Why Zuck sucked up to Trump
Mark Zuckerberg will likely be spared from an upcoming Senate grilling thanks to an intervention by the Trump administration. From Politico:
The White House intervened to try to spare Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai from appearing at an upcoming Senate hearing on their companies’ child safety practices, five people with knowledge of the events told POLITICO.
Instead, Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has agreed to let the heads of the tech giants’ Instagram and YouTube brands testify in the chief executives’ place at next month’s hearing, tentatively scheduled for July 28, four of the people said. And in turn, the White House is supporting a Grassley-backed package of bills — called the James T. Woods Act — aimed at combating online child exploitation, they added.
Since Trump’s electoral victory in 2024, Meta has donated millions of dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee, the East Wing ballroom construction project, and the White House’s Easter event. Zuckerberg, who last year appointed Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s board of directors, also attended the UFC event held at the White House earlier this month in celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday.
Meanwhile, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is lobbying lawmakers for legal protection against the thousands of child-safety lawsuits it faces over alleged harms caused by its platforms, according to Reuters. “If adopted by lawmakers and passed into law as part of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) under consideration in the U.S. Senate, such a provision could undermine thousands of lawsuits against Meta and other online platforms over harms to children,” the wire service reported last week.
The language that Meta is pursuing would make it and other social media companies “immune from suit or liability under state law with respect to all claims for loss caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the safety or privacy of individuals under the age of eighteen online or otherwise related to the provisions [of KOSA].”
This Week in Zuck:
Zuckerberg has reportedly tasked a team with creating Meta’s own facsimile of Polymarket and Kalshi, the leading online “prediction markets” that operate as de facto betting services. One source indicated to the New York Times that “Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video-game-like points system instead… though the company had not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting.” Meta plans to use its huge user base to funnel traffic toward the app, which is named “Arena.” The exploding popularity of online prediction markets has triggered an alarming rise in gambling addiction rates, particularly among young adults. (New York Times)
Meta is reportedly facing pressure from the Trump administration to hand over its AI models for voluntary federal review. Since previewing Anthropic’s Mythos model earlier this year, the White House has grown increasingly concerned about potential cybersecurity risks posed by leading large language models. (New York Times)
In response to an internal privacy scandal, Meta has temporarily paused an AI training program that tracked almost every action its employees took on their work computers. The stay was announced after an error caused sensitive information, including private chats and employee performance records, to become visible company-wide. A spokesperson said Meta has “no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees” but would pause the program “while we investigate.” The embarrassing slip-up occurred after workplace morale had already cratered due to recent mass layoffs and the general instability caused by Zuckerberg’s AI-focused restructuring. “[Company morale] is maybe not the worst it’s ever been in 20 years here, but it’s probably up there. It’s definitely up there,” Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth reportedly said in an internal chat on June 2. (Business Insider)
Zuckerberg, despite being disliked by a majority of Americans, is attempting to personally sell the public on Meta’s AI smart glasses. Donning a pair of the frames, he posed for photos alongside Kylie Jenner during a Meta hardware showcase in New York City this week. Jenner, a reality television star and former billionaire, has been the face of Meta’s push to sell its new line of smart glasses. “The first ever AI glasses designed with Kylie Jenner,” the company states on its website. The glasses feature a camera, microphones, and speakers and allow users to communicate with Meta AI. (CNN)
Tesla faces federal investigations over horrific death linked to automated driving
A 76-year-old woman standing inside a Texas home was killed last week after a speeding Tesla plowed into the residence and fatally struck her. The driver of the Tesla Model 3 was allegedly using the car’s Autopilot feature, an advanced driver-assistance system that has been linked to numerous deaths.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have launched separate investigations into the accident. The family of the victim has also filed a wrongful death lawsuit accusing Elon Musk’s automotive company of gross negligence.
Over the last decade, Tesla has faced dozens of NHTSA investigations into claims that its driver-assistance systems contributed to accidents. In February, a US judge upheld a $243 million verdict against Tesla over the role that Autopilot played in a fatal 2019 crash.
Musk and Tesla have attempted to place the blame solely on the driver. “FSD drives slowly through neighborhood streets and this was a high speed crash!” Musk wrote on X. “The driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area,” Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s AI software executive, wrote in another post.
Tesla instructs drivers to maintain control of their vehicles when using Autopilot or Full Self-Driving (FSD), but the systems can accelerate and steer without any user input, which can lead to distracted or complacent driving. Both systems are also prone to sudden fits of erratic driving.
Musk and his company have also shared promotional videos showing how Tesla drivers can choose to ignore the road by using the driver-assistance systems. In one clip shared by Tesla last month, a man is shown looking down and away from the road while using both of his hands to operate a coffee maker. “I do my espresso while I’m driving,” the disengaged driver boasts as he barrels down an interstate.
This Week in Musk:
The world’s first trillionaire is a trillionaire no longer after SpaceX shares dipped below their debut price this week amid a global selloff of tech stocks. As of market close on Thursday, Musk’s net worth sat at an estimated $946 billion. (Barron’s)
SpaceX reportedly plans to raise $20 billion in debt in the coming days, despite having just raised $86 billion in its initial public offering. (Financial Times)
With corporate AI users favoring OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok models have fallen behind in the race to secure enterprise clients that can provide substantial sources of revenue. xAI is instead leaning heavily on individual subscribers who use its less-restricted models to generate terabytes of pornographic content. The Information reported that more than half of Grok’s traffic comes from the generation of pornographic images, videos, and chat exchanges. xAI has repeatedly faced scandals after its models helped users generate images of child sexual abuse and sexual depictions of real people without their consent. (The Information)
Musk is, once again, fixating on the idea that he could be assassinated while simultaneously likening himself to the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “The reason they call me a Nazi is to encourage people to murder me,” he wrote on X last week. (X)
Musk has also spent the last week authoring a steady stream of posts on X insisting that his role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) never led to a single death. However, numerous media outlets and researchers have reported that the Musk-led funding cuts to USAID caused otherwise avoidable deaths from malnutrition and disease throughout the Global South, particularly in Africa. “Independent analyses estimate that your actions to dismantle USAID and drastically reduce lifesaving foreign aid have already killed 700,000 people,” Atul Gawande, a surgeon who served as USAID’s Assistant Administrator for Global Health, wrote in response to Musk’s denials. Gawande’s comment came a few days after Musk falsely claimed on X that “People in Africa are not starving. This is a myth.” (X)
“2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours”
That’s how Pentagon artificial intelligence chief Cameron Stanley described the military’s use of Elon Musk’s Grok models to automate the target acquisition process during the brutal US bombing campaign against Iran.
Stanley’s remarks, which marked the first time the Pentagon has confirmed its use of Grok for target acquisition, came in a sworn declaration in defense of xAI against a Clean Air lawsuit filed by the NAACP. The civil rights organization has accused xAI, which is a subsidiary of SpaceX, of illegally polluting communities in Tennessee and Mississippi by operating dozens of gas turbines without permits. xAI uses the turbines to power its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Justice Department has attempted to join the lawsuit on behalf of xAI by arguing that the company’s infrastructure is necessary for national security. “Prudent enforcement requires balancing public interests, including national security,” DOJ spokesperson Matthew Nies told Bloomberg.
How Bezos and Zuckerberg attempted to win Trump’s favor
In a conversation with Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos disparaged the Washington Post as his “worst investment” and complained that employees at the paper “don’t listen” to him. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg texted Trump that one of his small children was looking “forward to the golden age of America,” a reference to a Trumpian campaign slogan.
The comments were reported in Regime Change, a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that offers new insights into the obsequious ploys that Bezos and Zuckerberg used to win Trump’s favor amid his second rise to power.
Trump responded to their attempts by telling associates that the two centibillionaires were “kissing my ass” and even flaunted the text that Zuckerberg had shared of his child’s “letter to the president.”
“Think of where these guys were in 2016,” Trump reportedly said at one point. “They hated me. They were doing everything they could to knock me down. And look at them now.”
Bezos’ trashing of the Post took place during a December 2024 dinner at Mar-a-Lago, during which Trump pushed for changes to the Post’s “really unfair” coverage.
“The people there are terrible,” said Bezos, referring to his employees who oversee the business side of things at the Post. “They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen.” He also described the newspaper as “the worst investment I ever made.” Bezos has since shifted the Post’s editorial board far to the right, making its output almost indistinguishable from opinions hawked by the New York Post or the American Enterprise Institute.
According to Regime Change, Bezos used his access last year to lobby Trump to provide additional launch infrastructure and space contracts to Blue Origin, his rocket and satellite company. Washington’s growing reliance on SpaceX, Bezos argued, could pose national security risks down the road. Although Blue Origin has received substantial federal contracts under Trump, Bezos failed to secure the level of launch access he requested.
This Week in Bezos:
Several Amazon employees who testified against the tech industry’s “all-costs-justified AI build out” are being investigated by the company’s management. Their testimony took place during recent Seattle City Council meetings as officials explore a moratorium on data center construction. (CNBC)
Speaking at a tech conference in Paris last week, Bezos once again insisted that AI will be a positive force for working people. “I know there’s a lot of concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant and so on,” he said. “I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage.” (BBC)
Amazon MGM has ditched its plan to release Artificial, a movie by Luca Guadagnino that depicts the brief period in 2023 when Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI. The decision to drop the film came four months after Amazon announced it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a multi-year strategic partnership. (Deadline)
Bloomberg has a new piece detailing how Amazon employees sell insider information and competitive advantages to merchants whose livelihoods rely on the e-commerce giant’s website. “The message is always the same: ‘I’m going to show you screenshots to prove I have inside access,’” a former Amazon employee told the outlet while explaining how merchants are approached. “It starts with the internal notes. That’s the bait on the hook.” (Bloomberg)
Fox Corporation strikes deal to buy Roku
Fox Corporation announced last week that it has agreed to buy Roku, a powerful streaming content distributor and ad seller that produces its own widely used televisions and streaming devices.
If approved by regulators, the $22 billion acquisition would give Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s company the ability to decide what news, entertainment, and advertisements are pushed to the 100 million households that use Roku to access Netflix, YouTube, and other streaming services.
Roku produces its own free, ad-supported streaming service and controls the leading operating system for so-called smart TVs. But the vast majority of its revenue comes from advertising sales, given its unique ability to thrust content in front of tens of millions of Americans the moment they turn on their television.
Through its televisions, operating system, and streaming devices, Roku also collects huge amounts of data on Americans to sell to advertisers. The company tracks what content its users watch and how frequently, what streaming apps they use, and how they interact with ads. The data points are then compiled into comprehensive demographic profiles and sold for targeted advertising.
This sophisticated consumer-tracking scheme is part of why television sets, despite significant improvements in video and screen quality, have become so cheap in recent years. By frequently selling its televisions and streaming devices at a loss, Roku has managed to implant a surveillance device that moonlights as a hyper-stimulating billboard inside the living room of millions of Americans.
By as early as next year, Murdoch, the 95-year-old billionaire Trump ally and right-wing media baron, is poised to gain dominion over that system, assuming the Roku sale clears regulatory hurdles. The deal would also take Fox’s news and sports products and combine them with Roku, creating a combined company that “will become the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing,” according to a press release.
Oligarch Roundup
After receiving US regulatory approval, Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. expected to get green light in Europe. The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that the European Commission is expected to clear Paramount’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount, which is controlled by the ultra-wealthy and right-wing Ellison family, could be forced into some concessions, such as dropping Universal Pictures’ international distribution or divesting a portion of its children’s television assets. But the combined entity would remain among the most powerful entertainment and news behemoths. Paramount’s bid for Warner already received approval from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division earlier this month. That outcome was to be expected, given that Paramount chief executive David Ellison and his centibillionaire father, Larry Ellison, are both allies of Trump. Paramount has said that it will complete its acquisition of Warner “as soon as possible.” (Financial Times)
Ellison’s Oracle cut 21,000 jobs over the last year. The data software and AI computing giant, which was co-founded by Ellison, revealed in a filing that it had approximately 141,000 full-time employees as of last month, down from 162,000 a year ago. Oracle claimed that the “deployment of AI technologies across our operations has resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” But it’s possible that the company isn’t seeing huge productivity gains from “AI technologies,” and is instead cutting payroll to impress shareholders and trim costs. Oracle also has a vested interest in making AI seem like a viable replacement for white-collar workers, given that it is banking its future on computational large language models replacing huge swaths of the labor force. (BBC)
California billionaire tax to appear on November ballot despite centibillionaire Sergey Brin’s efforts to sink it. Brin, a cofounder of Google, has pumped tens of millions of dollars into fighting a ballot measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of California billionaires to fund the state’s Medicare program. And on Tuesday, a competing ballot initiative backed by Brin that would seek to nullify the billionaire tax received enough signatures to appear on the November ballot. However, on Thursday, advocates for the Billionaire Tax Act announced that their proposal will also appear on the ballot in November. (LA Times)
Scott Galloway nailed it this week on his podcast when he said these tech billionaires are now buying protection for their businesses. Trump runs our gov’t like a mob boss.
The illegal tariff that Trump imposed on all of us doesn't look as if Consumers will receive a dime from those High prices we were forced to pay, but the things we need. The refunds will go to Trump's friends in Big Business.
https://www.liebermanpllc.com/tariff-refunds-for-foreign-importers/?msclkid=36377490d34b1f4ea8f21eae59f5d153