Bezos silent on FBI raid of Washington Post reporter’s home

Jeff Bezos on June 27, 2025, in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Ernesto Ruscio/GC Images)

Following the FBI’s Wednesday raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter covering the Trump administration, Jeff Bezos, the paper’s billionaire owner, stayed radio silent. He has not released a statement supporting the targeted reporter, Hannah Natanson, nor said anything about the raid. Natanson’s cell phones and two of her laptops, including a work computer, were seized during the raid, which the FBI claims was connected to the Post’s reporting on “a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.”

In response to Bezos’s reticence, a number of journalists at the Post have anonymously expressed their disappointment, including one who told Status that it was “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event.” Meanwhile, the Post’s website has been flooded with notes from angry subscribers, prompting the paper to briefly disable comments.

Since the 2024 election, Bezos has aggressively sought to ingratiate himself with Trump. He attended the president’s inauguration last January, complimented the administration’s economic agenda, and overhauled the Post’s editorial board to make it more conservative.

This Week in Bezos:

• Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are among the billionaires who have invested in mining companies seeking to exploit Greenland’s natural resources, a goal that is also a key motivation behind Trump’s plan to seize the autonomous territory from Denmark. (New Republic)

• The antitrust authority in Italy has lowered a record-high fine on Amazon from €1.128 billion to €752.4 million. Despite the reduction, Amazon, which received the fine in 2021 for exploiting its near-monopoly in logistics, plans to appeal the fine. (Reuters)

• In a move targeting its chief retail competitors, Walmart and Target, Amazon plans to open a new 228,000-square-foot superstore in the Chicago suburbs. The location will offer groceries and durable goods. “This is a retail concept, a retail store, albeit with perhaps a larger storeroom in the back,” said Amazon attorney Katie Jahnke Dale. (Business Insider)

Pentagon embraces Musk’s AI chatbot

Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, has generated child sexual abuse materials, repeatedly praised Hitler, and shared the private home addresses of ordinary people. But the chatbot’s long list of offenses has not dissuaded the Pentagon. On Monday, the Defense Department announced that it would expand its relationship with xAI by integrating Grok into the Pentagon’s networks, including its classified systems.

During a speech at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the change “will go live later this month” as part of the Pentagon’s new focus on AI. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” said Hegseth, who was introduced by Musk. In borrowing the language that Musk has used to market Grok, Hegseth said the Pentagon’s AI “will not be woke.”

“We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI,” he added. “We will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.”

Hegseth announced the Pentagon’s expanded use of Grok at the same time that the chatbot is facing nationwide bans and investigations due to its creation of child sexual abuse materials.

In the U.K., Ofcom, the country’s social media regulator, has opened an investigation into X for publishing illegal content. Grok is an integrated feature on X — formerly Twitter, now the Musk-owned social media subsidiary of xAI. This arrangement allows users to query the chatbot in public posts that it then responds to as if it were a regular user. Many of the pornographic images from Grok were generated when users on X shared a photo of a real person with the chatbot and asked it to digitally undress them.

Those posts led U.K. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall to state that the entire X platform could be blocked in the country. Musk responded by accusing the U.K. of “censorship,” adding, “Why is the UK government so fascist?”

Grok, meanwhile, has already been blocked in Malaysia and Indonesia. And in California, Attorney General Rob Bonta said the state had opened an investigation into xAI “because of the shocking and potentially illegal nonconsensual sexually explicit material that has been produced using Grok.”

In a lengthy post on Wednesday, X claimed to have “implemented technological measures to prevent the [@]Grok account on X globally from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing.”

Still, Musk appears to have done little to remedy the scandal. While X has limited Grok’s image-generating capabilities to paid subscribers, an investigation from The Verge found that users could still easily generate sexual deepfakes by directly chatting with Grok or using xAI’s dedicated website.

This Week in Musk:

• Last week, Musk shared a post on X that called for “White solidarity” and stated, “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.” Musk endorsed the post by adding the “100” emoji while he shared it with his 232 million followers. (X)

• In the first nine months of last year, xAI burned through nearly $8 billion, with the company piling up losses as it seeks to expand its massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee. (Bloomberg)

• Musk said Wednesday that Tesla “will stop selling FSD” next month, referring to the Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver-assistance software, which the company sells for a one-time $8,000 charge. After February 14, according to Musk, the software will only be available as a $99-per month subscription service. (Reuters)

Zuckerberg chooses former Trump adviser to serve as Meta’s president

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that he has named former Trump adviser Dina Powell McCormick as Meta’s new president and vice chairperson. Powell McCormick, who is also the wife of Republican Senator David McCormick, worked for Trump during his first administration, serving as his deputy national security adviser.

Trump eagerly welcomed the news on Truth Social, writing, “Congratulations to DINA POWELL MCCORMICK, WHO HAS JUST BEEN NAMED THE NEW PRESIDENT OF META. A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!”

Zuckerberg’s appointment of Powell McCormick marks his latest step to curry favor with Trump and his administration. He has already overhauled Facebook’s approach to content moderation by doing away with the fact-checkers that angered Trump and much of the conservative world. He has also appeared with Trump at various gatherings, including a White House dinner in September, during which he joined the president to announce a $600 billion investment in domestic AI infrastructure. Additionally, Zuckerberg named close Trump ally and UFC CEO Dana White to Meta’s board of directors last year.

In turn, Trump has pushed to curb government regulation and oversight of AI, including through an executive order that attempts to block states from governing the disruptive technology.

As for Powell McCormick, she most recently worked as the president of BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank, and was previously a senior executive at Goldman Sachs.

“Dina’s experience at the highest levels of global finance, combined with her deep relationships around the world, makes her uniquely suited to help Meta manage this next phase of growth as the company’s President and Vice Chairman,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. The hire comes as Zuckerberg reshuffles Meta to prioritize its AI research and development division.

This Week in Zuck:

• Last Friday, Meta said it had struck multiple deals positioning the company as a leading buyer of nuclear energy as it seeks massive electricity supplies to power its AI data centers. The agreements include the development of new reactors by Oklo and TerraPower, as well as a deal to purchase power from a trio of existing nuclear plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The deals would provide enough energy to power roughly 5 million homes. Joel Kaplan, Meta’s head of global affairs, framed the company’s spending on nuclear energy as a way to help the U.S. “win the AI race against China.” (Bloomberg)

• A lawsuit against Meta filed by the New Mexico Department of Justice will go to trial. The state sued Meta in 2023 over claims that it failed to protect minors from sexual abuse and trafficking on Facebook and Instagram. (KOB 4)

• In Australia, Meta has shuttered 550,000 accounts to comply with the country’s new social media ban on users under 16. (BBC)

• Meta plans to cut around 10% of its Reality Labs division, which is focused on creating virtual reality and metaverse products. (New York Times)

Oligarch Roundup

Billionaire donates $10,000 to ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good. Bill Ackman, the pro-Trump hedgefunder worth an estimated $9.4 billion, made a $10,000 donation to a GoFundMe campaign for Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot and killed protester Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week. (USA Today)

Thiel shells out millions to fight proposed billionaire tax in California. Right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel has donated $3 million to a political committee attempting to torpedo a proposed tax on California’s wealthiest residents. Supporters of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-off 5% tax on billionaires’ assets, plan to put the ballot measure to a vote in November. Aside from Thiel, other billionaires, including Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks, Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey, and Silicon Valley investor Chris Larsen, have strategized to defeat the proposal in a private group chat on Signal. (New York Times)

Israeli billionaire calls for throttling First Amendment. In an interview with CNBC, Shlomo Kramer, an Israeli cybersecurity baron, said that the U.S. must “limit the First Amendment in order to protect it. And quickly before it’s too late.” He added that the government needs “to control the platforms, all the social platforms. We need to stack, rank the authenticity of every person that expresses themselves online and take control over what they are saying, based on that ranking.” (CNBC)

Billionaire NASA head offers staffers joyrides on his jet as agency’s funding dwindles. As the Trump administration looks to make additional large cuts to NASA’s funding, the space agency’s new billionaire administrator, Musk-ally Jared Isaacman, is offering staffers a pick-me-up: flights aboard his “privately-owned F-5 aircraft.” In a post on X, NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens announced, “If you are an accomplished NASA employee doing exceptional work, there will be opportunities ahead to take to the skies with the NASA administration.” (Futurism)

Paramount sues Warner Bros. in acquisition battle. Paramount, which is owned and controlled by the oligarchic, right-wing Ellison family, is suing Warner Bros. Discovery in its effort to acquire the media giant. David Ellison, the head of Paramount, said the lawsuit is for information “so that WBD shareholders have what they need to be able to make an informed decision as to whether to tender their shares into our offer.” Warner Bros., which reached a deal to sell its studio and top streaming assets to Netflix last month, has already rejected bids made by the Ellisons several times. (Business Insider)

OpenAI secures more circular financing. OpenAI is investing $500 million into SB Energy, a subsidiary of SoftBank, the Japanese investment company that has invested $41 billion in OpenAI. Like SoftBank, SB Energy is also both an OpenAI partner and customer. The investment marks another layer of circular financing between OpenAI and its partners. On the subject of questionable OpenAI investments, the company recently announced a $250 million investment into Merge Labs, the brain-computer interface startup led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. (Wall Street Journal)

Economics expert predicts OpenAI could run out of money by 2027. “My bet is that over the next 18 months, OpenAI runs out of money,” wrote Sebastian Mallaby, a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a Tuesday op-ed. OpenAI reportedly projects that it will exhaust tens of billions over the next two years, a burn rate that Mallaby believes is not sustainable. “The probable result is that OpenAI will be absorbed by Microsoft, Amazon or another cash-rich behemoth,” he added. (New York Times)

Unsealed texts and emails reveal private comments from Musk and Altman. Newly unsealed court documents in Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI reveal that Musk called Bezos a “tool” in a 2016 email in which he advised Altman against going into business with Amazon. Musk is an OpenAI cofounder who left the company in 2018 due, in part, to a lack of control over its future. While Musk and Altman were once close collaborators, the two have become arch-rivals. A 2023 text exchange between the two men revealed another chapter in their bitter relationship. “i remember seeing you in a tv interview a long time ago (maybe 60 minutes?) where you [were] being attacked by some guys, and you said they were heroes of yours and it was really tough,” Altman wrote to Musk. “well, you’re my hero and that’s what it feels like when you attack OpenAI.” (Business Insider)