Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. There's always been a lot of questions about Bohemian Grove ever since Richard Nixon was caught on tape talking about it, since Alex Jones infiltrated it and gave us some shocking footage from inside. But this one is actually a much more pedestrian problem.
Let's gohead. Put this up there on the screen.
The actual workers at Bohemian Grove are suing the elite club for wage theft. What they say is that Bohemian Grove, despite being a billion air playground, is accused of failing to pay overtime and not giving them enough breaks. In fact, one worker described members as obscenely wealthy, with private jets, multimillion dollar cars, two hundred thousand dollars watches homes on
the beach in Malibu. They said that they would have to perform tasks that or beyond their job duties, including such as one instance where a billionaire member forgot to bring underwear to the camp and the valets were asked to hand wash it. They explained over the years, the conditions overwork, lack of pay for overtime, lack of breaks worsening despite promises for workers do better. They include quote kind words from some of the very wealthy members friendship
coworkers coming back year after year for their job. It's still going on, and they say that even if you work twenty three and a half hours a day, your daily rate is still your daily rate. So surprised to no one, the billionaire kind of secretive hub remains a place where their staff apparently doesn't get treated very well. And you know, if you're going to ask a guy to hand wash your underwear, you may want to pay him well. Is when you're at worth that much so that he doesn't talk about it.
In the press.
I mean, that's the thing, is like these people could afford to treat these workers like very well, and then you wouldn't have this lawsuit and all these embarrassing claims out in the press, and to get more specific, they say that the Bohemian Grove treasure Bill Dawson has personally directed workers to falsify payroll records and to work off the clock.
The valets here say.
They were only paid for eight hours despite working sixteen plus hours a day, sixteen plus hours a day without breaks for the duration of the fourteen day summer camp. Another allegation claims a worker was directed to hide from a payroll employee when they made a surprise visit to the camp as they were being paid under the table. We just want this to stop, said a former valet at the camps to requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the clubs or members.
I mean, this is like.
Our whole society just in a nutshell right here, workers being used in abuse, these incredibly wealthy, powerful, secretive billionaires thinking that just them being like offering them some kind words is all they really want and need, not like actually getting paid for the hours that they're working and not being treated like indentured servants.
Unbelievd. I mean, it's just it's too perfect.
Honestly, it is a bit too perfect. So there you go. The latest from Bohemian Grove. Will keep everybody updated and we'll see you later.
So if you have existed online, you are probably aware of a new phenomena where a number of orcas has been attacking primarily yachts off the Iberian Peninsula. And apparently, so the story goes, according to scientists, there may have been one Orca that originally was traumatized by one of these boats, learned how to ram and disable them, and
has taught her Orca friends how to do. They're riding back and that has really captured the imagination of people online who've been talking about in Orca uprising against the yachts. So onque of course, the Atlantic has to come in as a buzzkill for everyone involved and pen this way too self serious piece, go on and put it up on the screen titled killer whales are not our friends? Stop rooting for the Orcas ramming boats. This is by Jacob Stern. I'll read you a little bit at the
beginning so you get a sense of it. In recent months, orcas and the waters off the Iberian peninsul have taken a ramming boats. The animals have already sunk three this year, damaged several more. After one of the leavest incidents, in which a catamaran lost both of its runners, the boat's captain suggested the assailants have grown stealthier and more efficient. Looks like they knew exactly what they're doing, he said.
Scientists have documented hundreds of orca boat incidents off the Spanish Portuguese coast since twenty twenty, but news coverage of these attacks is blowing up right now, thanks in part to a creative new about why they're happening.
Couldtation vengeance? Now that's a story.
This author then goes on to talk about how you shouldn't like, idealize or anthropomorphize orcas, and that if you want to do that, they're actually really brutal and terrible. Though recent events may fit the story of these organs being anti colonial warriors. Lol, you can't just anthropomorphize animals selectively. What about all the other evidence we have of orc
as cruelty or even wickedness. Scientists say they hunt and slaughter sharks by the dozen, picking out the liver from each one and leaving the rest of the carcasses.
To rot Uneaten orc is killed for sport.
They push, drag, and spin around live prey, including sea turtles, seabirds, and sea lions. Some go as far as to risk breaching themselves in order to snag a baby seal, not to consume, but simply to torture it to death. Once you start applying human ethical standards to apex predators, things turn dark. Fasts your views on hashtag ORCA uprising.
I mean, I still support them. Yeah, they're vicious killers, but so are a lot of things in the animal kingdom. So what I mean it's also like, yeah, like you said, why are we taking this so seriously in general? I mean, look, even if they are the vicious demons of the sea, we're the ones who are hurting them, So like, why shouldn't they make us? Yeah, exactly, we're the vicious demons of the land. I guess whenever you look at it. So I thought, the whole thing is a bit silly.
And I also I don't like though that he's actually falling into the trap of so called anthropomorpha right, portraying it as somehow putting a value judgment on killing baby seals. It's like, okay, well, actually, a huge number including us not that long ago of species in the animal kingdom kill their young like it happens quite often, including our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. Bears literally eat many of their
young sometimes. I believe in some cases where there's like a offspring of another alpha male who's killed, that all of their offspring will just be killed. It's part par for the course in the animal kingdom. That's the brutality if you even think it's brutal of evolution. In many ways, it's actually a very elegant system. So it's one of those where I get annoyed at this value judgment on
the orca itself. And I think that any time, and this is a little Ted Kaczynski hat coming on, where you see things in the wild evolve as a system to try and push back against the encroachment of mankind, can't help but cheer for it.
Just the thing that just to me was so funny is like everyone's joking about, like everyone's having a good time on the internet with this right making memes doing their thing, pretending that the orcas are anti colonial warriors like they said, And then you have to come in and do this like very self serious analysis of well, actually they kill baby cereals and blah blah, bless, like no one was actually thinking that the orcas were like
the vanguard of the revolution. Here, guys, everyone's just having fun on the internet. I liked some of their responses to this piece. One of them said they're not called best friend whales after all. Another one said did a yacht right, which I thought was pretty good. And then also regards to like the rogan RFK thing, there were a bunch of like one hundred thousand dollars to be the orca thing. So anyway, that's the state of the discourse.
I'm with the organs.
I still think organs are cool.
I think what they do is brutal, but I think a lot of things that are in the animal Kingdom are brutal in facts, that's what I think is cool. Some interesting developments in the social media world. It looks like Mark Zuckerberg will be launching a new Twitter competitor. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen.
They are calling it Threads. It will be was code named inside of the company called Project ninety two, and screenshop screenshots suggest it will feature continuous scroll of text like Twitter with buttons similar to like and to retweet. Ryan, You've been looking into this a little bit for us. What do you know what's going on here?
So basically what's coming out of Facebook is they think that Facebook is I mean sorry, they think that Twitter is quite vulnerable advertising revenue collapsing. And you've got a lot of liberals, kind of liberals freaking out about it leaving. And you've got they're thinking is that athletes and celebrities, which which once made Twitter, you know, the kind of place that it was for everybody to be, are themselves
with me. Because if if the journalists are going somewhere else, then the athletes and the celebrities who are there because the journalists are there that are going to go somewhere else as well. And so what they're doing is they're linking it up with Instagram but making it a separate account.
So the way it would work is that if you're on Instagram, you can port your user name over and you can alert all of your followers that you're that you're over there, and your blocklists, your safety features that people appreciate over at Instagram, know the ways those will all carry over.
To the other thing. And so they're really gearing this toward I think.
The kind of people who are interested in a Mastadon or a Blue Sky, And in fact, they're saying it will be interoperable with Mastadon.
See that's where I'm confused.
How would it be interoperable Because Masdenon is a decentralized I'm assuming they're building it on top of that arc.
So this would also be decentralized as well. And so they're reaching directly out to a bunch of celebrities and athletes trying to convince them to come over, which is the opposite of Elon Musk's approach, which is to reach out directly to celebrities and athletes and insult them, try to try to try.
Well.
See that's the fascinating part here, which is in terms of how you can actually get this going, you would need a actual network of people. Because we talk about this all the time. We had Jack Dorsey on the show very recently. We asked them about it. And you know, the whole point of Twitter is that everybody's on Twitter, right, you know, it's the network effect of all of that. So when you start an alternative, you going after elite users is smart because you know, Twitter is really only
used by some ten percent of its user base. It's more like everybody follows those people and to the extent they engage with that they're engaging with like replies, retweets of those individual very small select group.
The problem though, is that.
You still need the masses of people to make it in an effective communication tool. That said, it's not a smart it's not a dumb play because you look at this company, it's in turmoil. You know, people, whether people are engaged or using it, nobody knows based on the data. If there was ever a time where you might be able to replace it, it could be Now Facebook has
good relationship with advertisers. They obviously if they've got the cash and the money to burn as much as possible to try and prop it up for as long as needed.
So maybe it'll work. I don't know.
And if it does work, what it would probably wind up being is a liberal Twitter, right, and which would fit into the way that we're kind of splintering in our social media world that it's basically impossible, kind of to build these mono platforms anymore where everybody is on board, because you already see an over on Blue Sky. As you see conservative people start to join right, then you then see a reaction of people saying, well, I'm quiting
if this person's over over here. Like the idea that you're everybody can be on the same platform seems very It seems quaint at this point, and so I could imagine it being uh, you know, it would run from the left to the never trumpers.
Yes, it's very possible.
No, No, I mean I think the use case is there for a small number of political users. The question is it there for everybody else. Let me give you an example. I Well, one of the ways that I relax is I like to listen to like business podcasts, like stuff that has nothing to do with politics. You know, it's been interesting for me and for Crystal, Like we never you know, intended to become small business people and suddenly we're running a business and it's like it's it's fun
for me to listen and to engage. For example, I'm giving this examples business Twitter, So like I'm looking at all these entrepreneurships. Some of these people are really annoying and they're faking, you know, their business. But somebody you learned some cool stuff there anytime I get into a sub watches for example, or I like the watch if this is actually an Omega swatch, the Moon swatch, and
you know, let's start looking. You know, if you engage with it a little bit, you'll find these fascinating threats.
You know.
That's where I don't know if the user base of current Twitter, I think they're fine.
You know, watch Twitter.
They don't care about the vigureship, whatever's going Watch.
I think Watch, We're just gonna stay. There's nothing wrong with current Twitter. There's nothing wrong with you know, the men's wear guy.
I love that guy, by the way, Derek Guy on Twitter. He's a Here's lib.
But you gotta give it to him. The man knows that address. He's got great taste. His threads you know, and stuff are very useful. I don't see like there's there's nothing wrong for his with Twitter. For him right now, right like, it's actually working well. There are multiple different Twitter subcultures that I live in and engage with, of which censorship is just not an issue. Like and from what I've been told, NBA, Twitter is lit.
It's so much fun.
If you ever watch TV, if you're engaged in like shows I like to watch trashy reality TV sometime my fiance. My fiance tells me that Love Island Twitter is the best Twitter, right, So for them, you know, they don't they're not having issues, so that you and I could talk about here with all of that's the real success. You know, you have to be able to get normy stuff that has nothing to do with politics over. I just question whether that will pour it over to Yeah.
Actual it's a competitor. It's a real question, and.
It raises a question of what was it that originally brought everybody over to Twitter? And in my kind of oral history of it, I would say that it was in you know, twenty eight nine ten. Journalists, whether it's
sports journalists, political journalists, are there. Watch journalists, Ye, there are actually watching, Yes, shout out to because because the watch journalists were there and the big watchmakers, yeah, are going to be there and so and then people are going to like watching the kind of engagement back and forth between the watchmakers and the watch journalists.
And same with sports.
Same of course in politics you don't have the same kind of world of journalism that you had in twenty ten'rue. And so even if you did get everybody from CNN and MSNBC in the New York Times to join this new Twitter.
If they end up calling it threads or whatever.
That doesn't necessarily mean the same to the public because what the old Twitter is. Because all the journalists were there, then the politicians were there, and then the politicians realized that they had to be authentic if they wanted to get any engagement.
And then people were like, oh, wow, we're actually engaging.
I can yell at a politician and the right and they care about and they actually, we'll do something about it too. But if the politicians don't believe that the journalists have the same power that they used to, then they're not going to engage in the same way.
So I don't know. It depends on what kind of world we live in whether or not this can be recreated. Maybe it can. Maybe this is a river that has just and the water is flown.
By maybe right.
Yeah, I'm not so sure a competitor will work, but I'm interested.
I always like looking at new stuff.
You know, something that I think a lot of people, including me, who thought that social media was dead and was over, was the rise of TikTok TikTok completely cannibalized Instagram, it nuked a lot of short form video competitors, and it's the unequivocal winner in the social media war within just a couple of years in the United States. So, you know, put the Chinese complaints about it aside, of which I very much agree with. But as a matter
of tech, it worked. I mean, it disrupted the industry completely. So that is you know, sho, we shouldn't count these things out before they happen. I'm a little bit skeptical, but again, like I said, you never know.
Hey, folks, it's Kink Clippin sign with breaking Points, the Intercept edition. I want to talk to you today about my new story titled Pentagon's Secret Service troll social media for mean tweets about generals. Let's get element one up on the screen there. So when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milly enters into his scheduled retirement later this year, one of the perks he'll enjoy will be a personal security detail to protect him from threats,
including even embarrassment. That's right, your tax dollars will pay for this via the Pentagon's equivalent to the Secret Service, and that's called the US Army Protective Services Battalion. The battalion is tasked with safeguarding top military brass from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the Secretary of Defense. The unit protects these current as well as former and retired high ranking military officers from assassination, kidnapping, injury, or embarrassment.
And that's a direct quote from Army records that I'd like to show you, guys on Element two on the screen now. So this reporting is based on a number of obscure government documents I obtained in which I'm going to show you during this episode. So you don't have to take my word for any of this, and I don't blame you if you don't, because a lot of
it is pretty outrageous. To give you some background, the battalion has existed under a number of different names going back to nineteen seventy one, but more recently it expanded its mandate to include, let's get Element three on the screen now, monitoring social media for quote direct, indirect and veiled threats, as well as identifying quote negative sentiment regarding the people that it protects. According to a procurement document,
dated twenty twenty two. So the country's national security apparatus has become pretty obsessed with disinformation and social media, particularly after the twenty sixteen election, as I've reported on this show before, and as a consequence of that, agencies and offices have sprouted like daisies and just proliferated all across the federal government to try to respond to.
This purported threat.
Protective details of the past.
Generated a know, a pretty fair amount of controversy, particularly the trub administration might recall his Education Secretary of Bessie Devas, had an around the clock security detail that racked up over twenty four million dollars in costs, led to a huge scandal whole news cycle. Sam was the case with Scott Pruitt, who ran up over three point five million dollars and led to a Inspector General report that said, you know, what was the reason for any of this?
That they weren't very persuaded by the threats that he alleged. But now that it's the Biden administration, you don't hear much about this stuff anymore. But so the procurement document that I described before, which I obtained an unredacted copy of describes the armi's need to quote mitigate online threats as well as identify positive or negative sentiment about top defense officials. Let's get element four up on the screen
now to quote from it. It says that the Battalent has a requirement to provide services to the Department of Defense officials in order to mitigate online threats direct indirect or veiled, as well as identify positive or negative sentiment about these senior high risk personnel. Let's get element five
on the screen now. So here, the document goes on to describe the software it would used to do that, and that that is a reliable threat mitigation social media threat mitigation service, a web based toolkit with advanced capabilities to publicly to collect publicly available information, and also to provide the military with anonymity. When it goes about doing that, I mean, that's a really interesting point. Why do they need the anonymity?
They don't say so.
Long story short, your texts are paying for the Pentagon to monitor social media and things like negative sentiment and direct indirect or failed threats. What any of that means is your guest as good as mine, Because they don't define any of it and When I went to go ask them for comment, as I always do, they wouldn't.
They didn't have an answer for me. But what we do know is that they're they're putting money towards trying to meet these threats and and and protect these generals from whatever or however it is that they define veiled and indirect threats and negative sentiment. So make that what you will. Once again, I'm Kinklbin sign with Breaking Points Center Set Edition. Thanks so much for joining me. Guys.
Hey, I'm Matt Stoler, author of monopoly focused substack newsletter Big and an anti trust policy analyst. Have a great segment for you today on this Big Breakdown. It's an anti trust analysis of the proposed merger between the PGA Tour and the Saudis Live Golf, which was announced about two weeks ago. It actually already feels like quite a while and the narrative on the deal since it was first announced has completely changed, So I'm going to go into that as well. Okay, so let me give you
the TLDR. The deal is already falling apart. Now, first, let's start at the beginning. Here's c NBC's David Faber going on the details of what happened the day of the announcement.
The PGA Tour and at Saudi back competitor Live Golf, along with Europe's DP World Tour, have agreed to merge in expectation of creating a global entity for the game of golf. The agreement, which is not yet a definitive agreement, the hostility between Live and the PGA, along with the litigation between the parties, and it calls for the giant Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund PIF, which created Live, to invest significant I'm told what will be billions of dollars into the new entity.
That's over time.
Okay, So it was a big deal. It was a huge deal.
It was announced globe changing, you know, the Saudi's geopolitical like changing the world of golf, like Donald Trump was involved as sort of a massive, massive thing.
But here is the gist of the term.
So this was according to the Athletic as best as they could tell.
Okay.
So the tour is receiving upwards of two to three billion dollars plus all the litigation between the two parties, and there's a lot of it, and it's very bitter. Is going away now the background to this deal, as far as we can tell, and there here's important context is that the PGA Tour has been the ruler of pro golf for many decades. In nineteen ninety four, for example, the Federal Trade Commission actually investigated the PGA Tour for monopolization.
But Congress back then was, as one would expect, a fan of old rich golfers, and Congress actually threatened to cut the budget of the anti trust enforcers by twenty percent if they went ahead with a case. So the FTC said, okay, we'll drop the complaint. The vote was four to zero, and until twenty twenty one, that's pretty much how things in the world of pro golf remained. Then, the Saudi government, through its public investment funder PIFF, decided to finance a competitor to the PGA Tour.
It's called Live Golf. Now.
Live Golf started learning top players and putting on rival events, and it created competition in the space.
Wasn't profitable.
It was a sort of a geopolitical push, but it did create real competition for the first.
Time in many decades.
Now, part of this is that the two entities have been in a bitter antitrust suit over the nature of this competition, and it's been going on for about a year. There are allegations of anti competitive behavior on the part of the PGA Tour, and the PGA Tour itself is under investigation by the government.
Yet again. Now the story gets weirder.
As I noted, Donald Trump is involved with his properties hosting live golf events put on by his Saudi allies. He really wants in on professional golf money and PGA Tour prestige. Now, if you read the antitrust complaint filed against the PGA Tour last year, it seems pretty clear that the PGA Tour has been a problematic ruler of pro golf going back decades, but especially now when they
actually face arrival. So quote, members of the tour receive a substantially lower percentage of the tour's revenues than professional athletes in other major sports end quote. That's what the players argued when Live began challenging the PGA Tour. It quote threatened lifetime bands on players who play in even a single live golf event and threaten sponsors, vendors, and agents to coerce players to abandon opportunities to play in live golf events.
End quote.
Now this bitterness, but also the general competition is consistent with pretty much all sports leagues. Rivalry and sports leagues tends to push up compensation for players, and consolidation tends to do the opposites what you'd expect with monopoly. When you are selling sports services as an athlete to one entity, you're a price taker. When you have a choice of two,
they have to bid for your services. Okay, So to ward off the new competition, the strategy of the PGA Tour they want to maintain their monopoly, was to denigrate live golf as funded by murderous thugs. And because of the Saudi government's bad track record here on human rights, I mean, they're murderous thugs, a lot of players refuse to play in the new league. So this merger docked everyone who believed the PGA Tour's human rights rhetoric.
Those who believed it. Of course.
Now on a broader level, the public discussions were initially quite frantic about the rise of Saudi influence. Here's a headline in the New York Times the day of the deal. Oh my god, the Saudis are so influential now they
weren't influential before. I saw Tom Friedman and Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC the morning of the announcement wondering whether the Saudis could do the same thing to the NBA or other sports leagues as part of this giant geopolitical play to control athletics, as if athletics is not already dominated by huge sums of money and corporate power. But let's ask a different question. Is this deal legal? Is it actually going to happen? After all, we have anti
trust laws that prohibit illegal mergers. There is a lot of gray area and anti trust law. You know, some mergers it's like it's not totally clear that it's going to reduce competition, so it's not clear that the Clayton Act applies. That's what a lot of cases are about. But here's the thing. When two companies, the only two companies, want to merge to a monopoly and they announce it as such, that's just a violation of black letter law.
And did that happen here? Well, for that, I'll go to the head of the PGA tour j Monaghan, who said that this merger is good for his organization because it allows them to quote take the competitor off.
The board end quote.
Okay, when a corporate leader publicly says the point of a merger is to monopolize a market and eliminate a competitor, I mean that's pretty crazy, and I can only imagine what's in the private correspondence that usually lawyers go through when putting together an anti trust case.
Now it's not just me saying this.
All of the anti trust nerds that I'm friends with or that I know were in total disbelief at the audacity of these deal makers. So scholar Herb Hobbin Camp, who's generally monopoly friendly and very well respected in the antitrust bar said that this merger would be problematic in at least three markets, so live attendance, TV, broadcast rights
and advertising and call for compensation. Now, given that Live Golf and the PGA Tour have been bidding aggressively for the services of golfers, it seems pretty obvious that this deal will monopolize at least one of those markets. So that's how we antitrust works. It's about markets, specific markets. So Herb hobbin Camp puts out three markets, but others can do it differently. Everybody agrees that there's just a
monopoly going on here. So now it is unusual for a corporate leader to announce he's doing a deal to remove a competitor. As Bloomberg reporter Leah Nylan reported, one reason he might be doing that is because quote, no antitrust lawyers were involved in the PGA Tour live discussions.
That's crazy.
Every merger of any size involves at least calling an anti trust lawyer and saying, hey, what do you think?
But not this one.
And so this choice to just not even talk to an anti trust lawyer when they actually have anti trust lawyers on retainers suing each other, it just doesn't make any sense.
Both the PGA Tour and Live Golf.
You know, they've got a big fight, and they didn't ask one of their anti trust lawyers to attend a meeting where they sought to merge to a monopoly. They also have deal maker lawyers, and it's well, they're not specialists in an anti trust like they know that, you know, two to one merger is illegal, So like what is going on here? And then there's the announcement itself, which
is pretty vague. Apparently after saying it's a merger. The PGA Tour is now saying it's not a merger, it's an alliance, or it's a joint company in which they will put all assets, or maybe it's a framework.
Who knows.
One very clear point for the PGA Tour is that whatever this deal is, it is intended to remove a competitor, and legally that is what matters. So as a result, most anti trust lawyers who have commented on this deal publicly, from the far right to the far left, have scoffed at the very notion that this deal as announced is legal. So I'm going to put a couple of tweets on the board. Here's the former White House Competition chief Tim Wu He's a Columbia law professor's focus on anti trust.
He tweeted the deal won't survive.
Libertarian anti trust lawyer Josh Wright, who's at George Mason, he mocked the combination and indeed it is a joke. Indeed, it's so stupid that the PGA Tour and the Saudis have managed to turn Congress somehow against rich white golfers.
That is on accomplishment.
So Senator Richard Blumenthal, for instance, has demanded that the Anti Trust Division look into the merger. The Anti Trust Division is looking into the merger, and now the deal is probably going to face a challenge from enforces.
It's like almost impossible not to.
It's just it's just disrespectful to just merge to monopoly, like doing a cocaine deal, giant cocaine deal in front of a police station. There's also going to be a congressional hearing.
Now. A different lawyer pointed out that.
It's it actually gets worse because it's not just the Department of Justice with jurisdiction, but Great Britain and the European enforcers also have jurisdiction because you know, it's a global compinsation, it's a global monopoly. So now you can get around anti trust if they just pass a law saying that anti trust doesn't apply in this particular case.
And that has happened.
So in nineteen sixty six, when the AFL and the NFL wanted to merge football leagues, Congress actually had to grant an exemption to anti trust law. A side note, the politician who did that was from Louisiana and he said, if I'm going to grant this exemption, you have to start a football team in New Orleans, and that's why we have the New Orleans Saints. So you can thank
anti trust for the New Orleans Saints. At any rate, The point here is that unless America, the American government, the European Union, and the British government all grant an anti trust exemption, as Congress did for football in sixty six, the deal seems kind of crazy. So okay, to put it nicely, the legal situation in dice is dicey, and that's starting to have impacts on the discussions of whether
the deal will actually go through. So large Wall Street players are now possibly involved on the side of the actual golfers. So the legal situation is, to be nice, dicey, and that's starting to have impacts on the discussions of whether the deal will actually go through. Large Wall Street players are now possibly involved on the side of the golfers. Let's take a listen to CNBC talking about this.
I'm also told that Patrick kent Lay, one of the players who's also a player director whose sponsor includes Goldman Sachs, is probably getting some good advice from the likes of Goldman Sacks. Here and has been an important voice here in terms of what are we going to get as players here for stepping up and saying yes to all of this, given that we were willing to accept a lot less to stay at the PGA, so to speak, than go to live golf.
In light of how a lot of the players, like top player Roy McElroy, are responding to player compensation in this deal, it's hard to see how it's gonna go smoothie for all sides without a lot more money being put into the actual arrangements. So let's take a listen to what he said.
Should the golfers who maybe stayed loyal and turned down live should they be made whole financially?
I mean, the simple answer is yes. The complex answer is hard.
Does that happen?
Let's just be real here. There's no actual reason to allow the merger. It doesn't have to happen. Unlike team sports such as football or baseball, golf is actually a sportive individuals, and it doesn't actually require leagues.
It's more like boxing.
You can have boxing matches without having boxing leagues. You can have lots of different types of tournaments. You don't need just one league for golf. In fact, that's what a bunch of the anti trust complaints and investigations have been about from the nineties to today. Now, obviously the PGA Tour and Saudi leaders understand at some level these legal and operational realities. The people who run the PIF are sophisticated. Sow's the PGA Tour. So what's really going on? Well, honestly,
I don't quite know. One possibility is that the Saudi government, which funded live golf through its sovereign Wealth Fund, is trying to avoid embarrassment. In February, a court ruled that the Saudis had to make their emails public in their antitrust suit with the PGA Tour. They claimed, Oh, we're a government, we don't have to do that. We're not like a regular company. Governments do have what's called sovereign immunity. But a judge said, look, you have sovereign immunity when
it's government business. But you guys are running a golf league. That's like you're more like a corporation. So yeah, you have to tell us what's going on. You have to give us your emails, and the Saudis don't want that. Neither's the PGA Tour, but they knew it was going to happen that the Saudis didn't. So one thing that's going on here is that their ending all litigation between Live Golf and the PGA Tour, and the Saudi emails
will remain private. It's true that there could be a merger challenge and so bad emails could come out even if they try to bring this merger to a completion. But a more likely path is that the Anti Trust Division at the Department of Justice investigates the deal, the Saudis drop their merger attempt before the trial, and Live.
Golf shuts down.
There could be some sort of Saudi investment in the PGA Tour later. Meanwhile, everyone gets the headlines now, which obscures the reality that the Saudis don't want emails made public and they can blame the Anti Trust Division for the collapse of Live Golf, even though what's really going
on is Live Golf was never profitable in the first place. Iterrate, something weird is going on here, and if the deal goes through, which I don't think it will, it's likely because of high level political decision from the Bidy administration, the EU and the British government to move it through as a favor to the Saudis.
I don't think that's going to happen. It's easier just let.
Live Golf die and then have the Sadis make a separate, unrelated investment in a few years, or really not even do that.
There are a lot of other possibilities.
Maybe they'll find a way to do some sort of investment or change the terms to make the deal palatable, though honestly I can't see how they do that and make it legal. But when you're dealing with Saudi Arabia, Donald Trump Global, you can get to things like money laundering, arms dealing, espionage, weird diplomacy, and all sorts of other conspiratorial stuff.
And I don't like speculating on that.
Because it's like seeing ripples on an ocean and trying to guess what's happening beneath. But one thing I can say is that this deal in its current form doesn't make any sense, and that's starting to become clear. Thanks for watching this big breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up in the in the description below for my market power focused newsletter.
Big thanks and have a good one.