2. On his ABC late night show, Jimmy Kimmel managed to do the impossible and prove that he is even more revolting than I thought. Kimmel’s apparent mission is to make Americans vicious, unfunny, hateful and ignorant, so he said that Musk is an “obscenely wealthy weirdo” and an immigrant “who has been stealing from us. Hilarious! How “stealing”? Oh, this is more of the “big corporations don’t pay enough taxes and we should make it more expensive for entrepreneurs to risk their money to make the world better” argument that seems reasonable if you can’t spell “economics.” Kimmel says Musk “cheers immigrants getting kicked out of the country for stealing,” so we should kick out Musk because he “sure seems like an immigrant who has been stealing from us.” Musk is stealing from Americans by building some of the most successful companies in American history. Have you ever heard anything from an alleged comedian more idiotic and less funny? And oh: it’s illegal immigrants, Jimmy. Try to grasp that. Musk is sending satellites into space, and you can’t comprehend the significance of adjectives.

Musk could buy every NFL, NBA, and MLB team, along with every Wendy’s and Target, and still have hundreds of billions left over, Jimmy said. This “So what?” observation reminds me of how far late night comics have fallen. Johnny Carson used to joke about how rich he was with lines like…

• “I have a paper shredder that just slices up $100 bills to use as packing peanuts.”
• “My wallet is so thick, when I sit down, my left leg thinks it’s on a flight to Aspen.”
• “I don’t buy luxury cars anymore; I just buy the freeway lanes to keep them empty.”
• “I bought a solid gold ATM for my house, and it still charges me a $2.00 fee.”

3. The New York Times made a point of writing about American business’s first billionaire yesterday, John D. Rockefeller, who by all accounts was a terrible human being: he made Musk look like John the Baptist. But Rockefeller was also transformational figure that Musk will have to work hard to equal. His investments and oil business savvy led to the standardizing of the refining process, and innovative uses for what had been considered waste (such as petroleum jelly—Vaseline!— and paraffin). Rockefeller dramatically lowered the cost of kerosene and oil. Building the Standard Oil empire required extensive, efficient transportation and pipeline networks. Rockefeller’s massive wealth launched the Rockefeller charitable foundations. His use of his accumulated wealth created the template for strategic philanthropy followed by major corporations and his fellow industrial tycoons, like Ford and Carnegie. His donations financed massive sanitation campaigns that wiped out hookworm in the American South and served as a catalyst for the creation of institutions like the Centers for Disease Control. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research modernized medical education across the country. He was a primary founder of the University of Chicago and funded schools educating blacks in the Jim Crow era, including Spelman College.

4. This:

Your Trump Deranged friends want to elect to the U.S. Senate someone who has never built or created anything in his life, but who wants to make sure there are no more Elon Musks. The Left’s antipathy to Musk should be sounding ethics alarms in the brains of every thinking American. It isn’t. What does that tell you?

5. Finally, this Ethics Quote of the Day that I read last night:

“The worst enemy of this country is the man who tries in incite section against section, creed against creed, class against class.”

President Teddy Roosevelt said that in a speech in Shoshone, Idaho towards the end of his Western tour of the nation from April 1 to June 5 in 1903. [Source: “Keep It For Your Children” by James Blase]