Musk Says What We Are All Thinking About Hunter Biden's 'Art' Business
Elon Musk might not be an art critic, but he knows a fair amount about Hunter Biden, being the now-owner of the social media platform that handed the man a huge gift by censoring dissemination of his laptop in the waning days of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Thus, when informed by podcaster Joe Rogan that Hunter’s doodlings were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, Musk was able to come to a conclusion on the merits of those sales relatively quickly, noting it was “unlikely to be a legit transaction.”
The comments came during the Tuesday edition of the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where the Tesla and SpaceX CEO again guested. The two were talking about the collapse of nonfungible token art sales and the grift therein.
“With art, there is a fair bit of money laundering and tax avoidance,” Musk said in response to Rogan talking about a friend making millions of dollars from NFT art.
“So some of these things that seem inexplicable –” he continued, before Rogan cut him off: “Like Hunter Biden? You want to talk about Hunter Biden’s paintings?”
“Did he actually sell paintings for large sums of money?” Musk asked, slightly incredulously.
“Immense sums of money,” Rogan responded. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“That seems unlikely to be a legit transaction,” a smiling Musk said.
“Unlikely, right?” Rogan joked.
Musk laughed and responded, “Yeah.”
Rogan went on to note that “the work’s not bad, though … for that kind of bulls*** art,” which leads me to believe that Joe Rogan is not in a position to be an art critic:
Does anyone know why Hunter Biden stopped painting?
I mean if his talent was so good that people were paying $500,000 per painting, why quit? pic.twitter.com/GmTfG5V7OS— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) June 8, 2022
The relevant portion here is at 1:50:00, which is pretty late in the video:
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
Podcast with the great and powerful @elonmusk #ad Full episode is 2 hours and 41 minutes, first 2 hours is available here on https://t.co/AIkGSaxVMA pic.twitter.com/DQh0GGNyaO
— Joe Rogan (@joerogan) October 31, 2023
Hunter Biden’s artwork was nonetheless a good investment — at least for one purchaser. Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali was appointed to a position with the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad by the Biden administration and visited the White House no less than 13 times after December 2021.
While it’s unclear when Naftali bought the first son’s art, the dates at which the meetings at the White House began just happened to coincide with when Hunter’s finger-paintings began being exhibited.
As for the art gallery that hosted Hunter’s scribblings, the Georges Berges Gallery, it saw its COVID “disaster assistance loan” more than double after it was “revised” from the original $150,000 from the Small Business Administration under the Trump administration with an additional $350,000 from the SBA under Biden’s watch, according to the New York Post.
Overall, Hunter sold $1.3 million of his paintings through the gallery as of July, although the vast majority of that — $875,000 — came from an unnamed individual who bought 11 of the paintings. I’m sure that person received nothing in return. Nudge nudge. Wink wink.
The buyers might like the macaroni art, but other neutral parties are more critical.
Walter Shaub, the former head of the Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration, called the sales “absolutely appalling” and said that while Hunter Biden might be “a sympathetic character” because of his battle with drug addiction, “some of his problems are of his own making, in that he has always built his career around being Joe Biden’s son.”
Meanwhile, The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee said Hunter’s work looked like that of “a cafe painter.”
“By which I mean, you see a certain kind of art in coffee shops, and some of it is OK and a lot of it is bad, and sometimes it’s surprisingly good,” Smee said during an interview with CNN’s Chris Cillizza. “But you wouldn’t, unless you were related to the artist, spend more than $1,000 on it.”
But Hunter Biden took home millions for it.
Hope he set aside 10 percent for the big guy. And maybe a little something for Elon, too — a down payment in case another laptop comes out and he needs it censored.
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