Elon’s horrible, no good, very bad day

Elon Musk during a press conference at SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas on February 10, 2022. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Tesla stock fell by almost 15% on Thursday, shaving $214.5 billion off the company’s market capitalization. The selloff — which bled into Friday and took place as the stock of Elon Musk’s other public company, SpaceX, continues to plummet — was Tesla’s worst ever single-day market cap loss.

The plunge was triggered by Tesla’s quarterly report on Wednesday, which included missed earnings estimates, underwhelming profits from its vehicle sales, and $5.8 billion in spending on its speculative artificial intelligence projects: self-driving cars and humanoid robots.

On a call with investors, Musk promised to increase the company’s expenditures further, saying, “This is a massive capex year. We should be spending on capex as fast as we can… as fast as we can without it being too wasteful.”

Tesla still has very little to show for its AI spending. It has sold zero humanoid robots. And its so-called Robotaxi service — which is, in fact, wholly or partly human-operated — is currently a tiny pilot fleet spread across several US cities, primarily in Austin, Texas, with smaller pools in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa.

For more than a year, Musk has insisted that Tesla’s driver assistance systems are safer than human drivers and would save lives if regulators allowed them to be deployed. And yet, on the Wednesday call, he blamed the lagging rollout of Tesla’s Robotaxi service on safety precautions. “We want to grow as fast ​as possible with robotaxi, ⁠without harm to anyone,” he said after being asked by an analyst why Tesla had not added more vehicles to its rideshare fleets.

The company’s valuation remains largely tied to a sci-fi fantasy where autonomous cars and humanoid robots handle everything from chores to industrial manufacturing. “The stock is increasingly being valued on robotaxi and humanoid developments rather than core auto fundamentals,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Tom Narayan wrote in a recent note. Maybe some investors are finally starting to wonder whether any of Musk’s grandiose predictions for Tesla will ever come true.

This Week in Musk:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating a post Musk shared on X, his social media platform, in which he urged Tesla owners to turn on their vehicle’s driver assistance systems and “Make your espresso on the road while your Tesla drives itself.” He shared a video of a Tesla owner doing just that to support the recommendation. (Business Insider)

• SpaceX, the parent company of xAI, is reportedly in talks to lease the Pentagon billions of dollars’ worth of data center computing capacity to run the military’s AI models. The potential deal could explain why the Justice Department recently intervened against an NAACP lawsuit seeking to shut down the polluting power turbines that SpaceX’s data centers rely on. (Wall Street Journal)

• Currently, SpaceX operates both of its xAI data centers in Memphis, Tennessee. But it reportedly has plans to build another massive data center in Texas. (The Information)

• In an interview with the Economist, Musk was asked about critics who have called him a racist. “My partner, she’s half-Indian,” he said in response. “And I have four children with her, you know, one of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. Um, so I would say I’m not racist.” (The Economist)

• In the same interview, Musk said that he “got carried away” during his time working for Donald Trump and leading the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency. (The Guardian)

Zuckerberg’s AI propaganda campaign

Poll after poll has shown that a majority of Americans are wary of artificial intelligence technologies and their impact on society. In an attempt to combat that sentiment, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new corporate propaganda campaign extolling the virtuous potential of AI.

“Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind. We couldn’t disagree more,” says the narrator in a new Meta ad featuring the slogan, “The future is for everyone.” (In an odd musical selection, a David Bowie song about the Earth dying can be heard playing in the background of the ad, as noted by Wired.)

The narration continues:

We bet on people when we connected you to the ones you lost touch with, and again when we connected you to the ones you couldn’t be near. Twenty-two years and 3.5 billion people later, we’re doubling down. Because technology will change, our intention behind it never will. Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds.

In a post sharing the ad, Zuckerberg wrote, “Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want.”

“As we enter this next wave with AI,” he added, “... we’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”

The attempt to associate AI technologies with human connection and flourishing marks a departure from Zuckerberg’s rhetoric last year. At the time, he envisioned a future in which Americans — an increasingly lonely and socially isolated people — would turn to AI companions for the vast majority of their friendships and relational needs.

“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said at a May 2025 conference.

This Week in Zuck:

• Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company will remove videos from Instagram that depict individuals using Meta’s smart glasses to film themselves harassing strangers. “If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” Mosseri said. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.” The policy commitment appeared to be an attempt by Meta to reverse the growing belief that smart glasses are an accessory for seedy men who like to film strangers in public. (Business Insider)

• US District Judge William Orrick declined to block Meta from terminating 26 employees who sued the company. The employees have accused Meta of discriminating against them by using an AI system to measure worker productivity and decide which employees would be let go. That system, the workers claim, specifically targeted workers who have disabilities or took medical or parental leave. But the judge presiding over the lawsuit has said the plaintiffs will have trouble proving their case because “they were not in the rooms where it happened.” (Reuters)

• On Wednesday, a childhood social media addiction lawsuit against Meta was dropped by a 15-year-old boy from Florida. The lawsuit was the second of nine bellwether cases selected by the California Superior Court involving addiction claims against the leading social media companies. Emily Jeffcott, a lawyer for the Florida teenager, said her client was satisfied with settlements he had reached with TikTok, Snap, and YouTube, and dropped the case to avoid a “grueling weekslong trial.” (New York Times)

• In Nashville, Tennessee, a trial began this week for a lawsuit brought by the state accusing Meta of instigating a mental health epidemic among young Americans. The trial is set to last seven weeks. (Tennessean)

Peter Thiel to receive media award from parent company of Politico and Business Insider

Axel Springer, the German media giant that owns Politico, Business Insider, and Bild, announced last week that it will give its 2026 namesake award to Peter Thiel, a far-right, German-born billionaire.

Thiel is set to receive the award in September during a ceremony in Berlin that will feature remarks from CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. Past Axel Springer Award winners include Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman.

While announcing the award, Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner praised Thiel, saying his “ability to think long-term, argue against consensus, and consistently bet on innovation has inspired generations of founders. He reminds us that progress requires courage and nonconformism.”

In a 2009 essay, Thiel wrote that “freedom and democracy” are not compatible. In the same piece, he argued that granting women the right to vote had “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

More recently, Thiel has accused Pope Leo XIV of “working for the Chinese communists” and said that Greta Thunberg, an environmental activist, could be the antichrist.

The tens of millions that Thiel has spent tilting elections to Republicans like JD Vance and killing the media company Gawker were not mentioned in the Axel Springer Award announcement. Instead, the company credited him for shaping “public debate on innovation, freedom, and the future of Western societies.”

“As a co-founder of Palantir, he built one of the most valuable companies of our time and one that is crucial to the resilience of democracies,” Axel Springer added in its press release.

Palantir, a software company once funded by the CIA, produces digital analytics programs that the US and Israeli militaries use to choose which people to kill in airstrikes. “Palantir is here to disrupt… and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a 2024 message to shareholders. The Department of Homeland Security also has used a Palantir analytics program to select US neighborhoods to target for immigration raids.

Amazon’s conspiracy to raise prices on consumers

An investigation from the Guardian has shed new light on how Amazon wields its dominance in the online retail industry to artificially raise prices across the internet and funnel more shoppers to its website.

From the Guardian:

For years, as many Americans have felt squeezed by the costs of basic consumer goods, Amazon has deployed a variety of techniques that have incentivized suppliers to push for higher product prices on other retailers’ sites, California authorities claim in court.

In some internal emails, Amazon employees have flagged low product prices on rival retailers’ sites as threats to Amazon’s own profitability, and informed the products’ suppliers that their sales on Amazon.com have been cut – or might soon be cut – going forward.

Other emails describe Amazon slashing its product prices to match retail rivals like Walmart and Home Depot, then pushing suppliers to compensate it for the revenue lost due to these lower prices.

To escape this financial pressure, some suppliers have responded with a fast and cheap alternative: making sure the prices of their products are higher with Amazon’s rivals, or pulling their products from those rivals altogether, according to internal records cited in litigation.

This Week in Bezos:

• Bezos is considering joining a consortium of investors looking to purchase a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club, an English Premier League team and one of the most valuable athletic organizations in the world. In recent years, Bezos has explored buying the Washington Commanders and Seattle Seahawks of the NFL. But those inquiries never resulted in a bid. Bezos has used Amazon and its video streaming service to establish himself in the industry, with the company buying rights to broadcast UEFA soccer matches in the UK and NFL and NBA games in the US. (Sky News)

• A former employee sued Amazon Services last week, alleging that he was fired for taking time off to care for his ailing wife even though the company had approved his leave. (Bloomberg Law)

• While Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has promised to “hold data center developers accountable,” his Democratic administration colluded with Amazon, a leading AI hyperscaler, to develop the state’s data center standards. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Tuesday that it had “attacked the central data infrastructure of the American company Amazon in Bahrain with several cruise missiles and destroyed it.” Throughout the war with the US and Israel, the Iranian military has sought to target infrastructure associated with the most valuable American tech companies. Last month, Iran threatened to target Elon Musk’s business interests in the region. Both Musk and Bezos lead companies with significant Pentagon contracts. (CNBC)

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Oligarch Roundup

Federal judge orders Paramount to suspend its $111 billion acquisition of Warner. On Monday, US Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a temporary restraining order pausing the deal through August 3. The pause was requested by the 12 Democratic-led states that are suing to block the sale of Warner Bros Discovery to Paramount. Martínez-Olguín said the states made a “strong showing” when arguing that the deal would illegally hamper competition in the film and television industries. The parties are now waiting to see whether the judge will grant an injunction that could put the deal on ice for months. Paramount, which is controlled by centibillionaire Larry Ellison and his son, said its acquisition of Warner “is lawful, pro-competitive, and will benefit consumers, creators, workers and the entertainment industry.” The Ellisons face a separate lawsuit from a Paramount shareholder who has accused them of making an “illegal” deal with Donald Trump to receive regulatory clearance for the sale. (Reuters, New York Times)

Investigation purports to clear Gates Foundation of involvement in Epstein’s operations. The five-month investigation, which was commissioned by the Gates Foundation and conducted by lawyers from WilmerHale, “found no evidence” that the nonprofit’s employees participated in or had knowledge of “Epstein’s ongoing sex trafficking operations or criminal activities.” Investigators arrived at that conclusion despite having never reviewed the personal communications and interactions that Gates and his other entities had with Epstein. The glaring omissions were only acknowledged in a footnote from a summary of the report. Investigators also found that an unnamed Gates Foundation advisor introduced Epstein to Gates and other foundation employees in 2011. Additionally, according to the report summary, “Epstein learned information about Mr. Gates and the foundation through two employees who shared sensitive information and forwarded email communications to Epstein.” Gates, the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft, had a yearslong relationship with Epstein that began after the child sex trafficker’s first conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution. (Wall Street Journal)

Space experts and environmentalists warn that space-based data centers could be “catastrophic” for Earth. Proponents of satellite data centers “have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values,” read a petition filed by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Earthjustice, and DarkSky International. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are exploring launching millions of satellite data centers that could result in significant changes to Earth’s atmosphere. (The Guardian)