Musk’s sweetheart deal
On Monday, Elon Musk agreed to settle a lawsuit filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) related to his purchase of Twitter in 2022. The lawsuit, filed in January 2025 during the final days of the Biden administration, alleged that Musk “was 11 days late in disclosing that he had acquired a major stake in Twitter.” The delay, according to the SEC, allowed Musk “to buy up shares in the social media company on the cheap.”
According to the lawsuit, the delayed disclosure saved Musk about $150 million. But the SEC agreed to settle the case in exchange for Musk paying a fine of just $1.5 million. As part of the settlement, Musk will neither admit nor deny the allegations.
Musk’s fine was the equivalent of fining an average American 44 cents. Musk’s net worth, according to Bloomberg, is currently $663 billion. According to the most recent government data, the median American net worth is about $192,000.
“I do think that it suggests if you’re wealthy or powerful enough then there aren’t going to be consequences,” Mark Fagel, a former enforcement official at the SEC, said.
Book publishers sue Zuckerberg, alleging mass copyright infringement
Five book publishers and author Scott Turow sued Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week. The lawsuit alleges Meta “illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from notorious pirate sites” and then “copied those stolen fruits many times over to train Meta’s multibillion-dollar generative AI system called Llama.”
The lawsuit names Zuckerberg individually as a defendant. It claims, “Zuckerberg and other Meta executives authorized and directed the torrenting of over 267 TB of pirated material — equivalent to hundreds of millions of publications and many times the size of the entire print collection of the Library of Congress.” It calls this “one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
The plaintiffs claim that Meta was initially considering paying licensing fees to book publishers but abandoned that idea at “Zuckerberg’s personal instruction.”
In a statement, Meta did not deny using pirated material to train its AI model but claimed it was legal. “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
Bezos-backed Met Gala met with protests
Billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos, were the lead sponsors and honorary co-chairs of this year’s Met Gala. The glitzy event serves as an annual fundraiser for the Costume Institute, the fashion wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In recent years, Bezos has attracted increased criticism by supporting Trump, gutting the Washington Post, and remaking the paper’s opinion section into a megaphone for right-wing ideology.
Protesters blanketed New York City in the days leading up to the event with posters urging celebrities to boycott the event. “There’s no dressing it up. Met Gala chair Jeff Bezos avoids tax, enables ICE and backs Trump. Don’t let him get away with it,” one poster read. Another group held a competing fashion show a few blocks from the Met featuring Amazon workers. “The attention should go more on the people that helped them get all this wealth and publicity,” Shantiera Dubarry, a New York City security guard who attended the event, said. “They should put the workers’ hard work in the spotlight. They seem to want to grab everything for themselves.”
Some celebrities who previously attended the Met Gala agreed with the message. “I am so confused by some ppl that are going. I am just like WTF ARE WE DOING,” Actor Taraji P. Henson commented on Instagram.
While many celebrities attended the event, other mainstays were notably absent, including Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Musk threatened to make OpenAI executives “the most hated men in America”
Musk was involved with OpenAI at its founding and donated money when it was a non-profit organization. Now, Musk has sued OpenAI and its executives for $150 billion, arguing that he was hoodwinked and the court should unwind its new for-profit structure. The trial got underway last week and is ongoing.
According to a legal filing, Musk sent OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman a text a couple days before the trial began suggesting the sides negotiate a settlement. When Brockman suggested all parties simply drop their claims, Musk was not pleased. “By the end of this week, you and Sam [Altman] will be the most hated men in America,” Musk wrote. “If you insist, so it will be.”
Billionaires bankrolling 2026 election
The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the most expensive in history, fueled by record donations from billionaires, Bloomberg reports. The largest donor thus far has been George Soros, who has donated $102 million to his own Super PAC, Democracy PAC. Soros supports liberal causes. But after Soros, the remainder of the top ten donors are right-wing. This includes Musk ($84.5 million), Jeff Yass ($81.8 million), Richard Uihlein ($45.3 million), Marc Andreessen ($44.8 million), Ben Horowitz ($44.4 million), and Miriam Adelson ($42.6 million).
The New York Times took an in-depth look at the 1976 Supreme Court case that unleashed billionaire spending in political campaigns, Buckley v. Valeo. While the case upheld certain campaign finance restrictions, “[t]he court ruled that wealthy Americans could spend unlimited amounts of money to independently support candidates and causes they favored.” It was that decision that has “allowed the Koch brothers to build a right-wing political money machine that rivaled that of the Republican Party itself.”
Three months ago, Musk called Anthropic “evil.” Now they are business partners.
In February, Musk called Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude chatbot, “misanthropic and evil.”
Now, Musk has inked a major business deal with the company. Under the terms of the agreement announced this week, SpaceX, the parent company of xAI, will give Anthropic access to “the entire capacity of its Colossus 1 data center, amounting to more than 300 megawatts of new capacity (over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs) within the month.”
The deal is a tacit acknowledgement that Musk has been more successful in scaling infrastructure than creating an AI product that people want to use. Grok, xAI’s chatbot, has lagged behind Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT in terms of capability and users.
Veteran CNN anchor blasts incoming billionaire boss
At an event in London on Wednesday, CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour raised concerns about David Ellison, who will be in charge of the network after his company completes the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The transaction was substantially financed by Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, a Trump-supporting billionaire.
Q: [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth, the world’s favorite frat boy supremo, has said that the sooner David Ellison owns CNN, the better. And CNN has become this sort of lightning rod, hasn’t it, for this administration? Does it change what you do? Do you fear what is coming at you now in terms of a change?”
AMANPOUR: Clearly I’m concerned, and I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say about a corporate thing that’s underway, but I am, obviously, as a person, as a journalist with a record, concerned. And I’m concerned based on what’s happened to the other things that he’s taken over already like CBS News, right. I mean, do I have to list what’s happening there? I mean hemorrhaging viewers, probably hemorrhaging money, this ideological realignment of CBS and the destruction potentially of 60 Minutes.
“I would like to think that we would have the very basic, which is editorial independence, I’m hoping for that,” Amanpour concluded, striking a slightly more optimistic note.
Peter Thiel’s floating AI data centers
Billionaire Peter Thiel is leading a $140 million financing round for Panthalassa, a company developing massive structures designed to be placed in the ocean that use “the bobbing motion of waves to force water through a turbine to produce electricity and power AI chips.”
The “nodes” are “almost as tall as Big Ben in London.” According to the Financial Times, “[m]ost of the 85-meter-long solid-steel structure sits below the surface, including a hermetically sealed container holding the AI server, cooled by seawater.”
Interest in the startup reflects the increasing challenges of building land-based data centers, which face local opposition and limited access to energy and water.
Making open AI execs the most hated men in America is a pretty big stretch, especially when you consider the shitweasel making that threat is already one of the top contenders.
Yeah, well... buckle up Musk. France has the balls to come after you with guns blazing. The US might be swayed by your trillions, France obviously isn't.