Summary
Dutch pension fund Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP sold its $585 million Tesla stake over concerns about Elon Musk’s “controversial and exceptionally high” pay package and unspecified labor conditions.
ABP previously voted against Musk’s performance-based compensation, which has faced shareholder lawsuits and judicial scrutiny.
A Delaware judge recently invalidated the pay package, citing insufficient shareholder approval.
While Tesla’s Model Y remains popular in the Netherlands, European sales fell 15% in 2024.
ABP stated the divestment was not politically motivated despite Musk’s ties to the Trump administration.
There are people like my younger brother who believe that Musk is a pure genius, likes Bezos a lot, and is entirely sold on the idea that billionaire philanthropy is somehow a good and positive thing for regular people.
christians in particular like to imagine that god blesses those who are “good” with wealth, and that therefore wealthy people must be “good” because otherwise they wouldn’t be wealthy.
This then gets absorbed into more secular thought with “well they’re successful so they must be skilled”.
Truth is, his daughter-grooming daddy owned an emerald mine in Apartheid South Africa and got his seed-money from that. So he’s neither “good” nor particularly “skilled.”
That’s funny, because prosperity gospel is just there to indiscriminately wrench away money from the most desperately impoverished people imaginable. To think, it’s doing double work by lionizing oligarchs. It’s the purest form of evil, if you ask me.
it’s not even prosperity gospel- that isn’t about being good. Just that god will make you rich if you make Joel Osteen and his ilk rich.
Funny how that doesn’t work. (and yes… it’s fucking evil.)
The way Osteen and the other demons justify their wealth is that God appointed it to them.
He’s not wrong, but he’s judging occasional donations to particular issues as neither ineffective, incomplete, nor completely toxic to direction of research, because he judges them in a vacuum and/or against a fake goal-post of ‘no research funding’ instead of 'broad research funding based on income tax that rich fucks would have paid in a world before Reagan dropped the bottom out '.
The mating habits of cannabis-injected left-handed greater eastern blue potter’s snails will get no money from rich fucks, DESPITE its follow-on application to cancer cure research based on the secretion rate inprovement and or testing options derived from massive population explosions with a kill switch.