Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.

While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.

Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public.

The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be awarded randomly. Philadelphia's District Attorney sued to stop the giveaway, claiming that Musk was running an illegal lottery. During a hearing, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today, I’m talking with Walter Piecyk, a partner and analyst at LightShed Partners who covers tech, media, and telecom, about SpaceX’s recently announced plan to become a major wireless carrier.

Last week, SpaceX agreed to buy a big chunk of low-band spectrum to expand the Starlink network, spectrum that’s been traded around the telecom business for decades now. SpaceX’s ambitious plan is to use that spectrum to help build “the world’s most advanced mobile network.”

Combined with news that the FCC approved the deployment of 15,000 next-gen Starlink satellites and the company’s previous agreement to purchase close to $20 billion worth of EchoStar spectrum last year, it’s now clear SpaceX is serious about competing with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

I’ve covered the telecom business for a long time, and I’ve always known that these companies can say they want to do something until they run into the harsh reality of how expensive it is to actually do it. The telecom graveyard of pivots, bad ideas, and failed acquisitions is vast.

Walt has been closely monitoring SpaceX’s acquisition, and he’s correctly predicted that the company was headed in this direction for months now. So I wanted to dig into whether SpaceX can pull this off, why Walt thinks the existing telecom giants have really fumbled their response to SpaceX’s growing threat, and what happens when Elon Musk’s rocket company jumps headfirst into a business everyone loves to hate.

Okay: LightShed Partners’ Walter Piecyk on SpaceX’s plan to expand into mobile. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Walter Piecyk, you’re a partner and a tech, media, and telecom analyst at LightShed Partners. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m excited to talk to you. I feel like we’ve been tweeting or posting around each other for many, many years, but I’m a telecom nerd at heart. I’ve been covering the space for ages. SpaceX is going to make a big splash. It’s going to be the fourth major mobile carrier in the United States and maybe the world. It bought some spectrum to do it.

It’s EchoStar spectrum by way of private equity. It is at once very simple and also very complicated. Give us the state of the state. SpaceX bought 800 Mhz spectrum for $8 billion. They spent nearly $20 billion already on separate EchoStar spectrum. What is SpaceX trying to do here?

It’s definitely complicated, but maybe less complicated than trying to figure out how to put a data center out in space and making that work. Or something on the moon. But they don’t typically want to own spectrum and spend for spectrum. If you think about how Starlink was built, satellite companies don’t typically pay for spectrum. And then as the business evolved and as they saw the opportunity in telecom, they purchased some spectrum initially from EchoStar.

The feedback they got from investors at that time was very positive and they said, “Wait a minute, you should do more here.” This is a trillion-dollar enterprise value business in the US alone. Obviously they have global aspirations both for Starlink as well as what they’re doing with this mobile telephone service. So they bought more. They went back to EchoStar. That’s a key thing to pay attention to, in that they bought some spectrum and then they went back and bought some more.

Because with a lot of things that Elon Musk does, he learns as he goes. He bought the spectrum, got feedback, talked to people in telecom, and bought some more spectrum. Then we didn’t hear from them for a while. Now, you have this thing that happened last week where they bought some more spectrum, and I can go through the history of it if you care, but it’s long, wonky telecom stuff. This was originally the Nextel spectrum, if you remember that company.

I do. Actually, I do want you to go through the history because I think the telecom business is best understood as a bunch of lobbyists trying to make everything more complicated than it should be. Yes, spectrum auctions are complicated and what spectrum is good for what is deeply tied to the physics of the radio spectrum and all that.

But here it’s the 800 MHz spectrum from the Nextel service, the old push-to-talk, walkie-talkie service that Sprint had to divest as part of the deal to get sold to T-Mobile. They’ve been trying to sell it for ages. They sold it to this company, Grain Management. They’ve been sitting on it, and when Starlink showed up, Elon bought it. Nobody else wanted it. What did he see in the spectrum that no one else did?

When you realize that you need to build a terrestrial network to support what you’re doing with satellites, because satellites work fine if you’ve got your dish on the top of your house and you’re getting your broadband, but when you’re trying to connect with a phone that doesn’t have the same type of power or you’re going inside a home, you’re going to need better coverage.

Sirius Satellite also has supplementary towers. There are not that many of them, but sometimes when you get out of Sirius coverage, you will connect to a tower. When they bought that EchoStar spectrum and then got FCC approval, and if you looked into those details of that FCC approval and what was required, you would see that they can’t do this by satellites alone. There had to be terrestrial.

Then SpaceX, as Elon is wont to do, tries to send some diversions like, “We’re going to do Femtocell, we’re not going to do macrocell, this, that, and the other thing.” But they realized that they were going to build a terrestrial network. Now they finally realized, “If I’m going to offer mobile service, I need some form of a terrestrial network.”

At the same time, the telcos are not going to help them out. They’re not going to give them a wholesale agreement. Then when they go back and say the companies that had the lowest churn, what is the fundamental value you need in a terrestrial network? It’s low-band spectrum. Why? It travels further, you can get better coverage, and you have that connectivity.

So getting this low-band spectrum piece was just an important part, not to make the satellites work better, but to actually give them the spectrum assets that they need to build a terrestrial network. That’s why the stocks reacted, because people finally came to terms with the fact that Elon is actually going to build a terrestrial network.

I’m less interested in the stock and more interested in just the cost structure of how this works. If I rewind my brain to being a baby blogger at Engadget 100 years ago, the FCC told all the TV networks they had to stop broadcasting on 700 MHz and we were going to run an auction.

Verizon and AT&T bought big chunks of 700 MHz spectrum and that’s what 4G is built on. That’s the low-bandwidth spectrum that you’re talking about. It goes everywhere. This was a big victory that we reallocated 700 MHz, and 800 MHz was sitting right there the whole time. This is the Nextel spectrum. If it is so valuable, why wasn’t there a market for it until Elon showed up just now?

It was part of this transaction. T-Mobile ended up having to sell it because the government said, “If we’re going to allow you to take out the fourth competitor, which was Sprint, then in order to enable another fourth competitor out there, we need to have you guys give up some of your low-band spectrum.”

Part of the deal that T-Mobile and Sprint had with the government was that they would sell it to EchoStar. Why? Because Charlie Ergen, CEO of Dish at the time — it’s EchoStar now — was going to be the fourth competitor. This was the rationale that they gave in terms of the approval of the transaction. Dish needed low-band spectrum. The problem is Ergen went about his business, he was trying to build a network, and then he just couldn’t afford to buy that.

They had the rights to buy. Then at that point when Ergen failed on the bid to come up with the dollars to buy that spectrum, it enabled T-Mobile and actually forced them to put it up for auction. Now, your question: Why didn’t someone else show up then? Again, from SpaceX’s standpoint, as I mentioned at the start of this podcast, their strategy has been evolving over time.

In terms of the other telcos, they can’t really use it. There are some limitations that they have. But in hindsight, maybe Verizon or AT&T should have bought this 800 MHz spectrum for whatever it was, let’s call it $8 billion. They’re probably losing more in enterprise value over the concerns of what’s happening with SpaceX than what it cost them just to buy it in what’s known as foreclose. They basically just take it, even if they don’t use it or do whatever they need to meet those build out requirements and stop SpaceX from having unnecessary assets. I don’t think even these companies were taking Elon seriously and thinking that he would actually build the network.

Do you think that’s colored by the failure of Dish? We covered the promises of Dish Network to build a fourth wireless carrier in this country so closely. Their attempt was predicated on some amount of technology innovation.

They were going to build this thing called an O-RAN network, which had a more competitive supplier base instead of just Nokia or Siemens or whoever, and they were going to run it on AWS and that was going to reduce costs. Man, eventually they supported one Motorola handset in Vegas and even that was backstopped by AT&T. They literally could not do it. These promises never came true. Dish is a different company and Charlie Ergen’s a different CEO and their ability to just throw money at a problem until it’s solved is very different from Elon.

But if they couldn’t innovate to make a cheaper, faster network, what’s the evidence that Starlink can stand up an entire terrestrial network at a cost basis that allows them to compete selling service to consumers, while they’re also standing up an entire network in space? Because that feels like adding up a lot of cost.

I’m going to go back even deeper than that. Remember when Sprint was struggling, Masayoshi Son from SoftBank was claiming the same thing. They were going to cut their CapEx to nothing and they were going to use these small cells. They innovated how wireless was going to get delivered. That failed. Obviously, they had to get bailed out through the purchase when T-Mobile bought Sprint effectively for just the spectrum.

That network got completely decommissioned. To your point, Dish got a network built, but they couldn’t resonate in the market. The difference between Dish and SpaceX is Elon’s ability to get customers. That’s where Dish truly failed. They built the network. The network worked fine. They had the wholesale agreements that they needed.

I’ll push back on you a little bit there. I have a very funny email from a Dish PR person from several years ago where they said, “We’d like to issue a correction to your story. Our network does exist.” That was the level that they were competing at, where they had to insist to us that the network was real, even though we could not find it in our tests in the various cities they claim.

Maybe there was a network, they built some amount of network, but they had not built anything that competed at the national scale with the big three.

Absolutely. It’s not like your phone. The phone that I was using, I had an iPhone that it was mostly going to roam onto the AT&T and T-Mobile wholesale agreements that existed. The theory is you get the customers, you have a go-to-market strategy, and then you backfill the network. This is probably going to be something similar.

You can even go back to when John Legere first took over T-Mobile. They had a crappy network, and then Legere promised, “We’re going to build it,” taking on customers saying that the network was great before the network was great. Then it caught up because they actually finally got the Germans, Deutsche Telekom, to give them the money to invest in the network.

The same thing can happen here where SpaceX will sell something that’ll probably rely on other assets that are out there, even if the telcos themselves are circling the wagons. They have the satellites for certain benefits in terms of coverage and then they can build the capacity over time. The point is it’s going to take time. You can’t just turn on a network overnight and start selling service on that.

This has always been my framework of how to think about telecom companies. You can try to run the network cheaper or you can run some kind of different technology to make that cheaper. Or you can just spend and have the best network, which was the Verizon strategy for years and years and years.

Then you’ve got to acquire and manage your customers. That was the T-Mobile strategy. That was John Legere. He was just nicer to people than AT&T was, and he picked up a lot of customers and that drove some investment.

Then you’ve got to get some devices. You have to have the iPhone. We can set that aside because it feels like that era of competition is over. We’re not doing exclusive devices anymore. But those are the two. I’m just looking at the network here. It does not seem to me, from the outside, that Starlink is proposing to build a cheaper network.

It feels like they’re proposing to build a vastly more expensive network because they need the satellites. They’re going to launch 15,000 more satellites to support this network. Then they’re going to build a terrestrial network by investing in spectrum on the ground and building some set of base stations.

Then they’re going to have to convince one of the big three to let them roam over as some sort of mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The big three do not want to do that. So they’re going to overcharge them for that. I’m just stuck at that being a lot of cost, even if you’re Elon Musk and you can make some set of people buy whatever you’re selling.

The third thing you said is obviously the most challenging. That’s the tent and the pole that prevents you from launching services sooner rather than later. But without necessarily getting a wholesale agreement, there might be other ways. Roaming agreements exist out there. There are roaming partners that exist that these telcos still rely on. It’s very expensive. It’s not something you can build a high-margin business on, but it perhaps provides an entry to the market sooner rather than later.

As Apple has pitched in terms of satellite connectivity, some people are in the middle of the Utah desert texting because they’re injured. There’s value there. But it’s the soccer field. We have, maybe not in the cities, but in the suburbs, plenty of areas that the telcos have effectively given up on trying to provide coverage because of NIMBY-ism, meaning people just don’t want these cell sites. This satellite coverage can give you not just this basic text messaging that Apple has been doing through the Globalstar constellation, but a true cellphone-type experience.

So that’s a positive. The second differentiation is the fact that these telcos have 60 percent earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margins. So there’s a lot of fat there that can be eaten off of, that when you’re selling other services in terms of Elon, like home broadband, maybe this becomes an entree in terms of pushing Grok and people’s usage. You don’t necessarily need 60 percent margins, in this case, for him to justify building this network.

They also talk about other data connectivity that these satellites are going to enable. Again, in the current constellation, you need a lot of power and you need a dish. But if you don’t have that, if you have the cell phone-type power, then the internet of things (IOT) and other types of opportunities that exist there become another revenue opportunity that they look at.

It’s just funny. The IOT story — that’s what all these companies promised us about 4G. That’s what they all promised us about 5G. There’s something about this business that just rhymes every time. They’re going to do self-driving cars and robot surgery. I’m confident we’re going to hear about self-driving cars and robot surgery when it comes to Starlink and Tesla and Optimus.

There’s something about these applications for next generation networks that just recurs, and we hear about them all the time. Then I think about our consumer audience at The Verge, and they want long battery life and fast service and [connectivity] all the places they go. I’m not sure how that squares with your phone is going to connect directly to a satellite in the middle of a soccer field. There’s something about that that also seems challenging.

It’s just the performance if your phone does connect to the satellite on the soccer field and it works. A lot of the things that people said wouldn’t work on Starlink in terms of airplanes or even getting customer-premises equipment (CPE) down below a certain price, they’ve delivered on. Obviously, Elon sometimes delivers on them a little later than some of his initial optimistic promises, but they ultimately get delivered on.

There is the ability with these new constellations to give you that type of connectivity on these spaces. Is that enough to differentiate with consumers? I don’t know. The telcos have attacked this by saying, “No one cares about our direct-to-device (D2D) services.” Well, your D2D services are not good. It’s just sending basic text messages. What they’re talking about is giving you that blanket coverage where you get what you expect from your cell phone wherever you go.

That’s fine, but you still have to give it to the person in the middle of the building where their cell phone works today and provide the volume at a cost that is going to be attractive to that consumer. So those are longer-term things that are going to require some amount of terrestrial network build. Then the question is: how much? A lot of the attacks that have been out there have been referencing $100 billion, $200 billion. I get that. Why?

Telcos each spend $10 billion to $15 billion a year, but they are maintaining massive customer bases. To get that initial network up where you have that usage, where you use that low-band spectrum to get into buildings, is not those types of numbers. You’re probably talking like $10 billion, $15 billion for that initial build in terms of CapEx.

The dynamic there is really interesting. I’m just thinking about AT&T when the iPhone came out. The network immediately got overloaded because there was a surge of customer demand that took four years to truly resolve. Part of that resolution was just putting the iPhone on the other carriers.

How do you think that will play out for Starlink here? Because right now, Starlink customer service is not the best in the industry. Their actual service, people love it. And then when they need customer service, it’s a bunch of automated systems and people complaining on Reddit. So there’s some challenge there if you’re running a consumer business at this scale.

For consumer businesses, think about all the advertising that’s done. The fulfillment, dealing with the phones, phone subsidies, and that’s a big part of the financing. How many customers are we talking about? So for the amount of spectrum that they have now in the network that I’m talking about for $10–$15 billion, you’re not taking 50 percent share overnight. I don’t think that would be that expectation from day one.

But then the theory of telco is that when you do that initial CapEx build, you have your initial spectrum purchases — $10, $20, maybe $30 billion — another $10 or 15 billion in terms of CapEx. If you are successful and you do get that five or 10 million customers, the opportunity to invest more happens. If you go back to the old days when the cable view of wireless was going to be, “We’re going to get these MVNOs. We’re going to drive the wireless companies into the dirt and then we’re just going to buy them.”

That happened in at least one European market, and that was the cable bull thesis that was occurring. You could have the same bull thesis emerge from the SpaceX bulls here where they’re going to say, “We’ll get those first five or 10 million customers. We’ll drive them into the ground. Verizon’s going to be so desperate for any type of revenue because their revenue declined. They’re just going to hand them a wholesale deal and then they’ll start selling spectrum. There’s going to be a spectrum auction with the FCC.”

You can see how the narrative can build based on, “An initial CapEx that’s not that big, get in the market, and then if it’s successful, we start investing more.”

Let’s talk about the terrestrial network for one more turn. I heard you throw a little water on the idea that they’re going to build femtocells. That is what Elon and Gwynne Shotwell have been saying — that they don’t need to build the traditional kind of terrestrial network that AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile have, where you have a lot of fiber back haul, the big sites that require all kinds of zoning permits and everything. That they can basically just put small cell stations next to Starlink dishes, put them anywhere they want, and blanket the world with them. And Starlink itself will be the backhaul.

I sense some problems with this. Starlink is not 100 percent reliable all the time. If you have a network that is not 100 percent reliable all the time, you’ve got some problems, so maybe you have to backstop it somehow. But you don’t think that’s what they’re doing. You think they’re going to build a regular terrestrial network.

I’m sure that’ll be a part of it, but you need macro towers for that type of coverage and penetration and power. Not to explain physics to SpaceX, they probably know it better than anybody, but what you’ll see is as they talk more about this low-band spectrum that they purchase, when we get on the conference calls of these tower companies, you’re going to find out that you’re going to see a lot of those antennas show up on towers.

It’s just natural. You can talk about femtocells, but it’s hard to see that the network’s going to get built without macro towers.

One of the weirder aspects of the telecom industry, as it’s constituted in the United States right now, is that cell carriers own some of their towers and operate some of their towers. And then there are these crazy third parties that literally have names like TowerCo that operate a bunch of the other towers.

Are those captured? Do you think SpaceX can get deals with those companies, or are they beholden to their big partners?

These are huge real estate investment trusts (REITs). American Tower is the biggest one. It’s probably one of the largest companies in this. When you consider any REITs, there are other companies out there. They have these towers. They have space in many cases where basically SpaceX can just go and get an additional antenna. It’s a lot easier to do that now than when the wireless companies were initially building this stuff and having to erect their own towers.

In addition, EchoStar is going through a bankruptcy. They have a lot of radios that could be used, that could be bought on the cheap, that could expedite SpaceX’s entrance in the market. They haven’t shown interest in that yet. The EchoStar bankruptcy process hasn’t yet concluded, but EchoStar can still be a potential partner here by selling them radios that are already on towers.

You’ve lifted the amount of time. Those radios use the spectrum that SpaceX is purchasing, so it can be a quick fix for them to enter the market. Who knows if they do that? They may have their own view like Masayoshi Son did on how to build this new cheap network.

Is there a way to read this as just they’re slowly buying EchoStar or whatever EchoStar tried to do?

EchoStar has some remaining spectrum that Verizon really needs. At this point, there is some strategic sense to just buy EchoStar outright — because EchoStar is getting stock that was issued to them at a discount. If you’re buying them, you’re effectively buying in your own stock.

You don’t have to issue the cash to the company and you’re getting whatever cash proceeds that EchoStar is getting from some of its spectrum sales. They can actually get incremental cash on the balance sheet and buy their stock in. We’ll see if that plays out. By the way, then you don’t have to also deal with Dish, which sometimes can be challenging.

T-Mobile’s in the mix here. I want to talk about Verizon, you’ve mentioned them several times, but T-Mobile is Starlink’s current partner for direct-to-device cell connectivity. Are they just getting rocked? Are they going to be a part of this? How’s that going to work?

If you think about the start of that, that was former T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert up on stage with Elon announcing this thing and everyone’s very happy. Then Deutsche Telekom decided it needed a different CEO at some point. You had that transition where Mike retired and you brought in a new CEO, and there might just be a different view on how that relationship works.

I’m guessing that it’s been very frustrating for SpaceX to deal with them and certainly they would probably want to avoid any exclusivities going forward. They may need to if they want to sign one of these wholesale agreements that we talked about before.

It just seems like, as you mentioned, SpaceX and Starlink went after a little bit of the consumer market here. They bought some spectrum. They got a good reaction to it. Now they’re going to go after the whole thing and their existing telecom partner is thrown by the wayside.

If you look at the three big telecoms in the United States, they are circling the wagons. They’re saying this is never going to work. They’re never going to sign the MVNO agreements. They’re putting together their own satellite pool. There’s something here where they are panicked by the existence of meaningful competition in a way that does not usually happen in telecom.

Yeah, I agree with that. I don’t know if it’s SpaceX leaving them or T-Mobile leaving SpaceX, but that relationship which started out so happy with the old CEO is certainly not positive. T-Mobile executives have been throwing shade at SpaceX incessantly over the past couple of months. They formed a joint venture (JV) together.

It reminds me of when fixed wireless first hit the cable market and Chris Winfrey talked about it derisively as “cell phone internet” and played it down. Ultimately, that’s what’s really bit them and why cable stocks are in the position they’re in today, given the amount of customers that they’re losing to cell phone internet.

There are some similarities now in terms of how these executives are downplaying what they can do. Is it going to be costly? Is it going to be complex? Sure. But so is Terafab and so are so many other things. So is making an autonomous vehicle or catching a rocket with chopsticks. That’s the reality that they have to deal with. Investors have seen what this management team has done before in other areas and are just applying it here. Whether that’s fair or not, time will tell.

I’m actually very curious about that because I know you cover the company and I know you cover the industry. There’s some part of SpaceX that is just a meme stock. People love Elon. There’s some part of Tesla where it’s not valued like a car company, it’s valued like a software company, even though it is very much a car company. We’ve yet to see where the software multiples might come from for Tesla.

The same is true of SpaceX: huge IPO, but people are buying the physics miracle of the rockets launching and landing. They’re buying the promise of Mars. They’re buying the promise of AI, whatever that promise is, however frothy that market is. Those are valued against hopes and dreams.

Telecom is not. It’s well known. You can be a telecom analyst and you can examine the value of the spectrum. You understand the build-outs. The customers are not confusing. Consumers are going to pay some amount of money. There are other competitors that are built in at scale. Why do you think SpaceX would chain itself to a business that is easy to value when all of its other businesses are their dreams? You can’t value dreams. It’s just whatever is the biggest number.

I don’t think it’s an either-or. When you look at people’s attempts to justify the valuation of SpaceX, a lot of that value is going to land on data centers in space and the data centers on the ground. That’s where a lot of the value is in Starlink.

But that’s not the launch business, which theoretically is their business. It’s not even the AI provision business. We’re describing them as a hyperscaler.

Yeah, exactly. The AI and those are other big chunks of it. There are a lot of different stories here, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t pursue this if they have connectivity and constellations. They’re talking about connectivity in space because they believe that there’s going to be a demand for connectivity between the data centers, whether it’s theirs or others and their constellations. There are already data centers that I think are using their constellation to connect.

When they looked at it, it was just another part of the narrative that you build in terms of SpaceX and justifying the valuation. Because what do all of these things need? Whether it’s robotaxis, whether it’s data centers in space, they need money and money needs a narrative. This is just another one of the narratives to stack on top to say, “Here’s how we can drive incremental value.”

The value, if you look at the enterprise values of these telcos in the United States, you’re talking about a trillion dollars. That’s a trillion dollars of enterprise value. They’re obviously not going to capture a trillion dollars because part of it is shrinking the telcos down at the same time as getting whatever that stake is and the CapEx related to it.

The fair question is, if capital gets more scarce, how do you allocate between these different things? Don’t you want to push Terafab forward a little bit more or get those terrestrial data centers built so that you can start monetizing the billions of dollars that you’re getting there versus diverting whatever the dollars are here for the telco?

That is a reasonable thing. The problem for the telcos is even if that’s happening at SpaceX and this gets delayed a year, that doesn’t help them. The overhang of when that’s going to occur — whether that’s a year, two years, three years — is always going to be there. They’re not going to say, “We’re just giving up on going after this.” It’s just going to be a capital allocation issue in the near term that’s going to delay when the actual impact hits the telcos in the United States.

How much of this is just that Elon needs to supply connectivity to his own cars and his own factories and his own robots and he’ll just be his own best customer?

I don’t think that’s it. They think they really want to build a revenue business out of it. In fact, they’re going to use the cars as hotspots where they’ll put Starlinks on there and then use them as distribution points. That’s going to be part of the play.

I do want to end by talking about the existing telcos and what competition might do to them because I think that’s a fascinating dynamic. They are clearly not ready for an actual aggressive competitor.

But I want to stick with what you just said for a minute. If I pull that apart, it sounds like what you’re describing is the reality of the SpaceX business, which is that Starlink is the thing that makes profits. Everything else is incinerating money, but investors seem happy with that because the potential payoffs might be huge.

If you take the Starlink profits, you have to make a decision about whether to reinvest them into Starlink, and now Starlink’s mobile business, or into AI or into the launch business or into going to Mars. Regardless of how that allocation happens on what timeline, at some point, enough money will go back into Starlink Mobile to pose a real threat to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and that is just a matter of time.

You nailed it, and that is the issue. Capital becomes the biggest benefactor right now to the telecom companies. How does that capital get allocated? That’s in terms of reportive results. They’re 100 percent right on that. But in terms of the stocks, that concern is not going to go away because there will be incremental data points. Maybe one of these telcos has a problematic quarter or two. These are not founder CEOs where they have to do something quickly.

It’s easy to get a lot of wholesale revenue on the books by doing a deal with SpaceX. These are the types of things that they’re going to have to deal with in terms of that long-term risk. Cable’s got this. Look at Uber. Uber’s got the same issue. The threat of Waymo and robotaxis is what keeps that stock where it is.

Waymo with their 3,000 or 4,000 cars are obviously not impacting the two million drivers that Uber has in the United States. But the threat of where Waymo’s going to be two years from now, or three years from now, or the threat from Tesla’s robotaxis… that’s what investors care about and that’s going to obviously impact these companies.

Put that in the context of SpaceX being a public company for me. Is it just that we’re going to get next quarter’s results of SpaceX and we’re going to see that xAI is still burning money at enormous rates, but Starlink Mobile made a little bit more money? And that’s going to keep everybody happy for a minute?

I don’t know. I don’t think we have enough history yet in terms of what moves SpaceX stocks one way or another. To your point, you have a lot of believers, regardless of what’s printed, who are always going to say, “Who cares about this quarter?” Tesla’s got the same issue. Who cares how many cars that they actually sell because it’s all about the robotaxis and the robotaxi business is about to start scaling.

Those very positive people won’t care. Then there are going to be the negative people who, no matter how much traction you see them get in, whether it’s Starlink or progress on the build of space compute, are going to say, “He’s never going to deliver. This is never going to happen.” You’re just going to have those fighting battles back and forth.

The primary issue is going to be whether they can raise capital off of that. And in what ways? Because if you’re burning cash, at some point you need to bring in cash. If these businesses aren’t generating enough cash because you’re consuming it with the other growth initiatives, you still have to figure out ways to continue to issue cash or issue stock to get more cash on the balance sheet.

If I was going to offer that most cynical read, I would say the only business where they can see expanding the service will result in more profits to offset their losses elsewhere is Starlink. They don’t have another business that looks like that.

Just to be clear, Starlink is the broadband business that’s generating the cash flow. This mobile business would be cash negative initially before you get into that positive cash position. You have to look at the robotaxi business, there’s going to be a lot of CapEx initially, but these cars are pretty cheap. That theoretically could be a cash generator.

But that’s a different company.

But we know that, just like I mentioned earlier, it could make buying EchoStar make sense because you’re buying effectively cash in your own stock on the cheap. There are different ways to put cash obviously on the balance sheet in $10 or $20 billion chunks.

Obviously the structure of these companies — they’re all Elon’s companies in the end, and he’s managed them as closely as anyone can manage big public companies. But to make it as dumb as possible, say you have a dollar and if Gwynne Shotwell has a dollar and she wants to light the dollar on fire, she’ll put it in xAI against some return somewhere that might be $50 trillion total addressable market (TAM) or whatever their prospectus said.

Or you could put the dollar into Starlink Mobile in the build-out and you will probably return $1.10. That is what that business looks like because they will get some customers away from AT&T and Verizon. They’re already running that thing profitably.

The idea that they need to show some return somewhere, it feels like that’s why they’re making this move. Not because it makes the most financial sense, it just makes the most financial sense in the context of SpaceX.

You may be right. The problem with that belief is that it’s going to take time for them to get that dollar of profit out of the mobile business. They still have to build the network. They still have to sign up customers. You’re going to be negative EBITDA for a while. If you have two different businesses and you think the returns are significantly higher or more interesting to your investors to get to that next catalyst for space compute or Optimus or whatever it is, that is going to play a role.

What does Elon happen to care about the most at that moment? What is more interesting to him to do? Isn’t space compute a little bit more interesting to allocate those dollars than taking some mobile customers from AT&T?

Although the man’s addicted to his phone and I bet he hates seeing that AT&T logo in the corner. There’s just a part of that that’s always with these guys.

Let’s talk about the existing telecoms. They do seem a bit panicked. For a time, they were juggernauts. These were unstoppable businesses as mobile was growing. They poured a bunch of money into the 5G transition.

I’ve described the telecom industry as a bunch of lobbyists. Boy, did the lobbyists win the 5G transition. Boy, did they collect all the favors and all the capital they could to build out these networks and then reality hit them in the face. We beat China to some kind of network and then the thing that we were supposed to win did not happen.

Now we’re doing it again with AI, but that’s a different conversation. But that was the narrative with 5G: If we didn’t beat China to 5G, something. Who knows what, but we got to cut all the corners to build this network and spend all the money. It just didn’t pay off.

You’re an analyst, you’re in the trades. I skim the trades and boy are all these CEOs saying, “We’ve got to generate some revenue with these networks now.” You mentioned Mike Sievert is gone, the old CEO of Verizon’s gone. It just didn’t pay off for these guys.

Yeah, 5G didn’t deliver. Some of the promises were BS from the beginning. You talked about this earlier regarding autonomous cars. You’re not going to rely on the network to make that millimeter-second decision of whether you’re going to hit the car in front of you or not. Remote surgery, even if that was a thing, how is that a scalable business where you’re generating hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue?

These were all silly. Sievert used to be the guy saying, “People would say the same thing about LTE, there’s no application.” That was not even true. If you remember, the application was video and we knew that LTE was going to enable video and that’s exactly what happened.

You’re 100 percent right. This was just a way for them to get more spectrum because they were going to still have data growth on their networks. Capturing more spectrum to be able to handle the existing growth, and that’s cheaper to get spectrum, even at tens of billions of dollars, than it is to try and build the network for that capacity.

If they had just said, “We’re going to spend all this money and at the end of it, tens of thousands of people will be able to livestream Taylor Swift during the Eras tour on every one of those stops,” Americans would have said, “Go, go faster. Yes, we understand what that is.”

That is truly the thing they enabled. It’s very cool. It’s millimeter wave in stadiums and that’s cool. I don’t know if there’s another one. That said, they are on their back foot. They did spend a lot of money. This is around the time when, in my history as a journalist, they would start talking about 6G, and they want to, but they know they shouldn’t, so they don’t.

They’re having the meetings. They are certainly not as loud about the next round of investment as they would normally be in the cycle. Now they have a competitor. Your analysis is that Verizon is by far the weakest here. They have the most to lose. Explain why that is.

One other thing to mention is you have a very active FCC chair that would like to raise, and put on his resume, $100 billion from spectrum auction. You’re right, they’re going to talk about 6G again and have to come up with some type of revenue stream to justify getting this money. It’s going to be a lot harder though. They’re already pretty levered. They’ve got a new competitor.

In terms of Verizon, the issue is that AT&T has seen this thing developing for some time. They’ve built a fiber network. There’s only so much that wireless can do where a fiber network is ultimately your best connection. If you think about customers that own fiber and wireless, very high-value, very low-churn customers. That’s been their strategy. They’re plodding along. They’re going to get their two or three percent revenue growth and just pay their dividend and do their thing. That is the standard telco.

T-Mobile didn’t have that. They’ve got the dynamics — a lot of politics right now between Deutsche Telekom wanting to own it and not wanting to pay a high price and how that all plays out. Verizon just made a lot of bad strategic bets on spectrum. Obviously, AT&T had their own issues, but at least they got out of DirecTV and Warner quick enough and turned the ship.

But Verizon bought millimeter wave spectrum when they could have bought EchoStar and bought spectrum… even now they’re spectrum-constrained compared to their competitors and they need to go out and spend $10–$15 billion on the EchoStar spectrum. You have a new CEO in there who is not really a telco guy who’s just doing his thing, saying, “We’re just going to cut costs.” The EBITDA is going to look good because they’re just firing a bunch of people and there’s going to be a result.

There is going to be an impact of firing that many people in the organization. It may appease investors to make the EBITDA look good for the next couple of quarters. But at some point you have to show and have a strategy for some type of revenue growth. What is Verizon’s differentiation in the market right now? They have none. They’re the most in the crosshairs of where SpaceX and even the cable companies can continue to eat away at those customers.

That is surprising to me. It’s just my own history. I grew up in the midwest. I went to college in the midwest. That was Cingular territory and it became AT&T. When I moved to New York in 2010, Verizon was the gold standard network in the Northeast. It was the one everyone had. It cost the most money because it was the best network. The iPhone coming to Verizon a couple of years later was a huge deal.

Verizon’s network was so powerful at that time that they could try to force the Blackberry Storm down people’s throats. They were confident enough that their network was the thing holding people to them, that that was a worthwhile strategy. Obviously, it didn’t work. They made the wrong bet. You’re saying they made the wrong bet on millimeter wave. They made the wrong bet on other spectrum acquisitions. The one that I’m not quite tracking is media.

They did buy a bunch of dumb stuff. At one point they owned Tumblr, which is just one of the most confusing media outcomes of all time. But that stuff was all cheaper and easier for them to flip or shut down than AT&T buying all of Time Warner and putting out a 4:3 black-and-white Justice League movie. How did AT&T survive that? But you’re saying Verizon can’t survive owning Yahoo?

That’s a fair pushback, in that the media impact to Verizon was a lot less than AT&T. But these again were separate businesses. Obviously, it was a capital allocation issue for a period of years.

But the decisions on the spectrum front and the competitive front, and T-Mobile’s impact, John Legere’s impact in taking away the claim of having the best network, left them in a spot where they basically said, “We’ll just keep increasing price on our customers and we’ll get that 2 or 3 percent revenue growth.” And they just lost the narrative of what they meant to customers. I don’t really think under the new CEO that’s been regained.

Do you think their ability to say they have the best network is just gone?

That’s completely gone. That’s the crazy thing about this. The networks are effectively commoditized. These networks are basically the same. And they’re getting 60 percent margins.

That’s the whole thing with Dish Wireless — even if it wasn’t on their network and you guys tested it, it wasn’t on their network, you could have been buying AT&T’s network at half price. It’s crazy the average revenue per user (ARPU) and the margins that these guys get for what is effectively a commoditized market. That’s why the AT&T strategy is interesting because at least they’re trying to bundle that with a high-value fiber network. But for the other guys, it’s just commoditized wireless.

I would actually say the other strategic mistake Verizon made along the way was they got away from Fios. They decided it wasn’t worthwhile. It seems like they’re trying to reinvest in that now and go after that AT&T strategy.

Given their lack of spectrum, they can only take fixed wireless so far. You’re right. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got back to investing in fiber. The difference, obviously, with Fios is that you have union issues and a lot of cost structure issues that they were dealing with.

But the pivot to doing more fiber and perhaps laying off the fixed wireless, which is straining the network, is probably the right decision for them and what you’ll see happen going forward.

I want to end on just a big picture question here. We have covered so many crazy telecom mergers and it always feels like the right answer is to put more competition in the system.

We’ve mentioned John Legere several times in this conversation. He only got that job and T-Mobile only got to exist the way it does because AT&T was prevented from buying T-Mobile. They paid a breakup fee, which subsidized a huge portion of that early growth and those early strategic moves that Legere was able to make.

But that was good for the market. Consumers got a CEO who tried to change the market and have better customer experiences, reinvested that money in the network. That was good. The existence of Dish Network is T-Mobile trying to buy Sprint and instead of blocking the deal, we imposed some wild structural remedies and Makan Delrahim, who ran antitrust in the first Trump administration, rightly or wrongly engineered the outcome of Dish Network existing.

That was Delrahim’s preferred outcome: “We’re going to let this happen, but we need to have four carriers. Charlie Ergen is my guy. We were going to stand up a fourth one.” From my perspective, it just seemed obvious that he was never going to do that. And he didn’t.

Maybe I was correct to make that bet, but it just seemed obvious that Dish Network was going to hold onto a bunch of spectrum, watch the prices rise and then flip it when it turned out they never built their network. They had to hit targets with the FCC that they just weren’t hitting over time. Now, we have a true fourth competitor, or at least an aggressive competitor of the market in Elon, who’s probably going to try to actually do this thing and these companies are running scared.

Is this just evidence that we should have four carriers in the United States? And that when inevitably Verizon tries to buy T-Mobile, we should just say, no, the right answer is four and we’re not going to go to three again.

Under Chairman Wheeler, which goes way back, four was the number.

Wheels and I were buds.

If you called him now, he’d say, “I told you it should have been four and it’s going to go back there.” Obviously, in the new administration, they didn’t believe that that was the case. You see Chairman Carr pointing to prices, how he sees them being down and the competition that’s happened in fixed wireless.

But you always want more competition in a market. It drives innovation and it lowers prices and margins are approaching 60 percent in the wireless business. I can’t say we’ve had a tremendous amount of innovation, which gets back to what the telcos are doing in fear by refusing to give SpaceX a wholesale agreement.

That’s their right. But at some point, if the FCC’s mandate is to act in the public interest, we have a current administration — and who knows who gets in during the next administration — but if these telcos are going to push back so hard on what the fourth competitor, in this case SpaceX, is going to do, the FCC can probably get involved in some ways. That is the risk that they run by being so vocally against Elon Musk in the market.

You talk about the ultimate consolidation. It’s funny. We should save all these quotes now where they’re saying, “Elon can’t be a competitor because he only has 80 MHz of spectrum.” Because then when they want to merge with someone, they’re going to claim, “No, he’s actually a competitor.” They’re going to deny that as a competitive threat.

There’s nothing funnier than a giant telecom insisting that a thing that is not a competitor is their competitor. They all do it.

Last question. Again, this is just the big think rattling around my head. We might be on a cusp of an entire paradigm shift in what mobile devices even are. If you look at Meta, they’re going to put up the Muse charm and maybe we’re all going to talk to little cartoon AIs all day that run agents in a data center. Our use of mobile bandwidth to watch video will go down because we’re not even carrying phones anymore. Is that a risk here? Is anybody thinking about this?

We think about this every day at LightShed, in terms of all the different ways that AI [exists] and how we interact with our information and how we interact with commerce and using agents. Muse has obviously been something we’ve been waiting for from someone and there’s going to be other versions of that. But you’re right. It could decrease [phone usage], and it’s an Apple risk.

It decreases the importance of the status of holding an iPhone if you’re just not interacting with your data in the same way. If that happens, that whole paradigm in terms of the telcos and providing the subsidies changes. Whenever there’s change, there’s an opportunity for disruption and for margins to be contracted. It does change things and maybe SpaceX could play.

Elon’s been asked about making a device. I know Qualcomm, when you meet with those guys, says, “We have 40 different guys out there making devices.” I don’t think he’s going to add one more thing to his list, but again, let’s get back to what we’ve talked about during this podcast and narrative.

Will Terafab happen? Will data centers in space happen? It may not happen, but you can maybe talk about building a phone and then that becomes one more issue that the telcos have to deal with in terms of dealing with their customers. Why am I using this iPhone when I should be using this completely different device, whether it’s coming from OpenAI or Anthropic or maybe SpaceX?

The idea of Elon shipping a mid-range Android phone with the Play Store on it is so deeply funny to me. I truly hope it happens because that’s the product you can make today. Maybe there’s a paradigm shift and there’s a different set of products.

But right now you need to have Instagram and there’s really only one path to getting Instagram, which is shipping an Android phone with the Play Store on it. We just saw Amazon essentially capitulate with their new tablets.

If you’re focused on the future, you have to concede to the present. I truly do not believe we will see a mid-range Android phone from SpaceX. But you’re saying they might start talking about it.

No, I agree with you. I’m just saying when you’re trying to build narratives, why not throw that in the hopper? The bigger issue is someone’s going to build something that may resonate with… We’ve gone a long time. We’re spending $1,000 for these phones that are giving us some basic swipe functionality. They’re going to change in terms of how you use them.

This is a bigger and more obvious issue for Apple than anybody else, but it does change how the telcos are going to act and the role that they’re going to play and where that margin should be. They gave up a lot of value to Apple at some point during this continuum of the wireless industry. We’re going through another paradigm change, so we’ll see how those value splits play out.

Walter, we’re going to have to have you back soon because it feels like these things are going to happen fast. I was very happy to nerd out about telecom with you. Thanks for being on Decoder.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

WASHINGTON — After months of being outspent by Democrat James Talarico on the airwaves, Republicans launched a massive rescue mission for Ken Paxton in September, dropping over $200 million to boost their U.S. Senate candidate in Texas.

New campaign finance filings revealed that much of the advertising flurry was funded by one highly motivated donor: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man.

Musk, who lives near the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, appears to have poured nearly $190 million into the U.S. Senate race in his adopted home state. His role in financing Paxton’s air support was disclosed in reports filed Thursday to the Federal Election Commission by Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main super PAC and the biggest spender in Texas’ Senate contest.

On Sept. 9, the first day of the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Musk gave $75 million to SLF. The next day, SLF put $75 million into a new entity called Texas PAC. By the weekend after the convention, the new super PAC was up on the air with a positive spot about Paxton’s work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you.”

Two weeks after cutting his first check, Musk gave an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group’s filing. Sure enough, SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC’s coffers the following day.

Musk’s donations armed Senate Republicans to take over the airwaves in Texas. Using Texas PAC as the vessel to book airtime, SLF has thus far spent over $159 million on TV, radio and digital advertising, double the outlay from Talarico’s campaign, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

SLF backed Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, estimating that a Paxton candidacy would require $150 million to $200 million to retain the seat — money that could come at the expense of other states. While the prediction proved prescient, Musk’s investment has changed the calculus.

“Thanks to some generous investors who have dedicated money to an affiliate, Texas PAC, we’ve been able to go in and support Ken Paxton,” SLF executive director Alex Latcham told Bloomberg TV Wednesday. “We’ll spend nearly $200 million in that race. But again, thanks to Leader John Thune and the Republican caucus and our fundraising, we haven’t had to subtract resources from other states to do so.”

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The Tesla and SpaceX founder got involved in the race after his political team reached out to Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main outside campaign group, to voice Musk’s concerns about Paxton’s standing in the race, according to a person familiar with the conversations. That led to an agreement between Musk’s orbit and SLF — Musk would provide $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main outside group boosting Paxton, if SLF gave $5 million and the PAC raised an additional $5 million. The details of the conversation were first reported by Axios.

That windfall was badly needed. Lone Star Liberty PAC had only $35,000 in the bank at the end of June, having drained its coffers on Paxton’s hard-fought primary win over Cornyn. Talarico, meanwhile, was continuing his torrid fundraising pace and was poised to keep dominating the political ad spending battle if help did not arrive for Paxton.

Talarico posted another record quarter amid Paxton’s SLF-powered ad surge, hauling in $64 million between July and September — a third-quarter record among all U.S. Senate candidates. The Austin Democrat has maintained a polling lead for months in averages of nonpartisan public surveys, an alarming sight for a Republican Party whose unbeaten streak in Texas statewide races spans more than three decades.

With Musk’s donation and the matching funds, Lone Star Liberty PAC spent $17.5 million on broadcast TV advertising in early September, by far the most significant pro-Paxton ad buy of the general election. By the end of the month, a handful of outside groups led by SLF had dropped over $217 million on ads in the Texas Senate race.

X not a part of Paxton’s Big Tech crusade

Paxton has not commented publicly about Musk’s support.

In the past, the attorney general has praised Musk for backing Republicans in 2024. He spent hours at Musk’s home two days before that year’s election hearing Musk recount all his efforts to boost GOP candidates, Paxton said at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in 2024.

“Aren’t you all glad he’s on our side?” Paxton said to cheers. “I am convinced that whatever he did, whatever rocket science thing he did, made a huge difference in this election.”

Paxton has also aligned himself with Musk through his role as Texas attorney general — and largely skirted scrutinizing Musk’s companies as his office has increasingly taken on Big Tech.

In 2022, as Musk sought to buy Twitter, Paxton opened an investigation into the social media company for how it reported the number of accounts on the platform that were fake or bots — inspecting whether the service was inflating the number of its actual users to boost its value for revenue. At the time, Musk was raising similar questions. He ultimately bought Twitter and renamed it X.

In 2024, Paxton opened an investigation into World Federation of Advertisers, an organization that represents marketers, to assess whether its members were conspiring to boycott specific social media services. TechCrunch reported Musk’s X, which had filed an antitrust suit against the group, was likely among the social media platforms.

Meanwhile, Paxton has taken on tech giants including Netflix, WhatsApp, Discord, and Meta — probes he has touted on the campaign trail.

“As attorney general, I’ve sued some of the largest companies in the world … for taking advantage of our kids by exposing them to dangerous, addictive material,” Paxton said after defeating Cornyn in May. “In Washington, I will not stop fighting to protect Texas children from Big Tech.”

But Paxton has taken arrows from critics who’ve accused him of turning a blind eye to X and Musk. In January, a group of Democratic state representatives demanded the attorney general investigate the platform’s artificial intelligence agent, Grok, and its creation of exploitative content about children and women. Paxton did not respond to the letter publicly.

The same month, a group of attorneys general from across the country sent Musk’s company a letter demanding that it address its AI agent’s creation of child sex abuse content. Paxton was not among the signatories.

Funding the GOP ground game

Musk’s political operation is also deeply involved in the Republican ground game in Texas, from canvassing to mailers, across several key races. America PAC, which he seeded with nearly $90 million last quarter, had pumped $18.8 million into the Senate race through Tuesday, per FEC filings, which capture efforts like text messaging, mailers and ads but not in-person canvassing such as block-walking and phone-banking. Over 80% of that money has gone to anti-Talarico messaging.

The tech mogul has significant business interests in the Lone Star State. Musk has moved the state of incorporation for many of his companies to Texas in recent years. Boring Company and X are headquartered in Bastrop, SpaceX is near Brownsville and Tesla’s corporate headquarters is now in Austin.

And it’s not just the Senate race. Musk’s PAC has spent about $800,000 boosting Republican candidates in the five most competitive U.S. House races in Texas. The biggest share has gone to the 35th Congressional District, a San Antonio-area seat Republicans redrew last summer with the intention of flipping, but which has proven highly competitive.

Musk spent hundreds of millions in 2024 to boost Republicans, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Trump rewarded Musk by tapping him to lead the controversial Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The two had a public falling out later that year, when Musk disparaged the president’s signature legislative effort and alleged Trump was in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The dustup did not appear to sap Musk’s appetite for bankrolling Republicans’ political spending. The world’s wealthiest man has already surpassed his 2024 political spending this cycle, with Texas the largest focus of his operation.

Other GOP groups are fundraising off of Musk’s Texas spending bonanza as well.

“Elon Musk understands what it’s like to live under far left Democrats,” reads one National Republican Senatorial Committee fundraising email, which notes that Musk has spent $276 million in the midterms and directs readers to a WinRed fundraising page. “He fled an oppressive regime in California that crippled the state with a radical agenda before finding a new home in Texas. But now, the same Far Left Democrats that ran California into the ground are coming to SEIZE Elon’s new home!”

While far from reaching Musk’s investment levels, some prominent Texas GOP donors also came off the sidelines for Paxton in recent months, new filings show.

West Texas oil billionaire Farris Wilks, who has supported Paxton in his state campaigns and directed millions to hardline Republicans, donated $250,000 to one of Paxton’s joint fundraising committees in mid-August, his first federal expenditure of the cycle.

Amarillo billionaire Alex Fairly, meanwhile, had maxed out to Paxton’s direct campaign account with a $7,000 donation in the spring; in late August, he gave $274,300 to Paxton’s joint fundraising committee.

Paxton also received large sums this quarter from the Dallas Cowboys brass. Team president Stephen Jones and chief sales and marketing officer Jerry Jones Jr. gave $122,000 and $100,000, respectively. Their father, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, donated a six-figure sum in the second quarter.

Disclosure: Meta and WhatsApp have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune within the past five years. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

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From the moment Alex Gibney announced he was working on “Musk” in 2023, it became one of the most anticipated documentaries around – and a source of trepidation for its titular subject, tech mogul Elon Musk. But we may have underestimated how far the world’s wealthiest man and his ilk would go to prevent audiences from seeing it.

Weeks before “Musk” hit theaters, its distributor, Bleecker Street, couldn’t buy ads on TikTok, YouTube, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram or, here’s a shocker, Musk’s own X. A Hollywood Reporter story published on Sept. 25 made YouTube and Meta reverse course – a rare case of two media giants shamed into living up to their free-speech claims.

But this attempted media suppression shows “Musk” has struck a nerve, despite its namesake dismissing it as a “hit piece that misses.”

It was not lost on Gibney that at the same time that was happening, Zuckerberg, Musk and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos were dining with Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping at the White House. He’s confronted gravely perilous corruption and dangerous figures in previous, fearless documentaries such as  2019’s “Citizen K,” about a Russian oligarch who was crushed by Vladimir Putin, and 2015’s “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”

What happened to Bleecker Street, then, is both familiar to Gibney and extraordinarily alarming. “You can see how a few platforms coalescing around the endorsement of what these tech viziers are doing decide that a criticism of tech power is somehow political and can’t be allowed in terms of open discourse on their platforms,” Gibney told Salon. “So that was really disconcerting.”

It’s shaping up to be a dark autumn for Silicon Valley’s villains. In early December, Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” turns our attention to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, played by Andrew Garfield.  

Meanwhile, “Musk” was recently joined in theaters by Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” in which Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a soulless ghoul prioritizing clicks over user safety. In “You Can See Everything,” notorious prankster Nathan Fielder shadows notorious (for different reasons) Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in the days before she went to prison. 

Gibney also profiled Holmes in his 2019 work “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” which adds another layer of coincidental symmetry: Fielder’s film hits theaters on Oct. 16, the same day “Musk” opens nationwide.

But “Musk” is unquestionably a tougher watch, and given its subject’s extensive integration into the second Trump administration, it can’t help but be political.

Of course, “Musk” isn’t campaigning for anything except our need to confront the existential threat posed by one man exercising significant control over our media and our military.

A chorus of testimony from people who were once closest to Musk builds a profile of a megalomaniacal con artist. Two of Musk’s most incisive critics, his ex-wife Justine Musk and former right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, describe him as a gaslighter and a nuke, respectively. 

But perhaps the most damning testimonial comes from Musk himself – or rather, existing audio recordings of Musk delivered by a CGI version of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, since he refused to participate.

All of it boils down to simple questions Gibney poses at the film’s outset: How could Musk assume so much power, and why have we given it to him? I discussed those questions with Gibney, and what they taught him about Musk and our penchant for enabling men like him, in a wide-ranging conversation transcribed below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Salon: You’ve done a documentary on Putin. You did one on Scientology, a famously litigious organization. You have a vast filmography featuring subjects who might have taken issue, or have taken issue, with what was said in your documentaries. Where does this rank in terms of threat level, legal or otherwise?

Gibney: Well, high. I mean, when just before “Going Clear” was released, the Church of Scientology took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the L.A. Times with a big picture of me, sort of denouncing me. And there were people, you know, who would pop up in dark parking lots, you know, sort of accosting me, trying to kind of destabilize me psychologically. But I think in this case, he’s the richest man in the world. He has a lot of resources… And he has this platform, Twitter, which has become a kind of Thunderdome of hate and vitriol, and that activates, you know, unpredictable characters who sometimes act on their own…

That said, I don’t want to exaggerate what’s happened to me so far. Other people put themselves at greater risk than I, in the sense that they came forward and appeared on camera.

One of the things that you said in other interviews, and I think you actually said this in the documentary as well, is that you used to be a fan of Elon Musk’s products.

I mean, I looked at him from afar. I have some history on this whole electric car thing because I was brought in long ago to help with the editing of a doc called “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which is about GM’s first foray into the world of electric cars. A woman I met on that film, Jessie Deeter, later produced a film called “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and Elon Musk is in that.  And Jessie, when she worked with him on that, was a big fan. [Deeter is also a producer on “Musk.”]

(Courtesy Bleecker Street Film / Gregg Segal)

So, you know, I had a certain connection to him. And I’m a big electric car guy. I own one — not a Tesla— but I own one, and I had a Tesla Powerwall in my house. I also sort of liked the kind of mumbling charisma that he had for a while, because he seemed like very much a regular guy. He was joking with people around on Twitter and stuff like that.

That said, he could also do unpredictable, chaotic and sometimes offensive things. But largely speaking, my view of him was positive. But I was interested in the fact that he accumulated so much power, and so that was the basis on which I dug in back in 2022.

Do you think that his ability to amass this much power is related to the fact that he is doing it in the American capitalist system, or do you think he could have done it in any other place in the world?

Well, I mean, there are a lot of intersections of opportunities for Elon Musk, and I also think he discovered, to use a phrase of his, the anomaly in the matrix for the American system. And that is money. He discovered that not only can you get a lot of money from the federal government, but if you have a lot of money, you can use it to influence sometimes how much money you get from the federal government or state governments. So I think there was that.

The other big thing is that in America we also have a kind of grudging admiration for the P.T. Barnum-like qualities of certain larger-than-life entrepreneurs, you know, and you see that a lot in Silicon Valley . . . That is a kind of cultural trope in this society for which I think we have a weakness. We sort of like to see them trick us all, though we also do like to see them go down after they’ve tricked us. So I think for all those reasons that maybe Elon was able to succeed here in a way that really exploited some of the flaws in our system and our psyche.

There’s also a propensity in our culture to believe in some superhuman aspect of genius, which I think your documentary gets at very well.

Yeah, it’s also that our weakness for money, or the power of money, in this culture also causes us somehow to think that if you’re wealthy, you’re also wise rather than just ruthless, right?

I often think of that famous line from “Citizen Kane,” where Orson Welles is joking with somebody, you know, having been very successful playing this William Randolph Hearst character, who said, “It’s no trick making a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” Meaning,  if you’re ruthless and determined, you can make a lot of money. Doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and it doesn’t mean that you’re a tech genius either. 

I also think Elon Musk, having seen the ascent of Steve Jobs, was sort of defining himself in that way too – or going back to Thomas Edison, who had his own P.T. Barnum-like qualities in terms of inventing a character for himself to play. It’s not just the investor; it’s the inventor.

“Musk” runs for almost four hours. Did you always know it would be that long?

No. In fact, I had a cut of the film in the spring of 2024 that was under two hours. We were moving to release that and put it into the fall festivals. Then, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump is nearly assassinated, and Musk hitches his wagon to the Trump train. And my friends at HBO said, “You’re not done. You have to follow this story because it could go to places that you don’t expect, and having spent as much time as you have, you have to follow it to at least a moment of greater conclusion.”

So I did, and that ended up being the reason that it’s at such a length. You see patterns from the first film that then repeat themselves, but on a much larger scale, in the second film. Suddenly economic power meets political power, economic and technological power meets political power, and that is the making of an epic story.

In addition, it just so happened that as he embarked on his political project, a lot of people that I was talking to in the background, trying to persuade them to come forward, did come forward because they saw some of the more problematic aspects of Musk wielding power as part of MAGA world. That gave the story a kind of human dimension as well.

Weirdly, you know, I was having trouble kind of putting it all together, and I didn’t really get a sense of how to shape it until I watched Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which in itself was a kind of take on the tech bros. That helped me kind of find a way forward in terms of what became a kind of epic narrative.

How so?

Well, you know, you start with a scientist who wants to do something big and important. And there’s even a sense of idealism about his ambition. But then he literally creates a monster, and the whole enterprise becomes utterly reckless and irresponsible and all about his own sort of grandiosity. Rather than a mission that might help people, it becomes about him.

What are you hoping this documentary will do in terms of making people a little bit more aware of who Elon Musk is and getting at the man behind the curtain, so to speak?

Well, I mean, it is an agent provocateur. I don’t provide a solution, but I do provide, I think, a pretty compelling story, which asks the kind of fundamental question I posed at the beginning, which is, how did this guy get so much power, and why did we give it to him? Because it’s both about him and it’s about us, and it asks some discomforting questions about how literally existential power rests in the hands of one man who is increasingly chaotic, unhinged, and seemingly pursuing power without reason. There’s a chilling moment at the end of the film where somebody asks him, “Why have you accreted so much power?” And he literally can’t answer the question…

He’s a very peculiar character who’s a chaos agent. But we’ve allowed him to become normalized in a way.

I remember writing about him being on “Saturday Night Live” and people shrugging it off, like, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal.” But it was a very big deal. Those kinds of things make him into a character when the reality is he has massive access to power.

And he’s saying things, even on “Saturday Night Live,” that were patently untrue… Even when he says, “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Well, there’s a funny hidden message there, which is kind of discomforting if you really think about it. Like, if you want to drive a Tesla, be prepared to endure a lot of performative cruelty from me, including cruelty that may end up killing people. . .  That’s a pretty brutal message, honestly, for “Saturday Night Live.” But it was a joke, right? And that’s the genius, in a way, of Elon Musk: he’s constantly saying stuff that is deadly serious and a joke at the same time.

Speaking of that, the images and the joke, let’s talk about using the [CGI] avatar. I remember when the news first broke about that, someone said, “Well, I wonder if that’s Alex kind of trolling Musk back.”

I mean, it’s kind of a troll-back, yeah. In a way, it’s kind of investing in him, playing in his sandbox, because he didn’t agree to appear.

And I should make it clear, as I tried to do in the film, that what we hear from him are actual audio recordings of him. In other words, they’re not AI-confected answers. We didn’t ask AI what Elon would say. We’re taking real audio recordings, but how to couch that visually? And we took our cue, having done all this research into stuff that Elon said, from something he kept going over again: This idea that we’re likely living in a simulation. So I thought, OK, how about a simulated interview?

And yes, he’s famous for trolling people. He’s famous for creating memes. What was it he said in 2020 on Twitter? He said, you know, parodying “Dune,” he said, “He who controls the memes, controls the universe,” right? OK, well, here’s a meme for you, Elon, of you.

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What, if anything, about this documentary may help illuminate a few things for people, regardless of their political leanings, as we approach the midterms?

I mean, this should be our concern, whether you’re from the left or the right, is giving people unaccountable power. Also, this whole idea that our politics and, indeed, our Department of Justice and our Department of Defense can be utterly transactional.

We’re not getting the best that money can buy. We’re getting what money can buy. Period. In other words, the military stuff that you’re seeing is a third-rate frontier AI technology being fully integrated into our Department of Defense. And why is the worst technology being integrated? Because Elon Musk is literally paying for political advantage. So it’s a payback system, and we should all be outraged about that, left, right, or otherwise.

And now you’re seeing him trying to buy the midterms. He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts. But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.

Our whole system is built on a system of checks and balances, and the idea that the government is our instrument for making a better world, rather than, you know, making a few people rich…

But I think that what’s changed now with Trump is that the Department of Justice has become a protection racket for those who flatter and ally themselves with the president, and an instrument of revenge for those who oppose the president. You can’t depend on it as a kind of law-enforcing mechanism, and that may be the scariest thing of all. . . What we’re talking about is Putin’s Russia here, right? And if people want to avoid that, then I would strongly urge them to go out to the polls. Because this is a rogue administration that goes beyond any kind of sense of party affiliation. It’s a rogue administration that’s literally destroying our democracy.

“Musk” is playing in theaters nationwide.

 

The post Alex Gibney’s “Musk” asks why we gave Elon Musk so much power appeared first on Salon.com.

Last night, Elon Musk gave the people what they want: a car driving vertically up a multistory ramp, launching off the edge, executing a midair "kickflip" over a lineup of Teslas, and landing via cold-gas thrusters.

That's what the people want, right? "We were promised flying cars," sure, but isn't the operative word in that statement "we"? Because as far as I can tell, everything we saw last night - while extremely cool and incredibly impressive - won't result in a real, production-ready car you can park, or, I guess, land in your driveway.

Tesla's late-night demonstration in Waco, Texas, certainly gave some corners of the internet what …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The new car used thrusters to leap over a Cybercab, Cybertruck, Tesla Semi, Model Y, and Model 3 at a demo in Texas.

Though movies about disruptive tech founders are nothing new, 2026 has been unusually stacked with features that take a much more critical look at how Silicon Valley is reshaping our reality. Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning frames Mark Zuckerberg as a robotic villain whose ambitions are destabilizing society. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's You Can See Everything paints a damning picture of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as she prepares for her ongoing stint in prison. After years of being widely celebrated as a visionary, you can see how the larger narrative around Elon Musk has shifted in projects like Alex Gibney's Musk docume …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ukrainian officials claim the Elon Musk-owned Starlink put new limits on its service in the area without warning, disrupting the country's drone operations and missions, according to reports from Reuters and the Financial Times. The move comes just days after Musk wrote on X that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "has gone too far," in response to President Donald Trump's disapproval of Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries.

"It is clear that this action is not coincidental and is related to the current political situation," Ukrainian defense tech advisor Serhii Beskrestnov writes on Telegram.

Earlier this week, Russia launched a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

For a car that's supposed to be one of the fastest ever made, the new Tesla Roadster certainly took its sweet-ass time getting here.

It's been nearly a decade since Elon Musk made the surprise announcement about plans to build a next-gen Roadster. Now, the Tesla Roadster is finally expected to make its production-ready debut at an event in Waco, Texas - and the timing couldn't be worse.

The new Roadster is set to arrive in an EV market beset by high energy prices, political turmoil, and consumer uncertainty. The tax-credit-fueled exuberance of the post-covid years has since given way to slower sales and fewer options. Automakers are scalin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Elon Musk has handed out at least $276 million to Republican groups since July, The New York Times reports, making him both the party's top known donor and the biggest established midterm donor. $158 million of that money - one of the largest political donations in American history - has been funneled into the Senate Leadership Fund, the main super PAC that aims to secure and maintain a Republican Senate majority. Among others, it's fighting to retain the party's Senate seat in Texas, which serves as a major hub for Musk's business empire.

He's also donated over $76 million to America PAC, a super PAC Musk founded in 2024 that canvasses for …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In the 1987 Nintendo game “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link,” there is a village you can visit and a home you can enter and a man in a purple shirt you can speak with. But the only thing he says is “I am Error.” I was unexpectedly delighted by this dialogue when I first encountered it on a Gamecube emulator in 2009 (I’m not that old). It felt both meta and existential, or just an amusing bug. It turned out that Error was actually the character’s name, a sort of in-joke slash translation mistake that has since become a meme akin to “Your princess is in another castle” or “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this” from the original “Legend of Zelda.”

Error is a non-player character (NPC), meaning one that the player can’t control but is usually more than just video game wallpaper. Nearly 40 years later, NPCs have come a long way, with increasingly complex behaviors and conversational dialogue that span far more than just three words. The upcoming game “Grand Theft Auto VI” is rumored to feature unprecedented complex NPCs with rich, fleshed-out personalities and backstories, while video game companies explore using artificial intelligence to let players train NPCs as they interact.

In many ways, NPCs are how many people were first introduced to AI, although in a relatively simplistic form compared to the chatbots and massive data center hogs that we have come to either love or loathe, with little room in between. Years ago, NPCs became an insult spun out of 4Chan, the anonymous online forum, to describe real people who don’t think for themselves and follow a set of cultural programming, usually illustrated by an expressionless gray cartoon avatar. The meme became popularized by chronically online cohorts of Donald Trump supporters during his first presidential term, adjacent to the idea of “Trump derangement syndrome,” both implying that people oppose the MAGA movement out of reflexive mindlessness and not, you know, because they’d looked under the hood and seen it for what it is.

It might just sound like a new way to call someone an idiot, but the NPC label has much deeper, scarier implications. On the surface, it seems like harmless video game humor, and I’m sure we’ve all had encounters with actual humans that resembled interacting with tautological machines programmed with limited responses. “There is weather today. Did you hear about celebrity? Sports.” And certainly social media, now overrun by bots, increasingly feels as if every conversation is between different viruses. These realities don’t map to every experience yet following the NPC slander to its logical conclusion can be dangerous: declaring that a person’s alleged lack of inner thinking is justification for dismissing their humanity. After all, they’re just mindless characters in a video game (and maybe reality is just The Matrix, so whatever), so it’s fine to ignore them, disenfranchise them or abandon them to a grim fate.

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Solipsism, the philosophical position that you can only experience your own consciousness, and therefore other people might not exist or have souls, is not a new idea. René Descartes believed animals were soulless, unthinking automatons, though modern neuroscience has repeatedly disproven that one. (On some level, “I am Error” echoes Descartes’ famous quip about thinking and therefore am-ing.) But now that complex AI has spilled from video games into the mainstream, it’s especially dangerous to see the NPC label has become embedded in mainstream politics, whether explicitly or not.

All this is rooted in Donald Trump’s recent campaign to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” via executive order, posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” The idea has quickly been embraced by tech leaders, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk saying this week that AI is “no more” and promising to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Yeah, most of us are going to roll our eyes hard at AI being “super,” but if these attempts at normalization gain ground and get pushed to their absurd conclusion, it might end in providing AI more rights than humans. (It’s worth noting Musk invokes the NPC meme often.) It’s right there in the name: “Super intelligence” is better than the old, human kind, so why shouldn’t we give these computer programs rights and defend them from regulation? That’s why stories about AI bots being put into virtual torture chambers aren’t just silly, but foregrounds the false notion that AI is capable of suffering. (Maybe don’t put bots in rooms like that anyway — at the very least, it’s a waste of energy.)

After all, AI will either become the savior of humanity or make humans obsolete, depending on what day of the week it is. Sure, this technology is nifty, even as it comes with an enormous environmental destruction. But we are still a long way from elevating the technology above regular human intelligence. But as in a two-for-one, if you can be sold on the myth that AI is superhuman, it travels along with the idea that regular humans are disposable. In other words, the tech bros are trying to turn us all into NPCs, into Errors, not least through the mass surveillance programs being used to hunt migrants and spy on protesters.

Yes, thankfully, granting above-human rights to supposedly sentient AI sentience is still a fringe idea, but we can see that changing before our eyes, not to mention we already kind of did that with corporations. Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told POLITICO that the “world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” To further consolidate its power — or at least keep the economy from crashing — Silicon Valley wants us to believe their latest technological invention can think, reason and moralize. It’s no surprise that tech bros were recently exposed trying to convince none other than the pope that AI is conscious, but to his credit, Leo XIV has rejected this idea, saying “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity” and elsewhere warning against “losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines.’”

Spending time with large language models like ChatGPT and knowing a little about how they work, it becomes clear that it’s just a really good computer program that can mirror human expression, sometimes terribly and sometimes surprisingly well. There remains zero hard evidence that AI algorithms are sentient.

Yet an increasing number of people are convinced otherwise, as seen in the controversial AI psychosis phenomenon, which makes me wonder how so many people have persuaded themselves a souped-up version of “I am Error” is a conscious being. It can feel like human interaction typing back and forth with these things, but there are always gaps where you can sense the uncanny valley, where you know it’s just a lot of math and nothing more. Perhaps, if you want to be really cynical about it, you could boil down all of human nature and biology and the emergence of consciousness into “a lot of math” as well. But our brains aren’t computers and physics has yet to fully explain consciousness — that’s why they call it a hard problem. Instead of stewing in this mystery, tech bros have gotten the metaphor backward, assigning personhood to bots while denying it to living humans. Talk about soulless.

The post Billionaires love Trump’s AI rebrand appeared first on Salon.com.

Elon Musk has accused Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani of blocking competition.

The name change is enough for Germany's transport minister to start advocating for Europe-wide adoption of the driver assistance software.

Together, the awardees have donated nearly $6 billion to efforts tied to Trump and his administration.

If people don’t widely embrace artificial intelligence out of fear or a godlike savior complex, AI’s biggest champions will try something else: labeling critics “the enemy.” That’s precisely how President Donald Trump described people who don’t like his rebrand via executive order of AI to “super intelligence,” posting on social media Thursday that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” 

As noted by Axios, the White House still uses the term “AI” including on websites like ai.gov, though that website was updated Thursday with “SI.gov” in massive text. “The URL is still ‘AI.gov,’ though, with ‘SI.gov’ leading to an error page,” Axios reported, which Salon confirmed.

Tech billionaires are already embracing the term super intelligence. This week, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said AI is “no more” and promised to change the name of his AI company, SpaceXAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX, to SpaceXSI. More recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos shared his approval in a Wednesday interview with Fox News. “I do like SI, because ‘artificial’ is not a very flattering thing. Like, nobody wants an artificial sweetener, artificial flavoring,” Bezos said. “Artificial sort of means fake.”

Peter Thiel, founder of the tech company Palantir that aggregates data used in federal mass surveillance and deportation programs, has gone as far to describe AI’s critics as “the Antichrist.” Apocalyptic eschatology has long been an interest of Thiel’s, who has made the Antichrist a central topic of secretive lectures he’s given behind closed doors. Thiel doesn’t seem to believe in an Antichrist like in the “Book of Revelation,” but rather as a force that imposes a one-world government and stifles technological development.

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In leaked recordings obtained by Politico’s Decoded of Thiel’s speeches in Nashville in late September and published Thursday, the tech mogul claimed former President Barack Obama and Pope Leo XIV only oppose AI to boost their popularity, which is apparently something they would need.

“Many people know that AI is politically unpopular, and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category. Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI,” adding “AI is the threat über alles of late modernity. The pope knows it. That’s why he wrote his first encyclical … he needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI.”

Obama recently called for public oversight of AI while the pope’s first encyclical focuses on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”

The post Tech leaders embrace Trump’s “super intelligence” as he calls critics “the enemy” appeared first on Salon.com.

For years, and especially in the last month or so, we’ve been collectively inundated with an AI industry which, uncannily and bizarrely, tells us simultaneously that AI is essential, inevitable and runs a significant chance of exterminating all of us in as few as two or three years. If you’ve dipped into this debate at all, you’ve quickly come upon discussions of so-called “rationalists” or “long-termists” or supporters of “effective altruism” who are simultaneously ubiquitous among those developing AI and in the AI safety (i.e., the folks sounding the alarm) community as well. (For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I’ll refer to these folks as the “REL nexus”: rationalists, effective altruists and long-termists. This is my coinage since I don’t know a better one.) I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with this world and how it relates to current debates about AI. So I wanted to share my basic impressions.

President Trump reportedly asked for Grok's opinion before invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolás Maduro.

The CEO promised to get more specific about his vision. But the details are still absent.

A Republican Gives a Thumbs Up to White House Effort to Seize Congress’ Power

Yesterday afternoon, TPM’s Emine Yücel got word that Senate Democrats would hold a vote on a bill that would block Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought’s latest bid to impound almost a billion dollars. Congress had appropriated the funds and President Trump had signed that appropriations bill into law, but the administration later deemed the funding too woke, finding that it helped immigrants, met its contorted definition of “DEI,” or was otherwise unacceptable.

Congress, of course, holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. If Congress writes an appropriations bill, and the president signs it, the funds must be spent in the way Congress laid out. But Vought has found ways to claim he does not, in fact, need to abide by that schema, and has used various maneuvers to not just slash funding to government offices and programs but end some entirely. This latest one is a so-called pocket rescission, exploiting a loophole Vought believes exists in the Impoundment Control Act. I won’t unpack it here, but Emine has reported on it extensively.

So, on Wednesday, Senate Democrats on the appropriations committee put forward a bill to block Vought’s pocket rescission, and all future ones. The vote was held under unanimous consent, meaning a single senator could block it. It seemed inevitable one would — the question was who, and why.

So, around 7 p.m., we got our answer: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) objected to the bill. He did not directly address the way in which Vought’s maneuvering has run roughshod over one of Congress’ most important duties: dictating federal spending. He shrugged that all government spending should be reduced, and then said the law around impoundments was vague. “It’ll probably have to be all sorted out by the Supreme Court,” he said.

That much is right, and the Court has already shown an openness to what Vought is trying to do.

The Senate then adjourned until the midterms.

Sen. Eric Schmitt Faces Fallout From His Jack Smith Debacle

New details about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) fantastic flame-out during a congressional hearing with Jack Smith continue to emerge. The senator on Tuesday attempted to float a conspiracy theory about the former special counsel meeting with Fulton County DA Fani Willis at an Atlanta Hawks game. That theory immediately collapsed, but not before he accused Smith of perjury for not indulging it.

• Schmitt was warned that the texts he based his allegation on were “unvetted” and that he should proceed with caution, MS NOW reported yesterday. Some Senate Judiciary staff believe the White House had urged Schmitt to undertake his stunt, the report said.
• Schmitt in an interview with Politico was unapologetic, and seemingly confirmed that his misapprehension about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks game or an Iowa Hawkeyes game had to do with completely overlooking the existence of women’s sports, a topic about which the GOP professes to care greatly. “Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
• Schmitt’s staffer who held up a posterboard during his display was up for a new job at the White House, Politico reports. Now, he may not be.