Trump cheers oligarch takeover of CNN

President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on the South Lawn of the White House on March 18, 2026. (Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)

After months of playing coy, Donald Trump and members of his administration are now cheering Larry and David Ellison’s efforts to grow their conservative media empire by acquiring CNN.

“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week as he lashed out at CNN for its coverage of the U.S. war on Iran. Hegseth was referring to the $110 billion deal that Paramount Skydance reached last month to buy Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), which owns CNN. The Trump administration, specifically the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is currently reviewing the sale.

David Ellison was put in charge of Paramount and CBS last year after his centibillionaire father, Larry Ellison, financed its acquisition by Skydance. Both Ellison men are Trump allies.

“The Ellison family, two great people, great people. It’s a great family,” the president said on Monday as he discussed the UFC White House event that CBS is set to air on his birthday.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has continued to claim impartiality. “The idea that somehow enforcement has been politicized is ludicrous,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Omeed Assefi, who leads the antitrust division. Assefi also told Reuters the Justice Department will “absolutely not” fast-track a review of Paramount Skydance’s deal for WBD.

Teens sue xAI for creating child sexual abuse material

In a class action lawsuit, three teenage girls from Tennessee allege that generative AI technology developed by Elon Musk’s xAI firm was employed by users of Grok and a third-party app to generate child sexual abuse material depicting them.

“Like a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts, this [AI-generated] child can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful. To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real,” the suit stated, per NPR. “For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse.”

The app used to generate the sexual images and videos was not mentioned. However, by licensing its AI code and servers to third-party app developers, “xAI could attempt to outsource the liability of their incredibly dangerous tool,” the lawsuit stated.

From TechCrunch:

One plaintiff, Jane Doe 1, had pictures from her high school homecoming and yearbook altered by Grok to depict her unclothed. An anonymous tipster who contacted her on Instagram told her that the photos were circulating online, and sent her a link to a Discord server featuring sexualized images of her and other minors she recognized from school.

A second plaintiff, Jane Doe 2, was informed by criminal investigators about altered, sexualized images of her created by a third-party mobile app that relies on Grok models. A third, Jane Doe 3, was also notified by criminal investigators who discovered an altered, pornographic image of her on the phone of a subject they had apprehended. Attorneys for the plaintiffs say that because third-party usage still requires xAI code and servers, the company should be held responsible.

This Week in Musk:

• Musk wrote on social media that “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.” Two cofounders have since left the company, while Musk has complained internally that Grok’s coding tools cannot compete with those developed by rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. (Futurism)

• A federal judge said that Musk’s use of ketamine, a powerful dissociative and analgesic drug, cannot be probed by attorneys for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an upcoming jury trial. Musk, who cofounded OpenAI, is suing the firm and Altman for allegedly defrauding him. (Bloomberg)

• The Securities and Exchange Commission is discussing terms to settle a securities fraud lawsuit that it brought against Musk following his acquisition of Twitter. Musk is facing a separate civil lawsuit from Twitter investors who have accused him of manipulating the company’s share price ahead of his leveraged buyout. (CNBC)

• X has agreed to cooperate with a €120 million fine imposed by European Union regulators “for breaching its transparency obligations under the Digital Services Act.” However, it’s unclear whether the Musk-owned company has paid the fine or merely committed to pay if its ongoing appeal falls through. When asked by Politico, a European Commission spokesperson declined to communicate “about financial transactions happening between private businesses and the Commission.” (Politico)

• On X, Musk shared his agreement with a post that stated, “Eventually, content from humans will be considered the slop.” (X)

• In another post on X, Musk defended Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” product after a video went viral of a driver who was nearly killed after their Cybertruck drove headlong into an overpass barrier. “Logs show [the Cybertruck] driver disengaged Autopilot four seconds before crashing,” Musk wrote. But as noted by Electrek, “The fact that the driver disengaged FSD 4 seconds before the crash doesn’t prove the system was blameless. It proves the exact opposite, the driver recognized FSD was failing and desperately tried to correct it, but the system had already put her in an unrecoverable situation.” The owner of that Cybertruck is suing Tesla for negligent conduct. (Electrek)

• Despite recently donating $5 million to Sen. John Thune, Musk has repeatedly attacked the South Dakota Republican for failing to pass the SAVE America Act, a law that would require “documentary proof of United States citizenship” from voters who wish to register to vote in federal elections. “He can’t get it done,” he said of Thune. Musk has also shared posts calling Thune “corrupt.” (New York Times)

Meta weighs mass layoffs as it embraces AI ‘efficiency’

Meta is considering a 20% reduction to its 79,000-person workforce, Reuters reported last week. The looming cuts follow claims that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made in January about “efficiency gains” his company is seeing from artificial intelligence. “Projects that used to require big teams [can] now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said. Meta, which recently began using an “AI-driven impact” grade to measure employee performance, aims to have 50 employees for every manager, per Reuters.

According to Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik, Meta’s potential layoffs could encourage competing Big Tech firms to follow suit as they seek to show the market that their vast AI investments are paying off. This could lead to “a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem,” wrote Shmulik.

It remains to be seen whether the AI “efficiency gains” claimed by Zuckerberg are legitimate or a marketing ploy. Shmulik estimated that a 20% workforce reduction could save Meta up to $12 billion through next year, freeing up additional funds for Zuckerberg to spend on AI. Meta plans to pour $600 billion into data center infrastructure over the next three years, while spending tens of billions more on AI-related acquisitions and hiring sprees.

Despite those investments, Meta’s AI products have faced numerous setbacks and delayed model releases. The New York Times reported last week that the company’s new foundational model “has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing.”

Meta AI also has nowhere near the user base of its rivals, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Even if it did, attracting a large number of users has not saved leading AI companies from hemorrhaging billions of dollars amid the data center construction frenzy. OpenAI, which has some 900 million users through its ChatGPT service, projects that it will lose $14 billion this year.

Washington Post loses 60K subscribers following Bezos cuts

In the aftermath of Jeff Bezos’ round of mass layoffs at The Washington Post last month, more than 60,000 readers canceled their digital subscriptions, according to The New York Times.

The lengthy Times report, which told the story of how the Amazon founder has recently sought to reshape the newspaper in his image, noted that the layoffs had effectively undone the newsroom personnel investments that Bezos made after buying The Post in 2013. To overcome the loss of 350 journalists, Bezos reportedly told executive editor Matt Murray that he would need to “double the productivity” of the remaining journalists. (This plan does not appear to be going smoothly. The media newsletter Status reported last week that The Post has reached out to numerous journalists who were let go to see if they would be interested in returning.)

As for The Post’s readership losses last month, it was the third large subscriber exodus in two years. The first one came in late 2024 after Bezos effectively killed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. At the time, an opinion editor had told Bezos that the move would anger readers, to which he replied, “I don’t care,” per The Times. A quarter of a million subscribers responded by canceling their subscriptions.

Following Donald Trump’s victory that November, Bezos met with The Post’s leadership and made known his fondness for The Free Press, the conservative outlet founded by Bari Weiss. He also said that going forward, the editorial board would publish only opinions aligned with his libertarian and pro-business beliefs. The paper lost another 75,000 readers last year after that change was made public.

Last week, Bezos held his first in-person gathering with Post editors and reporters since the layoffs. At the meeting, which was held at his Washington, D.C., mansion, one Post staffer directly asked Bezos whether the $75 million that Amazon spent on First Lady Melania Trump’s vanity documentary was an attempt to win the president’s favor, according to Status. Bezos denied the premise of the question, claiming he was not directly involved in the “hands-off” deal.

“While Bezos reiterated his support for The Post’s future, he stressed that the paper’s business strategy must be driven by data,” Status reported.

This Week in Bezos:

• Bezos is looking to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would acquire manufacturing firms and use AI to fast-track industrial automation applications. The self-described “manufacturing transformation vehicle” has designs on acquiring defense, aerospace, and microchip fabrication companies. Bezos has reportedly pitched the project in Singapore and traveled to the Middle East to entice sovereign wealth funds. The fund would work in concert with technology being developed by Project Prometheus, an AI startup that Bezos leads as co-CEO. (Wall Street Journal)

• While Bezos has sought to sell himself as a climate philanthropist in recent years, the centibillionaire was absent from the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the 50 most prolific philanthropists for 2025. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison were among the other centibillionaires missing from the list. Meanwhile, MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex-wife, said she gave $7.2 billion last year, making her the single largest donor by a wide margin. (Chronicle of Philanthropy)

• A Luxembourg court sided with Amazon last week in its appeal to overturn a €746 million fine for data protection violations. The court said the country’s consumer privacy watchdog used flawed analysis to build its case against Amazon. (Reuters)

• Amazon has accused the U.S. Postal Service of “abruptly” walking away from contract negotiations to renew a shipping deal between the e-commerce giant and the Post Office. Amazon now plans to significantly curtail the number of packages it will deliver through USPS. (CNBC)

Thiel brings Antichrist lecture series to Rome

On Sunday, far-right billionaire Peter Thiel began a series of four lectures on the antichrist in Rome, sharing his theories on how “occult forces are ceaselessly at work” and “intent on destroying what remains of the West.”

That Thiel chose the seat of Catholic power to pontificate has angered some church leaders. Rev. Paolo Benanti, who advises the Vatican on the rise of AI, described the talks as “American heresy,” arguing that Thiel wants to expand corporate power by degrading liberal democracy.

While the lecture series was closed to the media and public, Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir, has previously suggested that the antichrist “would take over the world” by regulating Big Tech.

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Oligarch Roundup

Palantir CEO says AI empowers ‘working class’ male voters while inhibiting the Democratic Party’s ‘female’ base. During a CNBC interview last week, Alex Karp, the billionaire chief executive of Palantir, claimed that AI technologies will “disrupt the economic and therefore political power… of one party’s base. Highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat.” He continued: “This technology disrupts humanities-trained — largely Democratic — voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained… often male, working-class voters. And so these disruptions are gonna disrupt every aspect of our society.” (The New Republic)

Senators demand information from Meta on its plan to add facial recognition technology to its AI smart glasses. “Given Meta’s vast data collections, its smart glasses could capture images of thousands of people without their knowledge or consent and then instantly link those faces to names, workplaces, or personal profiles, creating serious risks of stalking, harassment, and targeted intimidation,” wrote Democratic Sens. Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, and Ron Wyden in a Tuesday letter to Meta. (U.S. Senate)

Altman envisions a future where intelligence is a metered ‘utility’ like water. “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said while speaking at BlackRock’s U.S. Infrastructure Summit last week. Altman also discussed public backlash to the AI industry, saying, “Data centers are getting blamed for electricity price hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI.” (Gizmodo)

Washington State passes millionaire tax bill. The bill, which overcame a 24-hour filibuster by Republicans, would impose a 9.9% tax on personal annual income exceeding $1 million. Once signed into law by Governor Bob Ferguson, the bill would be the first income tax in Washington’s history. (Seattle Times)