Meta accused of targeting employees with medical conditions
A group of 26 Meta employees sued the company in federal court on Monday, accusing it of using artificial intelligence to target disabled workers and those who took medical leave for layoffs.
The plaintiffs, who were notified in May that their jobs would be eliminated starting on July 22, are seeking a preliminary ruling from the court blocking Meta from completing the layoffs while they pursue their claims in private arbitration. The workers say Meta’s agreements require employees to arbitrate workplace disputes individually, but do not apply to requests for temporary relief…
The lawsuit appears to be the first against a major U.S. company to challenge the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs.
In response, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, told the outlet that “organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.”
The employees cited Meta’s use of productivity metrics and AI usage rates to decide who would be let go. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the layoff of 8,000 employees was necessary to ensure Meta’s “success” in the AI race. He also assigned thousands of employees to new AI development roles — a workforce shift marred by “mistakes,” as Zuckerberg has since acknowledged.
This Week in Zuck:
Less than four days after launch, Meta discontinued a tool that allowed users to generate AI images from real photos on Instagram. Specifically, any photo uploaded by an adult user with a publicly viewable account was automatically approved by Meta for AI manipulation. In turn, Hollywood talent agencies, the largest union for actors, and thousands of individual Instagram users protested the tool, accusing Meta of privacy violations. “Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.” (New York Times)
Last week, Meta appealed the jury verdict in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit from March. The Los Angeles jury found that Meta was liable for using Instagram’s addictive design features to harm a young woman. The company faces thousands of similar lawsuits that claim its products have harmed American children and teens. (Associated Press)
On the other side of the Atlantic, the European Commission found that addictive design features on Facebook and Instagram violate the region’s digital child safety rules. The commission has asked that Meta disable the infinite content feed and video autoplay features, install an effective “screen time” break mechanism, and curb the content algorithms that are used to maximize how much time users spend scrolling. Meta could face fines of up to 6% of its annual revenue if it fails to deliver the requested changes. “We disagree with these preliminary findings, which don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens,” a Meta spokesperson said in response. (Politico)
Meta is pumping another $40 billion into its Louisiana data center campus, pushing the project’s total costs past $250 billion. (Bloomberg)
While Meta has pressured its software engineers to burn AI tokens — data units used to measure model processing demand — the rising cost of such an unrestrained approach is forcing the company to reconsider. “I think that you can imagine, at least in a year or two… that the [AI token] burn rate of a strong engineer might be the same as their salary, or their cost of employment,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in a recent interview. “And in that world, you’re going to probably need to put in some caps” on AI usage, he added. (TechCrunch)
“Many journalists are more powerful than billionaires”
A bizarre anti-media project funded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel has launched a database to rank and “score every journalist on the rigor of their reporting.”
Objection, the company in question, launched earlier this year on the premise that it would host “tribunals” in which AI models would judge whether a given journalist’s reporting was trustworthy. In reality, it was a platform for rich people to pay thousands of dollars for “proof” that a journalist treated them unfairly.
But after changing its name to the Primary this week, the company now claims to host “a robust public methodology that scores, ranks and indexes journalists on the rigor of their reporting.” Thousands of journalists and pundits are featured on the site, alongside an AI-powered scorecard ranking their “sources,” “evidence quality,” and “polemical language,” among other “performance” metrics.
Primary CEO Aron D’Souza, who is best known for leading the Thiel-funded lawsuit that put Gawker out of business, has said he believes that “many journalists are more powerful than billionaires.”
“I can’t tell you how many billionaires and CEOs have called me in absolute tears about their lives being destroyed by one article,” he said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter earlier this year.
So you read this newsletter, but you haven’t purchased a paid subscription. There are two possibilities:
1. You just can’t afford the price of a subscription ($60/year or $7/month) right now. If that is the case, we get it! That’s exactly why Oligarch Watch articles almost never have a paywall. We want everyone to have access to our work, regardless of their financial resources.
2. You value independent journalism that holds the world’s wealthiest people accountable and understand why it is critical to preserving and protecting democracy. You have thought about supporting Oligarch Watch, but you just haven’t gotten around to it. That’s how it goes — life is busy.
But maybe today is the day! It takes a minute, and paid subscribers are the entire reason this newsletter exists. To maintain our independence, Popular Information has no advertisers and no corporate owners. We count on readers like you.
Musk’s $1 million election giveaway likely violated Wisconsin bribery laws
Elon Musk’s offer to give $1 million to voters in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year likely violated state bribery law, according to findings from a bipartisan panel.
In a 5-1 vote last week, the Wisconsin Elections Commission agreed to refer the election bribery complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office.
The commission said it had probable cause to believe that Musk violated Wisconsin’s election bribery statute because he “offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election,” per Wisconsin Public Radio.
In all, Musk spent $20 million supporting Brad Schimel’s failed candidacy for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His expenditures included a trio of $1 million checks given to three Wisconsin voters. During the election, Musk’s America PAC also offered to give $100 to voters who signed a petition against “activist judges.”
This Week in Musk:
xAI, the SpaceX subsidiary, has sued a South Carolina man for allegedly using the company’s Grok AI technology to produce child sexual abuse material. Terry Wayne Harwood “knowingly and intentionally used Grok to circumvent safeguards, alter nonconsensual images, and generate and distribute CSAM,” the company claims. The suit comes on the heels of a proposed class action lawsuit accusing xAI of enabling predators who used Grok to generate sexually explicit images of young girls. The complaint alleges that a stepfather fed Grok a photo of his then-11-year-old stepdaughter to generate thousands of sexual images of her. xAI’s safety mechanism only reported the stepfather after he prompted Grok to produce images of “gang rape.” The stepfather has since died by suicide. (The Verge)
Mindgard, a British cybersecurity company, found that xAI’s Grok would generate images of bloody body parts and naked women even absent explicit instructions to do so. (Axios)
xAI has doubled the number of gas-burning mobile turbines it runs to power its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, despite never having obtained clean air permits from the federal government. A Reuters investigation found that xAI’s power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, now houses 57 of the polluting turbines. Two additional turbines are operated out of a separate facility. “The scale of it is astonishing,” the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Patrick Anderson said. “This is an absolutely huge Clean Air Act violation that threatens public health.” Musk appears committed to using the dangerous generators to power his data centers. In May, he acquired APR Energy, a company that produces gas- and diesel-burning mobile turbines, according to new reporting from the Florida Times-Union. (Reuters)
Errol Musk, Elon’s father, told the Guardian that his son’s foundation paid for fascist activist Tommy Robinson to visit Moscow last month to meet with Russian business leaders. “I brought him out to Russia,” said the elder Musk, adding that the Musk Foundation covered the trip. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has sought to ignite race riots in the UK by depicting non-white immigrants as murderous child rapists. Errol Musk, meanwhile, has been accused of sexually abusing several of his own children and stepchildren. (The Guardian)
Elon Musk is also an outspoken supporter of Robinson. On Monday, the centibillionaire shared an AI-generated video from Robinson depicting a young white woman being sexually harassed by a South Asian man on the streets of London. When a white man intervenes to stop the harassment, a police officer is shown tasing and clubbing him, thus allowing the South Asian man to walk free. “Literally true,” Musk said in his post sharing the obviously fake video. (X)
$122.12
That was the new all-time low that SpaceX shares were trading at on Friday morning, a more than $12 dip below the stock’s initial public offering price of $135. The nadir materialized after SpaceX’s decision on Thursday to abort the thirteenth test flight of its Starship rocket.
Even after this week’s record sell-off — which cost Musk his trillionaire status and shaved $1 trillion off SpaceX’s market capitalization — the stock could “go a lot lower,” FBB Capital’s Mel Casey told Reuters.
Only 5% of the company’s stock is currently publicly traded. That portion could be devalued in the coming months when the company’s lockup period lapses, allowing insiders to flood the market with newly tradeable shares.
Oligarch Roundup
AI companies are increasing security spending for their executives. Of the $5.6 million that Oracle spent on security last year, the majority went toward providing residential protection for executive chairman Larry Ellison, the seventh richest person in the world. The company said Ellison faced “specific threats and safety concerns.” Overall, the company increased its security budget 85.5% year-over-year. Similar hikes were reported by Palantir Technologies, where spending on executive protection increased by 150%. (Wall Street Journal)
Democratic states sue to block Ellisons’ $110 billion deal for Warner. On Monday, California, New York, and 10 other Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit to block the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount, claiming the deal would eliminate competition in film and cable television distribution. “The likely result is higher prices, lower quality and less content for film,” attorneys general for the 12 states wrote. The lawsuit contends that the proposed deal runs afoul of the Clayton Act, a century-old federal law that prohibits mergers likely to hamper competition or create monopolies. A combined Paramount and Warner, the states argue, would create a market in which four distributors would hold the rights to an overwhelming majority of blockbuster films. Paramount is controlled and led by Trump allies Larry Ellison, the centibillionaire tech executive, and his son David. (Deadline)
Progressive advocacy group ramps up “Tax the Greedy Billionaires” campaign. The group is pressuring Democratic lawmakers to support a wealth tax of 5% on household net worth exceeding $50 million and 10% on net worth above $250 million. “What we’ve seen over the last couple of years is the kind of blatant exercise of billionaire power that so many folks have been warning us about over the past couple of decades,” Tax the Greedy Billionaires campaign director Igor Volsky said. “That’s why the issue is in the zeitgeist.” (Washington Post)
Amazon plans to launch its Leo satellite internet service in South Africa by 2027. If it meets that deadline, the Jeff Bezos-founded company would beat out Elon Musk, who has spent years attempting to launch his Starlink internet service in his home country of South Africa. (NBC News)
One more reason to support Medicare For All.
He is such a douchebag