Musk’s significant investment in Kean, who serves on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, appears to have already paid off for the billionaire.

Musk’s financial backing helped the congressman secure a close reelection victory.

He now sits on the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, which has jurisdiction over satellite communications, a critical policy field for Starlink, SpaceX’s growing satellite internet subsidiary.

Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, and made these false claims on the number one podcast in the United States. Rogan did not push back on Musk’s claims and accepted Musk’s version of reality.

What went unmentioned, however, was the actual dispute at the heart of the shutdown: the expiration of subsidies that will dramatically increase health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

Musk also claimed that states like California and New York would be bankrupt without federal aid and that they depend on such funding to secure votes from undocumented immigrants.
oligarchwatch.substack.com/p/musk-and-r...

His favorite is Optimus, Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot, which is still in early development. But despite Musk’s lofty claims, the future of Optimus remains highly uncertain.

With the company’s auto sales lagging this year amid intensifying competition, an aging lineup of vehicles, and backlash over Musk’s right-wing politics, Musk has taken to marketing more fantastical products.

Salesforce’s enthusiasm for Trump’s deportation regime is noteworthy, given that Benioff has spent the past decade using the company to launch headline-grabbing attacks against Republican policies.

In August, Benioff’s company approached ICE about using its artificial intelligence systems to boost the agency’s massive recruiting drive, according to a New York Times report last week.

He has since walked back his support for a National Guard deployment following widespread backlash. But Salesforce, the largest private employer in San Francisco, has explored other ways to support — and profit from — Trump administration policies.

In a recent interview, Benioff, the 61-year-old chief executive of software giant Salesforce and owner of Time magazine, said that he “fully supports” Trump and his plan to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco. “I think [Trump is] doing a great job,” he added.

Since making the commitment, Bezos’ wealth has nearly doubled from $124 billion to $240 billion.

Meanwhile, according to publicly available data, Bezos has given away less than $5 billion since 2018.

This represents about 2% of Bezos’ current wealth.

TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based developer ByteDance, will sell its U.S. operations to a consortium of American investors, including Ellison.

As part of the deal, Oracle, the database software company cofounded by Ellison, will control the app’s algorithm.

Last month, the Trump administration announced that it had finally struck a deal to overhaul TikTok’s ownership structure, as required under a law passed during the Biden administration.

In an interview with Oligarch Watch, Zitron, the author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter and host of the podcast Better Offline, predicted that the current AI “boom” will result in “the worst bubble of all time.”

But tech writer Ed Zitron, a fervent skeptic of the AI industry, believes that OpenAI’s spending commitments are not credible.

Ellison has a lengthy history of advocating for government surveillance. During a 2014 speech, he criticized NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting that no one had been "wrongly injured" by the agency's domestic spying operations.

Ellison believes that humanity would greatly benefit from a surveillance society governed by an all-seeing system of AI.

"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," he said during a Q&A with Oracle investors last year.