“Children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more”
Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, spent his Fourth of July weekend accusing anyone “who doesn’t love America” of being a “traitor.”
“Those who don’t love America, those who are disloyal should be exiled immediately,” he added in a post on X.
He also endorsed a post condemning universal voting rights, said that North African immigrants have “utterly incompatible values and must be deported,” and called for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be kicked “out.”
His fury toward Mamdani was inspired by an address the mayor delivered to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. “As we mark 250 years, what do we see?” Mamdani asked while seated behind a desk used by George Washington. “We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world,” he continued, “one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”
SpaceX president buys Trump praise
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell on Monday committed to giving roughly $320 million worth of company stock to Trump Accounts, a new namesake investment vehicle for children. The Treasury Department will fund the accounts with $1,000 for babies born during Donald Trump’s current term. Parents of older children can also open the accounts, but without government funding.
SpaceX, which has billions of dollars in federal contracts, is currently seeking regulatory approval from the Trump administration to launch up to 100,000 low-Earth orbit satellites.
“Thank you to the brilliant and highly respected Gwynne Shotwell, and her husband, Robert, for their extreme generosity in helping children to attain the ever magnificent American dream!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday thanking Shotwell for her “Gift of 325 Million Dollars of SpaceX Stock.”
Trump has also said that he expects SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to help fund the accounts.
This Week in Musk:
While expressing “significant misgivings,” US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan approved Musk’s $1.5 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over his 2022 failure to disclose his Twitter stake within the required timeframe. “Whether the Executive Branch (through the SEC) has done enough to hold Mr. Musk to account for his alleged violation is, like many other issues, for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box,” the judge said. (The Hill)
In the lead-up to SpaceX’s initial public offering last month, Musk posted about race and immigration twice as frequently as he did about his rocket company. (The Guardian)
Musk’s loathing of non-white immigrants has led him to embrace Citizen Vigilante, a new action movie set in Croatia in which Armie Hammer portrays a businessman who slaughters migrants in a series of vigilante murders. On X, Musk has repeatedly recommended Citizen Vigilante to his 240 million followers, including by sharing the entire 89-minute movie for a limited time in one post. “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better,” he wrote. (Wall Street Journal)
Meta contractor dumped deadly bacterium into Cheyenne water system
A Meta contractor dumped wastewater containing a rare and potentially deadly bacterium into Cheyenne, Wyoming’s municipal water system, according to the city’s Board of Public Utilities.
Meta, which is building a sprawling data center just outside Cheyenne, said the local drinking water had not been contaminated by the bacterium Cupriavidus gilardii.
The local utility board agreed with the company’s assessment but has installed additional safety measures for wastewater disposal, per the Guardian.
This Week in Zuck:
Officials in India have called for Meta to remove advertisements for child sexual abuse material from its platforms. The demand came after a BBC investigation found that Instagram was running ads in India promoting the sale of videos depicting child sexual abuse. (BBC, Bloomberg)
In a court filing, Meta said that four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — want $1.4 trillion in penalties over claims that the company’s addictive platforms harmed children. “A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement,” lawyers for Meta wrote, adding that the “calculations have no basis in fact or law.” In response, the California attorney general’s office said that Meta “prioritized profits over the safety of kids and fueled the mental health crisis we see impacting a generation of American children.” The trial is scheduled for August. (Reuters)
Having laid off 8,000 Meta employees in May as part of his pivot toward artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg has informed his remaining employees that things are not going as planned. The “trajectory of the agentic [AI] development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” he reportedly said during a company town hall last week, adding that his vision for a restructured Meta hasn’t “come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg’s candor came in response to cratering morale at the company, which is projected to pump up to $145 billion into its AI apparatus this year. (Reuters)
Threads, one of Meta’s lesser social media platforms, now has 500 million monthly users, according to the company, making its user base roughly equal to X’s. While Zuckerberg launched Threads in 2023 to appeal to those unhappy with post-Musk Twitter, it has since evolved into a Reddit-esque platform where users are funneled into shared interest groups. (New York Times)
How Bezos bought Trump’s support
The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy investigation last week into how Jeff Bezos ingratiated himself with Donald Trump, winning more government contracts for his rocket and satellite company in the process. From the Journal:
Trump hosted Bezos for a private dinner in the Rose Garden last year, frequently asks whether he will be attending other events and talks and texts with him regularly.
In recent months, Trump has told advisers that he wanted to see Bezos get to the moon with his rocket company Blue Origin and make sure it gets related contracts, people familiar with the remarks said…
Part of Bezos’ turnaround was a recognition, people close to him said, of the warm relationship with Trump that his primary rival in the space business, Elon Musk, had built. Musk, with his company SpaceX, could box Blue Origin out of the government contracts it needed unless Bezos made his own inroads with Trump’s team, the people said.
“You tell me what you would have done in October, November, December 2024 when your largest competitor was the main backer of the next president of the United States,” said Barry Diller, a friend of Bezos who is chairman of media conglomerate People Incorporated, formerly known as IAC. “This company depends on the government.”
The paper also noted that Blue Origin has seen a huge increase in federal contracts under Trump, even as the company’s rockets and satellites have demonstrated limited operational success. “Blue Origin’s overall obligations under Trump’s current administration have reached $1.1 billion, compared with nearly $1.2 billion during the entire four-year Biden administration,” the Journal reported.
Meanwhile, Amazon, the source of Bezos’ prodigious wealth, donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inaugural fund and made another contribution to his White House ballroom project.
The company also spent $75 million licensing and marketing Melania Trump’s hagiographic documentary. The first lady reported receiving a $10.7 million licensing fee for the movie, according to the president’s financial disclosure.
This Week in Bezos:
Buoyed by billions of dollars in federal contracts, Blue Origin is looking to close a $10 billion fundraising round this week that would value the company at $130 billion. The round, which marks the first time that Blue Origin has brought in outside investors, will reportedly include $2 billion in personal financing from Bezos. (New York Times)
Despite pledging to be carbon neutral by 2040, Amazon’s self-reported emissions last year rose 16%, largely due to its extensive and rapidly growing network of data centers. The figure, disclosed last week in a corporate “Sustainability Report,” marked the company’s second consecutive annual increase in emissions. (TechCrunch)
Amazon’s $25 billion bond sale this week was met with muted investor demand, forcing the company to offer sweeteners — 18 to 21 basis points on its longest-term bonds — to complete the deal. The company has issued a total of $92 billion in debt this year, largely to fund its headlong spending on AI infrastructure. Lagging interest in the bond sale suggests investors are increasingly wary of the large amounts of debt AI companies like Amazon, Meta, and SpaceX are taking on. (Fortune)
$80 billion
That’s how much debt would loom over a combined Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery if centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son, Paramount CEO David Ellison, manage to complete the acquisition.
“Its net debt is projected to equal roughly 6.5 times annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization after the deal closes as soon as this month, a level that analysts consider high for a media company,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Such a staggering amount of debt could lead to sweeping cuts across the conglomerate’s overlapping assets in news (CBS News and CNN), streaming (Paramount+ and HBO Max), and film (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros).
But a Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that Ellison’s deal for Warner “is premised on growth, not cost-cutting… We will be reducing debt while continuing to invest in the business.”
Meanwhile, a lawsuit seeking to block the deal could be filed by several US states as soon as next week, according to Reuters. The investigation is being led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta. A long legal dispute could end up costing the Ellisons hundreds of millions of dollars. If the deal isn’t completed before October, Ellison would be on the hook for as much as $650 million in quarterly ticking fees paid out to Warner shareholders.
Oligarch Roundup
A flight attendant accused Peter Thiel’s husband of assaulting her on a private jet. Stefanie Bojar, the Solairus Aviation flight attendant, alleged the assault took place during a 2024 flight, which was one of more than 200 trips she had worked for Thiel. According to Bojar, Matthew Danzeisen — Thiel’s husband and an executive at Thiel Capital — shoved her and hurled heavy bags at her while attempting to gain access to a bathroom in the rear of the jet. Bojar, who alleges that Danzeisen severely injured her knee and ankle, had sought to settle the dispute out of court. But in May, Danzeisen filed a lawsuit in federal court against Bojar, accusing the flight attendant of seeking to “extort” him and Thiel. Bojar responded with a counterclaim filed this week, in which she denied Danzeisen’s allegations and added Thiel Capital as a defendant. (Wired)
Secret Thiel donation to Cambridge University appears to have influenced the institution’s hiring of far-right philosopher James Orr. “Orr has housed students at his ‘right-wing mecca’ alongside race science advocates and hard-right political figures, in clear breach of Cambridge University’s safeguarding rules,” notes a new investigation from the Byline Times. “Orr’s appointment as Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity in 2019 was accompanied by a clandestine financial donation from the pro-Trump Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel.” Along with his work at Cambridge, Orr serves as a senior advisor to Nigel Farage, a right-wing politician and leader of the Reform UK party. (Byline Times)
GOP megadonor Ken Griffin inclined to back Marco Rubio over JD Vance in 2028. The Citadel hedge fund founder shared his preference for Rubio during a Wednesday interview at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. He has given hundreds of millions of dollars to Republicans over the years, including more than $100 million during the 2024 election cycle. Griffin, the 36th richest person, also backed Rubio’s failed 2016 campaign for president. (Axios)
This is the most difficult read I have every week. The oligarchs report is the most stomach churning stuff. These careless, myopic men and their overblown egos make me sick. I am doing okay but I see the desperate and hopeless everyday. I see Americans who have given up. I see young people frightened of a jobless future. I see mistrust on the faces of brown people, the fear and unknowing that surrounds their existence. And these men just frolic amidst the wreckage they are creating. And all around them are the minions they have paid off, the politicians who have shown their true colors and industry stepping aside as they bulldoze our culture and tear our safety net to shreds. Please keep up the reporting. I'll pop an antacid.
Musk himself was born in Africa.
He’s an immigrant-hating immigrant.