PayPal Balloon Animal & Orange Achilles
How the market is not pricing companies. It’s pricing a cult.
Twisting It Into Shape
The PayPal economy is a balloon animal: what appears to be different parts are really one hollow body of inflating techno-nihilism. It is not connected by an ideology, but by the lack of one—it is a vision of a mechanized, digital void where people are ancillary to the machine they serve.
To inflate the balloon, however, the oligarchs who created it have crafted a series of narratives and social media dynamics designed to attract not investors but believers.
The market is no longer pricing the economics of companies. It is pricing their psychological control.
When Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and their allies helped propel Donald Trump back into the White House, they bought themselves a license to validate those beliefs, and to make themselves obscenely rich in the process. However, the balloon animal is stretched so far beyond any rational connection to objective reality that it must and will burst. The only questions are: how it happens, when it happens, and who will be there to rebuild after it happens.
Three Bears
I want to focus on three publicly traded securities: TSLA (Tesla), PLTR (Palantir), and BTC (Bitcoin). Here are the latest charts.
Just these three securities represent four trillion dollars in vapor. If the set of beliefs propping them up disappears, so will the price. This isn’t a bubble, it’s an extinction-level event in waiting for a wide section of the economy.
TSLA
One of the first things you learn about stocks is something called the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, which tells you how many years it would take the company’s earnings to pay back the price of a share. If a stock has a P/E of 10, it would take a decade for a complete return on investment. This is about what the average car company, like Toyota or Ford, trades for.
Tesla, on the other hand, currently trades at a P/E of 292, around 30 times the valuation of its peers. Why? Because it’s not a car company, it’s an alternate reality machine. It is the body of the balloon animal. This kind of valuation would have gotten you laughed out of Silicon Valley in the height of the dotcom era—I was there. But now it is at the center of another mass delusion.
Last week, Tesla gave its “Technoking”—as he is formally listed in corporate documents—Elon Musk, a one-trillion-dollar pay package, contingent on a set of milestones.
These numbers are effectively impossible to make, unless Musk achieves not just perfection in product vision and execution, but civilizational capture as well. Like his company’s valuation, the forecasted scenario is science fiction.
PLTR
Palantir may be the most dangerous company on the planet, but it’s just software with a bad attitude. There is no magic about it, other than its function is to be completely amoral in its quest to collect, weaponize, and profit from everyone’s personal data.
Palantir’s peers are generally valued in the 20-40 P/E range, while Peter Thiel’s surveillance platform is trading at well over 400. This means that were you to buy a share of PLTR—currently valued by the market at over $400 billion—it would take over four centuries for today’s earnings to pay you back. The growth required for this investment to pay off is even more outlandish science fiction than TSLA.
BTC
Simultaneously, the cryptocurrency market, which was created and promoted by the PayPal Mafia over 15 years ago, is another part of the balloon animal, bloating people like Donald Trump into paper billions, while retail investors gamble on derivatives like NFTs and meme coins. Bitcoin alone represents $2 trillion of unsecured faith. The only thing holding it up is belief—and when belief goes, the going gets rough.
Orange Achilles
Until Donald Trump, the PayPal Mafia was a relatively obscure group of libertarian Silicon Valley billionaires. They had their cultish followings to be sure, but it was only when Thiel helped Trump win in 2016 that their power to alter the political landscape became a currency they could actively trade on. Musk’s blatant interference in 2024 by buying Twitter and giving out million-dollar checks—along with Thiel’s insertion of JD Vance as VP—cemented their willingness, and ability, to rig the game for themselves.
However, this long-standing partnership between the PayPal Mafia and Donald Trump has created a deeply integrated and self-reinforcing ecosystem of identity, political, and financial beliefs—all of which relies on a degenerating 79-year-old narcissist to keep it energized.
As Trump’s ability to shape the beliefs of America goes, so does the ability of the PayPal Mafia to profit from it.
This is the inescapable Orange Achilles of not just the PayPal Mafia balloon, but the entire U.S. economy. The only time the Shiller CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted P/E) has been higher than it is right now was right before the dotcom crash in 2000. CAPE is currently significantly higher than it was before the 1929 Crash, which led to the Great Depression.
When Donald Trump chose a 1920s Great Gatsby party on Halloween Night, while his regime fought tooth and nail to deny 42 million people food stamps, it was the ghost of 1929 returning in plain sight. Trump knows, it seems, deep down, exactly where we’re headed. The PayPal Mafia surely do. They’re counting on being the winners left to pick up the pieces.
PayPal Global
As one largely unnoticed example of this dynamic, the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark started last week after being announced almost a year ago. His name is Ken Howery—and he was the first CFO of PayPal. He’s been friends with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk for three decades, and has a great deal of interest in the “Network State” cult, including a reported membership in the white nationalist network state startup Praxis Nation and its Thiel-backed benefactor Pronomos.
It has been well reported that Howery’s goal is to pressure Denmark into ceding control and resources if not outright ownership of Greenland, to American interests. This is of high strategic value to Elon Musk because of its natural resources and geographic location—and as raw physical territory for Thiel’s network states. This appointment comes after a long propaganda and narrative attack on Greenland by Trump, including reported undercover influence operations sanctioned by the U.S. government, and a performative visit by JD Vance.
In order for the PayPal balloon animal to stay inflated long term, they would need massive resources, both to build batteries and chips, and to provide the energy to run ever-larger data centers for AI. This is exactly what you would get if you acquired Greenland, Venezuela, and Nigeria, for example—all countries currently being targeted by Trump. This group of countries supplies: heavy and light crude, battery metals and rare earth elements (including neodymium and lithium), and strategic locations for projecting military power across three continents.
U.S. foreign policy is not being set in America’s best interests; it’s being set to support an attempt to corner the market on electric vehicles, AI, surveillance, satellites, and currency. Targeting Venezuela has nothing to do with drugs; Nigeria is not about an attack on Christianity; and Greenland is not a national security priority. These are all attempted hostile takeovers because a specific group of people needs specific stuff.
When Prosperity Gospel Smacks Into Reality
Throughout the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge and others of his stripe championed the unquestioned, permanent trajectory of the United States financial markets—the prosperity myth. Among Coolidge’s lines:
“The country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism.”—June 1924
“The business of America is business.”—Jan. 1925
“The financial stability of the country is unquestioned.”—Dec. 1926
Herbert Hoover inherited Coolidge’s narrative and continued it—while it disintegrated into the worst financial catastrophe in U.S. history, the Great Depression:
“The fundamental business of the country is sound.”—Oct. 25, 1929, two days before Black Tuesday
“The depression is over.”—Dec. 1930
“Prosperity is just around the corner.”—1932 campaign against FDR
These were weak presidents, not evil ones. Neither Coolidge nor Hoover would have tried to overthrow an election. But America desperately needed two things—empathy, and strength.
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”—FDR, Democratic Convention Acceptance Speech, July 2, 1932
By 1932, America was in no mood for platitudes, or empty promises, the narrative of prosperity had been shattered, and FDR leaned into it:
“Do not let anyone tell you that the crisis is only in your minds.” —FDR, Campaign Speech, Oct. 1932
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” —FDR, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
It was the trauma of the Great Depression and the shattering of American illusions that led to the New Deal—the very protections the PayPal Mafia and Donald Trump want to take away right now.
The Bubble Is Not Financial, It’s Civilizational
While one off-year election is not a permanent trend, last week’s drubbing by the Democrats was an early sign of dramatic discontent in the electorate. 62% of the population is unhappy with the current direction of the country. 63% of the country is unhappy with Donald Trump.
The balloon animal that’s been inflated over the last decade is not just political, not just economic, not just psychological—it’s metaphysical. The hollow nihilism of the billionaire—now trillionaire—class has merged with the narcissistic amorality of Trumpism. They are all part of the same empty system.
And this may be our saving grace.
When hard reality hits, when the narrative falls apart, it will all go at once. When part of the animal deflates, the next part will follow: Trump cannot survive without the PayPal Mafia; the PayPal Mafia cannot succeed without Donald Trump. They are locked in a permanent embrace while the rest of us get sicker and poorer and more fed up.
In 1929, the final blow came when the myth collapsed, not the market. There are no economic theories that support the current picture of the U.S. economy. It is all based on the ability of one broken man to keep a thinning balloon inflated, to keep America in a trance, so billionaires can keep twisting reality into increasingly impossible shapes—to steal the last century out from under us.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
—FDR, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937
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What an unbelievably scary as hell predicament this country is in right now,Jim. You've got you hand on the pulse of the dark sickness that's spreading around the World 🌎. Thank you, for your Lazer Focused insight, and will reStack ASAP 🙏
This is the best title ever