This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member. The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and anywhere, they like. Except for …

One of the biggest events of the summer has been a mystery: When and where are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married? And when does everyone get to celebrate?

New details confirmed by The New York Times suggest a multiple-day event at Madison Square Garden, which an entertainment industry executive said Ms. Swift had rented.

The entertainment industry executive and another person with knowledge of the matter described the anticipated festivities: On July 2, the plans call for an intimate gathering of about 100 people at the Garden. The next day on July 3, about 1,000 guests would gather there for a splashier celebration, with possible stage appearances.

Seriously? You two are getting married at Madison Square fucking Garden? YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.

Never mind the Supreme Court upholding birthright citizenship — that was a foregone conclusion given that it is a totally unambiguous provision of the Constitution (although three Republican justices voted against it!). The important decision was handed down yesterday, when the Court, ruling on the Slaughter case — brought on behalf of an FTC commissioner arbitrarily fired by Donald Trump — overturned 90 years of precedent to give Trump dictatorial power over the regulatory machinery of the US government. The Court has now stripped regulatory agencies of their independence from Trump’s whims and corrupt practices. Even for an agency created by Congress with a specific mandate and responsibilities, Trump is now free to direct that agency to do something completely different, to fire any civil servants who don’t do whatever he wants, or to completely gut it so that it is unable to serve its function.

Notice that I said that Trump has been given dictatorial power. There have been many comments to the effect that a future Democratic president could make extensive use of these new powers, but this Court is utterly partisan. The moment a Democrat takes office, it will instantly decide that he or she has almost no discretionary power.

Various MAGA-adjacent parties, along with willfully blind centrists, are trying to sweep this ruling under the rug, hoping that the public doesn’t understand its meaning. In fact, even I am startled that the Wall Street Journal, whose reporting is normally excellent, barely mentions this astonishing act of Trump empowerment in its news section. Instead, it has posted only a misleading editorial, repeating the tendentious legal arguments of the Roberts radicals.

But you don’t have to take my word for how much this travesty matters. As the screenshot at the top of this post shows, the wannabe dictator is fully aware of how much the Roberts Court has undermined democracy in his favor. And he’s celebrating.

What I want to do in today’s post is enlarge on why Slaughter matters — and just how bad it is.

First, this decision is (almost) all about enabling corruption. Yes, there are ideological and policy aspects. But this Court decision is fundamentally about empowering Trump, not the presidency in general. And we know who and what Trump is. The normally soft-spoken Jared Bernstein says it clearly:

[G]iving this president such carte blanche is crazy. Name one firing or removal he’s made or attempted to make that was motivated by anything other than personal retribution, prejudice (it is not a coincidence that Lisa Cook is a Black woman), or personal greed.

The Court’s decision effectively eliminates government by professional civil servants who do their best to implement the law with government by henchmen and lackeys who will do whatever Dear Leader wants. And what he wants depends, above all, on who is most willing and able to enrich him, his family, and his cronies.

In my conversation with Lisa Graves posted yesterday, she gave the example of Jeff Yass, a billionaire who clearly purchased a complete reversal of Trump’s position on TikTok. The same has been true, on an even bigger scale, for policy toward cryptocurrency — which Trump denounced until it became clear that crypto was a way for corporations and super-rich individuals to funnel billions of dollars directly to him and his family.

Second, the Court’s sort-of carve-out for the Federal Reserve — for which, for the moment, the Court has preserved some of the protections the whole government had until now — looks even more hypocritical once we recognize the centrality of the issue of corruption.

As many people have noted, there is no conceivable argument under which the independence of monetary policy is somehow more sacred than the independence of regulation of critical areas such as antitrust policy, environmental policy, food and drug standards, and air safety.

Beyond that, Fed policy stands out as an arena in which the scope for corruption is relatively limited. While the Fed does play a role as a financial regulator, its key job is interest rate policy — and that’s basically choosing the setting on a single dial, with no room for favoritism. When the Fed raises rates, it raises rates for everyone, when it cuts rates it cuts them for everyone, with no way to exempt Trump cronies from rate hikes or give them selective rate cuts.

By contrast, the Federal Trade Commission can selectively reward some corporations by granting approval for the mergers they want while selectively punishing some corporations by denying approval for mergers. The Environmental Protection Agency can waive pollution regulations for some companies while enforcing them for others. And so on. And we know exactly what will determine which companies get favored treatment: It will be all about who greases Trump’s palm and puffs up his ego.

Why, then, give the Fed special treatment? Probably because the Court feared the market reaction if it allowed Trump to take immediate control. The Wall Street Journal editorial openly acknowledged this concern, explaining the carve-out for the Fed by saying: “the Chief and Justice Kavanaugh made the pragmatic judgment that they simply don’t trust Mr. Trump to run monetary policy.” But the last time I looked at the Constitution there wasn’t a special “unless it adversely affects the stock market” clause. Evidently, the Journal editorial board thinks it is only the little people who will be victims of Trump’s destruction of America’s regulatory institutions, while those who have big stock portfolios will be A-okay.

And they might be right given the trends in our economy. A headline in yesterday’s Journal:

“Resilient” is one way to put it. But who pays for this “resilience”? Profits have been soaring even as many workers’ wages fail to keep up with inflation. Indeed, profits as a share of national income keep rising:

It’s highly likely that a significant fraction of this rise reflects increased monopoly profits in an age of enshittification and the destruction of workers’ rights. And a major share of the rise in monopoly profits has, in turn, gone to enrich America’s oligarch class — the same class that is generously sharing some of its wealth with Trump and his family, in return for the favors. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, he can grant those favors free from legal restraint, as he completes his evisceration of the Federal Trade Commission — which is supposed to limit monopoly power — and the National Labor Relations Board, which is supposed to protect workers’ rights.

The stench of corruption and dictator-worship is overpowering.

NONMUSICAL CODA

The next three days are the anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg — days that deserve to be remembered. July 1:

SpaceX had its initial public offering last week. Now Elon Musk is a trillionaire on paper. But what is SpaceX? On one level, of course, SpaceX is a company that builds rockets and spacecraft and launches them into space. (Occasionally the rockets explode.) It is also the company that birthed Starlink, a satellite-internet business that generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year.

But the company can be defined in many ways. SpaceX is a financial instrument for Musk. Before the IPO, SpaceX acquired xAI, Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, which itself acquired X, the social-media site, back in 2025. The maneuver allowed SpaceX to claim that it believed it had “the largest actionable total addressable market in human history”: $28.5 trillion, to be precise. $26.5 trillion of that, according to the filing, would come from AI infrastructure and applications, meaning not from SpaceX’s core business of aerospace engineering and satellites.

Maybe most important, SpaceX is a story, even a meme. Musk is arguably a better salesman than an inventor, and what he began selling early on was a techno-utopian dream—of himself as a Tony Stark–style genius, of an environment-saving EV revolution, of securing a future for humanity by getting us all to Mars. He intuitively understands the warped dynamics of the attention economy. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian, the authors of the book Muskism, describe his strategy on social media as “trolling is infrastructure”: “Every joke, every poll is a stress test of responsiveness,” they argue. “Can he still move markets with a post?” Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a 13-year-old meme of a shiba inu, is the shining example of Musk’s ability to lavish attention on something—in this case, a fake asset whose entire joke was that it was worthless—and make it worth more to others as a result.

SpaceX is obviously not Dogecoin. Its rocket business is a genuine success story, as is Starlink. But the company’s appeal, particularly in the face of setbacks, is also reliant on a combination of story and Musk’s own image in ways that are not necessarily connected to reality. Musk has frequently set unrealistic timelines for projects, including putting a spacecraft on Mars by 2018. Last year, SpaceX’s flagship rocket underwent a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” on three test flights (it blew up). But SpaceX’s IPO filing was more oriented around its future ambitions and assumed triumphs, such as its desire to mine asteroids, promote space tourism, and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” An adviser to the deal told the Financial Times last month: “From a strict corporate finance perspective, the valuation makes no sense. But Elon is great at getting people to dream.”

What do you get when you combine SpaceX the business with the financial instrument and the meme? An unfathomable amount of money, it seems. Last week SpaceX opened trading at a market capitalization of $1.7 trillion. The scale of Musk’s own net worth is now almost impossible to comprehend, such that, on Monday, SpaceX’s stock rallied, and Musk’s one-day gain was more than the net worth of Bill Gates, once the richest person in the world. In short order, SpaceX has become the sixth-most valuable public company despite the fact that it posted a net loss of $4.94 billion last year on $18.7 billion in revenue.

On Tuesday, SpaceX announced it is using some of that value to purchase Cursor, the AI-coding start-up, for $60 billion, all in stock. In reaction to the news, Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager (and inveterate poster), wrote on X: “One of the things that makes SpaceX so valuable is how valuable it is.” Ackman’s reasoning rings true in a financial sense: According to the deal, the price that SpaceX will pay for Cursor will be set by its own share price in the seven trading days before closing, which in effect will mean that the more valuable SpaceX is, the less Cursor will cost it. But Ackman’s koan is also correct in a more absurdist way. It highlights the irrationality of the modern stock market and reflects a lesson of the past decade: If a person or group of people is able to marshal enough genuine attention toward an idea—no matter how ridiculous it might seem—they can usually bend reality toward their preferred outcome.

Other than perhaps Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue anyone has been more successful at this than Musk. Musk excels not because he can’t stop winning, but because he understands that, in the financialized logic of our age, winning is less important than the perception that you will win. Speculation beats fundamentals. One way to look at Musk’s personal brand is as somebody who has borrowed obsessively against his own reputation, each loan used to invest in and service the debt of the last, until it becomes impossible to follow the money. One of the things that makes Elon Musk so valuable is how valuable he is.

With SpaceX’s IPO, you could argue that Musk has either won or broken capitalism. His wealth, in our current system, makes him a chaos agent with no real comparison. He is virtually impervious to fines. His money, should he wish to spend it, has the potential to drastically influence the outcome of elections. That leverage could be used to benefit Musk’s businesses, securing further contracts with the government and entrenching him deeper into the infrastructure of everyone’s lives. This power isn’t theoretical; Musk’s dominance in satellite connectivity has already made him geopolitically relevant in places including Ukraine and Iran.

SpaceX and Musk are, of course, not inevitable. Analysts are predicting volatility for the  stock as lockup periods end and people sell shares. The AI bubble could pop. Musk could mismanage the company as he did with X, or he could become so radioactive that institutions stop associating with him. But you can also imagine the SpaceX flywheel spinning out of control, perpetuating itself as Musk and SpaceX become fully untethered from reality. On X, Will Manidis, a start-up founder and investor, argued recently that, given the dynamics of SpaceX’s stock, it could continue to purchase some of the internet’s foundational software companies at a cost of basically nothing. Neither Musk nor SpaceX responded to a request for comment on SpaceX’s direction, and such tweets, at this moment, are little more than fan fiction. But they represent the absurdity of Musk’s current position in the modern economy. Musk has long fantasized about creating a massive, vertically integrated constellation of services—from banking to social networking—he once dubbed “the everything app.” So far, he’s failed in that quest (the phrase trust Elon Musk with your routing number would still strike fear in the hearts of most people). But it’s not difficult to see Musk using his cheap and abundant money to build toward the Everything Holding Company.

Is any of this possible? Would it even be legal? That’s unclear. But as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine once noted, it seems like “Elon Musk’s recent career is a long experiment to prove that, if you are successful enough, the regular laws do not apply to you.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi memorably described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Goldman Sachs, he wrote, “positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble,” enabled by “a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules.” Revisiting that article in the age of Musk the trillionaire feels almost quaint. Musk and SpaceX have a true nose for money, including sniffing out government infusions and contracts. The aerospace company has figured out how to position itself firmly in the middle of the speculative hype of the AI cycle, and numerous financial organizations have amended rules designed to protect retail investors.

The vampiric Goldman Sachs that Taibbi describes is an institution, a system that became too big to fail, and thus ungovernable. Musk is a person, not a system or institution, but he owns more than 40 percent of SpaceX and controls more than 80 percent of its voting shares. According to Reuters, in the lead-up to SpaceX’s IPO Musk was dictating terms to Goldman Sachs and other banks.

If Goldman Sachs is the vampire squid, what does that make SpaceX and Musk? The natural world offers few good comparisons. What we’re seeing in terms of hype, valuation, and fortune is without precedent, even when stacked up against the wealth concentration of the Gilded Age. SpaceX and Musk are better served by a mythological comparison, in part because the entire enterprise is built on a story told over and over until it transcends reality. SpaceX is a rocket company, a complex financial instrument, a meme, a monument to a broken financial system. It is the seven-headed Hydra at the end of finance, the teleological endpoint of money. It is a myth kept alive by blind faith, devotion, and even aggression, which makes it dangerous whether you believe in it or not.

Following the launch of the surprisingly popular Kobo Remote, Boox has released its own device to ease the burden of reaching for an e-reader’s touchscreen that’s an arm’s length away. The Tappy isn’t Boox’s first page-turning remote, but its design takes a much different approach to the company’s slim but boring B.T. Remoter. The Tappy feels like a mashup of wireless remotes, fidget toys, and macro pads, with a healthy dash of retro charm. 

While the Kobo Remote looks like a streaming dongle accessory with a design that prioritizes ergonomics, the Tappy can be best described as a miniature keyboard distilled to just two buttons that draws its design inspiration from a retro typewriter. It’s not as comfortable to hold as Kobo’s accessory, but it’s small enough to sit discreetly in your hand. There are also four rubber feet on its underside so it won’t slide around if used on a desk, and it’s available in two very glossy color options: olive green and a bright orange that I tested.

Tappy’s two round buttons don’t use actual keyboard switches but they have about a quarter-inch of travel and are satisfying to press when you’re in need of something to fidget with. Out of the box, the buttons are labeled with a pixelated heart and steaming mug of coffee, which I just don’t understand. I immediately switched to the included alternatives that are instead labeled with an X and an O, but more customizability, even if it was just a sheet of stickers I had to apply myself, would be preferred. Forward and back arrows, or even just a plus and minus, would be welcome alternatives to what’s included.

Pairing the Tappy to a Boox device is easy, but don’t misplace the fold-out quick start guide that walks you through the process. After powering it on using a sliding metal switch on the side, you put the remote into pairing mode by holding down both buttons for about two seconds until a single LED on the side flashes blue. From there, you just need to connect to it through your Boox device’s Bluetooth settings. When you power it back on in the future, it reconnects automatically.

Boox Tappy Wireless Page Turner

Where to Buy:

• $29.99 at Amazon (Green)
• $29.99 at Boox (Citrus)
• $29.99 at Boox (Green)

The buttons’ default functionality is Reading mode that turns pages forward and back or controls volume when outside a reading app, but the Tappy can be switched to two other modes. Multimedia mode changes the buttons’ functionality to skipping tracks in music, video, podcast, or audiobook apps, while Browsing mode lets you scroll up and down through long webpages or social media feeds for as long as you’re pressing either button.

Pressing both buttons for about five seconds switches modes, which causes the LED to momentarily flash green. Repeating that process cycles through Reading, Multimedia, and Browsing modes, and every time you switch, a notification pops up at the top of your Boox device letting you know the current mode. But it’s not persistent and can be easily missed. A trio of labeled LEDs indicating the Tappy’s current mode or even having the single LED display a different color for each one would make it easier to know what mode it was in at a glance, especially when using the remote with other devices.

While Tappy works best with Boox e-readers and tablets running the company’s V4.2 firmware or later (which includes recent hardware like the Boox Palma 2 Pro), it can also be used with other Android mobile devices, and iPhones and iPads, with varying levels of functionality. The functionality is supported in both the Kobo and Kindle Android apps, but not in the iOS or iPadOS versions. However, I was able to use the Tappy on my iPhone and OnePlus phone to scroll webpages, control music playback, and adjust the volume.

The bigger challenge when using the Tappy with non-Boox hardware is you don’t get the useful pop-up notifications letting you know which mode you’ve just switched to. And without any LED indicators, the only way to know what mode Tappy is in is to just press the buttons and see what happens. Did the volume go up and down? Great, you’re in Reading mode and are just two switches away from the Browsing mode you want.

Other e-readers from companies like Pocketboot or BigMe are supported, according to Good e-Reader’s testing, but I had no luck getting the Tappy to work with the Kobo and the Kindle. That’s unfortunate because while I still regularly enjoy using the Kobo Remote for reading at night, I would happily abandon it for the Tappy. The tiny remote has already replaced my Apple Watch for skipping tracks when streaming my iPhone through my HomePod, even if its buttons occasionally get accidentally pressed when it’s bouncing around my pocket. At $29.99 it’s the same price as the Kobo Remote, but its buttons are more satisfying to use and it’s more than just a one-device accessory.

Photography by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge