An impressively varied collection of methods
Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state.
“I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)
The president isn’t trying to engineer prosperity for Americans. He’s seeking power for himself
Nor does he even believe in traditional mercantilist protection. He believes, like Putin, in political control of the economy’s commanding heights—success for those executives and companies who please him, failure for those who don’t.
Trump has also used tariffs to gain personal and political leverage over American businesses. During his first term, Trump levied broad tariffs and then entertained a parade of executives pleading for exemptions, which his administration doled out at its whim.
One study of the exceptions, published by the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, found that firms that had donated to Trump or hired staff from his administration were more likely to receive tariff exceptions. The tariffs, and the ability to hand out exceptions without any oversight or method, were “a very effective spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies,” the authors concluded.
The reality is that he brings together the least attractive elements of capitalism and socialism, fusing heavy-handed state control with high inequality, and entrenching a set of oligarchs who serve simultaneously as the ruling party’s victims and co-conspirators
Putin is in some ways a great ally of Russian business, and the country’s economic elite supports him, but Russia’s economy should be seen by intelligent advocates of capitalism as a vision of hell.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are blindly purging the government, ignoring the law, and cashing in like America has never seen
The meme coin was a blatant cash grab, to the point that one of Trump’s former White House communications directors denounced it as “Idi Amin-level corruption.”
At the end of February, Trump’s SEC moved to throw out its prosecution of Justin Sun — who had been charged with marketing unregistered crypto securities and manipulating the market for a crypto token — after Sun’s investments in World Liberty Financial reportedly netted the Trump family $56 million in fees.
The crypto caper is a perfect encapsulation of the bold-faced graft at the heart of the new Trump presidency: Uber-wealthy elites are poised to cash in, while ordinary people get hosed. And public policy will be designed to encourage this exact outcome.
The audacity is breathtaking: Musk runs his private empire while simultaneously demanding government employees send him weekly reports. This equation doesn't add up to anything resembling democratic governance.
The arrangement between Musk and the administration isn't just a violation of ethics or a breach of protocol. It's a fundamental rewiring of how power operates in our society. When a private citizen, accountable to no one but himself, can demand oversight of government functions while simultaneously running companies that benefit from government contracts and policy decisions, we've moved beyond mere corruption. We're witnessing the birth of a new form of governance, one that blurs the lines between public and private power in ways that our system of checks and balances was never designed to handle.
Tarriffs generate chaos that allows Trump to “save” individual businesses from the very chaos he creates. They keep him at the center of not only politics but also economics. They incentivize businesses to make placating, pleasing or rewarding Trump crucial to their bottom lines.
This sort of incentive for corruption — in both the literal sense and in terms of policymaking — is one of the main reasons we have an income tax in the first place. So many industries sought special treatment or vigorous enforcement against competition when tariffs funded the government that Congress — traditionally the designer of trade policy — became a hive of corruption. The IRS, then, was in part an antifraud invention.
A shadowy group of unelected figures reshaping the federal government to their own benefit from the inside? Sounds familiar!
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has never provided an org chart, did not have a publicly documented leader until last week, and refused to reveal the identities of its young staffers in early internal meetings.
DOGE is inarguably the Elon Musk extended universe. Current and former employees from X, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Tesla currently control or are deeply embedded in countless government agencies, including the ones they’re ostensibly regulated by. (How many of them? Hard to say exactly, so score another point for “secretive.”) In fairness, some DOGE staffers appear to have no prior affiliation beyond an apparent zeal for dismantling the US government.
"I didn’t think they would take this bold of a leap into deeply unconstitutional waters, but they have."
“I want to stress how far off the rails this is in terms of not just our norms and our expectations but our laws,” Kruse said. “There’s a lot that’s deeply unconstitutional here.”
Trump seems much more checked out and less interested in maintaining even a pretense that he’s in charge. He keeps saying things like, “I guess those workers were fired.” He doesn’t even know what’s going on.
He ran so hard to stay out of prison. I don’t think we can underestimate the fact that all of the looming prosecutions against him were really a prime motivating factor, and once he got into office and had presidential immunity again, thanks to the Supreme Court, the fire kind of went out.
Between the election and the inauguration, Trump met with at least eight crypto executives, collecting more than $50 million in donations for his inaugural fund and related groups, according to people familiar with the meetings. He asked the donors how they wanted the industry regulated and who should do it.
Trump was president-elect when he signed the meme-coin deal, which has generated around $350 million worth of cryptocurrency USDC for entities affiliated with him, according to the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.
“The topic of conversation was how everybody’s cases have suddenly and magically disappeared,” said Trevor Traina, a crypto entrepreneur who was at the lunch. “The new badge of honor in Silicon Valley is if the SEC has dropped your case.”
“Presidents shouldn’t be running businesses, especially not stuff where they can directly influence the outcome, which is clearly the case in crypto.”
Trump's World Liberty Financial also drew criticism over its potential for foreign entities and those with business before the U.S. government to channel money to Trump and his family without public disclosure.
In November, Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun invested $30 million in World Liberty Financial, which was struggling to meet fundraising targets. Afterward, Sun, who was battling an SEC lawsuit accusing him and several of his companies of fraud, became a World Liberty adviser.
Last month, the SEC asked a court to pause its fraud lawsuit
Corruption doesn't get much more blatant than this.
A bitcoin reserve would be a government-backed grift
Filling a crypto reserve would effectively represent a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to crypto holders.
the government has no strategic reason to own crypto assets. They have no use value either to the U.S. government or to the American economy.
Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own memecoin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.
For the many, the reserve poses an unnecessary risk; for the few, it offers rich rewards. The mere prospect of the government speculating in the crypto market is already enriching the small share of Americans heavily invested in the assets.
The president is strip-mining taxpayer resources and doling out contracts and favors to the politically connected.
It’s a volatile, highly speculative asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for. It’s hard to think of anything that would be less useful for America to stockpile.
Investing in something that is overvalued or intrinsically worthless might be the smart thing to do, if you can eventually find someone on whom to pawn it off at a higher price (“greater-fool theory”). A crypto reserve effectively turns the U.S. government into the next greater fool.
Crypto holders had the chance to make a tidy profit selling off some of their coins—despite the fact that the stockpile in the end simply included bitcoin and all other crypto assets seized by the government.
Driving the prices higher will require a steady stream of positive news. But the good news is already drying up. The price of bitcoin plummeted immediately after the order was announced.
At a certain point, even good news isn’t quite good enough. Buy the rumor; sell the news, as the old saying goes. Eventually, the U.S. government will be stuck with a bunch of crypto, searching for ways to drive the price higher and having no one to sell it to. If Trump keeps feeding the crypto hype machine, he may benefit—and the rest of us may be stuck with the bill.
World Liberty Financial (WLF), the Trump family’s fledgling crypto venture, has explored taking a financial stake in the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange Binance. If it wasn’t shady enough, the discussions are reportedly taking place as Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has been courting the Trump administration for a presidential pardon.
The Trump family has been cashing in at every opportunity since the president’s election win in November. Where his first term was riddled with notable transactions to his hotels and resorts, this time around the Trump’s are practically flaunting every new business venture that leverages their White House connections.
Sources who spoke to The Wall Street Journal said the company has been encouraged by the Trump administration’s treatment of Chinese-born investor Justin Sun, especially as it pertains to securing a pardon for Zhao. Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a court to pause a fraud lawsuit against Sun, who just happened to invest over $30 million in World Liberty Financial last November.
In January, Puck News reported that Amazon had agreed to pay $40 million to license a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. According to a report from Wired earlier this month, the rich and interested can pay $1 million to have dinner with the president at his Mar-a-Lago resort, or $5 million to secure a private audience.
The president is theoretically barred from engaging in private business ventures while occupying the White House, but the Trumps have become masters of milking their side hustles.
Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance
U.S. officials said the exchange facilitated transactions with sanctioned groups, including Hamas and Islamic State
Binance’s billionaire founder, Changpeng Zhao has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon
The talks began after Binance reached out to allies of Trump last year offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the exiled company to the U.S.
The Trump family has been profiting from his election victory, with first lady Melania Trump signing a $40 million documentary deal and Trump seeking tens of millions in financial settlements from companies he had sued years earlier
pursuing a business deal involving a felon seeking a pardon from his administration would be an unprecedented overlap of his business and the government.
Binance executives saw a potential legal playbook in the saga of Justin Sun, a China-born crypto entrepreneur who invested in a Trump crypto venture last fall as he faced civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, had invested $30 million in November in World Liberty Financial, the Trump-backed crypto venture, becoming its largest investor. Last month, the SEC asked a court to pause its fraud lawsuit against Sun and three of his businesses.
After Sun’s investment, Binance executives debated following the same route: a cash infusion into World Liberty Financial in exchange for a pardon for Zhao
they had been terminated without notice and a substantial reason, which are required by federal law. These are nonpartisan public servants, confirmed by the Senate.
IGs—who regularly remain in office across multiple presidential administrations—serve as independent watchdogs, playing a vital role in ensuring the effective and efficient operation of government. They do so by auditing and investigating their agencies’ operations and personnel in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and by making recommendations for improved agency operations.
These people are professionals at rooting out obstacles to good government; unlike Musk they have no personal interest in government contracts.
A 2019 investigation by the Commerce Department’s inspector general reported “the appearance of improper influence in decision-making” in the waiver process.
In his second term, Trump has managed to solve this problem—if you define problem as the exposure of corruption rather than its existence—by firing, to date, the inspectors general at 18 federal agencies, including Commerce.
During my time as the Justice IG and the acting Defense IG, I often would make officials in both political parties uncomfortable and upset with reports on government waste, fraud, and abuse
Inspectors General are placed in federal agencies across the government to make those agencies more honest, more efficient, and more accountable, and to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse in agency programs. According to the post-Watergate federal law that created the inspector-general system, IGs are independent officials who report problems to their agency head and Congress, and usually release their reports to the public.
Watchdogs, Inspectors General and the Battle for Honest and Accountable Government
The last line of defense for our institutions, and our democracy
"If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general.
If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them."
Pete Buttigieg (petebuttigieg.bsky.social)
Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change.
The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history”.
“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
The EPA also will take aim at rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins, soot pollution and a “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that burden downwind areas with smog.
The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is about to receive access to one of America's most sensitive military secrets: the Pentagon's war plan for a potential conflict with China.
Let that sink in for a moment.
The same Elon Musk who is currently CEO of Tesla, which operates a flagship factory in Shanghai that produces more than half of the company's global deliveries. The same Elon Musk whose company has a $2.8 billion loan agreement with Chinese lenders. The same Elon Musk who has publicly stated that Taiwan should be a “special administrative zone” of China. The same Elon Musk who wrote a flattering column for China's censorship agency and has consistently praised Chinese leadership on social media.
This isn't just a routine conflict of interest—it's a national security nightmare unfolding in plain sight.
We are witnessing the privatization of national security decision-making, where unelected billionaires with business conflicts receive information traditionally reserved for the military chain of command.
Most concerning is China's explicit identification of Musk's Starlink satellite network as an extension of the U.S. military—a view that puts his profound business interests in China in direct conflict with his privileged access to U.S. war planning. This is precisely the kind of conflict that led the Air Force to previously deny Musk an even higher security clearance, citing potential security risks.
What we are witnessing is, in fact, an oligarchical coup—a term I've repeatedly used here at Notes From The Circus, and one that becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss as hyperbole with each passing week. The transfer of core governmental functions to private interests with minimal oversight represents precisely the kind of capture that transforms democracies into oligarchies. When billionaires simultaneously direct government operations, receive classified briefings, and maintain private business empires—all with minimal accountability—we have moved beyond normal governance into something fundamentally different: rule by the wealthy few rather than democratically elected representatives.
With each successive norm violation, our capacity to be shocked diminishes, and the machinery of constitutional governance rusts further.
Milton was the founder and CEO of Nikola, an electric- and hydrogen-powered truck company that went bankrupt.
“Milton made false claims regarding nearly all aspects of Nikola’s business,” the Justice Department said when he was sentenced.
Donald Trump explained why he pardoned Trevor Milton: “He supported Trump,” Trump told reporters. “He liked Trump."
Today in Politics, Bulletin 100. 3/28/25
… NYT: “Nikola Motors founder Trevor Milton, just pardoned by Trump for fraud, donated over $2 million to Republicans between Sept and Dec of last year, per FEC records. His largest was $920K to the Trump 47 PAC. He'd never previously made political donations.
… Milton was convicted in 2022 on 3 counts of fraud and sentenced to 4 years in prison and $169 million in restitution and fines. “Two weeks ago prosecutors recommended Milton pay $676M in restitution to the people he defrauded, plus interest. But now with just $2M in campaign contributions, he presumably pays none of it and is a free man.”
… Rep. Dan Goldman: “CORRUPTION ALERT: Donald Trump just sold a get-out-of-jail-free card to convicted fraudster Nikola Trevor for $1.6 million in campaign donations. This presidency is a pay-to-play racket. If justice is for sale, our system will fail.”
A company can voluntarily settle a baseless lawsuit as a way to bribe Trump. Sometimes these settlements have an extortionate element to them as well (see Extortion section below).
Lawyers for Trump and for Elon Musk’s company X filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.
The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.”
In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court—in some cases for years—have now lined up to negotiate.
Two of the sources characterized the multi-million-dollar settlement as a complete “capitulation” to Trump during a time when the president-elect and his government-in-waiting are openly threatening retribution against individuals, media outlets, and large corporations.
the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanopoulos that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” -The Atlantic
“If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”
The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict-of-interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.
“What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”
In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be resolved before the Meta CEO could be “brought into the tent.” -Mike Masnick at Techdirt
“People were prepared, so when he did win, Trump was looking for checks”
So far this year, the 2025 inaugural committee is expected to raise at least $225 million and spend less than $75 million
Zuckerberg’s, Bezos’s, and Musk’s federal business interests include rocket-ship and cloud-computing contracts, a federal investigation of Tesla’s auto-driving technology, a pending Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta, and a separate antitrust case against Amazon. Just last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Musk for allegedly failing to disclose his early stake in Twitter.
Existing federal ethics rules were not designed to address the possibility of the world’s wealthiest people padding the pockets of the first family through television rights or legal settlements. The Trump family’s recently announced cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, creates yet another way for the wealthy to invest directly in an asset to benefit the commander in chief.
“They’re lining up to obey in advance. because they think they’re buying themselves peace of mind.” -Ruth Ben-Ghiat | Historian - Author - Political Commentator
Business leaders can secure a one-on-one meeting with the president at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, according to sources with direct knowledge of the meetings. At a so-called candlelight dinner held as recently as this past Saturday, prospective Mar-a-Lago guests were asked to spend $1 million to reserve a seat, according to an invitation obtained by WIRED.
The event occurred at 7 pm on March 1 and was listed on the president’s official schedule as the “MAGA INC. Candlelight Finance Dinner.”
“I can’t recall a sitting president in the first weeks of his administration asking for millions of dollars in fundraising,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
“Part of what is worrying,” Moynihan adds, “is the lack of ethical guardrails in the current Trump administration, where there doesn’t seem to be a clear line between Trump’s businesses and the presidency.”
Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Directly Into Trump Political Operation
Trump performs in Tesla ad on White House driveway to show support for Elon Musk
An invitation to a “candlelight” dinner held this past Saturday at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club asked prospective guests to spend $1 million per seat. Trump attended the dinner along with Elon Musk
As opposed to crypto-kleptocracy, see kleptocracy section above
President Trump was bribed $75 million by a jurisdiction-hopping Chinese crypto entrepreneur known for his many brushes with illicit activity, after which the SEC dropped its fraud case into him. We know this because it happened in the open.
Justin Sun, the Tron founder whose blockchain is a linchpin in the money-laundering networks for global cybercrime, bought $30 million worth of $WLFI tokens, the governance token from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company
The $WLFI tokens are useless except as a potential influence vehicle for President Trump and his inner circle. Right now you can't move the $WLFI token off the company’s platform. You can't sell or trade it. It’s not listed on exchanges. Buying it is essentially a donation to Donald Trump
On February 27, 2025, the SEC paused its fraud case against Sun.
It doesn't get more explicit or brazen than this. The president received a $75 million payment for a political favor, and we all saw it happen. It worked so well that the deal is now considered a proof-of-concept for others seeking influence and favors to get into Trump’s good graces, including the world’s most corrupt cryptocurrency exchange — a criminal organization that received severe penalties under the last administration.
Seems almost quaint to list examples. We might run out of internet.
Trump is forcing companies to settle baseless lawsuits (some new, some old, including some he had essentially already lost) to give him money in exchange for not seeking retribution.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Judge Ho wrote in his ruling.
Virtually the moment he was charged, Adams began making blatant overtures to the Trump administration, essentially prostrating himself before the incoming president in the hopes of receiving some sort of reprieve. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, the groveling was so egregious that some in Trump’s administration mocked Adams as “thirsty” for a pardon.
In February, during a joint Fox News interview with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, Adams was asked about allegations that he had “offered to help with the migration problem in the immigration agenda in exchange for the case being dropped.”
“That’s quid-pro-quo,” Adams replied. “That’s a crime.”
Homan immediately undermined the mayor, telling Fox News that “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City, and we won’t be sitting on a couch. … I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’”
Two Trump Organization entities were indicted on tax fraud charges that July and found guilty at trial. The following year, the attorney general’s office sued the Trumps and its business for engaging in a decade long fraud. A New York state judge found the Trumps liable for fraud for inflating the value of certain assets to obtain loans.
President Donald Trump’s business trust sued Capital One for closing its bank accounts in 2021, claiming the Virginia lender “debanked” them over their political views causing “considerable financial harm.”
Paramount, owner of CBS, its namesake studio and several cable channels, has a major piece of business in front of the new administration: its planned merger with Skydance Media. It’s become clear to executives at both companies that Trump’s dissatisfaction with CBS News will make the review tougher than they anticipated, and that they’ll likely need to offer concessions to win approval, people familiar with the situation said.
Paramount finds itself in a similar predicament to the one CNN owner Time Warner faced in 2016 when it proposed merging with telecom giant AT&T. Trump regularly took aim at CNN for alleged bias, and his Justice Department sued to block the deal on antitrust grounds.
Incoming Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr gave Paramount executives a warning to that effect at a reception late last year ... and he has echoed the message in public remarks.
How are journalists supposed to cover Trump’s rampant corruption when their employers participate in it?
In the case of CBS, for example, it’s been widely reported that the network is considering settling in hopes the Trump administration will look favorably upon its parent company’s merger plans. That’s despite the obviously frivolous nature of Trump’s legal theory that CBS violated consumer protection law by editing an interview for time.
Since when do multibillion-dollar corporations settle cases when the only relevant piece of evidence exonerates them?
Meta’s $25 million settlement makes no sense as anything but a protection racket, given that the Supreme Court upheld social media platforms’ First Amendment rights to moderate content just last year.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump had made clear to Zuckerberg that he needs to pay up if he wants to be brought into the tent.
Even though the case was very defensible as a matter of defamation law, ABC’s characterization of the sexual abuse verdict against Trump as “rape” was arguably not entirely accurate. But $15 million? On what planet does one lose that much money because people believed they were a rapist as opposed to just a regular ho-hum sexual abuser? Not to mention that the money went to a potential slush fund, not necessarily a presidential library as many reported.
The firm's description of its surrender as providing “$40 million in pro bono legal services... to support the Administration's initiatives” represents a perversion of language so profound it borders on Orwellian.
“Pro bono” literally means “for the public good”—work undertaken voluntarily for those who cannot afford legal representation or to advance important public interests. It has nothing to do with providing free services to the most powerful person in the world in response to explicit threats. The firm did not choose this work—it was coerced into it through an unconstitutional executive order. It is not serving the public good—it is serving a president who demanded tribute. It is not voluntary—it is extortion.
Musk has seized nearly every major data repository in the federal government and may now access the Social Security numbers, employment records, banking information, and tax returns of the majority of Americans. If you are a veteran, use Medicare, or have applied for Social Security Disability Insurance, he may have a chunk of your medical history too. The value of this treasure trove of data is hard to calculate — but given Musk’s keen interest in amassing enough data to build an artificial intelligence empire with his AI platform, Grok, it is safe to assume he has a pretty good idea. It certainly exceeds the $300 million he spent to put Trump in office.
It’s not just your personal data he’s after either. This is corporate espionage in broad daylight.
Musk and his DOGE boys now have access to the business and technology ideas of America’s best and brightest. They are thumbing through tens of millions of new business applications at the Small Business Administration in a terrifying game of Shark Tank in reverse. We can only assume the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be their next stop, if they are not there already. Musk has also ransacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he’ll find detailed information on the future competitors of his new digital payment platform collaboration with Visa, X Money.
Over at the Food and Drug Administration he’ll find immensely valuable information from clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, like those of the competitors to his new brain chip company, Neuralink.
Meanwhile, Musk is after larger and more lucrative federal contracts for his companies, Starlink, Space X, and Tesla. The fruits of his labor are already bearing: The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that they’ll use Starlink to upgrade its IT systems. Further, he can axe the regulators tasked with keeping an eye on companies. To date, Musk has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helped Trump fire labor law enforcers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which have investigated Musk’s companies for illegal hostility and harassment of their workers.
Across his career, Musk’s companies have reportedly benefitted from nearly $40 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax credits.
But even as Musk sends entire agencies that he has feuded with to the “woodchipper,” he is continuing to reap new and lucrative government contracts, while deploying minions from his various companies to probe some of the most sensitive data at agencies in government.
DOGE has been granted high-level access to a lot of data that could benefit Musk, and there has been no evidence of a firewall preventing misuse of that data.
There are multiple ongoing cases involving Musk and the NLRB.
"It's not that he's a random person who's getting information that a random person shouldn't have access to," said Harvard Law's Block. "But if they really did get everything, then he has information about the cases the government is building against him," she said.
"DOGE is, whether they admit it or not, headed by somebody who is the subject of active investigation and prosecution of cases."
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed.
Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
Rank corruption aside, the GOP is genuinely convinced that Musk is an engineering super-genius who can fix government with a wave of his hand. They genuinely have no idea that this persona was a press-enabled mythology providing cover for a rank opportunist who takes credit for other peoples’ ideas, something the tech press only belatedly discovered during his bungled takeover of Twitter.
So they’re keen on throwing all of their eggs in the Elon Musk basket, fairly oblivious to the fact they’ve given absolute power to a conspiratorial oligarch who genuinely has no Earthly idea what he’s actually doing. So yeah, a lot of this is just corrupt cronyism pretty typical in an authoritarian kakistocracy. But a lot of it genuinely is being driven by rank delusion into Musk’s actual intellect and expertise, which is going to end extremely, extremely badly for absolutely everybody involved.
The problem is that by redirecting billions of dollars to Musk, you’re directing it away from a lot of locally owned businesses and smaller providers that are intimately familiar with and directly serve these neighborhoods. You’re also potentially directing funds away from extremely popular community owned fiber providers that have made affordability a key focus of their deployments.
It’s also worth noting that in many instances they’re renaming the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) to strip the word “equity” out. Because, you know, racist kakistocracy.
And, as we long predicted, they’re now redrafting key components of the program to the direct benefit of Elon Musk.
“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”
The FAA has frequently tangled with Musk’s SpaceX, as the rocket company and others fight to operate their own interests in crowded American airspace.
In September, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines following two 2023 incidents in which SpaceX allegedly did not follow its license requirements, violating regulations.
The FAA did not respond to further questions about whether the presence of SpaceX engineers at the agency would constitute a conflict of interest.
The thing about the takeover of key US government institutions by the world’s richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it’s happening so fast.
Elon Musk’s unprecedented influence over the executive branch will ultimately benefit Elon Musk. The employees in charge are his employees. The data DOGE collects, the procurement contracts they oversee, it all flows up to him.
the agency claims to be responsible for $19.7 billion in consumer relief since its inception, as well as $5 billion in civil penalties. Some of those wins have come against payment processors including Block, which last month was ordered to pay $175 million in penalties for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect users of its Cash App from fraud.
Elon Musk will soon be in the peer-to-peer payments business as well, after X entered a partnership with Visa in late January.
“The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and 'X’ (formerly Twitter),” a press release issued by the CFPB’s union said Friday morning. “Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers, as well as auto lenders like Tesla.”
In DOGE’s case, however, the code is informing search engines that when people search for content found on DOGE.gov, they should not show those pages in search results, but should instead display the posts on X.
“This isn't usually how things are handled, and it indicates that the X account is taking priority over the actual website itself.”
What we are reporting has shown is that there are two people working at the Department of Housing Urban Development that both have ties to the real estate industry.
And so Kukun is a company that works to get information to homeowners and real estate investors about how much return on investment they'll get if they renovate their properties. And it also helps them predict where property values are going to rise in the future so they can make smarter investments. Obviously all this involves a lot of data. And what does HUD have? A lot of data about housing. So what we're seeing is that Langmack and another guy from DOGE, his name is Michael Mirsky, have access to three major systems within DOGE that gives them information about what kind of money is flowing through, who's getting public housing assistance, who has permissions to which systems.
etc. etc. etc.
the first family is profiting off of the presidency in increasingly novel and flagrant ways, while the administration is doing all it can to boost the bottom line of Trump’s most important financial backer: Elon Musk.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for example, appeared on Fox News Wednesday night and urged viewers to purchase Tesla’s struggling stock. “I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight: Buy Tesla,” he said.
Trump hosted an improvised Tesla dealership on the South Lawn of the White House where he made a show of purchasing a Model S.
Trump, Lutnik, and the rest of the Trump administration wants to make sure the world’s richest man doesn’t suffer financial consequences as a result of his destruction of the government. Their efforts may not be legal, and they certainly aren’t ethical, but these things are of little concern to the new Trump administration. Musk is openly attempting to pilfer federal contracts for his companies, mutilating regulatory bodies that oversee his work, and is himself straddling a dubious legal line by ransacking government agencies without having been elected and without the approval of Congress.
A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino has made comments that seemed like similar warnings in conversations with Interpublic executives
Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group OMC 1.71%increase; green up pointing triangle could be torpedoed by the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role in the federal government
Days after the Interpublic-Omnicom merger was unveiled, Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, launched a probe and said the tie-up raised anticompetitive concerns.
With Elon Musk's social media platform X poised to launch a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment services, Musk's associates have been granted access to confidential information about X's competitors
“The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and 'X,’” the union said. “Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers.”
On Sunday, CFPB staffers were told that the agency headquarters would be closed this week.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Friday said it would allow Starlink, a unit of Elon Musk's SpaceX, to operate a direct-to-cell service with T-Mobile at higher power levels despite objections by rival companies.
Starlink, the satellite internet service controlled by billionaire Elon Musk and his rocket company SpaceX, is expanding its footprint in the federal government weeks after the billionaire began slashing the federal workforce and agency budgets under President Donald Trump’s direction.
Multiple federal agencies are exploring the idea of adopting SpaceX’s Starlink for internet access — and at least one agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done so at the request of Musk’s staff, according to someone who worked at the GSA last month and is familiar with its network operations — despite a vow by Musk and Trump to slash the overall federal budget.
The roughly $300 million Musk spent to help elect Trump is starting to look like a pretty good deal. The billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla now stands to net a great deal more in federal contracts.
When Elon Musk met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday, the pair was seated in front of the American and Indian flags, an arrangement that typically accompanies a meeting between world leaders.
The summit was held at Blair House, a building across from the White House used to host foreign dignitaries.
The contents of their meeting were not made public, but CNBC reported that the agenda included renewing talks about Tesla building a plant in India and Musk’s desire to sell SpaceX’s Starlink internet service in the country.
“Musk is effectively operating as the Secretary of State. He is meeting with a key foreign leader not to ask for concessions that would benefit Americans, but for concessions that would make him rich.”
Trump said he was open to Musk securing new government contracts while working in the administration.
suddenly, this week each of them announced a partnership to bring Starlink into India, pending the government’s approval.
With Mr. Trump’s election, and Mr. Musk’s proximity to power in Washington, new arrangements seem possible.
In another example of Musk and his businesses being considered an extension of the White House, the government of Vietnam hopes to avoid U.S. tariffs by allowing SpaceX’s Starlink internet service to operate in the country. “[It's a] demonstration from the Vietnamese side that they can play the transactional diplomacy game if the Trump administration wants that," a Vietnamese official told Reuters.