Crypto News: Elon Musk was very busy on his favorite holiday

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Elon Musk needs the news.
Homebuyers have hit the ceiling.
The labor market's racial divide.
The era of Cheap Oil has arrived.

Folklore says that Elon Musk uses a "time-blocking" method for his calendar, with his day planned out in five-minute intervals. He's denied doing this, but I imagine he's plenty busy — with 4/20, of all days, jam-packed with activities. The unofficial holiday for cannabis is like Christmas for Elon. The date holds a special place in the billionaire's heart for many reasons — including that his birthday, June 28, is exactly 69 days away. He is constantly using different variations of 420 (sometimes in concert with 69) to troll everyone from Tesla investors to Twitter users to Starlink customers.

For mere mortals, 4/20 might be a day to get lit with some friends and eat discounted White Castle burgers. But Musk clearly didn't intend to use the holiday to relax. Quite the contrary! For fun, I took some creative liberties in imagining what the Chief Twit's Google Calendar for today might look like:

Chaos in a calendar. Illustration by Jessica Karl

I'm sorry, but nobody can tell me that this isn't the schedule of a Dance Mom! And it's not like yesterday was a breeze, either. 4/19 was not only his mother Maye's 75th birthday, but it was also a major day for Tesla. Ahead of the EV maker's quarterly earnings announcement, the company slashed prices on the Model Y and Model 3. "Speaking on Wednesday's call, Musk added a typically futurist spin to [the price cuts], saying that increasing the number of Teslas on the road — even by selling them at no profit — lays the groundwork for autonomous fleets," Liam Denning writes.

And autonomous fleets aren't the only pipe dream that keeps Elon up at night. Today's SpaceX launch left much to be desired, with a lot of people wondering why it exploded four minutes after takeoff. One person joked that Elon must have mistakenly sent the Starship launch team the instructions he had planned to use to blow up Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, as of 12:18 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, my "legacy" blue checkmark [1] remained intact, but less than two hours later, poof! It was gone. I had expected Musk to wait until precisely 4:20 p.m. to remove it, but maybe that level of precision is beyond Twitter's paper-thin engineering staff. Now that everyone from Kim Kardashian to the Pope is uncheckmarked, Dave Lee says thousands of news organizations will be forced to make a decision: "Line the pockets of the world's second-richest man in order to keep verified status and maintain visibility on the platform," or "refuse to pay for the privilege of adding immense value to Musk's business." Chances are, they'll choose door No. 2. Having managed Bloomberg Opinion's social accounts for five years, I can tell you that web traffic from Twitter, contrary to popular belief, is barely a whisper in the grand scheme of things:

"Twitter needs the media more than the media needs Twitter," Dave writes. If the entire journalism industry decides to jump ship, Musk may not have such fond feelings about 4/20, after all.

Trying to buy a home these days is like trying to dislodge a popcorn kernel stuck between two molars. It's not easy! Sometimes you need a friend to help you. And sometimes you just give up and resign yourself to the fact that you are now one with the kernel:

If you think that sounds bad, imagine what it'll be like next year, when Conor Sen says it's going to be virtually impossible to find any kind of home at all. "It's hard to convey just how dire things have gotten," he writes, arguing that spooked-out homebuilders are being waaay too timid, given the lack of inventory. Sure, mortgage rates are are freaky and the economy is down in the dumps, but people are desperate. As it stands, builders are finishing homes faster than they're starting new ones:

Now, maybe you're thinking: So what? Can't people just … buy used houses? (In the charming jargon of the real-estate industry, they are known as "existing homes.") No. Because the resale market is at a standstill that even LA traffic can't compete with. Homeowners — many of whom snagged mortgage rates below 3% during the pandemic — are refusing to sell. The only safe haven for homebuyers has been new construction, but not for long, Conor warns: "The new-home market will join the resale market in dire-shortage territory by mid-2024." Read the whole thing.

The Black-White gap in the men's labor participation rate has all but disappeared, thanks to what Claudia Sahm says is "a remarkable four percentage-point jump in the rate the past three years." While this progress is a win, a significant unemployment gap remains. That's partly to do with the fact that Black men tend to have less upward economic mobility compared to White men, and they're also more likely to have a criminal record and experience discrimination and racism at the workplace. The government can do plenty of things to address these discrepancies, such as introducing new apprentice programs and making it easier for companies to hire former felons.

It's always a bit of a bummer when a seemingly good thing — lower gas prices!!! — turns out to be pretty bad for the planet. During the pandemic, Big Oil had to pause a bunch of refinery construction projects. Now, all those refineries are being built simultaneously, which Javier Blas says "may sound counterintuitive given efforts to ease the climate emergency." All that new capacity means that the cost of fuel production is going down. Lower prices at the pump are great news for Jerome Powell — and your bank account — but Mother Nature is taking an L.