“The government’s monthslong quest to wring savings from federal contractors is widening beyond consulting firms and entering a new phase focused on tech companies,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Trump administration is moving its spending review beyond consulting firms, such as Accenture and Deloitte, to now scrutinize contracts at a collection of companies providing sometimes obscure technology services to federal agencies.”

New York Times: “In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.”

“Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.”

Rick Wilson: “If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had proposed this, the GOP would be in the streets with pitchforks and torches.“

Axios: “By scaling back the time and money he spends on politics, Musk is seeking to claw back the credibility he torched during his toxic tenure in Washington.”

“That won’t be easy: SpaceX and Tesla both saw their brand reputations crater over the past year, with the latter enduring violent protests and a steep drop in sales as a result of Musk’s activism.”

“Still, Musk is clear-eyed about the task ahead — and has already taken steps to distance himself from Trump in a rare series of interviews over the last several days.”

Nonetheless, Playbook points out that Musk “failed on his own terms, getting nowhere near his much-vaunted $1 trillion savings target and making little impact on America’s debt and deficit crises.”

“OpenAI led a group of American technology giants that won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence data centers in Abu Dhabi,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Behind the scenes, Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup.”

“On a call with officials at G42, an AI firm controlled by the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, Musk had a warning for those assembled: Their plan had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless his company xAI was included in the deal.”

The CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of artificial intelligence, said that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Axios reports.

404 Media: “Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE.”

“Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader system … giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.”

“Elon Musk’s Neuralink raised $600 million in a deal that values the brain-mapping company at $9 billion before the new cash,” Semafor reports.

“The startup was last valued at $3.5 billion in late 2023, but has since implanted three chips into the brains of patients paralyzed or unable to speak. The most recent, a non-verbal Arizona man with ALS, posted a video on Musk’s X last month in which he speaks using the chip.”

Earlier this year, “as many as 75% of Elon Musk’s posts on X were about DOGE or U.S. politics,” the Washington Post reports.

That figure that has fallen to 10% recently as Musk has resumed “posting more about battery technology and AI.”

New York Times: “To better understand how the information that Mr. Musk consumes on X could shape his worldview, The New York Times recreated a version of Mr. Musk’s personal feed by opening a new account on X and following the same 1,109 users that he follows. We then analyzed more than 175,000 posts from the accounts that he follows, using a service that collects data from X…”

“The resulting feed, shown in this article as a selection of posts curated from the much larger set, revealed ample praise for Mr. Musk and his various priorities, mixed with a torrent of right-wing outrage over progressive politics. It highlights the ways that social networks can create information bubbles.”

ProPublica: “Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.”

“As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.”

“America’s tech titans backed President Trump’s promise of a new ‘Golden Age’ with seven-figure checks, glowing public praise and front-row tickets to his inauguration,” Axios reports.

“So far, those favors remain unreciprocated.”

The United States is encouraging countries facing tariffs to ink deals with Elon Musk’s Starlink, though there have been no explicit demands for “favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs,” the Washington Post reports.

“SpaceX has been granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration to launch and land its massive Starship rockets and Super Heavy boosters up to 25 times per year from the company’s Starbase spaceport in Texas,” CNBC reports.

The Guardian: Trump to stop research into space pollution, in boon to Elon Musk.

“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years,” Wired reports.

“Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the U.S. spy chief.”

Ross Anderson: “When Elon Musk’s engineers bundled a batch of prototype satellites into a rocket’s nose cone six years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 functional satellites in Earth’s orbit. Many more would soon be on the way: All through the pandemic, and the years that followed, Musk’s company, SpaceX, kept launching them.”

“More than 7,000 of his satellites now surround Earth like a cloud of gnats. This fleet, which works to provide space-based internet service to the ground, dwarfs those of all other private companies and nation-states put together. And almost every week, Musk adds to it, flinging dozens more satellites into the sky.”

Key takeaway: “The space internet of the future may become the central way that we communicate with one another, as human beings. Information of every kind, including the most sensitive kinds, will flow through it. Whoever controls it will have a great deal of power over us all.”