Harambe Remembered Ten Years Later

Ten years ago Thursday, the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla Harambe was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. Born on May 27, 1999, at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville, Texas, Harambe had been transferred to Cincinnati in 2014.

The zoo's decision to shoot him rather than risk a tranquilizer, which could have taken minutes to work and potentially agitated Harambe, set off a petition that collected over half a million signatures and launched what became one of the internet's most durable meme cycles. The Cincinnati Zoo director said publicly that the zoo was "not amused" by the jokes and petitions, and the zoo eventually deactivated their Twitter temporarily.

What followed over the next decade was harder to categorize. The memes, often absurdist, irreverent, occasionally pointed, became a shorthand for a particular strain of Millennial and Gen Z humor. This week, on the eve of the anniversary, the official White House account on X posted a lengthy tribute calling Harambe "an icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation's timeline," and referred to him as a "true patriot." The post sparked immediate debate, with some finding it nostalgic and others questioning whether the gesture was appropriate for an official government account. Whatever one makes of it, the fact that the White House felt the moment worth marking says something about how thoroughly a gorilla from Brownsville worked his way into the American cultural fabric.

 

SpaceX IPO Nears Reality

SpaceX filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on May 20th, putting the world's most anticipated IPO on an official countdown. The prospectus targets up to $75 billion in proceeds at a valuation approaching $2 trillion. The filing revealed that Musk controls 85% of shareholder votes and that the company lost nearly $5 billion last year, driven in part by AI division spending. Starlink is the only profitable segment.

 For markets, the deal would reset expectations around private-to-public transitions and test whether retail investors, allocated 30% of the offering, three times the typical share, will absorb that risk willingly.

 

End of an Era in Texas as Paxton Faces Talarico

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated four-term Sen. John Cornyn by more than 25 percentage points in Tuesday's Republican Senate runoff, ending the long-serving Republican senator’s career and making Cornyn the first GOP senator from the state to lose his party's nomination for reelection. The Associated Press called the race almost immediately after polls closed.

Paxton, who was impeached by the GOP-led Texas House in 2023 on corruption charges and later acquitted by the state Senate, secured the nomination one week after receiving President Donald Trump's endorsement, the latest in a string of Trump-backed primary victories this month that also ousted Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

In the attorney general race, state Sen. Mayes Middleton defeated U.S. Rep. Chip Roy roughly 55% to 45%, casting himself as the MAGA candidate even without a Trump endorsement. Roy's past criticism of the president likely hurt him among primary voters.

In response, the Cook Political Report shifted the Texas Senate race from "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican" after the runoff, and an early post-runoff poll showed Democrat James Talarico, a state representative from Austin, leading Paxton 47% to 44%. Nearly a third of Cornyn's primary voters told pollsters they would support, a figure that could make Texas a major battleground for Senate control in November.