Fox News host Mark Levin has called out billionaires for not paying Donald Trump’s legal bills after the former president’s legal team said paying his $400 million New York civil fraud penalty would be “a practical impossibility.”
Trump is seeking a bond of $464 million to cover his fines and a stay in the execution of the monetary portion of the civil trial ruling after Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in February that Trump must pay $355 million for committing fraud. The New York court held that Trump and top executives at The Trump Organization inflated the value of his assets to obtain more favorable terms from lenders and insurers. With interest, the full payment will be roughly $454 million. Trump’s lawyers are appealing the verdict.
On Monday, the Republican suffered a setback after Trump’s legal team admitted in a court filing that it is a “practical impossibility” for him to make the $464 million payment and requested a stay pending the outcome of an appeal process. His team had contacted 33 companies to try to secure funding.
I would be VERY surprised. And I NASA didn’t award blue origin a second moon lander contract because they have utmost faith in Starship/HLS.
I will be first in line to say Falcon is an amazing piece of engineering, and Starlink is a great way to fund Falcon. It’ll never turn a profit, but it’s an amazing way to turn venture capital into cheap rockets for everyone.
But SpaceX has missed every single HLS deadline by a mile. They’ve got 2 more weeks to do their first unmanned moon landing, according to the original schedule. It’ll take 12 (or 20?) successful launches to do 1 lunar landing and return, so I’ll take this bet.
The 2 billion contract was for HLS. It was originally higher, but Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call to lower their bid to just under the (previously undisclosed) limit, making them the only valid bid. That’s what the Blue Origin lawsuit was about, but the judge said it was legal for NASA to “enter in negotiations” with single parties, so this was allowed. You might recognise the name Kathy Leuders, because right after she handed SpaceX the contract, she quit NASA and got a job at SpaceX.
I think I’m validated in finding the whole HLS situation extremely concerning.
I agree with you on HLS, the whole thing seems foolish. I meant more like SpaceX will chuck something around the moon for sport than that they would actually get HLS working. After all, SpaceX can already get to the moon, a lot of the recent payloads to the moon have flown on Falcon 9.
The hardest part of getting to the moon is getting mass to orbit, and Starship just proved it could get mass to orbit, even if the reusable components didn’t work out. Now they just need to put Blue Origin’s lander inside the payload bay with a kick stage to send it off to the moon 😉 Doing a ton of refueling just to send an entire, oversized Starship as a lander makes no sense.