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World News See other World News Articles Title: Report Details How Dem Senate Candidate Mark Kelly Got Rich Quick, Including Selling Out to China Report Details How Dem Senate Candidate Mark Kelly Got Rich Quick, Including Selling Out to China By C. Douglas Golden Published September 6, 2020 at 3:04pm Having a financial interest in the Chinese government’s opinion of you can be hazardous to your moral health. Witness, for instance, the brave NBA multimillionaires, so comfortable slagging President Donald Trump and the perfidies of America. When the issue of Hong Kong came up after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of pro- democracy protesters, that kind of ethical certitude went out the window — mostly because of the fact that the NBA does a great deal of business in China and Beijing had made it clear they weren’t happy with Morey’s remark. Suddenly, individuals like LeBron James, Gregg Popovich and Steve Kerr didn’t have any clue about Beijing’s oppressive tactics. (Last month, Kerr called his 2019 comments “embarrassing” — which was convenient, considering he said this as the NBA was lecturing us all about social justice yet again.) Another person who didn’t have a whole lot to say about the protests in Hong Kong was Mark Kelly, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Arizona. Kelly, a former astronaut and Navy pilot, is the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman shot by an unstable gunman in 2011. Since Giffords’ shooting, Kelly’s most visible role has been as a gun control advocate. However, he’s also become a wildly effective “celebrity brand,” as one academic put it. In Gabby Giffords’ financial disclosure during her last full year as a member of Congress, back in 2011, she declared her family was worth $2.1 million. Granted, her husband was still in the Navy for much of that year, but they were still a couple of above-modest means. Eight years later in 2019, Kelly had to file his first financial disclosures for his run against GOP Arizona Sen. Martha McSally. According to The Arizona Republic, his net worth was between $10 million and $27 million. (It’s now between $9 million and $27 million, the paper said, citing a financial disclosure report filed in August.) This would, as The Republic reported, be “an amount that would make him among the wealthiest people in Congress at the time.” Even at the low end, $9 million is more than quadruple what the couple was worth in 2011. And $27 million represents a nearly 13- fold increase from that $2.1 million figure. How did he get to be so wealthy? Kelly has a lot of metaphorical fingers in metaphorical pies, but one of the most worrying is his stake in a company that’s received significant investment from Tencent, a tech firm that has ties to the Chinese Communist Party. “Through a very unexpected situation, what happened to Gabby, I wound up having to leave my career in the Navy and at NASA, and Gabby resigned from Congress,” Kelly told The Republic in a recent interview. “Like a lot of a lot of other astronauts, I went out there as a self-employed person and found opportunities for work.” From this language, you’re probably envisioning a man who took high- paying speaking gigs and made his personal brand work for him. To a certain extent, you’re right — he did make some money from speaking. However, he also did consulting, sat on corporate boards and tried his hand at investing. One of his investments was World View Enterprises, a company that does near-space balloon imaging. Kelly was a co-founder of the firm, which received money from Tencent. He owns company stock that’s worth at least $100,000, but insists there’s no conflict of interest. “I’m the, the test pilot, I am the technical guy. I’m not the CEO or the finance guy, or I wasn’t,” Kelly said, although he conceded he talked with Tencent before they invested in World View. “I had a very brief conversation with one individual that lasted about 30 seconds, maybe a minute,” Kelly claimed, saying the conversation was about the vision for the company. He also has links to Tilman Fertitta, the billionaire Texas businessman behind the Landry’s restaurant group. “Fertitta hosted Kelly’s 2007 bachelor party aboard his $40 million yacht, and Kelly and Giffords attended several swanky events with Fertitta, from the opening of new restaurants to pre-launch parties for Kelly and his brother,” The Republic reported. “Fertitta flew Kelly to Tucson in 2011 on his private jet to be with Giffords after her shooting. “Kelly served as a board member for Landry’s from 2013 until 2017 and held stock worth up to $100,000 for another Fertitta-related company as late as 2019. He gave the keynote speech to Landry’s annual conference in 2017.” The issue? Fertitta is the owner of the Houston Rockets, the team which employs Morey. Tencent also streams the broadcasts of NBA games in China, which meant there was what those on the left might call a bit of intersectionality regarding Kelly’s interests in the matter when Morey announced (and then quickly deleted) his support for protesters in Hong Kong. Fertitta was also one of the people who acquitted himself most poorly during the NBA’s China debacle. After tweeting that the Rockets weren’t a “political organization” and disavowing Morey’s comments, he began liking posts on Instagram calling for Morey to be fired. Poster Comment: A good deal of the pols take advantage to sell out their own country for their own comfort. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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