Somebody get these guys a Netflix deal because this is the funniest villain monologue since Dr. Evil demanded “one million dollars.”
The IRGC issued its threat after U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Brigadier General Jamshid Eshaghi, the guy who ran Iran’s military budget. (Spoiler alert — that budget wasn’t buying much.) The Revolutionary Guard declared that “from now on, for every assassination, an American company will be destroyed.” They even set a deadline for the start of their corporate demolition spree: Wednesday, April 1, at 8 p.m. Tehran time.
April first. April Fools’ Day. You’d think someone on the Supreme Council would have checked a calendar.
The full hit list reads like the NASDAQ’s greatest hits: Cisco, HP, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Dell, Palantir, JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and a handful of others. They also threw in Tesla, which has zero military contracts and zero defense operations. Tesla’s big Middle East footprint consists of Supercharger stations at shopping malls and a Cybertruck delivery event in the Dubai desert back in January. Terrifying military infrastructure, that.
The IRGC helpfully warned that “residents around these terrorist companies in all countries in the region should leave their places within a radius of one kilometer.” So if you’re charging your Model Y at a Dubai mall, Iran wants you to know you’re standing in a blast zone. Sleep tight!
Meanwhile, back in the Islamic Republic of Rolling Blackouts, the situation is — how do we put this — not great. Iran has been suffering daily power outages of three to four hours since February. Ali Nikbakht, chairman of Iran’s own power plant association, estimated a 25,000-megawatt electricity deficit. That’s roughly one-third of the country’s total consumption. Thirteen power plants went offline because they literally ran out of fuel.
Schools? Closed. Universities? Closed. Shopping centers across Tehran and 17 provinces? Shuttered. Half the country’s industrial output has ground to a halt. Their drought is the worst in fifty years. And these are the guys who are going to take down Apple.
But wait — a former IRGC commander named Hossein Kanani Moghaddam went on Iranian state TV the same day and bragged that Iran possesses secret “electromagnetic weapons” capable of “disabling an entire city’s power and electronic systems without harming civilians.” This is the same IRGC that unveiled a device in 2020 they claimed could detect COVID-19 using electromagnetic radiation. International scientists called it pseudoscientific garbage and compared it to a proven-fake bomb detector. These people couldn’t detect a ham sandwich with a bloodhound, but sure, they’ve got city-killing EMP weapons stashed somewhere.
The comedy gets richer. After the U.S. and Israel started hammering Iranian targets in late February, Iran’s own government shut down the country’s internet — voluntarily. Connectivity dropped to 4% of normal levels. Their communications minister admitted the self-imposed blackout was costing Iran’s economy $35.7 million per day and cratered online sales by 80%. A country that deliberately unplugged itself from the internet is now threatening to “destroy” Google and Meta.
They’re also reportedly working with Huawei to build a permanent internet kill switch. A regime coordinating with the Chinese to cut off its own citizens from the web just put the company that runs the world’s largest search engine on a hit list. That’s not strategy. That’s a cry for help.
President Trump noticed the absurdity too. Back in February he reshared a post on Truth Social about Iran’s cascading blackouts with the caption: “This is how regimes fall.”
Thirty-two days into this conflict, the U.S. military has struck over 11,000 targets inside Iran. B-52 bombers — built by Boeing, one of the eighteen “terrorist companies” on Iran’s little list — are now flying directly over Iranian territory. The fact that those Cold War-era heavy bombers can cruise through Iranian airspace tells you everything you need to know about what’s left of Iran’s air defenses. (Hint: not much.)
Over 3,400 Iranian military and civilian personnel are dead. Thirteen American service members have been killed. The Supreme Leader is gone. His son, reportedly even more radical, has taken over and is running the country straight into the ground at an accelerated pace.
And their big play is threatening to blow up Tesla Superchargers at the Mall of the Emirates.
This is what a collapsing regime looks like when it runs out of options — it starts issuing press releases that read like parody. Iran can’t fuel its own power plants, can’t keep its own internet connected, and can’t stop American bombers from treating its airspace like a parking lot. But they want Apple to be scared. They want Nvidia to tremble. The IRGC’s threat isn’t a military strategy. It’s a tantrum from a dying regime that knows the walls are closing in and the lights are about to go out — permanently this time, and not because of a scheduled blackout.
Happy April Fools’ Day, fellas.
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