charge a toll, he said only “it would be freedom of movement.”
And with that, U.S. oil futures are down another 5%-plus — now under $76 for the first time in over three weeks.
Assuming a deal comes through, will this be a rerun of the “memorandum of understanding” in June — where a deal was supposedly done but it took days for the text to be made public?
Ah, memories…
In the meantime, Big Oil is making bank — and Donald Trump is big mad.
The lead to Bloomberg’s story was devastating — but only because it was accurate: “President Donald Trump scolded Exxon Mobil Holdings Corp. and Chevron Corp. for their soaring profits, as oil prices surged amid the war in Iran he launched in February alongside Israel.”
The two companies more than doubled their second-quarter net income — choosing to use that money to shrink their debt burden.
As Trump sees it, the two are “making too much money” and they should “give some of that back to the public,” presumably in the form of lower gasoline prices.
"I don't like it. I should be the last one to say because I'm a big free enterprise guy, nobody bigger," he told reporters at the White House. "You surprised I'm saying it? I'll say it loud and clear. I'm not happy about it."
Exactly what he plans to do about this, he did not elaborate. It would be — well — interesting to see him try to go the Jimmy Carter route and urge Congress to pass a “windfall profits tax.”
For the record, XLE — the big energy ETF in which XOM and CVX comprise over a third of the holdings — is up 36% over the year, compared with 23% for the S&P 500.
As for the broad stock market, it’s adding to yesterday’s big gains.
At last check the S&P 500 is up another 1%, blasting past its previous record close on June 2. Indeed the index is barely 20 points away from the 7,700 mark.
The Dow, after setting a record yesterday, is up another 1.3% today, barely 100 points away from 54,000.
The Nasdaq is up 1.6% — not record territory, but good enough to surpass 26,000 again.
Gold is staging a modest rally — up a half percent to $4,078. Silver’s up 2% to $59.27. Crypto remains range-bound — Bitcoin a little over $64,000 and Ethereum a little below $1,800.
About Those Tariff Refunds…
For as much as your editor keeps a pulse on the news and the markets, I end up learning about some things through memes…
Upon further investigation, it is true that Amazon is due a $600 million refund from tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last year, struck down by the Supreme Court this year.
But… are customers truly out of luck?
On AMZN’s quarterly earnings call last week, CFO Brian Olsavsky said the firm "identified a limited set of circumstances where we can trace that we passed specific import charges on to customers."
But no, there’s no process by which Amazon customers can apply for refunds of their own. Not yet anyway.
"When we receive those refunds [from the federal government], we will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them," Olsavsky said.
Turns out Amazon’s refund is lower than some of its competitors because the firm had the foresight to stockpile items before the tariffs were imposed.
Which reminds us we should update our item about the tariff-refund lawsuit against Costco.
Costco customer Matthew Stockov sued in March, asserting it would be “unjust enrichment” if the firm recouped its tariff costs twice — “from customers through elevated pricing and from the government.”
At the time, Costco wasn’t even sure what, if any, tariff refunds it might collect.
In May, the company responded to the suit, urging a federal judge to deny Stockov’s request to make the case a class action — adding that Stockov received all the goods he paid for at posted prices.
As near as we can tell, that’s the most recent development. To be continued…
Comic Relief
We always enjoy a searing rejoinder to corporate babble…
That said, the dog’s post on LinkedIn is still the ne plus ultra of the genre.
Mailbag: What About the Xers?
On a lark, I went to the “suspected spam” folder of the 5 Bullets email account this morning and found…
… a handful of recent emails from real readers, some of them weighing in on the generational warfare that’s been waged in our mailbag of late. We’ll share one today…
“I appreciate Dave's continued throwing up about generations and specifically millennials and Gen Z. What the hell about Generation X???
“We are a large voting block and a bunch of us are unaffiliated because of crap like this. I'm so sick of being passed on and overlooked and so are my cohorts in Gen X. I think you're really doing your readers a disservice when you willfully do not include a large voting block — in the last several decades in a lot of elections votes have come down to literally a few.
“I'm not saying they don't matter. I'm saying we're tired of being looked at like what we were labeled slackers and not to be cared about.
“Would love to get your feedback and I don't mean just feedback I mean honest feedback like I'm giving you. Quit writing half-truths and tell us like Paul Harvey used to: ‘And now you know the rest of the story’!”
Dave responds: LOL, I’m an early-wave Xer.
Furthermore, I’m not only old enough to know who Paul Harvey was, I was in the audience as he accepted a prestigious award in 1992 from the Radio-Television News Directors Association.
(Here’s a clip from his speech where he poured cold water on global warming.)
Anyway… I’m sorry to tell you, but we’re not really that large of a voting block. The millennials leapfrogged us and took over the title of largest voting block from the boomers around 2019.
The demographer Neil Howe says it’s the fate of “Nomad” generations like Xers — or before us, the Lost Generation born in the late 1800s — to be afterthoughts in the broad sweep of history. We’re forever living in the shadow of the “Prophet” generations like the boomers who immediately preceded us.
As Howe wrote in his 2023 book, The Fourth Turning Is Here… “We remember Nomads best for their rising-adult years of hell-raising (Paxton Boys, Missouri Raiders, rumrunners) and for their midlife years of hands-on, get-it-done leadership (think of Daniel Morgan, Stonewall Jackson, George Patton). Underprotected as children, they become overprotective parents. Their principal endowments are in the domain of liberty, survival and honor.”
We get the short end of the generational stick all our lives. In our childhood, Howe characterizes our reputation as “bad.” Seriously, can you imagine movies like The Exorcist or Taxi Driver being made any time other than when Xers were kids?
And I hate to break it to you… but it’s not going to get any better. Howe says while Prophet generations like the boomers are “respected” in their elderhood, Nomads are by contrast “abandoned.”
