Zuckerberg offered to censor Meta users for Musk
Last year, as Elon Musk was using the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency to collect Americans’ personal data, fire civil servants, and slash life-saving aid programs, Mark Zuckerberg reached out to offer his support.
“Looks like DOGE is making progress,” Zuckerberg wrote in a text to Musk on February 3, 2025, according to documents unsealed as part of Musk’s legal battle with Sam Altman and OpenAI. “I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”
Zuckerberg sent the text on the same day that Charlie Kirk accused Wired of “doxxing” employees working for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, although the media outlet had merely reported their names. While doxxing refers to the malicious distribution of someone’s personal information, such as their home address, Musk and other conservatives inflated the definition to include anyone who publicly named DOGE employees.
The Meta CEO’s offer to censor users of his platforms on behalf of Musk — and, by extension, the Trump administration — came less than a month after Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to accuse the Biden administration of censorship, claiming officials had bullied Facebook into taking down posts from antivaxxers.
Musk, for his part, reacted to Zuckerberg’s text with a heart emoji. He then pitched a business opportunity. “Are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others?” he asked.
“Want to discuss live?” Zuckerberg replied.
It’s unclear whether the discussion progressed. However, Zuckerberg was not party to the Musk-led $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI, which was submitted several days after their text exchange and ultimately failed.
That Zuckerberg would reach out to Musk to extend his support is interesting, given their past. In 2023, the two men even entertained the idea of physically beating one another in a “cage match.”
This Week in Zuck:
Zuckerberg met with House Speaker Mike Johnson last week, shortly after juries in two court cases found Meta liable for harming children through its addictive algorithms and by allowing sexual exploitation on its platforms. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has faced pressure from parents who want Congress to pass legislation that they believe would protect children on social media. “To have prioritized a meeting with Mr. Zuckerberg rather than with the grieving parents who want to share with you stories of our children who have been victimized by his platform is incomprehensible,” ParentsSOS, an advocacy organization that includes parents who blame social media companies for the deaths of their children, wrote in a letter to Johnson. “We hope you will rectify this immediately by finally meeting with us.” (Axios)
Research from Proton found that Meta has increased its disclosure of user account information to the government by 668% over the past decade. Similar disclosure increases were reported by Apple and Google. “This isn’t a blue or red thing — this isn’t a sort of Trump or Biden or Obama thing. It has gone up consistently for over a decade now,” said Proton’s Edward Shone. “This is a government oversight point.” The U.S. government regularly asks social media and email companies to grant it access to users’ messages, files, and contacts. (Bloomberg)
Meta is testing a premium Instagram subscription in Japan, Mexico, and the Philippines that allows paying users to view Stories without the poster’s knowledge, track how many times others have rewatched their Stories, and create special audience lists for Stories. Another feature — reminiscent of Elon Musk’s pay-to-play scheme on X — gives premium users an algorithmic advantage by prioritizing the visibility of their Story posts over those shared by free users. Instagram Stories are ephemeral posts that remain live for 24 hours. (TechCrunch)
FCC chair: Sale of CBS and CNN is proof Trump is “winning”
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, FCC chairman Brendan Carr dropped any attempt at subtext, declaring that CNN’s pending takeover by David and Larry Ellison represents a policy victory for the Trump administration.
“President Trump took on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning,” said Carr. “Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded. Joy Reid, gone from MSNBC. Sleepy-Eyed Chuck Todd, gone. Jim Acosta, gone. John Dickerson, gone. Colbert is leaving.”
“CBS is under new ownership, and soon enough, CNN is gonna have new ownership as well,” he added, a line that received loud applause from the conservative audience. “We’re not at the point yet where we’re raising the mission accomplished flag. But President Trump is taking on the fake news media, and President Trump is winning.”
Paramount Skydance, led by David Ellison, has a $110 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN. The deal is being largely funded by his centibillionaire father, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s executive chairman. Trump has described both Ellison men as good friends of his, and Larry Ellison has reportedly talked with White House officials about firing specific CNN hosts. (Oracle, by far the largest source of the Ellisons’ wealth, appears to be experiencing financial problems at the moment. The software and cloud computing giant fired some 10,000 employees on Tuesday in a surprise 6 a.m. email.)
While the Paramount-Warner deal remains under review by the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, comments like those from Carr — America’s top communications regulator — suggest that there will be little friction as the Ellisons look to consolidate power in the news and media industry.
State Department wants to use X for “psychological operations”
In a directive to every U.S. embassy and consulate building, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed diplomats to use X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, to wage coordinated propaganda campaigns to fight back against narratives that “promote alternative worldviews antithetical to America’s interests.”
The cable, first reported by The Guardian, also advised U.S. diplomats to collaborate with “the Department of War’s Psychological Operations.” The Pentagon has historically deployed its psychological operations units to create information campaigns aimed at scaring or demoralizing enemy troops and manipulating native populations. More recently, the U.S. military has used social media platforms to spread pro-American and anti-Iranian narratives in Arabic and Farsi language content.
That appears to be the goal here, but on a global scale. Rubio described X as an “innovative” and “crowdsourced” tool to counter “anti-American propaganda operations without compromising free speech or privacy.”
Musk took part in Trump’s call with Indian prime minister
Elon Musk joined a phone call last week between Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to The New York Times. The call marked Musk’s most overt return to government activities since he left the administration last summer during a short-lived feud with the president.
Why Musk was included and what he said remain unclear, but officials from both countries said the call was arranged to discuss the burgeoning economic and energy crises from the Iran war. Musk used his prior position in the Trump administration to host Modi at a function last year that resembled a state visit, during which the two men discussed Musk’s businesses in India.
This Week in Musk:
In a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats requested “information on Elon Musk’s role, if any, in… [the Treasury’s] decision to halt enforcement of a key bipartisan law—the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA)—designed to counter abuse of anonymous shell companies by criminals and foreign adversaries.” The lawmakers noted that “Musk uses a network of dozens of secretive companies—potentially the type of entities that, under the CTA, are required to report ownership information to the Treasury Department.” (Senate.gov)
Switzerland’s former president and current finance minister filed a criminal defamation complaint accusing Grok, the chatbot created by Musk’s xAI firm, of generating vulgar and sexist remarks targeting her. The complaint is somewhat unique in that the X user who prompted Grok to generate the comments could not be identified. Instead, the Swiss official asked prosecutors to decide whether xAI bears legal responsibility. (Bloomberg)
SpaceX has filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation and plans to list in June. (CNBC)
Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission appear to be nearing a trial over allegations that the billionaire defrauded Twitter investors in 2022. (Bloomberg)
On X, Musk cosigned a post that read, “Never get so racist that you forget white leftists are the worst people in the world.” (X)
Head of Jeff Bezos’s climate philanthropy fund describes all life on Earth as his “customer”
Last week, Axios published a puff piece on Bezos Earth Fund president Tom Taylor, a former Amazon executive who oversaw the company’s AI products. Taylor, who has no experience in environmental science or related fields, provided a revealing description of his climate vision.
From Axios:
“I think what I brought into the organization was the same sort of inventor mindset that Amazon has, which is, think very big, think very long term, think about who your customer is,” [Taylor] said. In this case, he notes, that customer is the people and species of the planet.
Bezos has used his climate fund to give an environmentally friendly veneer to the destructive and carbon-intensive AI industry.
Oligarch Roundup
Data centers are creating massive heat islands. A new study by Cambridge associate professor Andrea Marinoni and colleagues found that data centers can raise local temperatures by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, with some heat spikes being felt up to 6.2 miles away from the facility. Data centers built by AI companies like Meta, xAI, and Amazon typically house tens of thousands of GPUs and other components that generate massive amounts of thermal energy. The warehouses themselves are typically built on sprawling lots of heat-absorbing surfaces, such as asphalt, and lack surrounding tree cover. This results in a heat island effect, where the area around a data center is significantly hotter than the surrounding environment. (CNN)
David Sacks says he’s no longer White House AI and cryptocurrency czar. The billionaire venture capitalist said his 130 days as a special government employee had been “used up.” But he will continue to influence White House tech policy by serving as co-chairman of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a panel that includes Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on not just AI, but an expanded range of technology topics,” said Sacks. (Bloomberg TV)
Warren Buffett says he hasn’t spoken with Bill Gates since Epstein revelations because he doesn’t “want to be under oath.” “I haven’t talked to him at all since the whole thing was unveiled,” Buffett told CNBC, referring to Gates’ relationship with the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “I don’t want to be in a position where I know things... to be called as a witness,” he continued, adding, “I think until it gets cleared up, it doesn’t make sense to do a lot of talking.” Buffett — the 13th-richest person in the world — had a decades-long friendship with Gates, during which he gave more than $43 billion to the Gates Foundation. While Gates has denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein, the two men had a close relationship. Epstein claimed he had facilitated “illicit trysts” for Gates and alleged that Gates had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from “Russian girls.” (CNBC)
The tech billionaires who hate introspection. The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams examined how tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk detest and actively avoid self-reflection. The analysis was inspired by comments from billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who recently boasted that he practices “zero” introspection. “If you go back, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective,” he said on a podcast. “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point. It’s all a new construct.” Sharing a clip of the podcast on X, Andreessen concluded, “Introspection causes emotional disorders.” Elon Musk endorsed that sentiment, writing, “Introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.” (The Atlantic)
OpenAI indefinitely shelves erotic mode for ChatGPT. A company executive said in December that ChatGPT’s “adult mode” would launch in the first quarter of 2026, but OpenAI now has no timeline for its release. The change comes after one advisor at the company had reportedly warned that OpenAI could be at risk of unleashing a “sexy suicide coach” on the public. (Financial Times)
"Research from Proton found that Meta has increased its disclosure of user account information to the government by 668% over the past decade."
Why anyone stays on FB is beyond me.
Reflection causes you to think…to be better. Can’t have that from mediocre whiny white assholes!!!