April 5, 2022

"The Earth is not flat. It's a hollow globe & Donkey Kong lives there." This tweet is one of the more mundane abstractions Elon Musk has shared on Twitter. Now, as fate would have it, he is Twitter's largest owner. It is only a matter of time before Twitter's home page is a GIF of a T-Rex ballet dancing.

Today's Wrap gives the history of the man at the center of Pakistan's unfolding political crisis, Prime Minister Imran Khan. It starts on the cricket pitch.

― Key Stories

Elon Buys Large Stake in Twitter
Overview

• An SEC document revealed that Elon Musk bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the company's largest owner
• The stake was worth $2.9B as of Friday. After the news broke on Monday, Twitter's stock jumped 27%
• Last week, Musk posted a poll: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle? The consequences of this poll will be important... Please vote carefully.”
• Musk, who has 80M followers, is critical of Twitter. While he currently holds a passive stake, there’s speculation he may seek a controlling interest

Road-Rage Shootings Rise
Overview

• The frequency of US road-rage-related shootings has doubled since 2019
• In 2021, an average of 44 people were shot in road-rage incidents each month, per data from the Gun Violence Archive. In 2019, the average was 22
• The study was conducted by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, a gun violence awareness group. That group's director said the figure equates to someone “shot and injured or killed every 17 hours in a road-rage incident”
• The researchers said the exact cause of the surge is unknown, but a link to the pandemic seems clear

Grim Scenes in Ukraine
Overview

• Ukraine's government said it has discovered 400+ civilian bodies while entering cities from which Russian forces retreated last week
• The cities are near Kyiv, Ukraine's capital. Mass graves were most prevalent in Bucha, a town Russian soldiers occupied for most of March
• Victims allegedly had marks of execution. Some had their hands tied or appeared to be shot from behind
• Ukraine's president called the Russian forces there “evil”; France's called for tougher sanctions; President Biden called for a war crimes investigation. Russia said the claims were false

Avocados Help the Heart
Overview

• A Harvard study found that eating avocados is linked to reduced cardiovascular disease risk
• The study followed 110,000 people over a 30-year period. When controlling for other factors, it found that those who eat half an avocado twice a week are 16% less likely to develop cardiovascular disease
• The study established correlation but did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship
• The researchers said the link may be that avocados contain cholesterol-lowering fiber and fats that reduce blood pressure and inflammation

See yesterday's results below the Wrap!

 Popcorn

Culture & Sports

• Kansas stormed back from a 16-point deficit to win its 4th national championship. UNC shot just 31.5% from the field in the game
• The Festival Dropout: Kanye West will no longer headline Coachella, one of the world's largest music festivals, after dropping out last-second
• The 2022 Grammys barely beat last year's record-low TV ratings. Only 8.93M viewers tuned in compared to 19.9M in 2019

• Florence's Uffizi gallery passed up the Vatican Museums, Pompeii ruins, and the Colosseum as Italy's most-visited cultural site last year
• They see me rollin', they hatin': Queen Elizabeth now rides around in a luxury golf cart that Mercedes-Benz helped design
• WallStreetBets takes Hollywood: The story behind the wild meme stock craze of early 2021 will be turned into a movie
• Vincent van Robot: A  robot named "Ai-Da" has been trained to paint like an artist. Ai-Da takes a while but never paints the same thing twice

― Roca Wrap

A Newsletter Exclusive

A cricket champion and playboy turned devoutly Muslim prime minister: Imran Khan’s political rise was stranger than most.

Khan was born into an affluent Pakistani family in 1952. Attending school in Pakistan and then Britain, he excelled at cricket. That helped him secure a spot at Oxford, where he became captain of the university’s cricket team.

He represented Pakistan – one of the world’s cricket powerhouses, alongside Australia, England, India, and some other formerly British colonies – after graduating, and secured his spot as one of the country’s all-time greats. In 1988, Pakistan’s president personally asked him to come out of retirement, which he did. 4 years later, Khan helped lead Pakistan to a Cricket World Cup victory.

Khan’s career made him an international icon, and – although he claimed not to drink – he became a fixture in British paparazzi, known as a partier and a playboy. “I was a bachelor. I was playing cricket. I loved life,” he would say. “I have never claimed to be an angel.” In 1995, he married Jemima Goldsmith, the socialite daughter of a British billionaire. 

Yet around that same time, Khan says he had a spiritual awakening. He sold off all of his cricket memorabilia and used his money to create one of Pakistan’s best public cancer hospitals, named in memory of his mother. He also became increasingly religious – and he entered politics.

In 1996, Khan launched his Pakistan Movement for Justice (PTI) party, which campaigned against Pakistan’s rampant corruption. 

Pakistan’s next 20 years were crazy: The government bounced between dictatorship and semi-democracy; various parties – all of which Khan alleged were obscenely corrupt – took control and lost it; leaders were forced out of office for an array of crimes; terrorism made Pakistan one of the world’s most violent countries. No prime minister would finish a 5-year term.

Throughout all of that, Khan and his PTI waited on the sidelines. He carved out his political niche – nationalistic, religious, anti-American, anti-corruption – and his image: He divorced his British wife and married twice more, eventually to an Islamic scholar. He also drew increasingly close to the army, which controls Pakistan’s politics behind the scenes. 

Then in 2018, amid widespread accusations that the army rigged the election, Khan’s party swept to power. The cricketer was prime minister at last.

Khan promised to deliver a “new Pakistan” that would be stable, prosperous, and free of corruption. He spoke of making life easier and more affordable for average people by growing the economy. He talked about reducing the country’s extreme poverty. 

Yet that didn’t happen. Since his election nearly 4 years ago, the country has bounced from one crisis to the next. The country faced a financial crisis, then inflation hit multi-year highs, making life harder for many people, particularly the poor. There has been a surge in terrorist violence. Khan also had a falling out with the army that formerly backed him.

Last week, having lost his support base, the Pakistani opposition lined up enough votes to remove Khan from power in a no-confidence vote. Then Sunday, just before the vote would take place, Khan dissolved parliament, alleging that the opposition was conspiring with the US to topple him. He says the US opposes his foreign policy, which is pro-China, pro-Taliban, and sympathetic to Russia. The US, which is a frequent target in Pakistani politics, says this is made up. 

That move has thrown Pakistan – the world’s 5th most populous country and 1 of 9 with nuclear weapons – into a political crisis. Soldiers have been deployed in anticipation of violence.  

The country’s supreme court must now decide whether to accept Khan's dissolving parliament. If they do, Pakistan will hold elections, which Khan has called for to prove his popularity. If they don't, his time may be up. 

The cricket-playing PM won't go down without a fight. 

 Games

1. Stillwater, OK
2. Hanover, NH
3. West Lafayette, IN
4. Gainesville, FL

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