Big tech companies tend to make a lot of enemies — but there are none more powerful than the US government. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta are regularly called in front of Congress to fend off monopoly accusations — and lawmakers bring up bills to rein in the companies just as often. The Federal Trade Commission has taken a particularly central role, leading a lawsuit to sever Facebook and Instagram while blocking new acquisitions for Oculus and the company’s virtual reality wing. Like it or not, these regulatory fights will play a huge role in deciding the future of tech — and neither side is playing nice.
Tim Sweeney recently endorsed Elon Musk’s latest attempt to paint the nationwide protests as a leftist conspiracy — this time, one backed by billionaire progressive mega donors George Soros and Reid Hoffman. “Disgusting,” he wrote in response to Musk’s X post connecting the dots, then defended himself by citing his experience in the Apple lawsuit. (Not sure whether these are similar circumstances?)
Donald Trump livestreamed a Tesla showcase in the White House driveway on Tuesday, apparently reading the notes of a Tesla sales pitch as he performed choosing one of its EVs to purchase from five delivered for the event.
Standing alongside Elon Musk, Trump attempted to boost the automaker, after prices of its shares dropped 15 percent over the last five days, and said he’d label violence against its locations as domestic terrorism.
Plankey isn’t new to the Trump administration, as he previously served as the principal deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy from 2019 to 2020. He also worked as the director for cyber policy with the National Security Council before that.
[cyberscoop.com]
Donald Trump continues to push his trade war with Canada, saying in a Truth Social post that he’s adding an extra 25 percent tax on steel and aluminum imports — doubling what he announced on Monday. These additional tariffs are in retaliation for a surcharge on electricity coming into the US that Ontario implemented (which itself was retaliation for previous Trump tariffs).
The Department of Commerce laid off 40 people from the office overseeing CHIPS grants after senior department official Michael Grimes held “brief interviews” with employees, reports The New York Times.
...Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.
Last week, Trump called for ending the program.
Mahmoud Khalil is a legal permanent resident. That didn’t stop ICE.
At least, that’s what this SEC filing says. He’s one of several insiders who’ve been selling lately, I notice; the chair of Tesla’s board, Elon Musk’s brother, and Tesla’s CFO all dumped tens of millions in shares last month, too. Tesla shares closed today at $222.15, down 41 percent this calendar year. They’re still up about 25 percent from this time last year. It remains unclear whether the continuing Tesla protests have rendered the brand toxic.
[sec.gov]
I’ve been at the courthouse this morning as Adam Martinez, chief operating officer at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is grilled about whether the agency is unlawfully trimming staff and ordering people to stop work. Martinez admitted staff members have been confused about what they’re allowed to work on, but he insists it’s improving. So far, Judge Amy Berman Jackson seems skeptical — we’ll be headed back after lunch for more.
Six people were arrested Saturday after “several hundred protestors” blocked entrances to a Manhattan Tesla showroom, The New York Times reports. “Tesla Takedown” protests aim to hurt Elon Musk by targeting Tesla, which has seen sales dropping globally since Musk started directing deep cuts in the federal government.
The Times details violence beyond formal protests, including shots fired at a showroom Thursday night. Earlier that day, feds charged someone accused of “planting a Molotov cocktail near a vehicle.”
[nytimes.com]
That’s one of the minor changes the Justice Department made to its proposed final judgement in its antitrust case. The DOJ Antitrust Division is still operating under an acting chief as President Donald Trump’s nominee Gail Slater awaits confirmation. But so far, the government made only small tweaks to its asks based on discovery. It’s no longer asking that Google divest AI investments, for example, but that it give a heads up on future ones.
[storage.courtlistener.com]
While Musk and Rubio beefed about who should really be in charge of the state department, an unelected billionaire or the secretary of state, “the president sat back in his chair, arms folded, as if he were watching a tennis match.” The result of the meeting was the first attempt to put any brakes on Musk’s power. Good luck with that!
His distorted face has been inescapable on social media — blown up and tinted like a blueberry, smooth and textureless, edited as a Minion and Furby. What began as “an easy own” has spiraled into a full-blown meme of making the vice president look like a child with a propeller hat and candy. Vance, apparently, is definitely not mad and is laughing, actually.
A day after workers at the US African Development Foundation blocked Elon Musk’s cronies from entering their office, DOGE employees came back with federal marshals, The New York Times reports. The DOGE team had been described as “very young men” with backpacks. This Times photo shows the DOGE employees entering on Thursday with their escort.
The New York Times reports Trump signed an EO Thursday evening to “establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile” consisting of crypto assets owned by the Treasury forfeited in criminal or civil cases.
In a video, the president prepared to sign as a voice offscreen called it “like a digital Fort Knox for digital gold,” however CoinDesk notes that not everyone in crypto feels like they got what they paid for yet, with one exec calling it “the most underwhelming and disappointing outcome we could have expected for this week.”
The 25 percent tariffs Donald Trump announced for Canada and Mexico just a couple of days ago have been quickly pared back. First there was a 30-day exemption for automakers and now, as Bloomberg and the New York Times report, goods from either country covered by the USMCA trade agreement are also exempt, at least until April 2nd.
The suspension effectively abandons many of the tariffs that Mr. Trump had placed on Canadian and Mexican products — levies he said were necessary to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump said DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk,” despite DOJ lawyers arguing he isn’t its administrator or even an employee. Now Politico reports he told the top members of his administration that Musk “was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy.”
Of course, as CNN reports, Trump also told reporters later:
“We’re going to be watching them, and Elon and the group are going to be watching them, and if they can cut, it’s better,” Trump said. “And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
As part of the DOGE-directed reshaping of the federal government, General Services Administration listed more than 400 federal properties “designated for disposal” earlier this week, before replacing them with a “coming soon” message.
That could be because 14 of them were in a warehouse complex also housing “the worst-kept secret in Springfield,” a U-shaped building that Bloomberg Law says “doesn’t appear in federal property records but has long been associated with the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Wired has more details.
The new State Department program, called “Catch and Revoke,” will use AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of students who are in the US on visas, Axios reports. State Department sources tell Axios that officials plan on combing through internal databases to see if any international students were arrested in pro-Palestine demonstrations since October 2023 — and that the department is working with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure a “whole of government and whole of authority approach.”
Rubio, the new Secretary of State, has been calling for the revocation of student visas for pro-Palestine protesters since October 2023.
Big brands are advertising on X again, and some Senate Democrats are worried their return to the platform is due to coercion. In a letter addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, five Democratic Senators asked the DOJ to investigate whether Musk is using his influence to retaliate against companies that refuse to do business with his platform.
Musk’s role at DOGE, combined with his ownership of X and other businesses, amount to a “significant conflict of interest,” reads the letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal. “The apparent attempt to strong-arm the federal government to advance his business dealings could violate federal ethics laws and, depending on the specific facts, the federal extortion statute.”
The FAA is dealing with crashes, layoffs, and outdated tech. Now Elon Musk wants in.
During the State of the Union address Tuesday night and in a post on the White House website published Wednesday, Donald Trump and his administration tried to claim that the government was spending millions on “transgender animal experiments.”
However, as this Rolling Stone article points out, the National Institutes of Health grants cited as examples of “examples of waste, fraud, and abuse” aren’t for that at all, with the White House misleadingly referring to studies of transgenic (not transgender) mice, and others about the effects of hormones that again, did not create transgender animals.
It’s not surprising that the government’s crypto reserve involves Bitcoin and Ethereum, but the other three coins seem kind of random — Cardano (have you heard of it???), XRP, and Solana.
Popular Information dug deeper and identified a few politically-connected entities involved. There’s Ripple, the company that created XRP, which donated tens of millions to Republican super PACs and candidates like Trump in the 2024 election. Then there’s Solana, which backs memecoins like $TRUMP and $MELANIA. And to nobody’s surprise, David Sacks is also all up in the mix.
[popular.info]
