Daily Bafflements

• Here’s an epic road trip: visit the richest person in every U.S. state, with this handy map, courtesy Movoto, in tow. Score three for the Waltons: they’ve got Arkansas, Texas, and Wyoming. 

• Today in stating the self-evident: “What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society,” writes former secretary of labor Rob Reich at Salon.

• App-makers are cashing in on the Gaza conflict, the Guardian reports, with titles like “Gaza Assault: Code Red,” “Iron Dome,” and “Rocket Pride.” (Yesterday, Google pulled the latest app, “Bomb Gaza,” from its Play Store.)

• And now for Billionaires, SpaceX edition: It’s been an ace few weeks for Elon Musk. Yesterday, Texas governor Rick Perry announced that SpaceX has settled on Boca Chica, Texas, where two out of five residents live in poverty, for its new commercial spaceport/rocket launch site/heavily incentivized development project. Over the weekend, Musk got out ahead of artificial intelligence (“potentially more dangerous than nukes,” he told us via Twitter). And, hey, Simpsons fans, Musk has your number too. At Comic-Con, a Simpsons producer teased an upcoming episode, “The Musk Who Fell from Earth,” in which Musk, voicing himself, will win the energy game the old-fashioned way: by vanquishing cartoon meanie and nuclear-power tycoon C. Montgomery Burns.