False prophet: Elon Musk with peace proposal

We start this shortened week with afterthoughts on the celebrations of German unity, which alarmingly often included references to a lack of unity. Immediately, however, the events of the war in Eastern Europe came to the fore again, this time with the Ukrainian success report that their armed forces had made the biggest breakthrough on the southern front against the Russians since the beginning of the war.

Thousands of Russian soldiers are now cut off from supply lines on the front line in the Dnipro River area in the Kherson region just annexed by Russia.

Reports of a mass brawl at a military base near Moscow are also disturbing for the Vladimir Putin faction. After that, newly conscripted soldiers who had been there for a long time were pressured into giving up their clothes and mobile phones. The freshly recruited won the fistfight that followed, 20 regular soldiers locked themselves in and called the police.

When someone is the richest person in the world and has 100 million followers on Twitter, they can easily feel like a mixture of God, Dag Hammarskjöld and Gary Cooper.

This explains the actions of Elon Musk, 51, the head of Tesla and SpaceX and the anointed among managers who usually think in terms of EBIT. At the beginning of the Ukraine war he had personally challenged Putin to a duel, Musk is now entering the world stage as a foreign policy maker.

His proposal, put to the vote on Twitter, is to repeat the “elections in the annexed regions under UN supervision”. Russia will leave Ukraine “if that is the will of the people,” Musk said.

Finally, the billionaire claimed that Crimea was “formally” part of Russia as it had been since 1783, alluding to party leader Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to transfer the peninsula from Russia to Ukraine within the Soviet Union in 1954.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda responded pedagogically: “Dear Elon Musk, if someone tries to steal the tires of your Tesla, that does not make them the rightful owner of the car or the tires.” Musk followers tried it confrontationally: 63 percent voted against him “Peace Plan”, which could also have come from Gerhard Schröder.

Oliver Blume in front of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange: The double CEO of Volkswagen and Porsche can be happy. The IPO was successful.

(Photo: AP)

The stock market makes you greedy, a successful IPO makes you even more greedy. This is what happens to Oliver Blume, who, in a rare form of managerial double whammy, directs both the large Volkswagen group and the dashing Stuttgart subsidiary Porsche.

With their most recent stock market debut, the Swabians have actually managed the feat of being worth almost as much as the whole of Wolfsburg at 80 billion euros.

So the two-time CEO has a “virtual IPO” of all ten group brands run through, as our title story tells – regardless of whether it’s the main brand Volkswagen, Skoda, Lamborghini or even Audi.

The Ingolstadt brand with the four rings was already on the stock exchange before the group, in its rapidly changing wisdom, opted for “squeeze out” in 2020 and bought up all the shares.

The new chief pilot, Blume, sees “potential” everywhere, including the new Powerco battery unit. In the end, however, the view could also prevail that a swallow does not make a summer and a Porsche does not make a stock market spring.

Volkswagen does it a bit like Siemens – the Munich industrial group also has Healthineers, Siemens Energy and Gamesa (still) on the stock exchange. Having role models is a nice thing, but in reality comparisons can end badly.

This is how it is with the inexperienced-looking British politician Liz Truss, 47, who made it into the office of Prime Minister with Margaret Thatcher theses, which is why even her own Conservative Party is now confused.

Truss quickly had to bury her vulgar Thatcherism, which was also supposed to spoil the rich with tax cuts from 45 to 40 percent financed on credit: Investors had sunk the British pound to an all-time low.

A party conference has now turned into a Canossa gang and her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, sheepishly: “We understood, we listened.” The Tories are already demanding new elections. And some remember a saying by the icon Thatcher: “This lady is not for turning.” This lady will not change her course.

Qatar is a hot topic everywhere. Some people don’t like the fact that the best soccer players are holding their World Cup in the well-cooled arenas of Doha under the eyes of the sheikhs and their welfare autocracy. But the emirate’s wealth is based on natural gas, the stuff dreams are made of, especially after Vladimir Putin’s gas ban and demolitionist attitude.

And Qatar has plenty of gas, so that the Al Thani ruling family buys into the German economy on a large scale: Deutsche Bank (almost ten percent), VW (17 percent), Porsche (five percent) and now also RWE (almost nine percent).

The cash providers from the Gulf are rising to become the largest shareholder in Essen because they are financing a good part of the almost seven billion euro purchase of the American solar specialist Con Edison Clean Energy Business. Such participations will certainly last longer than a football World Cup.

In times of great economic crises, one quickly recalls the situation before the Wall Street crash of 1929. Pulitzer Prize winner Liaquat Ahamed described in his book “The Lords of Money” how the heads of four central banks (USA, Great Britain, France, Germany) helped their then extremely restrictive monetary policy would have driven the world into bankruptcy.

In the US, critics are now following in Ahamed’s footsteps, concerned by the recent stock market slumps. They warn that the US Federal Reserve was too bold with its three rate hikes of 0.75 points to a level of 3.0 to 3.25 percent, as our correspondent Astrid Dörner describes.

“Monetary policy works with a time lag and we’ve been moving very quickly lately,” says Charles Evans, head of the regional central bank in Chicago. And Daniel Alpert, co-founder of the investment bank Westwood Capital, also sees a trend reversal: “The Fed has raised interest rates too far and too quickly.” If inflation continues to dwindle, the time for interest rate hikes is already over.

With Victor Hugo we believe: “It is difficult to believe, impossible to believe nothing”.

Rainer Beaujean: The CEO is leaving the company.

The Italian maybe-government politician Silvio Berlusconi is likely to take a look at the private TV group Pro Sieben Sat.1 in Munich today. His family is the largest shareholder there with more than 25 percent and has now got rid of the CEO Rainer Beaujean, 54, who made a name for himself as an opponent of the aged businessman, but who did not achieve much.

The fact that his contract was not extended until the end of 2021 until mid-2027 was not a job guarantee. On November 1st, a colleague from the Supervisory Board, Bert Habets, 51, will take over.

Although the man was once the head of the Bertelsmann subsidiary RTL, the talk by the Gütersloh media group that RTL could merge with the Pro Sieben Group has not yet become a cartel case.

And then there’s influencer and reality TV show Kim Kardashian, 41, which has problems with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In a settlement, she had to pay almost $1.3 million in fines and compensation because she had advertised the cryptocurrency Ethereum Max using rather unclean methods. The provider had rewarded her with $ 250,000 for a recommendation on Instagram without Kardashian disclosing this connection.

The SEC has repeatedly warned investors about such dubious investment tips from celebrities – and also fined boxer Floyd Mayweather and hip-hop producer DJ Khaled for sleazy deals with digital currencies.

We can’t help but think of the old adage that there are three kinds of advertising: “Loud, louder, and unfair.”

I wish you a loud, energetic start to the week.

It greets you cordially

Her

Hans Jürgen Jakobs

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