Musk’s playing dangerous money games… again
One of the biggest suppliers of hot air for the crypto market is billionaire Elon Musk, whose off-the-cuff tweets have made (usually for him) and lost fortunes.
Musk got into trouble before by confusing the highly regulated stock market with his favourite playgrounds of Twitter and cryptoland, where anything goes.
He tweeted price sensitive information about his Tesla electric car company and was charged with a criminal offence and slapped with a massive $40m fine.
Now he is in hot water again for making a similar type of mistake. He made a high offer to buy Twitter for $44bn, got buyer’s remorse about it and now apparently is having second thoughts.
Sorry Elon, you’ve made a commitment that has impacted hundreds of thousands of lives and finances. You might be able to play fast and loose on Twitter and in the Wild West of cryptoland – but not in the world of real money.
■ Be careful with fruit pastilles – they can cost more than you think! Dermot Goode of Totalhealthcover.ie revealed that chewing one cost €2,000 in dental bills.
Dermot was advising on dental health cover, which he said offers good value.
The trick is that consumers are in the highly unusual position of buying insurance for something they know will actually happen – like getting non-emergency dental work.
Speaking on Newstalk’s Lunctime Live, he recommended DeCare Dental, which costs from €16 a month.
He also gave a thumbs up to the Hospital Saturday Fund, which offers non-comprehensive health cover for not much more than €500 a year – two and a half times less than a decent health plan.
You won’t get proper cover but this might suit healthy young people who are unlikely to need it and want dayto-day expenses cover.
Other choice tips from Dermot included moving children onto less pricey plans – not everyone in the family has to be on the same one – and adults are far more likely to need hospital care.
He also gave his latest list of recommended mid-range plans with plenty of features, like cover for routine medical expenses.
■ The ‘cryptocurrency’ market was worth $3 trillion last November but is now worth just over a third of that after crashing yet again.
Crypto sceptics scoffed at its apparent demise but it’s still worth more than €1 trillion – a lot of money for something that has no intrinsic value – which shows resilience. A single Bitcoin plummeted from $67,000 in November to around €25,000 at
one point – pretty shocking.
But it has been pretty resilient at clawing back to $30,000 and sticking there, for a while anyway.
This market is a balloon alright – but more of a big hot air balloon that deflates and reinflates all over again.
■ Fianna Fail’s Barry Cowen has claimed the ESB is using its generation dominance to keep electricity prices artificially high. This came after it emerged that households here are paying €250 more for their electricity each year than the EU average. But could this also have something to do with the pay and perks enjoyed by ESB staff?
Staff already on salaries double the national average also get over €600 a year in discounts. Not too shabby. It compares well with RTÉ and Irish Water – other Semi States that get lambasted over high staff pay, while the ESB seems to get a free pass.
ESB salaries were partly built up with a generous pay hike in 2008 – as the country faced bankruptcy – awarded by Fianna Fáil, Mr Cowen’s party.
The unspoken threat to ‘turn the lights off’ at the worst possible time might have had something to do with his party caving in even as it slashed everyone else’s pay. So maybe Barry is right about the ESB abusing its power – but why wouldn’t it when politicians always cave in?