Tim Cook, the billionaire CEO of Apple, exhibited his fealty to Donald Trump on two occasions last week. First, Cook attended a reception the president held at the World Economic Forum with 100 corporate executives. “He’s great, he’s done some job,” Trump said of Cook during his reception speech. “I don’t know how many have done better than Tim. But some are right up there with you. You’d better get your ass moving, I’ll tell you.”
A few days later, on Saturday night, Cook was one of several tech executives who visited the White House for a screening of Melania Trump’s vanity documentary. During the event, Cook posed for a photo with director Brett Ratner, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women. Among the other tech executives in attendance were AMD’s Lisa Su, Zoom’s Eric Yuan, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy. Amazon MGM Studios is distributing the Melania film.
The black-tie party took place Saturday evening, hours after Customs and Border Patrol agents gunned down Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti, sparking outrage directed at Cook and Apple. (Apple previously drew protests after ICEBlock, which communities can use to track and warn of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in real-time, was removed from the App Store at the behest of the Trump administration.)
Then, on Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that Cook had shared an internal memo to Apple employees stating that he is “heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis,” adding, “This is a time for de-escalation… I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views, and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all.”
Following ownership change, TikTok blames alleged censorship on power outages
Last week, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company finalized a $14 billion deal to spin off its U.S. operations to a new ownership group to comply with a 2024 divestiture law. Oracle, the database software giant led by Trump donor and ally Larry Ellison, now owns a 15% stake in TikTok’s U.S. entity. The terms of the deal, negotiated by the Trump administration, placed Ellison’s company in charge of user data and of changes to the platform’s content algorithm, which will be retrained and managed on Oracle servers. Oracle executive Kenneth Glueck is also one of seven members named to the new entity’s board of directors.
“I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok! It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
Not long after the deal was finalized, some users on TikTok claimed the app had new censorship controls in place, including limitations on posts related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the fatal shootings perpetrated by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, and protests against ICE. Some users who tried to send a direct message naming Epstein also received an automated alert stating, “This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines.”
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, responded to the news by saying he would launch “a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”
A spokesperson for TikTok told NPR that it was just a glitch. Oracle claimed that one of its data centers “experienced a temporary weather-related power outage,” which led to “technical issues” for some users on TikTok. (Downdetector said it received hundreds of thousands of outage reports from TikTok users following the winter storm that affected much of the conterminous U.S.)
Still, fearing censorship or surveillance from TikTok’s new U.S. ownership, some TikTok users have migrated to competing short-form video platforms, including UpScrolled and Skylight.
Musk weighs merging xAI with SpaceX or Tesla
Reuters reported on Thursday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has held discussions to merge with xAI, his artificial intelligence startup and the parent company of X, before the rocket and satellite company goes public. From Reuters:
The combination would bring Musk’s rockets, Starlink satellites, the X social media platform and Grok AI chatbot under one roof, according to a person briefed on the matter and two recent company filings seen by Reuters.
The plan, which Reuters is reporting exclusively, would give fresh momentum to SpaceX’s effort to launch data centers into orbit as Musk battles for supremacy in the rapidly escalating AI race against tech giants like Google, Meta and OpenAI…
Under the proposed merger, shares of xAI would be exchanged for shares in SpaceX. Two entities have been set up in Nevada to facilitate the transaction, the person said.
The report noted that a final agreement has not been reached, although the entities to handle the merger were established on January 21.
Alternatively, Musk has considered merging Tesla with SpaceX. “The firm has discussed the feasibility of a tie-up between SpaceX and Tesla, an idea that some investors are pushing, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public,” Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
A SpaceX and xAI merger, which appears to be the more probable bet, would take arguably the sturdiest component of Musk’s empire, SpaceX, and saddle it with the frailest of his major businesses. xAI, along with being a steady source of scandals, hemorrhaged billions of dollars last year. Last year, he had xAI acquire X, the social media platform that he purchased in 2022, in an all-stock transaction.
In other SpaceX news, the Financial Times reported that it is targeting mid-June for what would be a record-setting $1.5 trillion initial public offering. The timing is reportedly meant to coincide roughly with Musk’s 55th birthday on June 28 and the planetary alignment of Jupiter and Venus earlier that month. SpaceX has already lined up four banks to lead its IPO, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, per Bloomberg.
EU Commission opens investigation into X for non-consensual sexualized images
On Monday, European Union regulators opened a formal probe into Musk’s social media platform, X, stating that the company has not adequately prevented the creation and circulation of sexualized deepfake images through its integrated Grok AI tool. Authorities in the bloc believe X may have violated the Digital Services Act, the EU’s legal framework for content moderation. The EU is also investigating X’s recommendation algorithm.
Additionally, a bipartisan group of 35 state attorneys general in the U.S. issued an open letter to Musk’s xAI last week, urging the company to “immediately take all available additional steps to protect the public and users of your platforms, especially the women and girls who are the overwhelming target of” sexualized AI-generated images.
Despite the international outrage xAI has drawn this month, an investigation from CBS News published on Monday found that Grok, xAI’s chatbot and AI tool, has continued to allow users to produce sexualized deepfake images of real people.
Among those who were victimized by the tool is Ashley St. Clair, a right-wing influencer and the mother of one of Musk’s children. St. Clair has since sued xAI, with her lawyer recently telling the Wall Street Journal, “We are saying that xAI, because of its Grok feature that undresses people, is not a reasonably safe product, and that it was foreseeable through its design and manufacture and its lack of warnings, that it would cause injuries like what befell Ashley.”
This Week in Musk:
Tesla disclosed on Wednesday that it had invested $2 billion in xAI. “A lot of investors asked us to do this,” Musk claimed, ignoring the outcome of a November proposal in which Tesla shareholders voted against an xAI investment. SpaceX previously invested $2 billion in xAI. (TechCrunch)
Also on Wednesday, Tesla released its fourth-quarter results, showing a significant drop in its annual profit for the second consecutive year. For 2025, Tesla reported $3.8 billion in net profit, down from $7.1 billion the previous year. Its total revenue fell by 3%. Tesla also announced that it will discontinue the Model S and Model X, two of its three luxury models. Sales of its other luxury model, the Cybertruck, were down 48% for the year. The California factory that built the Model S and X will be repurposed to manufacture the company’s Optimus humanoid robots. (NPR)
Tesla is testing rides for its “robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, without a human safety monitor on board. (Reuters)
After billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla accused Musk of advancing a racist political movement, Musk used the ethnic backgrounds of one of his sons to shield himself. “My partner, Shivon, is half Indian and my eldest son with her is named in honor of the great Indian physicist Chandrasekhar,” he wrote. Musk also called Khosla a “pompous asshole” for trying “to stop the public from using a public beach near your house.” Musk’s SpaceX routinely blocks access to a public beach in Texas. (X)
Meta is spending millions to convince the public that data centers are good
The advertisement began with a panning shot of Altoona, Iowa, a town of 20,000 near Des Moines. The camera moved from a diner to a farm to a high school football field. To the pluck of guitar strings, a voice-over promoted a boon for the local economy.
“We’re bringing jobs here,” the ad said. “For us, and for our next generation.”
The ad’s folksy vibes were not for a political candidate. They were for a data center that Meta had built in Altoona — part of an ad campaign by the Silicon Valley giant to shape a new narrative around the vast computing facilities that power artificial intelligence.
So in November and December, Meta spent $6.4 million to run a series of ads — including the one about Altoona — in the television markets of eight state capitals such as Sacramento, Salt Lake City and Tallahassee, Fla., as well as Washington, D.C., according to data from AdImpact, an analytics firm.
The Times reported that in November and December, Meta spent $6.4 million on ads aimed at swaying public opinion in favor of its massive data center expansion.
Cuts announced at Washington Post as Bezos vacations in Paris
This week, as Jeff Bezos stayed in a £2,000-a-night hotel and hopped between Paris Fashion Week events, reporters at the Washington Post sent letters to Bezos urging him to cancel plans for another major round of layoffs. The cuts will focus on “sports, local and international sections.”
On Thursday, the Post’s seven White House reporters authored a letter to Bezos asking him to keep the paper intact, according to CNN. “In a typical month, some of us have found that more than half of the new subscribers we brought to The Post came from stories and scoops that relied on desks such as International and Metro,” the letter read, adding, “Our colleagues’ work helps lift up our own.”
Amazon lays off 16,000 employees, spends lavishly to promote Melania documentary
Meanwhile, Amazon announced on Wednesday that it would lay off another 16,000 corporate employees. The cuts come after Amazon shed 14,000 from its corporate workforce in October.
It appears that Amazon has opted to allocate its resources elsewhere, spending $40 million to acquire Melania Trump’s documentary from her production company and another $35 million on promotion, including ads that ran during NFL playoff games. “This has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” Ted Hope, a longtime veteran of Amazon’s film division, told the New York Times. “How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?” The documentary premiered on Thursday evening at the Kennedy Center.
Oligarch Roundup
Landmark social media addiction lawsuit heads to trial. A lawsuit filed by a 19-year-old and her mother accuses TikTok, Snap, Meta, and YouTube parent company Google of deliberately creating addictive platforms that foment mental health issues and thoughts of self-harm. The plaintiff alleges that her addiction began when she was a child. The process of selecting jurors started on Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court. (The Guardian)
CBS News’s new right-wing boss advises wary employees to quit. During an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, Bari Weiss, the right-wing commentator appointed to lead CBS News, declared that any employees who are uncomfortable with the network’s new direction should seek employment elsewhere. “Startups aren’t for everyone. They’re places that move at a rapid speed. They experiment. They try new things. They sometimes create noise and, yes, bad press,” said Weiss, who described CBS News as “the best-capitalized media startup” in the industry. “If that’s not your bag, that’s OK. It’s a free country, and I completely respect if you decide this is just not the right place at the right time for you.” Weiss was appointed after CBS News was acquired by Paramount Skydance Corporation in a transaction facilitated by Trump loyalist Larry Ellison. (The Daily Beast)
Peter Thiel’s Antichrist tour stops in Paris. Palantir’s co-founder, billionaire Peter Thiel, gave a speech at the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences that included a 23-slide presentation sharing his theories about the biblical Antichrist. One contender for the Antichrist, in Thiel’s telling, is Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg. (Politico)
Palantir landed its largest-ever deal with Ministry of Defence after recruiting four of its officials. Last month, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence awarded Palantir a three-year, £240.6 million contract following a several-month period during which the company hired four officials from the department, including its director of industrial strategy. (OpenDemocracy)
Palantir defends work for ICE after Alex Pretti shooting. Wired obtained Slack messages from Palantir employees questioning the company’s work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir then defended its work for the agency by updating its internal wiki to state, “We believe that our work could have a real and positive impact on ICE enforcement operations by providing officers and agents with the data to make more precise, informed decisions. We are committed to giving our partners the best software for the job, while acknowledging the reputational risk we face when supporting immigration enforcement operations.” (Wired)
Do not believe for 1 moment this is the real story. Sleazy little Tim Cook has been up Trump's Ass for the last 10 yrs. People should have done alternatives to Apple if possible a long time ago. It is time to break Appls's stranglehold on the american consumer. Check out the board of directors,see what kind of slime is there.
I need to get a new laptop sometime soon. It will not be a Dell or Apple product, neither will it have a Microsoft operating system. Meta is also a big no. Also don’t care for Alphabet’s invasive nature. In the meantime I’ll trying to figure out what options are affordable.
Sigh