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    The Caretaker of Muncy Farms

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    In November 1940, four children showed up after dark at a stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. They arrived by car down a long dirt driveway. The headlights illuminated the tall elm trees surrounding the manor house, and the rooms inside were lit up brightly.Brian, Susan, Sheila and Malcolm Barlow, ages 12 to 5, had just endured the blackout of the London Blitz, the German bombing during World War II.To protect her children, Violet Barlow, their mother, had placed them on a boat from England to Canada, a 3,000-mile journey. The children then took a train to New York City, where they spent several weeks in immigration limbo, and then got on another train to the small town of Muncy, Pa.Awaiting them was Margaret Brock, who owned the farmhouse and country estate called Muncy Farms, dating to 1769 and set on more than 800 acres of fields and woods along the Susquehanna River. Muncy Farms was once part of a 7,000-acre estate. The original stone farmhouse dates to 1769. Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. “It was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie à la Mode,” he said. “A very British dinner.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Musk’s Tweet-Fueled Bubble May Be About to Burst

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      Elon Musk’s business empire may be starting to wobble.Over the past six weeks, the value of Tesla’s shares has plunged about 40 percent, wiping out virtually all they had gained after the 2024 election. This reversal reveals Mr. Musk’s soft underbelly: His fortune depends heavily on the inflated expectations of his rabid following. As those expectations deflate so will his power, demonstrating that financial markets are an underappreciated guardrail against both Mr. Musk’s and President Trump’s agendas.It is tempting to compare Mr. Musk to the true business titans of the past quarter century such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But those individuals created genuinely huge businesses that eclipse anything Mr. Musk has built by any possible metric. While Mr. Musk has built a car company from the ground up — no easy feat — his wealth is largely thanks to a financial cult, one in which legions of dazzled investor-followers have enabled him to launch an ever-growing list of disparate initiatives and provided immunity from critics who question his operational decision-making, his corporate governance, his obscene pay packages, and now his migration into the political sphere.The high-wire act goes something like this: Dream up a business so ambitious that any setback is trivial and every accomplishment heroic. Identify yourself as the manic genius behind this ambitious business in order to personally capitalize on outsize returns from excited investors. Enlist social media to cement your iconic status, keeping your believers so enthusiastic that their fervor beats back any skeptics who dare to bet against your ventures, even as you pitch more and more fantastical ideas. At this point you hit the flywheel: Other investors, searching for outsize returns, flock to the shares of your other companies, pushing their valuations ever higher, thus fortifying your wealth and burnishing your reputation as a business mastermind.If you’re lucky, this happens when investors are dreaming of alternatives to the poor returns available when interest rates are ridiculously low; magical thinking about the power of technology suppresses any worry about the risks of problems down the line; and retail markets are turning stock trading into something more akin to online gambling.Understanding this cult requires one to rethink what one knows about finance. Financial purists like to think of financial markets as neutral arbiters that merely record the value-creating activities of entrepreneurs. Financial pragmatists understand that prices need not always reflect value, as behavioral finance has demonstrated. But what if entrepreneurs can capitalize on these dynamics to manufacture fortunes and political power?This trick is precisely what Mr. Musk has mastered. His messianic status, which was birthed in the explosion of social media, created a powerful cycle of outsize returns on ventures that lead to investors providing him with more and cheaper capital to diversify his empire that, in turn, attracts yet more investors fearful of missing out. Skyrocketing Tesla shares have made fans and investors so devoted that all he has to do is mention a new ambition to goad them into buying even more. And the larger the stated ambition, the more wealth and power they hand him. So why not try for Mars? The final step in this process is to consolidate power in the political sphere to ensure that the outsize ambitions can be nourished forever. If Mr. Musk had played it well, his empire may have been impregnable.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nicole Shanahan Puts Money Into Effort to Recall Karen Bass

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      Nicole Shanahan, who pumped millions into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign last year and joined him on the ticket, is now backing an effort to remove Mayor Bass of Los Angeles.The first serious effort to recall Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles after the city’s devastating fires is taking shape, with financial backing from Nicole Shanahan, who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in last year’s presidential election.Ms. Shanahan’s involvement in the push to remove the mayor was disclosed on the bottom of a website for the Recall Karen Bass Committee, which listed her as the sole donor providing “major funding.” Ms. Shanahan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Shanahan, a onetime Silicon Valley lawyer, could bring financial firepower to the effort: She has a fortune in the realm of $1 billion that stems largely from her divorce settlement with Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder. She has also demonstrated a willingness to pour her wealth into politics, spending more than $15 million to support Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.Ms. Bass has come under pressure for her handling of the enormous wildfires that struck Southern California in January, destroying thousands of homes as fire hydrants ran out of water. She has also faced criticism for being out of the country when the fires hit.Those hoping to recall Ms. Bass must first clear several hurdles, however. Once their campaign is approved, they must gather 330,282 valid signatures of Los Angeles voters to qualify the question for the ballot. Ms. Shanahan said last month that she believed it would cost $4 million to collect 400,000 signatures.And in recent years, several attempts to remove officials in Los Angeles have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot. In 2022, a high-profile effort to recall George Gascón, the district attorney at the time, did not collect enough valid signatures. Attempts to recall Los Angeles City Council members have also failed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

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      Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      World’s Priciest Dinosaur Fossil Comes to Museum of Natural History

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      The billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, who bought the stegosaurus fossil for $44.6 million, is loaning it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for four years.The most expensive dinosaur fossil ever sold at auction, a stegosaurus that the billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin bought over the summer for $44.6 million, has a new home: the American Museum of Natural History in New York.The museum announced on Thursday that it would be the first institution to exhibit the sought-after stegosaurus, as part of a four-year loan from Griffin.“It’s one of the dinosaurs that every kid knows how to draw,” Sean M. Decatur, the museum’s president, said in an interview this week before the dinosaur was revealed. “This is a unique opportunity to have something that simultaneously, I think, really resonates in the public imagination about dinosaurs, but also from a research standpoint, is really a pretty special specimen to understand.”The mounted stegosaurus was revealed from behind a billowing beige curtain on Thursday morning to reporters, photographers, museum employees and a group of elementary school children. It is scheduled to go on view to the public on Sunday after it is fully prepared for exhibition.The Sotheby’s sale of the unusually complete specimen — which is nicknamed Apex — shattered records in the booming fossil market. And it established a new king of the dinosaur world, at least in the eyes of the auction market: The stegosaurus dethroned the Tyrannosaurus rex, the previous record-holder.But the auction also stoked fears among academic paleontologists that museums and universities were being priced out of their research field by well-heeled private collectors. After purchasing the stegosaurus, Griffin, the founder and chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, said he intended to lend the specimen to an American institution so it would be available to scientists and the public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

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      Trump Picks Warren Stephens, Billionaire Investment Banker, for U.K. Ambassador

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      Warren Stephens, an investment banker and billionaire who donated to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s rivals before eventually supporting him in the 2024 race, was tapped as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Britain on Monday.The selection of Mr. Stephens for the ambassadorship, a plum posting that often goes to one of the largest donors to presidential campaigns, was in part a nod to the American Opportunity Alliance, a big-money network of Republican donors in which Mr. Stephens plays a leadership role. Mr. Trump and the alliance had a tense relationship at times over the course of his campaign.In 2016, Mr. Stephens, the chief executive of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank based in Little Rock, Ark., gave $2 million to a group dedicated to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination. During the most recent election cycle, he backed other Republican presidential candidates, including Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.Beginning in April, after it became evident that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Mr. Stephens donated over $3 million to support his campaign, according to federal campaign finance reports. He also donated $3.5 million to Mr. Trump’s super PACs in 2019 and 2020 during his re-election campaign.During his first term, Mr. Trump named another financial backer of his campaign, Woody Johnson, as ambassador to Britain.In a statement posted on social media, Mr. Trump praised his new pick for “selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist.”“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” the president-elect said. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”Theodore Schleifer More

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      Elon Musk recibe un curso intensivo sobre cómo funciona el mundo de Donald Trump

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      La persona más rica del mundo, no muy conocida por su humildad, está aprendiendo la despiadada política cortesana del círculo íntimo de Donald Trump, y su influencia final sigue siendo una incógnita.Durante los primeros 53 años de su vida, Elon Musk apenas pasó tiempo con Donald Trump. Luego, a partir de la noche del 5 de noviembre, básicamente no pasó tiempo sin él.Y así, Musk, más que cualquier otro actor clave en la transición presidencial, se encuentra en un entrenamiento intensivo para aprender la política cortesana del círculo íntimo de Trump. Para la persona más rica del mundo —no muy conocida por su humildad o su paciencia— es un reto de ingeniería social mucho más difícil y menos familiar que la fabricación pesada o la ciencia de cohetes.Abundan las dudas sobre si se graduará en 2028 con un título de cuatro años en Trumpismo: en este momento, en Washington y Silicon Valley, es como un juego de salón especular cuánto durará la relación Musk-Trump. La respuesta, como te dirán los asesores descartados del primer mandato de Trump, puede depender de la capacidad de Musk para aplacar al jefe y mantener un perfil relativamente bajo, pero también para apuñalar a un rival cuando llegue el momento.En resumen, cómo jugar a la política en el mundo de Trump.La mayoría de las personas que rodean actualmente a Trump en la transición son ayudantes curtidos en batallas anteriores o amigos personales desde hace décadas. Musk no es ni lo uno ni lo otro. Lo que aporta en cambio son sus 200 millones de seguidores en X y los aproximadamente 200 millones de dólares que gastó para ayudar a elegir a Trump. Ambas cosas han impresionado mucho al presidente electo. Trump, asombrado por la disposición de Musk a despedir al 80 por ciento del personal de X, ha dicho que el multimillonario de la tecnología ayudará a dirigir un Departamento de Eficiencia Gubernamental junto con Vivek Ramaswamy.Musk mostró a Trump y a legisladores republicanos la sala de control antes del lanzamiento de un cohete de SpaceX el martes, en el sur de Texas. Foto de consorcio de Brandon BellWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

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      Trump Keeps the Tax Cut Promises Coming, Now for Americans Abroad

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      Former President Donald J. Trump suggested that he would try to reduce taxes for Americans living abroad, the latest in an expensive string of tax cuts he has promised to different voting groups during the presidential campaign.Americans who live outside the United States must still file tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service. That means in some instances, Americans living abroad pay taxes to both the United States and a foreign government, creating so-called double taxation. Many other countries collect taxes from people living and working within their borders but not on their citizens living abroad.In a statement, which was provided earlier to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump said he would eliminate the practice. “I support ending the double taxation of overseas Americans!”But, as with many of Mr. Trump’s campaign tax pledges, it was unclear what exactly he envisions changing. Americans living in other countries don’t always owe taxes both there and in the United States. They can already discount taxes paid to another government from their U.S. tax bill, and those making less than $126,500 don’t owe anything to the I.R.S.Higher-income Americans living in countries with low taxes are more likely to owe additional taxes in the United States. Mr. Trump’s idea, depending on how it is ultimately drafted, could encourage wealthy Americans to move to tax havens overseas to avoid taxes.During his campaign, Mr. Trump has expressed support for a wide variety of seemingly simple, but potentially far-reaching, tax cuts aimed at specific groups of voters. He has said Social Security benefits should no longer be taxed, a bid for support from retirees, and suggested that tipped income and overtime pay should not be taxed, proposals that he has framed as benefits for working Americans.“Fellow Americans living abroad, your vote is more important than ever,” Mr. Trump said in the statement. “No matter where you are, your voice can make a difference.”Mr. Trump’s campaign promises come on top of the Republican goal to extend many of the tax cuts from his signature legislative achievement while president, a 2017 tax law. Many of those tax cuts expire after 2025. The cost of continuing those cuts is significant, and together all of Mr. Trump’s plans could cost $7.5 trillion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan budget group.Mr. Trump has also repeatedly said he would raise tariffs on imports to the United States to pay for his tax cuts, which would effectively shift the country’s tax burden to lower-income Americans. Those Americans spend more of their money on consumer items that could get more expensive because of the tariffs.Vice President Kamala Harris has attacked Mr. Trump’s tax plans, arguing that they would amount to a giveaway to the rich. She has pledged to raise taxes on corporations and Americans making more than $400,000 a year. More