“The Gang Goes To China”

May 15, 2026

Members of the U.S. delegation and CEOs stand prior to a welcome ceremony for U.S. President Donald Trump on May 14, 2026, in Beijing, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Donald Trump brought along a gaggle of billionaires and corporate executives during his state visit to China this week, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Trump is using the trip to discuss artificial intelligence, rare earth metals, and trade negotiations with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

All three of the executives have significant business interests in China, with Trump calling the group “distinguished representatives from the American business community” who “all respect and value China.” Xi, in turn, told the American magnates that their respective companies “will have broader prospects in China.”

BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon, and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg were also among the U.S. executives who took part in the delegation.

The trip highlighted the return of Musk to Trump’s inner circle, nearly a year after he left the White House amid a bitter feud with the president. During their fallout last summer, Musk tacitly accused Trump of being entangled in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking network. But on Thursday, Musk stood side by side with members of the president’s cabinet as Trump and Xi greeted each other in the Great Hall of the People.

A particular concern for Musk in China is the country’s trade restrictions on rare earth metals and magnets, which are necessary for the manufacturing of rockets, cars, and semiconductors. China mines and refines the vast majority of the world’s rare earths. Most of China’s exports of the materials were paused in April of last year in response to the Trump administration’s trade war. The country planned to install additional export restrictions in October but held off after Xi reached a temporary agreement with Trump. A sustained choking of the rare-earth supply by China could hamper many of Musk’s business priorities.

Musk, meanwhile, made the trip to China without receiving approval from a federal judge overseeing the ongoing trial between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. From NBC News:

Before Musk left the witness stand April 30, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked the parties if there was any reason to hold Musk in “recall status,” meaning that he should be available to testify again if called upon to do so. OpenAI lawyers said, “Yes.” The judge instructed him: “OK, Mr. Musk, you are not excused, but you can leave for the day.”
But Musk is now in China with Trump on a state visit.
Two sources familiar with the matter told NBC News that Musk didn’t obtain permission from the judge before leaving the country and was still subject to recall as a witness.

This Week in Musk:

The heads of the New York City, New York state, and California pension systems authored a letter to Musk on Wednesday expressing “serious concerns with the reported novel and extreme governance structure” that SpaceX plans to utilize when it goes public this summer. The structure would restrict shareholder rights and grant immense powers to Musk and his allies. (Reuters)
Google and SpaceX have discussed a partnership to launch orbital data centers. (Wall Street Journal)
The Paris prosecutor’s office announced last week that the investigation into Musk and X has been elevated to a criminal matter. French authorities, who are investigating pro-Hitler content generated by xAI’s Grok chatbot and algorithmic manipulation by X, summoned Musk for questioning last month, but he refused to appear. (CNBC)
Tesla has issued a recall for the Cybertruck RWD over concerns that its wheels could separate from the vehicle. “Wheel stud separation can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of crash,” reads a notice filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Tesla has now recalled Cybertruck models 11 times since its introduction in 2023. (MotorTrend)
US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan declined to “rubber stamp” a $1.5 million settlement between Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission over a lawsuit related to his initial stake in Twitter. The judge also asked attorneys for the SEC and Musk to answer questions about the settlement by June 1, including whether the centibillionaire received “some kind of special treatment in this case.” (Bloomberg)

“Bitches Money No Taxes Party” — Elon Musk

The world’s richest man shared those words on X at 1:00 in the morning on Sunday, seemingly describing his guiding personal and political principles. Musk later deleted the post, but not before adding an addendum that read, “Don’t cut your balls off, guys, really.”

Bezos’ attempt to turn the Washington Post into a podcasting network is not going well

As part of Jeff Bezos’ efforts to ensure the opinion section at the Washington Post serves his personal interests, the paper has embraced the video podcast medium, building a new studio and spending $80,000 on equipment, according to the media newsletter Status.

But viewers are not interested. On YouTube, the central hub for video podcast consumption, videos from the paper’s new opinion podcasting vertical, “Make It Make Sense,” average hundreds of views. It is not uncommon for the clips to score fewer than 30 views, even as the Post attempts to entice lowest-common-denominator viewers through the use of provocative memes, pointed facial expressions, and loud colors and fonts in its thumbnails.

The turn toward opinion podcasting has not pleased some journalists at the Post, where Bezos recently laid off about 30% of the staff. From Status:

One current staffer questioned why O’Neal and the opinion section would need a makeshift version of Joe Rogan’s podcasting set. “It’s what the owner wants, I guess,” they sighed…
But with only three people remaining on the video team, down from 60 staffers two years ago, some inside the paper are questioning how the efforts to embrace video will function logistically. One former staffer called the investments “haphazard,” telling Status, “No one is even there anymore to make sure things run properly.”
…
“It does feel like this is just for an audience of one,” one former staffer told Status, alluding to Bezos. “That audience of one is happy to put down money for a studio and programming that doesn’t serve any of the existing audience.” And while O’Neal has discussed making the paper’s editorials more appealing across the ideological spectrum, the former Postie added that the content being produced “isn’t something people on the right want either.”

This Week in Bezos:

Blue Origin, the Bezos-owned rocket and space technology company, is looking to raise “external funding” for the first time. Chief executive Dave Limp reportedly told employees that Blue Origin would need to “take a lot of capital” to schedule launches at its desired pace, a goal that cannot be covered by “just one investor.” (Financial Times)
An Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia overheated last week, causing outages for customers, including the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. “We are actively working to bring additional cooling system capacity online, which will enable us to recover the remaining affected hardware in the impacted zone,” an AWS spokesperson said. (The Next Web)
Despite investing heavily in its own AI code-generating tool, Amazon has given employees approval to use competing coding models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The change suggests that the capabilities of Kiro, Amazon’s coding tool, are lagging. (Business Insider)

$500 million

That’s how much Jeff Bezos paid in 2021 to purchase his 417-foot superyacht, which he may now sell, according to Page Six. The Koru, which has a glass-bottomed pool, three jacuzzis, a helipad, and requires its own “support yacht,” is apparently too large to dock near the new Bezos compound in South Florida. It costs more than $30 million per year to operate. A representative for Bezos said the Page Six report was “not true.”

Meta faces pushback from employees over workplace surveillance measures

Meta informed its U.S. employees last month that it would begin closely tracking their digital inputs, including where and how often they moved their mouse cursors, what they typed on their keyboards, and the content displayed on their screens. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company, which plans to lay off 10% of its workforce next week, said the logs would be used to develop Meta’s large language models. In other words, Meta plans to force its remaining human employees to train the AI models that could soon replace them.

According to the New York Times, one Meta engineering manager said the digital monitoring made them “super uncomfortable” and asked, “How do we opt out?” In response, Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth told the employee, “There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop.” Scores of Meta employees then replied to Bosworth’s message with angry and shocked reaction emojis.

Meta could carry out additional rounds of layoffs in the near future, as implied by chief financial officer Susan Li. “We don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future,” Li said on a recent investor call. “I think there’s a lot of change right now, with A.I. capabilities advancing rapidly.”

While the company is posting record profits and is poised to overtake Google as the largest digital advertising platform, investigative journalist Julia Angwin argued in a Times op-ed last week that the company “is dying.” From Angwin:

Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.
Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.

This Week in Zuck:

The Santa Clara County municipal government has sued Meta over claims that it “knowingly facilitates and profits from billions of scam advertisements” that appear on Facebook and Instagram. Many of the ads have been used to defraud elderly users on Meta’s platforms. The lawsuit was filed by the attorney for Santa Clara, the most populous county in the San Francisco Bay Area and home to many of California’s leading tech companies. (Fortune)
Elsevier, a publisher that oversees The Lancet and thousands of other scientific journals, has sued Meta for allegedly using its copyrighted works to train its AI models. Joining the lawsuit are book publishers Hachette and Macmillan. “This case is the first AI action brought by major publishing houses, who have their own story to tell about Meta’s flagrant violation of their rights,” the Association of American Publishers said. (Nature)
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s internet and communications regulator, over claims that its fines are “disproportionate” and miscalculated. (The Telegraph)
Cellular Intelligence, an AI startup backed by Zuckerberg, has acquired the rights to a novel therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease from Novo Nordisk. (Bloomberg)

Oligarch Roundup

Justice Department to drop charges against billionaire who hired Trump’s personal lawyer. Gautam Adani, an Indian billionaire, was indicted by Joe Biden’s Justice Department for committing “corruption and fraud at the expense of U.S. investors.” The government now plans to drop its case after Adani retained the services of Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a personal lawyer to Trump. Last month, Giuffra promised the Justice Department that Adani would pump $10 billion into the U.S. economy and create thousands of jobs if the prosecution abandoned its case. (New York Times)

Journalism nonprofits accuse Larry Ellison of telling Trump that he would fire CNN anchors. Last week, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Reporters Without Borders wrote in a letter to Paramount’s chief legal officer that Ellison’s reported promise to overhaul CNN to the president’s liking is cause for “credible concern that Paramount leadership has offered, solicited, or effectuated a corrupt exchange.” The two press nonprofits own shares of Paramount Skydance, which they could use to launch a shareholder lawsuit against the media conglomerate. Paramount has a deal to acquire CNN as part of its pending, Ellison-funded merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount’s attempt to acquire Warner is also facing official scrutiny in California, where 34 state lawmakers have backed Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta’s review of the merger. (LA Times)

Regulators reject Oracle plan to power $165 billion AI data center with natural gas. Oracle, Larry Ellison’s software and cloud computing corporation, failed to receive approval for a gas pipeline from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the New Mexico State Land Office. The company will instead partner with a solid oxide fuel cell company to power the plant. While the new plan will still result in huge amounts of pollution, it will produce about 30% less greenhouse gas emissions than a natural gas plant. “I don’t know that this is the clean energy solution that they’re saying it’s going to be,” said New Mexico Environmental Law Center attorney Kacey Hovden. (Futurism)