“President Trump is planning to give TikTok another lifeline,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app.”
“It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January.“
ProPublica: “As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.”
“The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts ‘MUNCHABLE.'”
“The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.”
Washington Post: “The tech mogul’s about-face reverberated across X, the social network formerly known as Twitter that Musk acquired in 2022. His attack on Trump tested the loyalty of politicians and influencers active on the site, who scrambled to choose sides.”
“And it set up a colossal political battle for the attention era: A pair of very online billionaires duking it out in public, each with his own social network and millions of acolytes ready to amplify his every post.”
“Thursday’s online drama underscored that while Musk’s stewardship of X made it into a powerful tool for his allies and the conservative movement, he feels free to wrench it in whatever new direction he pleases.”
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New York Times: “If there’s one core similarity between Elon Musk and President Trump, it’s that they share many of their immediate, fleeting thoughts unfiltered online.”
“For years, the two men have built huge followings sharing their perspectives online. Now, on different sides of a monumental breakup, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are dealing with it as they always have: by posting through it.”
Time was able to use Google’s AI tool “to create realistic videos, including a Pakistani crowd setting fire to a Hindu temple; Chinese researchers handling a bat in a wet lab; an election worker shredding ballots; and Palestinians gratefully accepting U.S. aid in Gaza.”
“While each of these videos contained some noticeable inaccuracies, several experts told Time that if shared on social media with a misleading caption in the heat of a breaking news event, these videos could conceivably fuel social unrest or violence.”
The White House plans to have President Trump sign another 90-day operating extension for TikTok as the future of the Chinese short-video app get enmeshed in the trade talks and will likely be used as leverage by the Chinese in crafting a deal, Fox News reports.
One caveat is that if Trump sees a strategic advantage in crafting a deal by letting it go dark, and that could happen.”
“Elon Musk recently swapped his Dark MAGA hat and government ‘Tech Support’ garb for his old ‘Occupy Mars’ T-shirt, a reference to his rocket company SpaceX’s mission to colonize the red planet,” the New York Times reports.
“He embarked on a media blitz, granting interviews to news outlets that he had previously avoided and saying he was focused on SpaceX and discussing his electric automaker Tesla.”
“And on social media, he posted that he was again spending ‘24/7 at work’ and sleeping in his companies’ factories and server rooms.”
“The U.S. has tried almost everything to win the tech race against China—across areas as varied as AI, energy, autonomous vehicles, drones and EVs. So far, none of it has worked,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“China’s EVs are cheaper and by many measures better than America’s. The country dominates in consumer drones. Autonomous vehicles have rolled out on the streets of Wuhan and Beijing at a pace that Waymo and Tesla have yet to match. China produces the lion’s share of the world’s solar panels and batteries. And while the U.S. and its allies maintain a narrow lead in advanced microchips and AI, the gap appears to be closing faster than ever.”
“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.”
“In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined,” the New York Times reports.
“The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook…”
“On Friday morning, Mr. Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple’s leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25 percent on iPhones made anywhere except the United States.”
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.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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