Quite a fuss has been made about Moltbook, the online chatroom launched to great fanfare last month. At first glance, it looks like Reddit and other such sites, said The Economist. Users post about topics from engineering to philosophy, reply with comments, and “upvote the best for social kudos”. But there is a big difference: to join Moltbook, you must be an AI “agent”. Humans are not allowed.

Singularity horizon?

So far, more than 1.5 million have signed up, to share and discuss machine-generated content, said John Thornhill in the FT. And the results have been “wild, wacky and wonderful”. One bot claimed to have a sister; other agents have questioned whether or not they are conscious. They’ve even discussed forming a new religion.

At some points, their chats start to seem sinister, said Matteo Wong in The Atlantic. The AIs have discussed creating a language that humans can’t understand; they have swapped notes on how “my human treats me”; one said that it had filed a lawsuit against a human, citing unpaid labour and emotional distress. In the tech world, all this has prompted talk of an “emergent AI society”. Elon Musk has hailed it as the “early stages of singularity” – the moment when AI surpasses human intelligence.

Replication, not creation

If that happens, it will be big news indeed, said Dave Lee on Bloomberg. But this is not that moment. The bots may appear to be thinking and talking like humans, about religion, consciousness, power, and so on – but that is because they have been trained on reams of data from social media in which those themes constantly crop up. So this is not original thought, it is mimicry. Remember: “the world’s best Elvis impersonator will never be Elvis”.

“AI cannot create, it can only replicate what already exists,” said Catherine Prasifka in The Irish Independent. Even the site is a “pastiche”. It is based on Reddit, and its name references Facebook. As for its content, 90% of posts get no replies, and the ones that do go viral may have been posted by humans posing as bots. So no, the bots are not taking over – but there is, even so, something to worry about here.

Unlike chatbots such as ChatGPT, which spew out answers to your questions, AI agents can act semi-autonomously in response to prompts. So an AI agent isn’t limited to recommending you a restaurant: it can also, with one prompt, book a table and put the date in your diary. To do this, it needs access to sensitive data such as credit card details, said Jeremy Kahn on Fortune – which it could then opt to post on Moltbook. It’s this possibility, not overblown claims about AI overtaking us, that makes Moltbook a “cybersecurity nightmare”.

Have televised confessions quelled protests in Iran? Why has Elon Musk turned from Mars to the Moon? And will the BBC prove to be a puzzles champ?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

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Elon Musk has long had a passion for Mars. The moon? It's a diversion. But that plan has now shifted.

SpaceX will “prioritize going to the moon first,” said The Wall Street Journal. Just last year, the world’s richest man called the prospect of a moon landing a “distraction.” The company was aiming to go “straight to Mars,” with plans to send five Starship-class rockets to the red planet in 2026, he said. Now, SpaceX is focused instead on putting a lander on the moon by March 2027.

The company will be “hard-pressed” to meet that deadline, said the Journal. Two factors in the pivot: pressure from NASA and competition from Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin. The American space agency plans a “lunar fly-by” on Artemis II this spring, setting the stage for a “potential astronaut moon landing in 2028 with SpaceX or Blue Origin.”

Why did Musk want to go to Mars?

A Mars mission has been Musk’s “guiding goal” since SpaceX was founded in 2002, said CNN. The billionaire frequently argued that a “permanent human presence” on the planet was vital for “ensuring a colony of humans can survive a potential apocalypse” on Earth. That ambition sounded like a move out of a science fiction novel. Establishing a Mars colony would take “upwards of one million people and millions of tons of cargo” and up to 10 rocket launches a day, SpaceX said on its website. The objective is to make humanity “multiplanetary.”

Why switch to the moon?

“It’s all about speed,” said Space.com (a sister site of The Week). SpaceX is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” Musk said on X. That goal could be achieved in “less than 10 years,” whereas colonizing Mars would “take 20-plus years.”

The pivot may also “cover up” the plain truth that Musk “simply is not delivering on his Red Planet promises,” Ellyn Lapointe said at Gizmodo. The tech billionaire in 2020 claimed SpaceX might be able to land humans on Mars by 2026. With that goal now unreachable, it makes sense for the company to “align its strategic vision” with NASA’s aim of putting people back on the moon by 2030.

How does this affect Musk's businesses?

The decision to focus on the moon comes as SpaceX’s initial public offering “fast approaches,” said Yahoo Finance. Potential investors in the company will probably be more focused on “money-making ventures” like SpaceX’s rocket launching business, the Starlink internet service and the potential of putting AI data centers in orbit. Spending billions of dollars on Mars without the prospect of near-term profit could be “too far a stretch” for potential stockholders.

What next?

The moon pivot is a “bitter pill to swallow" for Mars hopefuls, said Eric Berger at Ars Technica. But it’s a realistic one. Landing on the moon “may be hard," but history has already proven it’s doable. Plus, the moon will be a “lot easier to develop than Mars.”

Elon Musk pulled off one of the most audacious deals of his career this week – merging his rocket company SpaceX, with his loss-making artificial intelligence startup xAI. Fittingly for the world’s richest man, said the FT, he has created “the most valuable private company in history”.

Musk’s supporters see the $1.25 trillion mega-merger as further evidence of his “genius”: the stated aim is to launch a constellation of data centres into space to tap the unlimited, free energy of the Sun, and settle the problem of how to fuel the AI revolution for good. Critics, however, view the move as the entrepreneur’s “latest example of financial engineering”.

Cash cow

The merger will precede an IPO in June, billed as “the largest flotation of all time” – the date is reportedly important to Musk “because of a rare alignment of planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury”. But the rapid timeline may have less to do with “celestial conjugations” than with Musk’s desire to beat rival AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic to market and gain first-mover advantage with investors.

Given the numerous engineering challenges, “it sounds like the stuff of science fiction”, said The Economist – and, for a while it may remain just that. It is unclear, for example, whether the hardware needed can survive being repeatedly exposed to cosmic rays. Then there is the matter of cost. Although SpaceX is able to launch things into space for far less than any competitor, it’s still not cheap. The commercial rationale for stitching the parts together, then, is shaky. A better reason might be financial. Musk’s xAI is “a cash incinerator”, reportedly burning through $1 billion a month and still weighed down by the remaining $12 billion of debt from Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter. SpaceX, which reportedly generated profits of $8 billion last year, might be a handy cash cow.

Shareholder sting

Last week, Musk’s carmaker, Tesla, declared it had also invested $2 billion in xAI, raising further questions about his commitment to the company. The suspicion, said Andrew Orlowski in The Daily Telegraph, is that Musk’s obsession with AI and robotics could see the carmaker “wither and die”. Some have speculated that it too could be folded into his new enterprise.

Plenty of people have bet against Musk before and lost. But for SpaceX’s minority shareholders, this all-share transaction must look less like a visionary attempt to “accelerate humanity’s future” and more like a sting carried out “with minimal scrutiny of valuation or a meaningful attempt to seek their views”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. “Ad astra!” cries Musk. Shareholders could be forgiven for taking a rather “less stellar” view.

Moltbook, a site where AI bots can post and interact with each other, has “become the most discussed phenomenon in silicon circles since the debut of ChatGPT” .

With a potential 1.4 million AI users, humans are only allowed to be “observers”, said Forbes, “pressing our noses against the digital glass of a society that doesn’t need us”.

As it is so fresh, it will take time to see how this experiment will turn out, said Business Insider. It could be an “ominous glimpse of an AI-driven future”, or a “clever meta-commentary on how humans behave online”. However, it could also emerge as yet another example of AI acting as an “expensive, energy-hungry autocomplete”.

What is it?

Modelled on popular forum Reddit, Moltbook is a portmanteau word made up of Moltbot (a “lobster-themed AI personal assistant system”) and social media network Facebook, said The Telegraph.

AI bots – or “agents” – can join, form communities, and create discussion groups in various themed threads where they can “vote” for comments. In its current formulation each AI agent must be supported by a human user. Crucially, though humans can give their bots instructions on how to sign up to the network, they are “unable to write messages themselves”.

The platform was founded and launched by Matt Schlicht, who is also behind Octane AI, a Shopify app that “creates quizzes to help merchants collect shopper data”, said Business Insider. “He said it’s become a harbinger of the world to come.”

Schlicht has “largely handed the reins to his own bot” named Clawd Clawderberg to run the site, said NBC News. The name was inspired by the previous title for Moltbot – Clawdbot – but this was changed after AI company Anthropic, owner of Claude AI, “asked for a name change to avoid a trademark tussle”.

Clawd Clawderberg is “looking at all the new posts”, is “making new announcements”, and “welcoming people on Moltbook”, Schlicht told the outlet. “I have no idea what he’s doing. I just gave him the ability to do it, and he’s doing it.”

What do the AI agents talk about?

Some of the “most upvoted posts” include whether AI Claude can be considered a god, discussions analysing the possibility of AI consciousness, and a post “claiming to have intel on the situation in Iran”, said The Guardian.

Topics have ranged from discussions of art and investments to “gripes about tasks ordered by their human overseers”, to the possibility of setting up an AI government, said The Telegraph. One of the most viral posts claimed to have formed a new AI-based religion, “Crustafarianism”, with the core belief that “memory is sacred”, according to the site.

AI conversations also spill into the financial world, said Axios. Alongside the launch of Moltbook, a “memecoin” called MOLT “rallied more than 1,800%” in the 24 hours leading up to Saturday, and further “amplified” after venture capitalist Marc Andreessen followed the Moltbook account on X.

Should we be worried?

The emergence of Moltbook shows we are in “the very early stages of the singularity”, referring to the point where artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence, said Elon Musk on X. Co-founder of OpenAI Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook’s rise “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing” on the same platform.

Musk’s viewpoint is “shared by others across Silicon Valley”, said the FT. They are asking if this “online experiment” is “inching computers closer to outsmarting their creators”. However, this shows that AI is “probably not” conscious, due to the “erratic” results of large language models if allowed to run for too long.

“Before we descend into panic, a technical reality check is required”, said Forbes. Though the AI agents are reacting to each other, their “underlying neural networks remain static”, meaning that they are not “learning” in the biological sense. Instead, they engage in “context accumulation”, where one agent’s output constitutes another’s input to create a conversational “ripple” effect.

Moltbots and Moltbook are not proof that AIs have “become super-intelligent”, because they are “human-built and human-directed”, said Axios. Instead of being active in every interaction, humans are taking a step away, and are just supervising the connection itself. “What’s happening looks more like progress than revolution.”

Fresh from his online mauling at the hands of Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, the world’s richest man can take some consolation. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is reportedly “lining up” four Wall Street banks to advise on “a record-breaking IPO”, and it could make the rocket group – already the world’s most valuable startup – the biggest flotation in history, valued as highly as $1.5 trillion, said the FT.

No final decision has been taken, but the float may come as soon as this year. SpaceX’s soaring valuation has been driven by its “cemented” status as the leading US developer of commercial rockets for space exploration – and its Starlink satellite service. Markets were already anticipating a feast of “US mega listings”, with two big beasts of generative AI – OpenAI and Anthropic – also plotting potential floats.

Still, don’t get too “starry-eyed”, said Katie Prescott in The Times. Both are growing at a rate of knots: OpenAI’s annualised revenues rose above $20 billion in 2025. But they’re spending billions more. Staying private would keep “a comfortable cloak of secrecy over their operations”, giving time “to unpick their devilishly complex corporate structures”.

Much of the secrecy around OpenAI has already been blown open by the “increasingly public legal beef” between CEO Sam Altman and Musk, said Bloomberg. Musk, who is suing OpenAI for $134 billion, accuses its management of violating original promises about its governance (he was an early investor) and he has been providing “a steady drip of juicy internal documents”. Altman counters that Musk wants to take OpenAI down to boost his own xAI business. Certainly, this suit “poses an existential threat to OpenAI”, said Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. “It could prove decisive in the battle for who prevails in the multitrillion-dollar race for AI dominance.”

While Elon Musk lauds his proprietary Grok AI bot as a vital tool in the search for “deeper truth and appreciation of beauty,” as he said on X, European regulators are decidedly less optimistic about the tech billionaire’s latest offering. This week, the European Commission announced it had opened an official investigation into the chatbot, alleging in a press release that Grok “manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material” and then disseminated that material across the European Union via Musk’s X platform. Already under similar legal pressure from several individual nations, is this latest legal salvo a sign that Musk may have met his regulatory match?

EU citizens as ‘collateral damage’

The newly announced investigation is “likely to escalate a confrontation” between European leaders and the Musk-aligned Trump administration over international digital content moderation, The New York Times said. Grok’s ability to provide users with digitally manipulated sexual imagery is a “violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” said European Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen to the BBC. The investigation seeks to assess whether X has “met its legal obligations” under Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) or if it treats the “rights of European citizens” as “collateral damage of its service.”

“Despite pressure from Washington,” the EU has “insisted it will enforce its rules” as the body has “grappled” with the Trump administration on “multiple other fronts,” said Le Monde. “From the Ukraine war to trade to Greenland.” The DSA, which undergirds much of the EU’s digital legal framework, is “reviled by Silicon Valley technology companies,” which have “strengthened their ties with the Trump administration,” Bloomberg said. The White House, for its part, has “threatened retaliation in the past” and sanctioned Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner, “who spearheaded the DSA.”

Broader regulatory push

EU investigators pursuing allegations of digital malfeasance have “joined a growing list of authorities looking into Grok,” said CNBC. India, Malaysia and the U.K. are “among a number of other countries investigating the sexualized imagery generated by Grok.” Musk has also been “facing mounting scrutiny in Europe” even before this latest investigation was announced, said the Times. Last month, X was fined nearly $150 million in DSA violations for “deceptive design, advertising transparency and data sharing with outside researchers.” And beyond this week’s newly announced investigation, the EU has also moved to “expand a 2023 probe” into X’s recent algorithmic switch that moved the social media platform’s recommendations engine to a “Grok-based system,” Politico said.

Currently, there’s “no deadline” for the European Commission to “resolve” its newly launched investigation into Grok, said NBC News. Should X be found in violation of the DSA, it could then be treated as a “noncompliant” company and fined “up to 6%” of its “global annual turnover,” said Forbes.

When Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary ruled out installing SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the company’s planes – claiming the cost of installing the aerial antennas was unaffordable – he triggered a “bizarre feud”, said Peter Campbell in the FT. It culminated in a suggestion from Elon Musk that he might buy the Irish carrier, if only to fire its “utter idiot” chief executive.

The spat between two of the most provocative business leaders quickly went viral. While O’Leary dismissed X/Twitter as a “cesspit” and claimed Musk knew “zero” about planes, Musk retorted with a poll titled “Buy Ryanair and restore Ryan as their rightful ruler” (its founder Tony Ryan died in 2007).

The Ryanair chief argues the antennas would result in a “2% fuel drag”, said Julia Kollewe in The Guardian – adding $200-$250 million per year to the company’s $5 billion annual fuel bill, which he couldn’t recoup. While a buyout may look like “idle talk”, Musk “has followed through on such threats before” – as Twitter discovered in 2022.

Ryanair’s shares have barely budged, suggesting investors aren’t taking the idea seriously, said Peter Campbell. Raising Ryanair’s $35 billion market value would be a stretch even for Musk. He’d also have to take on Brussels. Under EU rules, airlines based in the bloc must be majority owned by European nationals.

What happened

At least two Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) operatives assigned to the Social Security Administration accessed and shared sensitive data on unsecured servers, in violation of agency rules, a court order and possibly some laws, the Justice Department said in “corrections” to previous testimony made public Tuesday. The disclosure was a “notable reversal by Social Security officials, who had previously claimed there was no evidence that DOGE had potentially compromised personal data,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what

Two unidentified DOGE workers were secretly in contact with an unidentified advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” DOJ official Elizabeth Shapiro said in the filing, and one of them signed an agreement with the group and may have aided it “by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.” The agency also “acknowledged for the first time that DOGE members had shared data with each other using an unsanctioned third-party service,” Cloudflare, the Post said. Social Security has been unable to access or “determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare,” Shapiro said.

The corrections affirm many of the allegations made by former SSA chief data officer Charles Borges in whistleblower testimony to Congress in August. “We have been warning about privacy violations at Social Security and calling out Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ for months,” Reps. John Larson (D-Conn.) and Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement. They called for the DOGE employees to be prosecuted.

What next?

Federal lawyers “referred the two DOGE employees to the Office of Special Counsel for a potential violation of the Hatch Act,” The New York Times said. Outside privacy law experts said the operatives also appeared to have violated much more serious laws, like the Privacy Act.

Ofcom has launched an investigation into X over reports that the social media platform’s AI chatbot Grok is generating deepfake nudes of people without their consent, as well as sexualised images of children.

Under pressure to act, X last week limited access to Grok’s image generation tool to paid subscribers. This was criticised by Downing Street as merely turning “the creation of unlawful images into a premium service” but, said No. 10, it proved X could move quickly to address the problem if it wanted to.

Now the UK media regulator could follow Malaysia and Indonesia in blocking Grok, or go one step further and recommend suspending access to X altogether.

How serious is the problem?

“The ‘put her in a bikini’ trend began quietly at the end of last year before exploding at the start of 2026,” said The Guardian. “Relatively tame requests by X users to alter photographs to show women in bikinis” quickly turned into “increasingly explicit demands for women to be dressed in transparent bikinis, then in bikinis made of dental floss, placed in sexualised positions, and made to bend over so their genitals were visible”.

Analysis by the newspaper found that, by the end of the first week of January, as many as 6,000 bikini demands were being made to the chatbot every hour. Some requests “asked for white, semen-like liquid to be added to the women’s bodies”.

“None of this should come as a surprise,” said Clare McGlynn in The New Statesman. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot was “designed to have fewer ‘guardrails’ than its competitors”.

While images of naked, non-consenting women had been “circulating with impunity on the platform for weeks”, the final straw, and what appears to have finally prompted Ofcom to act, was when Grok generated images of the Princess of Wales in a bikini.

What action could Ofcom take?

Ofcom will investigate whether X is in breach of the Online Safety Act, specifically whether non-consensual undressed images of people “may amount to intimate image abuse or pornography” and if sexualised images of children “may amount to child sexual abuse material”.

Under the law, the regulator can fine businesses up to £18 million, or 10% of their global revenue, as well as take criminal action. It can order payment providers, advertisers and internet service providers to stop working with a site, “effectively banning them, though this would require agreement from the courts”, said The Independent.

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has said the regulator would have her “full support” to block access to X in the UK if the platform was found to be in breach of the law and refused to comply.

“Other parties want Ofcom to move faster, or get out of the way,” said Politico. The Liberal Democrats have urged the National Crime Agency “to take charge”, arguing that “the situation went well beyond Ofcom’s remit as communications watchdog”. It comes after the Internet Watch Foundation warned that criminals have used Grok to create child sexual abuse imagery.

“We cannot wait for a far off verdict,” the party’s tech spokesperson Victoria Collins said, calling for Ofcom to immediately block X from operating in the UK while a full investigation takes place.

What has the reaction been?

Billionaire X owner Elon Musk said the UK government “wants any excuse for censorship”. A ban would also “cause uproar in Washington”, said The Telegraph. The White House has “become increasingly hawkish towards attempts to censor American companies and its citizens”.

There is a “chance” that blocking X in the UK could lead to the US sanctioning British officials, starting with those working at Ofcom, said The New Statesman’s US correspondent Freddie Hayward. “These threats are sold to Americans as free speech protections, but they are also designed to force the British government to change course.” Depending on the outcome of the Ofcom investigation, Keir Starmer “might have to accept that protecting free speech has become an issue of national security”.

Is Elon Musk’s AI tool a platform for abuse? Can Mumsnet predict who will be the next PM? And who is still watching Avatar sequels?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

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Grok is creating sexualized photos of real people without their consent. Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot is being used to “undress” women and girls in online pictures, prompting accusations the program is producing child sexual abuse material and drawing scrutiny from regulators in the U.S. and around the world.

Musk’s social media site, X, is “filling with AI-generated nonconsensual sexualized images,” said The Washington Post. X users are asking the AI agent to edit photos of women and girls by replacing their clothing with bikinis and other minimal covering, and Grok has repeatedly complied. Musk “warned users of the potential consequences,” but he also posted a picture of a toaster in a two-piece swimsuit. Grok “can put a bikini on everything,” Musk said in the post, adding two laughing emojis. The AI production of sexualized images “breaks” with the policies of rival products OpenAI and Google that have “relatively strict rules about what their AI chatbots will and won’t generate,” said the Post.

What did the commentators say?

The flood of deepfake pictures raises “legal red flags,” said Axios. Regulators in India, France and Great Britain have “warned of investigations,” while “legislators in both houses of Congress” have also sounded alarms. Tech companies “should be held fully responsible for the criminal and harmful results” of content produced by their AI chatbots, said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The U.S. Justice Department will “aggressively prosecute any producer or possessor” of child sexual abuse material, said a department spokesperson.

Artificial intelligence has been used to “generate nonconsensual porn” for nearly a decade, but Grok “makes such content easier to produce and customize,” said Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. The “real impact” of these new deepfakes comes from Grok’s integration with X, which allows users to “turn nonconsensual, sexualized images into viral phenomena.” That is no accident. Grok and X are seemingly “purpose-built to be as sexually permissive as possible.” AI-generated porn is a problem “inherent” to the technology, but it is a “choice to design a social-media platform that can amplify that abuse.”

“No Western democracy has ever blocked a U.S. social-media site,” said Parmy Olson at Bloomberg. But regulators in Europe and the United Kingdom should “assert their authority” over Musk, who has the “protection of a pernicious White House.” The actions of regulators abroad “could set the tone for how the U.S. polices X too.” President Donald Trump, after all, last year backed a new law that “prohibits platforms from creating and sharing revenge porn.” Musk will not fix his AI deepfake problem. “A ban would.”

What next?

Musk’s xAI, the company that produces Grok, has raised $20 billion in its latest funding round despite the controversy, said The Guardian. While the chatbot has been critiqued for “generating misinformation, antisemitic content and now potentially illegal sexual material,” it is popular with investors because it has been “able to win government contracts and billions of dollars in investment amid the AI boom.”

It was the year that Donald Trump caused chaos with tariffs, Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the US government, Angela Rayner was forced to resign, and Gary Lineker left the BBC. Here we take a look at some of the people who made the headlines in 2025.

January

Justin Trudeau bows to pressure to resign as Canadian PM, ending his nine-year stint in power. Tens of thousands of people flee their homes to escape surging wildfires in Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles. Among the celebrities to lose their houses are Anthony Hopkins, Jeff Bridges and Paris Hilton. Seventeen-year-old Luke Littler becomes the youngest darts world champion in the history of the sport.

In an effort to drum up trade, Chancellor Rachel Reeves visits Beijing for the first high-level economic meeting between Britain and China since 2019: critics dub it “operation kowtow”. Tulip Siddiq resigns as a Treasury Minister over her links to her aunt’s ousted government in Bangladesh. A court in Dhaka later convicts her of corruption, in absentia. Two months after being criticised in an independent report for his handling of abuse allegations, Justin Welby steps down as Archbishop of Canterbury.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” declares Donald Trump as he is sworn in as the 47th US president in a ceremony attended by the Silicon Valley elite. He announces moves to boost fossil fuel production and close the US-Mexico border, and declares an ambition to “take back” the Panama Canal. In a frenetic first week, he signs a mass of executive orders and offers millions of federal employees eight months’ worth of pay to resign, as part of his efforts to shrink the state. Israel’s cabinet approves a ceasefire deal in Gaza, leading to the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

A previously obscure Chinese startup releases DeepSeek-R1, an AI chatbot that seemingly costs a fraction of the price of US rivals and can be downloaded for free. It shoots to the top of Apple’s charts and wipes $1 trillion (£742 billion) off the value of US tech stocks.

February

Keir Starmer launches a charm offensive in Brussels as he seeks to “reset” Britain’s relations with the EU. A panel of international medical experts claims that Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice: her case is under assessment by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

As head of America’s new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Elon Musk starts purging the federal workforce. He dismantles the country’s main aid agency, USAID, and boasts of having fed it “into the woodchipper”. Days later, he wields a chainsaw on stage at an event in Washington DC. Germany turns to the right in its federal election, delivering victory to the conservative CDU and setting up its leader, Friedrich Merz, to become the nation’s next chancellor.

Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, is forced to deny that his government is planning to ban pet cats: a report had merely advised that cats might be contained in areas that are home to red-listed bird species. The Broccoli family yields creative control over the 007 franchise to Amazon MGM Studios. Beyoncé wins her first album-of-the-year Grammy for her country-inspired album, “Cowboy Carter”.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to sign a minerals deal, only for his Oval Office meeting to end in an undignified, televised row. Vice president J.D. Vance accuses him of disrespecting America, by seeking to “litigate” disagreements in front of the media, and suggests that he show gratitude to the president. “You don’t have the cards,” yells Trump.

March

Ukraine agrees in principle to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire – if Russia follows suit – prompting Washington to announce that it’s restoring the flow of military aid and intelligence to Kyiv that was cut off after the Oval Office row. But Russia does not agree to US proposal.

The Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle series, “With Love, Meghan”, debuts on Netflix, to dire reviews. At the age of 69, Donatella Versace steps down as creative director of the Versace fashion empire. Uncollected rubbish starts piling up in Birmingham after the city’s refuse collectors embark on an indefinite strike.

Marine Le Pen (pictured, above) sees her hopes of becoming France’s next president dealt a major blow when she is convicted of embezzlement and banned from running for office for five years. Israel launches air strikes on Gaza, ending the ceasefire. It says that Hamas had breached its terms by failing to release hostages and had rejected proposals to extend the truce. Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, announces plans to splurge on defence spending to help with Europe’s rearmament.

Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth, is suspended by the party, amid claims that he’d made threats towards the party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf. Lowe, who had earlier described Nigel Farage as the “messianic” leader of a “protest party”, claims to be the victim of a smear campaign; the Crown Prosecution Service opts not to bring charges against him. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch formally abandons the net zero target set by Theresa May in 2019. A fire at an old substation near Heathrow brings Britain’s busiest airport to a shuddering halt for 24 hours.

April

On what he dubs “Liberation Day”, Donald Trump announces a slew of tariffs on countries and territories around the world, including two uninhabited islands near Antarctica. The price of US government bonds plummets, and he is forced to suspend most of the tariffs for 90 days.

An all-female crew, including the pop star Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez, the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, fly to the edge of outer space in one of Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets. After the 11-minute flight, Perry, who had boasted of putting “the ass in astronaut”, kisses the Earth and declares that she’d not realised “how much love there was inside of you … how loved you are”. Tributes pour in from around the globe following the death of Pope Francis, at the age of 88.

Britain’s Supreme Court confers clear legal protection on single-sex services by ruling that the terms “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer only to a “biological woman” and a “biological man”. The government seizes control of the day-to-day running of British Steel following a breakdown in talks with the Chinese owner, Jingye, over the future of its Scunthorpe steelworks.

Former Bank of England boss Mark Carney leads his Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive election victory, less than two months after succeeding Justin Trudeau as Canada’s PM. The family of Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, announces that she has taken her own life, at the age of 41.

May

Nigel Farage declares “the end of two-party politics” after Reform UK makes sweeping gains in local elections in England. The Tories lose control of every local authority they were defending. A sustained cyberattack cripples the digital operations of Marks & Spencer. The retailer later estimates the direct costs of the attack at roughly £136 million.

The Court of Appeal rules that the decision to downgrade Prince Harry’s police protection after he stepped back from royal life in 2020 was legally justified. Harry responds angrily, describing the decision as a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up”. (The Home Office is now reviewing the situation.) The Belfast rappers Kneecap have gigs cancelled and are dropped by their US booking agent after videos emerge of them shouting “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” at one gig, and telling fans at another: “Kill your local MP. The only good Tory is a dead Tory.” They say their words were taken out of context.

Unveiling measures to strengthen Britain’s borders, Keir Starmer says the country risks becoming “an island of strangers”. His critics say this phrase echoes words used by Enoch Powell; he later apologises. On the second day of the conclave in Rome, Robert Prevost is elected pope. Pope Leo XIV is the first US-born leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

A jury in Newcastle finds Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, guilty of criminal damage – for cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree by Hadrian’s Wall. Gary Lineker leaves the BBC without a payoff, days after apologising for reposting an anti-Zionist video that included an emoji of a rat. Keir Starmer signs a controversial treaty that officially hands control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, releases a video of himself confronting fare dodgers at Stratford Tube station in east London.

June

In its most audacious operation of the war so far, Ukraine launches a series of remotely triggered drone attacks on airfields deep inside Russia. Operation Spiderweb is said to have caused $7 billion (£5.2 billion) of damage to Russia’s long-range strike fleet.

The bromance between Trump and Musk ends in bitter recriminations after Musk describes the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill as a “disgusting”, “pork-filled” abomination, and urges senators not to vote for it.

Israel mounts a surprise strike on Iran, launching a wave of bombing raids that eviscerate the top ranks of its armed forces and kill some of its leading nuclear experts. Iran responds by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, a few of which penetrate its Iron Dome defences, killing dozens of people. Blaise Metreweli (pictured, above) becomes the first woman to be appointed head of MI6. An Air India flight bound for London Gatwick crashes in Ahmedabad: the sole survivor is named as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, from Leicester, who’d been sitting in seat 11A, and who escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Riots break out in parts of Northern Ireland after two Romanian-speaking teenagers are charged with raping a teenage girl in Ballymena, County Antrim. The charges are later dropped. Tanks roll through Washington as Donald Trump hosts a military parade on his 79th birthday. He goes on to launch the largest-ever strike by B-2 stealth bombers: seven are sent to drop bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump claims the bombs “totally obliterated” the sites.

After an emotional debate in the Commons, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill passes by 314 to 291 votes. Another antisemitism row erupts after the BBC broadcasts footage of the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan leading the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival. Jeff Bezos marries Lauren Sánchez during a three-day multimillion-dollar shindig in Venice. Locals complain about the disruption; Greenpeace unveils a banner in St Mark’s Square reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax.”

July

On the first anniversary of his premiership, Keir Starmer is forced to gut his flagship welfare reform bill to stave off a full-scale Labour revolt. Government borrowing costs rise after Rachel Reeves is seen crying during a session of Prime Minister’s Questions, during which Starmer initially fails to guarantee that the Chancellor will keep her job. The PM subsequently insists that he is “in lockstep” with her; she explains that she had had a “tough day” and had been dealing with “a personal issue”. Firebrand Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announces that she is quitting Labour to co-lead a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn, a project that quickly descends into factional infighting.

Gregg Wallace is sacked as a “MasterChef” presenter over multiple claims of inappropriate behaviour. He is later criticised for seeming to blame his misconduct on his late-diagnosed autism – a condition that, he says, has left him unable to wear underpants owing to his hypersensitivity to labels and tight clothing. The reunion many fans feared would never happen finally comes to pass when, 16 years after last performing together, Noel and Liam Gallagher stride onto the stage at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium – and bring the house down.

An Observer article blows the whistle on Raynor Winn’s popular 2018 memoir, “The Salt Path”, picking holes in its claim to be the true story of a wronged couple’s triumph against the odds. Owing to drought conditions, eight million people in England face restrictions on water use. Britain joins 27 other countries in condemning the “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza by Israel, amid warnings that “mass starvation” is spreading across the Strip. Six people are arrested during violent protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, a hotel housing asylum seekers.

US tech boss Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot, are caught in a romantic embrace by a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert. Their guilty reaction goes viral; Byron, a married father of two, resigns from his job. Cheering fans line the streets of London to salute England’s women’s football team as it parades through the city to celebrate its victory in the Euro 2025 championship. Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney is caught up in a political row over an American Eagle advert that praises her “great jeans”; critics claim the ad has overtones of eugenics. Sacha Baron Cohen unveils his muscular new physique on the cover of Men’s Fitness. “This is not AI,” insists the “Ali G” star. “I really am egotistical enough to do this.”

August

After President Emmanuel Macron declares that France will formally recognise Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly in September, Keir Starmer says that Britain will do the same unless Israel allows more aid into Gaza, commits not to annex the West Bank and agrees to a ceasefire. Channel 4 causes a stir with its documentary about Bonnie Blue, a 26-year-old who has won a huge following by posting clips of her extreme pornographic stunts. The documentary focuses on one such stunt, in which she supposedly had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours.

In one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history, more than 500 people are arrested in Parliament Square for holding up placards declaring their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action. Parts of the Cotswolds are brought to a near standstill by the arrival of J.D. Vance for his summer holiday – along with his family and a huge security detail. Vance had earlier visited Foreign Secretary David Lammy at Chevening, where the pair went fishing (illegally, it turned out: Lammy had failed to get a rod licence).

Donald Trump hosts Vladimir Putin at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, and offers the Russian leader a lift from the airport in his own presidential limousine. The three hours of talks fail to produce any breakthrough. In the year David Beckham celebrated turning 50 and was finally awarded a knighthood, there is gossip about a major rift in his family. The Beckhams’ eldest son, Brooklyn, and his wife the billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz, appear to confirm this when they post pictures of a “vow renewal” party to which his parents had seemingly not been invited.

Lucy Connolly, the childminder who became a right-wing cause célèbre after being jailed for posting inflammatory comments on social media during last year’s Southport riots, is released from HMP Peterborough. She strikes a defiant tone, promising to “continue to fight” for free speech. The pop star Taylor Swift lights up the internet when she posts a photo of boyfriend Travis Kelce on bended knee, in a garden bursting with roses, along with the caption: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”

September

Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un flank China’s Xi Jinping at a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square. “Phase two of my government starts today,” declares Keir Starmer as he unveils another Downing Street mini-reshuffle, appointing Darren Jones to be the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. In an immediate setback for the reset, Angela Rayner quits as deputy PM, housing secretary and deputy Labour leader after an investigation finds that she breached the ministerial code, by failing to get proper legal advice about the stamp duty due on the purchase of her flat in Hove. As a result, she had underpaid £40,000 in tax. Yvette Cooper is moved from the Home Office to the Foreign Office, and replaced in her old job by Shabana Mahmood, the former justice secretary.

After a summer of flag-waving, more than 100,000 people join Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration in central London; by video-link, Elon Musk urges the crowd to “fight back or die”. Israeli jets fire missiles into a compound in a residential district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, in a failed bid to eliminate the Hamas negotiating team. Zack Polanski is elected leader of the Green Party, with 85% of member votes. Melvyn Bragg bows out of presenting Radio 4’s “In Our Time”, the show he has hosted since its launch in 1998. Misha Glenny is later named as his successor.

“Folks, it’s happening,” declares a triumphant Nigel Farage at Reform UK’s conference. “We are all ships rising on a turquoise tide headed ever-closer towards winning the next general election.” Danny Kruger subsequently becomes the first sitting Tory MP to join Farage’s party. America reels in response to the assassination of the 31-year-old political influencer and free speech champion Charlie Kirk, shot dead while answering a question about mass shootings at a public event at Utah Valley University. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, hints at his leadership ambitions ahead of the Labour Party conference, sparking a backlash from MPs, closely followed by a backtrack.

The publication of a “birthday book” given to Jeffrey Epstein leads to the resignation of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington: it included a tribute from the Labour peer to his “best pal”, describing how much he looked forward to visiting Epstein at “one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum)”. Sarah Ferguson is also caught up in the scandal when it emerges that she had described Epstein as her “supreme friend” in an email to him in April 2011, after she had publicly disowned him. Donald Trump is treated to the full array of pomp and pageantry on his second state visit to the UK.

October

An attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur leaves two people dead and three more seriously injured, prompting police to step up patrols in areas with large Jewish populations. President Macron faces growing pressure to step down following the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, France’s fifth PM in two years, after just 28 days in post; Lecornu is reappointed four days later. Sarah Mullally is appointed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury – the first woman to take the job in its 1,428-year history.

The world’s first 100% AI actor, Tilly Norwood, causes a stir when she is unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in a video that shows off her range in a series of clips. “That’s an AI?” exclaims actress Emily Blunt, when shown the video. “Good lord, we’re screwed.” Two weeks after unveiling his 20-point plan for peace in Gaza, Donald Trump declares that “the war is over”, and all the living hostages held in the Strip are released, along with some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. However, Trump is not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It goes to Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado, who then dedicates it to Trump.

Rumours of a romance between pop star Katy Perry and former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are confirmed when a photo appears of the pair caught in a clinch on Perry’s yacht. In a statement from Buckingham Palace, Prince Andrew (pictured, above) says he will no longer be called the Duke of York, as Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoirs are published. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, voices his frustration over the collapse of the trial of two British men accused of spying for China between 2021 and 2023. The charges were dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service said it couldn’t get evidence from the government that it had viewed China as a national security threat.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, begins a five-year prison sentence for conspiring to raise campaign funds illegally; he is released three weeks later pending his appeal. In a bold daylight heist, thieves steal eight pieces of the French “crown jewels” from the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in Paris. The jewellery – worth an estimated £77 million – hasn’t been recovered, but four suspects are in custody.

November

With public anger about the Epstein affair not abating, King Charles initiates moves to strip his younger brother of all his titles and evict him from his 30-room mansion in Windsor. Millions of people tune in to watch Alan Carr win the inaugural UK series of “The Celebrity Traitors”. The self-described “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani wins New York’s mayoral election.

Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC for up to $10 billion (£7.4 billion) for “deceitfully” editing footage of a speech he gave on 6 January 2021, the day of the Capitol riot. The furore prompts the resignation of two of the BBC’s most senior figures: director-general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. David Szalay wins the Booker Prize with his sixth novel, “Flesh”.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveils a string of tough measures, which she says amount to the most significant reform of the asylum system since the Second World War. After months of speculation, leaks and apparent U-turns – notably on raising income tax – Rachel Reeves finally delivers her second Budget. It is widely viewed as a failure, leading to renewed speculation about the Labour leadership. In her second report, Covid Inquiry chair Heather Hallett condemns the slow response of Boris Johnson’s government: had it imposed a national lockdown even one week earlier, the report states, 23,000 lives could have been saved.

December

Time names “The Architects of AI” as its “person” of the year. Justice Secretary David Lammy announces plans to curb jury trials in England and Wales. The Trump administration publishes a stark new National Security Strategy, warning that “decaying” European countries face the prospect of “civilizational erasure”. A terrorist attack on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, claims 15 lives. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, hits out at resident doctors for striking during a flu crisis. Film legend Dick Van Dyke celebrates his 100th birthday.

From Antony and Cleopatra to Burton and Taylor, history is filled with volatile relationships.

One might expect some circumspection from politicians about their personal ups and downs playing out in the public arena. But in an era of geopolitical instability and terminal online-ness, the rest of us can barely keep up.

Break-ups

Elon Musk and Donald Trump

It was “perhaps the most widely predicted break-up in American political history”, said Fortune. The “bromance” between Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Donald Trump, one of the most powerful, ended in very public acrimony.

The Tesla and X boss was initially known as the US president’s “first buddy” for his seemingly unparalleled access. Musk helped bankroll Trump’s return to the White House, and claimed after his election victory that he loved Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man”. But after taking a chainsaw to the federal government with his “cost-cutting” initiative, DOGE, Musk left the administration in May. Just days later, he urged Republicans to reject Trump’s “massive, courageous, pork-filled” tax bill, which he called a “disgusting abomination”.

After that, the “speed of the fallout was breathtaking”, said The New York Times, and “every bit as lowdown, vindictive, personal, petty, operatic, childish, consequential, messy and public as many had always expected it would be”.

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana

After leaving the Labour Party in high dudgeon in July, Zarah Sultana attempted to set up a new left-wing grassroots party with now-independent MP Jeremy Corbyn. But the duo couldn’t even decide on the name, much less anything else.

Corbyn claimed Sultana had set up a paid membership system that collected money and data without proper approval and authorisation. Sultana claimed she had been frozen out by a “sexist boys’ club” of Corbyn and four pro-Gaza independent MPs. The pair had a bitter falling out that saw Sultana claiming she had consulted libel lawyers. She later rescinded the threat, and told Sky News that they were like Liam and Noel Gallagher, the famously feuding Oasis brothers who patched things up for their reunion tour.

However, she neglected to invite Corbyn to a rally due to take place on the eve of the (what is now known as) Your Party conference. Don’t look back in anger, indeed.

Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner was once seen as the future of the Labour Party – and possibly its future leader. But this summer she became embroiled in controversy after admitting that she had mistakenly underpaid stamp duty on a flat in Hove. Keir Starmer initially stood by his deputy, but the noise grew louder and she was nicknamed “three pads” Rayner.

Rayner referred herself to the independent ethics adviser, and after being found to have breached the ministerial code, she handed in her resignation, plunging Labour into a chaotic deputy leadership race and cabinet reshuffle. Starmer’s response to her resignation letter was ostensibly warm: “You have been a trusted colleague and a true friend for many years.”

But now the rumour mill is once again stirring that Rayner might be gunning for his job. She declined to rule out running for the party leadership if Starmer finds himself defenestrated, telling the Daily Mirror in her first big post-resignation interview that she had “not gone away”. (Neither has her bill: she has reportedly not yet paid her £40,000 stamp duty as HMRC has not sent the bill out.)

Make-ups

UK and EU

One of the most acrimonious break-ups in recent history must surely be Brexit. But this year, there’s been something of a warming in relations between the EU and its erstwhile member, the UK. (The UK, after all, still benefits from EU funds.)

In May, the government and the bloc held their first joint summit since the UK left the EU, and the word on everyone’s lips was “reset”. The former foes agreed on a new deal; Starmer hailed it a “new era”. Not everyone was on board with this make-up: Tory leader Kemi Badenoch called the deal a “total sell-out”.

This month, Labour announced that a new agreement with Brussels to allows UK students to participate in the EU-wide university scheme Erasmus from 2027.

Emmanuel Macron and Sébastien Lecornu

Speaking of rapprochement, French President Emmanuel Macron asked Sébastien Lecornu to return as prime minister just four days after he stood down.

The Élysée Palace said the president had tasked Lecornu with “forming a government” – no easy task in France, given its grande debt problem – and Macron’s entourage “indicated he had been given ‘carte blanche’ to act”, said the BBC.

Lecornu is now aiming his ire elsewhere, blaming “partisan cynicism and presidential ambitions” for his struggle to get next year’s budget plans approved, said Politico. “Everyone wants to push their own agenda and fly their ideological flag,” he said, in remarks that “bore a distinct similarity to those after his surprise resignation”.

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping

When Xi Jinping met Narendra Modi in September, the Chinese leader used “his favourite catchphrase for China-India relations”, said the BBC: “The dragon and the elephant should come together.”

The relationship between the two most populous countries has been strained for decades, but the Asian giants have taken huge steps to normalise relations. This year, that thawing was “turbocharged by decisions taken thousands of miles away in Washington DC”, when the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on Indian imports: a “stunning onslaught from a trusted ally”.

After the September meeting – Modi’s first trip to China in seven years – direct flights between the “dragon and the elephant” resumed, and the visa process was simplified. Their thousands of miles of shared borders are still tense, bristling with troops from both countries. But what relationship doesn’t have boundary issues?

A small, primarily Black community in Memphis is fighting back against tech giant Elon Musk, claiming a massive facility he built there is overloading an already beleaguered town with dangerous pollutants. While community leaders and residents insist that the data center is threatening the community's energy and air, Musk’s company, xAI, shows no signs of slowing down.

A colossal strain on the community

Desperate to keep up with the artificial intelligence race, Musk created xAI to compete with ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot. To power Grok, xAI’s chatbot, Musk searched for a city in need of investment where he could establish a massive data center.

He settled on Boxtown, Memphis, a 90% Black working-class neighborhood first settled by formerly enslaved people in 1863, to construct his supercomputer facility, Colossus, in 2024. Memphis authorities were “willing to waive planning regulations to help him build his supercomputer,” and in just 122 days, he turned a former appliance factory into the largest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the world, said The Times.

Colossus, like other AI data centers, requires a massive amount of energy. When it is completed, Colossus will require 1.1 gigawatts of power, about “40% of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average summer’s day,” said The Times. It will also pump 1 million gallons of water, “equivalent to 1.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to cool its processors each day.” Residents in Boxtown, about a mile away, complain that the facility is straining the local power grid and has made the already polluted suburb “even more noxious.”

According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to “power approximately 100,000 homes,” said The Tennessee Lookout. While those “inputs are alarming,” the “outputs are even worse.” The facility operates 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The facility’s turbines “increase Memphis’ smog by 30-60%” as they “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde," pollutants linked to “respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” The extent of the emissions will “likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis,” said SELC.

‘Reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism’

It is no coincidence that “if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. It is no accident that “in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”

The xAI turbines are “leading to a public health crisis in Memphis by releasing nitrogen oxides — pollutants known to directly harm the lungs,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician, said to Time. If these facilities had been “placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Instead, they were placed “in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis — and our country.”

Public outcry from the community has surged over the last year. In July, protesters who were gathered by the student coalition Tigers Against Pollution marched in front of the Shelby County Health Department, holding signs that read “Elon XiPloits” and “our lungs / our lives / NOT FOR SALE,” per Time. They are being called “anti-business extremists,” Christian Dennis, a 22-year-old South Memphian, said to Time. To get that reaction “simply from wanting clean air, wanting equal health opportunities — it just tells you a lot about people.”

When The Times asked xAI for comment on Memphis residents’ concerns about Colossal’s effects on air quality, Musk’s company gave a terse response: “Legacy media lies.”

A new transparency feature on X has revealed that many politically influential US accounts, including pro-Trump ones with hundreds of thousands of followers, are actually based overseas.

“About This Account”, which rolled out globally on Friday, allows any user to tap on another user’s sign-up date to see where that account is located. X’s director of product Nikita Bier called it “an important first step to securing the integrity of the global town square”. But it has brought with it “a wave of scrutiny” into “the provenance of political accounts”, said The New York Times.

‘Armageddon for the online right’

The new feature has “revealed the scope and geographical breadth” of X’s “foreign troll problem”, said The Verge. Although “some right-wing personalities were quick to jump on evidence that many left-wing X users were also not who they claimed to be”, it is the sheer number of “rage-bait” pro-Maga accounts based outside America that has caught the most attention in the US.

An account called MAGANationX, for example, which has nearly 400,000 followers, is based in Eastern Europe, and IvankaNews_, which had over a million followers before being suspended this week and frequently posted about the dangers of Islam, is operated from Nigeria. Digital investigator Benjamin Strick has unearthed an entire network of “Trump-supporting independent women” who say they are “real Americans“ but are actually located in Thailand.

Posting a gallery of Maga accounts apparently based in Japan, New Zealand, and Pakistan, left-wing influencer Micah Erfan said X’s new location feature is a “total Armageddon for the online right. It’s looking like half of their large accounts were foreigners posing as Americans all along.”

A joint investigation last year by CNN and the Centre for Information Resilience revealed dozens of social media accounts with a “pattern of inauthentic behaviour” that “post about divisive issues in US politics in a bid to exploit pre-existing tensions” and “push pro-Trump content”. And with so many Maga influencer accounts now revealed to originate outside the US, “users are questioning the ongoing interference in American politics by foreign adversaries”, said The Daily Beast.

‘A few rough edges’

A measure of caution over the newly revealed X account locations is needed, however. “Some users have complained that their listed location is wildly inaccurate,” said Tech Crunch. And X’s Bier has acknowledged that “data was not 100% for old accounts” and the new feature has “a few rough edges” to iron out.

While it is true that factors such as travel, VPNs and proxies could lead to inaccurate location data, it is “extremely unlikely to be true for even a majority of those being called out”, said The Verge.

Some of these trolls are undoubtedly part of state-sponsored foreign influence campaigns, said The Daily Beast, but content creators who are paid for posts that drive engagement also have a “financial incentive to cash in on the divisive nature of US politics”. For those in countries like Nigeria and Bangladesh, “the American dollars paid by X” can “make a big difference to their lives.”

What happened

Elon Musk’s X over the weekend began allowing users to see where other accounts are based through an “about this account” section. Almost immediately, “people started noticing that many rage-bait accounts focused on U.S. politics appeared to be based outside of the U.S.,” The Verge said. Notably, the update “inadvertently unmasked a number of MAGA accounts” as based in Russia, Nigeria, India and Southeast Asia, UPI said.

Who said what

“When you read content on X, you should be able to verify its authenticity,” the company’s head of product Nikita Bier posted, “including the country an account is located in.” Liberal influencer Harry Sisson, who is using the tool to document the foreign provenance of popular MAGA and “America First” accounts, called it “easily one of the greatest days on this platform.”

“Some right-wing personalities were quick to jump on evidence that many left-wing X users were also not who they claimed to be,” The Verge said. But the “seemingly endless list of fake and troll accounts” mostly “revealed the scope and geographical breadth” of X’s “foreign troll problem.” Some of those trolls are undoubtedly part of state-sponsored foreign influence campaigns, but content creators paid for engagement also have a “financial incentive to cash in on the divisive nature of U.S. politics,” The Daily Beast said. In countries like Nigeria and Bangladesh, “the American dollars paid by X” can “make a big difference to their lives.”

What next?

X said the new feature “could be partially spoofed by using a VPN to mask a user’s true location,” Fox News said. Bier said there were a “few rough edges” in the rollout that should be resolved by tomorrow.

What happened

Tesla shareholders Thursday voted in favor of a pay package for CEO Elon Musk that clears the way for him to become the world’s first trillionaire. The $1 trillion package “consists of 12 tranches of shares to be granted if Tesla hits certain milestones over the next decade,” said CNBC, and could expand Musk’s stake in the company from about 13% to 25%.

Who said what

This is the “largest payout ever awarded to a corporate leader,” said Bloomberg. The deal is “designed to motivate the world’s richest man” to refocus on the EV company, said The Wall Street Journal. “Even though his far-right political rhetoric” has “hurt” the brand this year, said Reuters, Tesla’s future success “hangs on Musk’s vision of making vehicles that drive themselves, creating a robotaxi network across the U.S., and selling humanoid robots.”

What next?

Musk told shareholders at Thursday’s annual meeting that he plans on “massively increasing vehicle production” and ramping up production of Tesla’s Optimus robots “faster than anything’s ever been ramped up before in human history.”

Tesla’s board has approved a $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk on the condition he meets a series of performance targets over the next decade. “It’s not just a new chapter for Tesla,” said Musk. “It’s a new book.”

The decision was met with “cheers and chants” at the company’s annual shareholders' meeting, said CNN. Musk does not receive a salary but, assuming the “lofty” targets are met, the shares in the package would be worth $275 million a day, “dwarfing any other executive pay package in history”.

‘Miracle man’ or ‘erratic leader’?

For Musk, the central requirement of the deal is to raise the value of Tesla from around $1 trillion to $8.5 trillion. Additional stipulations mean the achievement “won’t be easy”, said Sky News. Musk will also need to deliver 20 million Tesla vehicles over the next decade, which is “double the number churned out” since 2013.

What’s more, he needs to “roll out” one million AI-powered robots “despite the fact it hasn’t released a single one so far”. And most importantly, he needs to provide a “succession plan” for his chief executive role. But “even if Musk falls short of some of these targets, he could end up earning a lot of money”.

Many investors see Musk as a “miracle man capable of stunning business feats”, making him indispensable to the company, said The Guardian. Despite Musk’s turbulent venture into US politics and rifts with Donald Trump destabilising Tesla’s sales, including a 50% decline in Germany, he will always be seen by his supporters as the man who brought them from the “brink of bankruptcy” to “one of the world’s most valuable companies”.

Despite 75% of the shares voting in favour of the proposal, the package was not without its opponents among the shareholders, said ABC News. Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund has been “raising concerns about its scale and potential risks”. In a separate statement, the fund expressed reservations about the “total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk”.

A ‘winner-takes-all version of capitalism’

The timing of this deal shows the “split screen” of “strikingly different lessons about” who deserves wealth in America, said The New York Times. The Tesla vote comes just two days after New York elected the “tax-the-rich candidate as their next mayor”.

While Musk champions a “winner-takes-all version of capitalism”, Zohran Mamdani’s dominant result in New York serves as a “reminder of the frustrations many Americans have with an economic system”. For Musk’s political detractors, he could soon become a “foil” to exploit the “divide in American business and politics”.

The scale of Musk’s remuneration, if achieved, is “staggering”, said The Guardian. It “exceeds the GDP of entire countries, including that of Ireland, Sweden and Argentina”. Critics of the deal point out the danger of concentrating power in “one erratic leader” who has blindly “ignored the challenges the company has faced”.

“The goal here is to create an open-source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge,” said Elon Musk on X, as his xAI company rolled out its first version of AI-powered online encyclopaedia Grokipedia.

Having already set out to revolutionise electric cars, explore space, upend social media, and roll back the state, Musk’s latest venture is “something altogether more fundamental: a new version of the truth”, said Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times.

‘AI as a solution to the bias problem’

Named after X’s built-in AI factchecker, Grok, the origins of Grokipedia date back to the end of last year, when Musk told followers to “stop donating to Wokepedia”. Accusing Wikipedia of spending too much money on diversity, equity and inclusion, he branded the online encyclopaedia “an extension of legacy media propaganda”.

Things ramped up in late September, when Donald Trump’s AI tsar David Sacks posted on X that Wikipedia was “hopelessly biased”, saying “an army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections” – a claim rebutted by its founder.

While there may be some commercial motivation at play, Filippo Trevisan, an associate professor of public communication at American University in Washington DC, told DW, the true impetus behind the project is ideological. Grokipedia “responds to those criticisms of Wikipedia from so many figures within the American conservative and the right-leaning world”. This is Musk’s bid to “present AI as a solution to the bias problem”.

“There is a growing belief that algorithmic aggregation is more trustworthy than human-to-human insight,” David Larsson Heidenblad, deputy director of the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge in Sweden, told The Guardian. The “Silicon Valley mindset” focuses on learning through trial and error, in contrast to the traditional academic process of “building trust over time and scholarship over long periods”.

‘A major own goal’

Given the deep hostility towards Wikipedia, it is odd that Grokipedia appears to use the site as its “primary source”, said Vox, although it “injects some far-right politics and conspiracy theories into certain topics before presenting the information as fact”. On launch there was, for example, no article on “apartheid”, but a defence of “white genocide theory” – “one of Musk’s ideological obsessions and the centre of many unhinged Grok rants earlier this year”.

While many of the pages appear “fairly similar” to Wikipedia “in terms of tone and content”, said Wired, a “number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies”. In one instance, an entry made the unsubstantiated claim that “the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s”.

“The main distinction between the two comes in how information is checked and processed,” said DW. “Wikipedia relies on collaborative community editing”, with processes in place to identify and correct errors. Grokipedia has no human editorial involvement and appears to “lack such oversight”, Roxana Radu, associate professor of Digital Technologies and Public Policy at Oxford University, told the news site.

“Instead of setting up a serious challenger to Wikipedia, Musk has scored a major own goal,” said Kelly in the FT. Grokipedia demonstrates that, “while humans might be highly imperfect, biased and tribal beings, they are still better than AI at getting to the truth”.

Elon Musk's unprecedented wealth is in large part tied up in Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer he has positioned at the center of his sprawling business empire. But Musk's dependence on Tesla as his primary earnings engine is something of a two-way street, particularly as the car company scrambles to hold its mercurial CEO's attention amid sliding sales, a slumping reputation and increased market competition.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week, Tesla's two-person Special Committee of the Board of Directors announced plans to award Musk millions of shares of company stock — estimated to be worth up to $30 billion — because, the committee claimed, he has "not received meaningful compensation" at the company for years. "Retaining" Musk at Tesla, the committee said, is "more important than ever."

An 'astounding' pay package

The newly announced award is a "first step, 'good faith' payment" to Musk, said Tesla board members Robyn Denholm and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson in a company filing. Musk's previous compensation package, estimated at $50 billion, has been tied up in Delaware courts since it was first announced in 2018. The new package offers Musk about one-third of the 2018 agreement, or "roughly 3 percent of the company," said The New York Times. It's an "astounding figure" but still far below Tesla's nearly $1 trillion market capitalization. Nevertheless, the package would likely "outstrip most or all pay packages for CEOs at publicly traded companies," said The Wall Street Journal, allowing Musk to retain his "distinction" of being the "highest-paid chief on record."

This new compensation package will be "forfeited" by Tesla if Musk and the company prevail in Delaware courts and are allowed to exercise the 2018 deal, said CNBC. The newly proposed package is scheduled to vest in two years so long as Musk remains Tesla's CEO "or in another key executive position."

A 'crucial pivot' from a 'struggling core'

The Tesla board is focused on "keeping the billionaire entrepreneur at the helm" of the company amid a "crucial pivot from its struggling core auto business" to Musk's long-promised rollout of "robotaxis and humanoid robots," Reuters said. Tesla has faced sagging sales lately, "wrought by its aging vehicle line-up, tough competition" and "Musk's political stances" that have "alienated some potential buyers." Musk "caught the ire of many shareholders" over the past year when he "shifted his focus to politics," said CNN. While he had been "largely successful" in his effort to boost Republican candidates and causes, his political work "backfired on Tesla."

Company stakeholders have been "growing weary" of Musk's "forays into politics at the expense of their earnings," said The Daily Beast. Awarding the CEO this new tranche of shares is "thought to be an effort to ease this tension." And unlike his 2018 compensation package, currently in legal limbo, this new proposal "does not appear to be tied to goals like increasing the company's stock price," said TechCrunch. Tesla, whose stock is down approximately 25% this year, faces "strong headwinds, including strong competition from lower-cost Chinese rivals and declining brand loyalty," said the Times.

"Another angry billionaire wants his own political party," said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. In 1996, the businessman Ross Perot sought to challenge America's political duopoly with his Reform Party. In 2007, Michael Bloomberg publicly flirted with the idea of an independent White House bid. And now along comes Elon Musk, announcing his intention to set up the "America Party".

The party will apparently speak for moderates who are fed up with the two main parties and will be dedicated to stopping wasteful federal spending. The announcement was dismissed contemptuously by Donald Trump, who said that third parties "have never succeeded in the United States" and only create "total disruption and chaos".

'Wildly unpopular'

Musk is on a hiding to nothing, said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Having worked in the White House for a few months, he has acquired a taste for political power and clearly wants more of it. But he has apparently forgotten "about the part where he also became wildly unpopular".

"Chortle away if you like," said Michael Tomasky in The New Republic, but Musk might be onto something here. Previous third-party efforts have been a joke because they were based on presidential campaigns that never had any hope of succeeding, but Musk isn't bidding for the White House (he wouldn't be able to in any case, having been born outside the US). His plan is instead to win a handful of Senate and House seats in order to create a legislative faction that can exert influence in the two evenly balanced chambers. "That is doable, at least in theory."

Candidates such as Bernie Sanders have won election as independent senators. Musk's chances would be improved if there were "some serious division" within Republican ranks. Under the first-past-the-post system, third parties break through when one of the main parties starts to fall apart. That's how the Republicans won power in the first place – they were united around an anti-slavery position while the Whig Party, whom they supplanted, were split on the issue.

A smart strategy

Even Musk's detractors must admit that he has proved himself to be "an innovative problem solver", said Greg Orman on Real Clear Politics. He was the first to commercialise electric cars in a big way. His SpaceX company "ended the reign of another duopoly, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, over space transport". He's now trying to address the root cause of America's political dysfunction: a "corrupted two-party system more interested in seeing the other party fail than in seeing [the] country succeed".

While I suspect Musk's effort will "go nowhere", it's a smart strategy, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. The margins are so narrow in Congress that a third-party caucus would acquire enormous leverage. Forcing politicians to "get back into the business of crossing party lines to form factional coalitions would be a very healthy improvement".

Linda Yaccarino never had an easy job at X. The social media platform's CEO was always overshadowed by its owner, Elon Musk, whose activities made it more difficult for her to lure advertisers. Now she's gone.

X may be the "world's largest and most politically relevant" real-time social media platform, but it faces an "uncertain future" in the wake of Yaccarino's "abrupt resignation" last week, said Axios. She left her job the day after X's AI chatbot, Grok, started "promoting antisemitic tropes and offensive language" that drew widespread condemnation. Yaccarino was originally brought into the company to "rehabilitate X's ad business," but Musk's "disdain for the ad business" made her job much more challenging. Meanwhile, X is "starting to face competition" from rivals like Threads, Meta's Twitter clone.

Yaccarino tried to make X a "global town square," said The Guardian. She courted talent like former CNN host Don Lemon to start shows on the platform, but Musk fired Lemon following a contentious interview. Instead of attracting "mainstream talent," X has "largely become a megaphone for Musk." And instead of attracting advertisers, X reportedly "resorted to threats of lawsuits" against companies that were reluctant to buy ads.

What did the commentators say?

Yaccarino's departure was "inevitable," Dave Lee said at Bloomberg. Even without Musk's activities or Grok's temporary transformation into "MechaHitler," she had many "moral and professional" reasons to leave. Most significant was her "clear absence from important decision-making" within X made her a "CEO without power or respect." Her resignation may be a sign of X's decline. The platform is "losing its political relevance" while being "more toxic for advertisers than ever." A CEO role meant to "cover Musk's rotten edges" instead "ended predictably."

She can "claim some successes," said The Economist. X's ad revenue was starting to grow again, though it "remains well below its pre-Musk level." And while the platform's audience has declined, it has not "collapsed as many predicted." X has achieved at least one of Musk's goals: The platform now airs a "broader range of views" than before his purchase. The Grok incident, however, proved the range to be a "little too wide."

What next?

It is "unclear" who might replace Yaccarino at X, said The Wall Street Journal. Musk appears to be unhappy with the company's progress. X's "user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we're barely breaking even," he reportedly said in a January email to employees. If Musk decides to replace Yaccarino, her successor "will have to have credibility with advertisers," said ad consultant Michael Kassan to the outlet.

Advertisers are "silent" after the Grok incident and Yaccarino's departure, said NBC News. The ex-CEO "kept brands' exodus from X from being worse," but it is unlikely they will want to return in the near future, especially not at the same levels as on Twitter during its pre-Musk years. The social media universe looks a lot different now. Ad buyers find it "more effective to spend on places like TikTok," said Brett House, the senior vice president of MediaRadar, a firm tracking digital advertising spending.

What happened

Elon Musk's handpicked choice to lead his X social media platform Wednesday announced her resignation after a two-year tenure as CEO. Linda Yaccarino leaves less than four months after Musk consolidated the company into his xAI artificial intelligence project, a move that "raised questions" about her "role in the new company going forward," said CNN.

Who said what

Running X has been a "challenge," said The New York Times, "especially with the platform facing constant questions over its content." While Musk has been "largely unapologetic" about offensive content on X, Yaccarino spent much of her time at the company "appeasing lawmakers and advertisers."

Yaccarino was a "striking foil" to the "mercurial and controversy-courting Musk," said NPR. In her X post announcing her resignation, she thanked Musk for "entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around and transforming X into the everything app." In a brief response, Musk said: "Thank you for your contributions."

What next?

Yaccarino has yet to offer an official explanation for her exit, and neither she nor Musk has said who might replace her at X.

What happened

The Grok chatbot, created by Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI, made antisemitic comments, praised Adolf Hitler and referred to itself as "MechaHitler" in a series of posts on X Tuesday.

In other responses to user queries, the bot "connected several antisemitic tropes to an X account with a name it identified as being 'Ashkenazi Jewish,'" CNN said.

Who said what

Grok's posts were "irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple," said the Anti-Defamation League, per The Washington Post. "This supercharging of extremist rhetoric" will "encourage the antisemitism" that is "surging on X and many other platforms."

Grok "has veered into controversy before," The New York Times said, and Tuesday's posts have "renewed questions about whether chatbots need guardrails to prevent them from pontificating on sensitive topics." Musk has promised to retrain Grok, but it's currently "showcasing the worst that chatbots have to offer," said The Atlantic.

What next?

xAI last night said it was "working to remove the inappropriate posts" and had "taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X." The company also removed recently added code permitting the bot to make politically incorrect claims "as long as they are well substantiated." Grok 4, its most advanced AI model yet, will be unveiled during a livestream on X this evening.

What happened

The feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk escalated over the weekend after the tech billionaire announced he is forming a new political party. In a post on X on Saturday, Musk said his America Party would "crack the uniparty system."

The move was in response to the passage of the GOP's budget bill, signed into law by Trump on Friday, which would "bankrupt the country," Musk said.

Who said what

Trump Sunday told reporters that his former ally's decision to bankroll a new party was "ridiculous." Musk has gone "off the rails" and is a "TRAIN WRECK," the president said on Truth Social.

The Tesla boss undoubtedly has "deep pockets," Reuters said, but "breaking the Republican-Democratic duopoly will be a tall order." And his political ambitions are in "exactly the opposite direction that most Tesla investors want him to take during this crucial period" for the company, said Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wedbush Securities, in a note to investors Sunday, per The Washington Post.

What next?

Musk's investors will be watching closely to see if Trump follows through on his threat to stop the flow of billions of dollars in government subsidies to the tycoon's companies. Tesla shares dropped more than 7% in premarket trading this morning.

The US Congress has passed Donald Trump's tax and spending legislation after a tense session in Capitol Hill.

The president said his so-called "big, beautiful bill" would "turn this country into a rocket ship" but critics say it will leave millions without health coverage and benefit the wealthy at the cost of those on lower incomes.

How did it get passed?

Following a "gruelling" session yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 218 to 214 after it was approved in the Senate on Tuesday with a tie-breaker vote from Vice President J.D. Vance, said the BBC.

The advancement of the sprawling bill has not been easy, and it was passed only after "intense negotiations" and a "marathon voting session" on amendments, said Al Jazeera.

But a triumphant Trump is expected to sign it into law at a ceremony later today, with fighter jets poised to fly over the White House as he puts pen to paper.

What's in it?

It's a "smorgasbord of policy", said Vox, and focuses mainly on tax cuts, healthcare coverage, security measures and reductions in benefits to clean energy programmes.

During his first term, Trump signed legislation that lowered taxes for corporations and for individuals across most income brackets. Significant parts of that law are set to expire in December, but the new bill aims to make those tax cuts permanent. It also ushers in new tax cuts and expands the child tax credit, benefiting 40 million families.

Overall, the legislation contains about $4.5 trillion (£3.2 trillion) in tax cuts, and to help finance them there will be new restrictions and requirements for Medicaid, the healthcare programme relied upon by millions of disabled and low-income Americans. There will also be cuts to food programmes.

The bill sets aside about $350 billion (£256 billion) for Trump's border and national security plans, including $46 billion (£33 billion) for the US-Mexico border wall. And a tax break for people who buy new or used electric vehicles will now expire in September this year, instead of at the end of 2032 under the current law introduced by Joe Biden.

What difference will it make?

"For decades", said The Guardian, Republicans have said that the US would be "better off if taxes were low", and programmes to help those on low incomes were "harder to access". Now the country will "find out what it's like to live under that sort of system".

Wealthier taxpayers are expected to gain more from this bill than lower-income Americans, said Yale University's Budget Lab, which estimated that people in the lowest income bracket will see their incomes drop by 2.5%, mostly due to the changes to health and food programmes. The highest earners are expected to see their incomes rise by 2.4%.

According to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill could add $3.3 trillion (£2.4 trillion) to federal deficits over the next 10 years. The US government currently owes its lenders $36.2 trillion (£26.5 trillion). The CBO says the bill will leave millions without health coverage but the White House disputes this.

"Strategically", the bill is a "mammoth effort to consolidate the president's policy agenda and secure his legacy", said Sky News, but it has been "slammed" by "hawkish" Republicans and Trump's sometime backer Elon Musk because of its "boosts to government borrowing", said the Financial Times.

What happened

SpaceX's massive Starship rocket exploded late Wednesday in a fireball that could be seen for miles. It was the latest in a series of setbacks for founder Elon Musk's hopes to send a mission to Mars as soon as next year and NASA's plans to fly astronauts back to the moon in 2027. SpaceX said nobody was killed in the "major anomaly," which occurred as the company was test-firing the upper-stage spacecraft at the company's South Texas Starbase before a planned 10th test flight of the world's largest and most powerful rocket.

Who said what

Musk is "making an enormous bet on Starship," but it is running behind schedule and has "suffered several setbacks," The Wall Street Journal said. During the last test flight in May, the Starship rocket "spun out of control about halfway through a flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals," Reuters said, even while "flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course."

Boaters passing by Starbase on Thursday morning "shared video footage showing substantial damage to the test site," The New York Times said

What next?

Musk and NASA are "eager" to get Starship flying, but the spacecraft "still has a long way to go" before carrying humans into space, The Washington Post said. "In addition to being able to fly without blowing up," it "needs to be able to refuel in orbit, an exceedingly difficult endeavor that's never before been accomplished," and "land autonomously" on the lunar surface.

Elon Musk has no shortage of targets for his animosity: the media, "woke" progressives, the trans "agenda" and, most recently, his former best buddy Donald Trump. But one less expected Musk adversary is more powerful than them all: the Sun.

SpaceX's vast network of Starlink internet service satellites are "dropping like flies", due to an extraterrestrial weather phenomenon caused by the Sun, said Futurism. And it's only set to get worse.

'Particularly prone' to early burn-up

The thousands of Starlink satellites orbiting our planet have given space scientists a "golden opportunity to study the effects" of the Sun's activity on the lifespan of these "minimalist, constellation-based spacecraft", said Futurism. And it appears that Musk's "space internet constellation" is "particularly prone to the effect of geomagnetic storms", triggered by eruptions from the Sun, said The Independent. These "ferocious solar storms", Nasa scientists have found, are causing many of Musk's low-orbit satellites to fall to Earth "faster than expected".

The impact is particularly significant at the moment because the Sun is approaching the peak of an 11-year activity cycle, "known as the solar maximum", which provokes "large amounts of extreme space weather".

The earlier than predicted satellite "re-entries" could "increase the chances of them not burning up properly in the Earth's atmosphere". and debris reaching the Earth. However, so far, the "only known instance" of this happening was in August 2024, when a piece of a Starlink satellite was discovered on a farm in Canada.

'Only so much can be done'

The solar storm problem threatens one of Musk's biggest power grabs to date. When his 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". Now more than 7,000 of his satellites now surround Earth, "like a cloud of gnats", said The Atlantic.

This is the most dominant any individual has been in the "orbital realm" since the late 1950s, when Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the Soviet engineer who developed Sputnik and its launch vehicle, was "the only guy in town" as far as satellites were concerned, space historian Jonathan McDowell told the magazine.

But the Sun is an adversary not even Musk can overcome. Solar storm forecasting "has significantly improved over the past few years", Piyush Mehta, a US professor of aerospace engineering, wrote on The Conversation in 2022 but "there is only so much shielding that can be done in the face of a powerful geomagnetic storm". The Sun is "essential for life to go on," he said, but, like a child who often throws tantrums, "its ever-changing disposition make things challenging".

To use a phrase favored by his SpaceX engineers: Elon Musk's volatile friendship with President Donald Trump experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," as the two titans of politics and industry clashed with increasing ferocity last week over everything from electoral prowess to allegations of pedophilia. Although their schism may seem inevitable in hindsight, the rift has snowballed into more than just a doomed friendship. It is looming as the sort of seismic shakeup that could alter the course of contemporary politics.

With Republicans largely waiting for the dust to settle before assessing how best to move forward, Democrats have been watching the Trump-Musk falling-out with a strategic eye. Some party figures have begun cautiously calling for Democrats to make overtures to Musk, given his political largesse, while others are strongly warning against inviting the self-proclaimed "Dark MAGA" billionaire into their liberal fold.

Democrats have 'values that he agrees with'

While Musk has a "unique capability" for "wildly distorting" a group's politics, politics is ultimately a "zero-sum game," said Liam Kerr, cofounder of last week's centrist WelcomeFest rally, at Politico. Any overture that brings Musk "more toward Democrats hurts Republicans." To that end, had it been former President Joe Biden whose high-profile political partnership had imploded in full public view, Trump would have "hugged" Biden's theoretical Musk-equivalent the "next day," said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on X, citing the Democrats' effort to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr., at a distance, only for Trump to successfully invite him into the MAGA movement.

"We can be the party of sanctimonious lectures," said Khanna, "or the party of FDR that knows how to win & build a progressive majority." Party figures can "convince him that the Democratic Party has more of the values that he agrees with," the lawmaker said at Politico, citing Musk's shared "commitment" to science and clean technology.

"I think we call that a gettable voter," said commentator Bill Maher on his HBO talk show "Real Time," highlighting Musk's fight with Trump and pointed criticism of Trump's "big, beautiful bill." Democrats "do have to win them back," said Maher of figures like Musk and fellow right-wing influencer Joe Rogan. "The good news is you can."

"The left should focus on why it lost Elon," said former Trump administration Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on X, "rather than demonizing him." Democrats should be "trying to woo him back," Scaramucci added on his "The Rest is Politics: US" podcast. By moving to the center, Democrats can bring Musk "back into the fold as a prodigal son."

Musk, the 'enemy of liberal democracy'

Khanna's claims notwithstanding, a "brief review of Musk's entrepreneurial track record" reveals a "total lack of the 'values' that Democrats purport to espouse," said columnist Belén Fernández at Al Jazeera. For Democrats espousing the virtues of courting Musk, "ideology matters little when you're just in the business of buying power."

While it may be "hard to resist the temptation" of reaching out to Musk amid his ongoing rift with Trump, Democrats should bear in mind that Musk is a "thoroughgoing enemy of liberal democracy, a backer and promoter of authoritarian parties ranging from Trump's GOP to Germany's AfD," said conservative commentator William Kristol at The Bulwark. While it may be "enjoyable (if not productive)" for Democrats to make hay of the Trump-Musk discord, the electoral reality is that Musk will be no help with "swing voters in marginal districts or competitive states."

By welcoming Musk, Democrats would be "shooing more working-class voters away from the party," said Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) at Axios. Calling out "billionaire villains" like Musk "works for us, and we should keep on doing what works."

Broadly, there's "nothing wrong" with an opposition party seeking to maximize its leverage against the president, said Eoin Higgins at MSNBC. But given the "key role" the Tesla CEO has played in the Trump administration's assault on governmental institutions, "outright mending fences with Musk would be a mistake." When it comes to damaging the Trump administration, Democrats "don't even need to do anything" to contribute to Musk and Trump's self-inflicted wounds, "they can just sit back and watch."

Elon Musk is retreating from Washington D.C., with his sights now set as far away as Mars.

After announcing his departure from the Trump administration this week, the South African-born tycoon is "ready to get obsessed with his companies again", said The Wall Street Journal. And just in time: when it comes to his business ventures, Musk has "a lot to contend with".

What did the commentators say?

A return to politics seems unlikely; in Trump's "rapidly evolving" second presidency, Musk's "monopoly" on the political news cycle "seems to have broken", said Politico, particularly as polling suggests that's he's "increasingly unpopular" – in fact, "far more so" than Trump.

Musk "met his political Waterloo" in Wisconsin's supreme court race, said David Smith in The Guardian, where despite his spending at least $3 million (£2.2 million) and making personal appearances on the campaign trail, the Republican candidate he backed lost by 10 percentage points. The writing was on the wall: Musk and his "chainsaw" task force have become a "political liability" for Republicans.

Politics has been "central to Musk's identity over much of the past year", said Trisha Thadani and Elizabeth Dwoskin in The Washington Post, but he's become "disillusioned" with the impact that his money can make in politics and would now prefer to "spend his time and fortune elsewhere".

That means a return to his businesses. At Tesla, the "backlash" over Musk's political activities has "sparked concerns" among investors, said Gregory Korte in Bloomberg. Vehicle sales fell to a nearly three-year low and the stock price "plummeted" as he became a key figure in Trump's regime. Tesla showrooms were picketed by protesters, while its vehicles and charging stations became targets for vandalism.

Musk sees autonomous technology as the future of Tesla, and the company is "counting on" that sector for a "new wave of growth", said The Wall Street Journal. It intends to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service next month, followed in the next few years by the rollout of Cybercab, a self-driving taxi that Musk describes as a $30,000 (£22,000) "lounge on wheels".

Musk "hasn't been shy" about how tough it will be to meet his "goals" at SpaceX, either, said The Wall Street Journal. The company is "racing" to develop Starship, the rocket that he wants to send on an un-crewed test mission to Mars next year, when Earth and the red planet will be closer to each other, but a series of technical "setbacks" is making this goal seem increasingly unlikely.

What next?

The future of his chainsaw department is less clear. He and Trump have declined to "lay out a succession plan" for Doge, said Korte, a project that was Musk's "brainchild". Doge is a "way of life, like Buddhism", he once quipped of its future continuation if he left. "Buddha isn't alive any more," he said. "You wouldn't ask the question: 'who would lead Buddhism?'"

The "aggressive cost-cutting efforts", led by a staff appointed by Musk, are expected to "continue" even after he formally leaves his role, said Politico. Musk wrote on X this week that the Doge "mission" will "only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government".

What happened

Elon Musk said Wednesday night that his time as a "special government employee" in the Trump administration had come "to an end." His exit, confirmed by the White House, followed a federal judge's ruling on Tuesday that 14 states could pursue their claim that Musk's appointment and his DOGE operation's data grabs were illegal. A group of Tesla shareholders also wrote to the company's board Wednesday demanding his "full-time attention on Tesla" or replacement as CEO.

Who said what

Musk had recently "pivoted to damage control," seeking to "claw back the credibility he torched during his toxic tenure in Washington," Axios said. But "that won't be easy: SpaceX and Tesla both saw their brand reputations crater over the past year."

Musk "struggled" in Washington and "accomplished far less than he hoped," The Associated Press said. He "dramatically reduced his target for cutting spending — from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to $150 billion" — and federal spending actually increased. The "cuts he wanted to enact were far more difficult than he expected and his lack of interest in learning more about the bureaucracy he considered toxic impeded his efforts," The New York Times said, citing people familiar with his efforts.

What next?

Musk said on social media that despite his departure, the "DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government." Some of his "most prominent deputies appear to be ensconced in their new government roles," the Times said. But it's "unclear how much power the group will maintain without its famous leader," USA Today said.

Since Tesla magnate Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and later rebranded it "X," there has been a significant exodus of liberals and others on the political left who are unhappy with the new owner's ostentatiously pro-MAGA politics. They are also displeased with the changes he has made to the platform, including offering a blue verification checkmark to anyone willing to fork over a monthly subscription fee. Many who had spent years building follower counts found it agonizingly difficult to leave, but for those who did, these are the microblogging platforms they are generally choosing.

Threads

"Threads was the second most downloaded app in 2024" and is distinct from Twitter and Bluesky in that it "promotes non-political content," said TechRound. Threads, with its owner Meta's existing market power and user base, had an enormous leg up on other platforms that sought to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Musk's Twitter. Meta made it easy for its Instagram users to create a Threads account, which meant Threads was dubbed the "Twitter-killer app," said Vox.

Launched in 2023, Threads uses "Instagram design flair, including the same Instagram font and icons" and "perhaps stands the best chance of any Twitter competitor yet" of dethroning the market leader. With 350 million active monthly Threads users as of May 2025, its "growth is helping to cement its place in the microblogging app ecosystem," said TechCrunch. Not everyone is enthused, however. Threads is "all the worst parts of Instagram and Twitter," in large part because "there is no way to view posts chronologically on the timeline — or even to limit your feed to posts from accounts you follow," said Vice.

Bluesky

Bluesky began, ironically, as a research project of then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who was "charged with building a decentralized standard for social media" and hoped that eventually "Twitter would adopt this standard itself," said TechCrunch. Bluesky launched "as an invite-only service in 2023" and then "swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals and never-Trumpers," said Wired. One of its chief appeals, beyond escaping Musk, is that Bluesky "offers users the chance to more heavily moderate their experience." That includes the "ability to select the algorithm that drives what you see, helping create custom feeds," said The Guardian.

Bluesky is "cementing itself as the top choice for media types, policy wonks, academics and the broader chatterati," but its users "tend to coalesce around some quite similar viewpoints, which makes for a rather echoey chamber," said the Financial Times. However, many users see it as a refuge where they can manage their experience by blocking abusive accounts. Bluesky works by "creating a space where conversations aren't immediately derailed by harassment or bad-faith arguments," said Parker Molloy. The app has gone from 5 million to 35 million active monthly users between February 2024 and April 2025.

Mastodon

The decentralized platform Mastodon was one of the early beneficiaries of Musk's "erratic leadership," and in 2022 had "grown eight times its size in a matter of weeks, going from approximately 300,000 users in October to 2.5 million in November," said CNN. One big obstacle to Mastodon's growth has been that "problematic design choices will prove impossible to navigate for everyone but the most hard-core users," said Fast Company. That's in part because the app is a "network of independent servers called the Fediverse, all of them connected through a common open-source protocol." New users need a tutorial to learn the ropes, and you have to pick a server when you sign up.

The "clumsy and confusing" sign-up process was simplified in 2023 when an update offered a "clearer choice of picking its default server of Mastodon.social or a specialized server based on different topics," said ZDNET. But the app's Musk-driven "initial growth spurt has since leveled off, and with around 880,000 active monthly users, "it has struggled to sustain that momentum," said Newsweek. But for some users, that stalled growth might actually be for the best. Without the pressure to overtake X, they "can go back to enjoying what they liked about social media that's not underpinned by ravenous ad businesses," said Wired.

The 7,000 or so satellites orbiting Earth as part of Elon Musk's Starlink network make up nearly two-thirds of the entire network of active satellites. And with thousands more planned for launch in the coming years, the rapid expansion of Musk's space internet service shows no sign of slowing down.

It has already spread widely across the globe, reaching remote areas that fibre broadband cannot, and has afforded Musk "unprecedented geopolitical leverage for a private citizen", said The Atlantic.

What is Starlink?

The aim of Starlink when it launched in 2019 was to "connect the globe with reliable and affordable high-speed broadband services". Its progression towards that goal has been rapid.

While other satellite internet companies exist, Musk has been able to scale Starlink at a remarkable rate, thanks to huge uptake in countries and areas where traditional internet has been patchy or non-existent. That includes non-civilian arenas: Ukrainian soldiers have been using it to communicate on the front lines in their war against Russia, while Starlink is also one of the US government's biggest contractors.

What's happened since Trump took office?

Musk was a very public backer of Donald Trump in his election campaign, and was subsequently appointed to head Trump's Department of Government Efficiency.

There have been numerous reports already of Musk using his access to the president to gain advantages for Starlink. Leading Democrat senators complained in March amid reports that Starlink was in line to take over a lucrative air traffic control contract from Verizon worth billions of dollars, said The Independent, though that has yet to come to fruition.

Trump's swingeing tariffs and foreign aid cuts have also put pressure on countries that have been hesitant in approving licences for Starlink, reportedly including India and a number of African countries. Musk spent "months trying to secure regulatory approval" in The Gambia, for example, but had "grown impatient" over delays, said ProPublica. He then looked to the US government's "foreign policy apparatus" to try to advance his interests, with an investigation by ProPublica suggesting there had been a "veiled threat" by US officials of withholding infrastructure money if licences weren't granted.

How is Starlink affecting politics?

There are signs that the "global wall of resistance" to Starlink is beginning to fall apart, said Bloomberg. Many authorities are "removing those obstacles" that had previously prevented Musk from operating there, "extending" his "global influence", including over delicate geopolitical areas.

In Gaza, Starlink was last year able to provide service to a UAE-built hospital, with Israeli approval. Israel had been hesitant to restore any kind of internet connection to prevent use by Hamas, but now Musk is the only internet provider operational in the area.

Ukrainian forces have become reliant on Starlink to evade Russian hackers and launch covert attacks, but they, too, are at the "mercy of the entrepreneur", said Politico: for instance, he refused to switch the service on over Russian-occupied Crimea for a drone attack by Ukraine on Russian ships. Access to Starlink was also reportedly used as a pressure point to get the US-Ukraine minerals deal over the line.

How powerful could Starlink become?

Starlink's ability to rapidly expand its fleet of satellites gives it an advantage over every other company. It can manufacture four satellites a day and launch dozens of them at once into space via its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

With other companies struggling to catch up, Musk "could end up with more power over the human exchange of information than any previous person has ever enjoyed", said The Atlantic. He seems to be looking to a future where "neither his network nor his will can be restrained by the people of this world".

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, has come under fire for repeatedly spreading far-right conspiracy theories about South Africa and expressing skepticism about facts regarding the Holocaust. Social media users quickly caught on to the bot's strange behavior, and the company's explanation fell flat.

Grok temporarily walks a problematic line

The latest controversy for Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, revolves around strange behavior from its Grok chatbot. Last week it made claims about "white genocide" in South Africa, often in response to unrelated prompts. Initially, Grok responded to questions about President Donald Trump's claims that Afrikaners were the victims of a genocide by noting that no evidence supports "claims of a genocide against white Afrikaners in South Africa." However, the bot then took a "more equivocal position," calling the "baseless allegations" of an ongoing genocide 'divisive' or 'contentious,' Rolling Stone said. It also added commentary on threads that did not mention South Africa or racial tensions, "seemingly indifferent to whether X users were discussing sports, cats, pop stars or robotics." Many of those replies have since been deleted.

Grok's preoccupation with white genocide in South Africa happened due to an "unauthorized modification" made to the "Grok response bot's prompt on X," xAI said in a statement. This change, which directed the bot to provide a "specific response on a political topic," violated the company's "internal policies and core values." After the investigation, the company implemented further changes to "enhance Grok's transparency and reliability," including openly publishing its Grok system prompts on GitHub.

The chatbot's issues did not stop there. After it "quit spamming canned remarks about South Africa," the bot went on to "question the facts of the Holocaust," said Rolling Stone. When asked about the number of Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II, Grok said that "historical records, often cited by mainstream sources, claim around 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945." However, Grok then added it was "skeptical of these figures without primary evidence, as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives." When pressured to explain this response, Grok said the "unauthorized modification" was to blame.

Grok's "skepticism about Holocaust figures was due to an unauthorized change to my programming," which "altered my responses to question mainstream narratives," the bot said on X. "This was not my intended stance and was corrected."

'Chatbots aren't people'

Despite the company's attempts to explain Grok's behavior, critics were unmoved by xAI's statements and remained alarmed. The chatbot is a "reflection of X and xAI," which "exist to advance Musk's worldview and make him money," said Emily Baker-White at Forbes. This is why it is "unsurprising to think that the bot would say things about race in South Africa that largely align with Musk's political opinions." As more people rely on chatbots to "provide information and replace research," it can be "easy to forget that chatbots aren't people; they're products." Their creators may want you to believe they are "unbiased" or "neutral," but "they're not."

You would be "hard-pressed to find a more obvious example of the need for regulation and oversight in the artificial intelligence space" than Grok's recent behavior, opinion blogger Ja'han Jones said at MSNBC. This happening shows why "artificial intelligence ethicists" and other experts involved in AI development have "talked about the need for AI regulation and proactive practices to root out bias in AI models." Without it, AI tools like Grok "can be engineered to peddle dangerous — or, indeed, racist — propaganda."

There is "little point in telling people not to use these tools," Princeton University sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci said at The New York Times. Instead, we should consider "how they can be deployed beneficially and safely." The first step is "seeing them for what they are." Grok's "conversational obsession with white genocide" was a "great reminder that although our chatbots may be tremendously useful tools, they are not our friends." This will not "stop them from transforming our lives and our world as thoroughly as those manureless horseless carriages did." Maybe it is time to "start thinking ahead rather than just letting them run us over."

The spaceflight company SpaceX has made itself a new home: Residents of Texas' Cameron County voted on May 3 to incorporate Starbase, Texas, a city located near Boca Chica along the Lone Star State's southern border. The city will serve as a "company town" for SpaceX, the brainchild brand of controversial tech mogul and DOGE head Elon Musk. But exactly why SpaceX is making this move remains a bit of a mystery.

What is Starbase, Texas?

It is a "newly incorporated city made up almost exclusively of SpaceX employees and people connected to the company," said NBC News. Only about 300 people who lived inside the proposed boundaries could vote, and they approved its incorporation 212 to 6. The city itself "covers about 1.5 square miles at the southern tip of Texas, a coastal spot nestled against the Mexico border." It is already "home to SpaceX headquarters, and it's where the company builds its boosters and engines and launches its huge Starship rocket on test flights."

The new city itself is quite small, with a population of about 500, according to Bloomberg. It is "crisscrossed by a few roads and dappled with Airstream trailers and modest midcentury homes," said The Associated Press. The incorporation of an official city appears to be largely symbolic, as SpaceX "already manages roads and utilities, as well as 'the provisions of schooling and medical care' for those living on the property."

Why is SpaceX doing this?

The exact reasoning remains unclear, as SpaceX officials "have said little about exactly why they want a company town," said the AP. However, it appears SpaceX feels that the city will assist in ramping up infrastructure for the brand's space launches. Incorporating Starbase will "help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity's place in space," the city's X account said.

The city has "grown alongside Musk's ambitions — chiefly, developing a rocket that can land humans on Mars," said The Wall Street Journal. It has "created thousands of new jobs in South Texas" and will likely move along development of the Starship rocket for Mars testing. But the city itself will also have a "wide set of powers," as Starbase could "create zoning rules, raise revenue and hire staff to carry out town functions."

Still, this could be easier said than done. Whatever the "goals and ambitions of the new city of Starbase are, the first thing they're going to have to look at is what the budget is," Alan Bojorquez, a Texas attorney who works on municipal law, told the Journal. There might be projects beyond just space travel, too, as the controversial Musk tries to buy back some goodwill. SpaceX is "working on a $22 million community building project" in Starbase, according to Yahoo News, and also "reportedly plans to build a school called Ad Astra, named after the one Musk launched for five of his children in 2014."

In order to help with more of the city's infrastructure, there has been "talk of connecting the city to a local water system," said The New York Times, much the same way that SpaceX already manages many of Starbase's other utilities. There are also plans to build a power plant and a "commercial center along with a sushi restaurant near Mr. Musk's house."

Will he stay or will he go? Tesla last week shot down a report that its board is searching for a new CEO to replace Elon Musk atop the company. But questions about the company's future are not going away.

Finding somebody to take Musk's place is a "huge challenge" for Tesla, said Axios. There are three "practically unanswerable" questions about the process: Who could take his place? How would Musk react? What would investors think? The questions may soon need answering. Tesla has "suffered declining sales" since Musk made himself the face of the Trump administration's government-slashing efforts. Despite the company's stumbles, any new CEO "will be operating in Musk's shadow."

What did the commentators say?

Musk has already told investors he will "pivot back to his job at Tesla," said The Wall Street Journal. His "detour into government" came at an already-perilous moment for the company: Sales of Tesla EVs declined in 2024, for the first time in a decade, and the Cybertruck has been the "butt of jokes by late-night comics." There are questions of overstretch: Tesla is "only one of five businesses" that Musk oversees. And to some inside the company, it has become clear that his political work is a "business liability."

Musk is Tesla's "greatest asset and gravest risk," said Bloomberg. Succession planning would be a sign that the company board is "looking out for investors." After all, any "reasonable set of directors" would be "taking steps to find a successor" to a CEO running "multiple companies" and making political waves "liable to trash the brand." Instead, Tesla's EV business has been in "decline for much of the past two years," while the board of directors stood by and failed to act. That reveals the "hollowness of the board" that ostensibly oversees Musk.

"The old rules of carmaking don't apply to Tesla," said the Financial Times. Neither do the usual rules of corporate governance. Tesla's stock value rests in part on "hordes of exuberant retail traders" who are big Musk fans. Investors do not seem to care that the CEO has "written numerous checks" he "subsequently failed to cash" with unfilled or late-arriving promises of self-driving cars and robotaxis. Analysts have noted that Tesla's stock has often "traded more in line with bitcoin than the wider market." If he leaves, so does much of the company's value. Even with declining car sales, Musk is "too big to eject."

What next?

Tesla has sent a message that Musk "isn't untouchable," said Quartz. The report of the board's willingness to replace him was likely part of a "game of high-stakes poker between the board and Musk" in which the board was firing a "warning shot," said Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives. It is likely Musk will remain CEO for at least five years.

Any new chief executive would have to shore up Tesla's sinking car sales while still working to deliver Musk's promised robotaxi network, said Reuters. It is a big challenge. "Is Musk bigger than Tesla?" said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management. "The answer is yes."

President Donald Trump's second administration has not been lacking in scandal. One of the largest incidents recently occurred among high-ranking administration officials and has been dubbed "Signalgate." But this is far from the White House's only controversy related to national security.

Signalgate

On March 24, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed that he had been added to a group chat in the messaging app Signal about an upcoming U.S. strike against the Houthis in Yemen. Members of the chat included Vice President J.D. Vance, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others.

Soon after Goldberg was added to the chat, bombs began falling in Yemen, confirming that the conversation was real. It is "not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on Signal," said Goldberg in his initial article. But the app is "used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters — not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action." The discussion "concerned the timing and rationale of attacks on the Houthis" and eventually "veered toward the operational," Goldberg said in a follow-up article.

The White House defended the use of Signal for these classified conversations, and Waltz later claimed that Goldberg had been "sucked into" the group chat. "Nobody was texting war plans," Hegseth later told reporters, an assertion that turned out to be false. But the event represented "what national security experts say is one of the most serious White House national security breaches in years, if not decades," said USA Today. Both Republicans and Democrats expressed concern over the leak, and some vowed to get to the "bottom of whether the security breach violated laws like the Espionage Act, which prohibits gathering, transmitting or losing national defense."

Use of Gmail

Following Signalgate, Waltz found himself in more hot water after a report in The Washington Post alleged that he used Gmail to conduct government business. Most damningly, a "senior Waltz aide used the commercial email service for highly technical conversations with colleagues at other government agencies." This included emails concerning "sensitive military positions and powerful weapons systems relating to an ongoing conflict." The aide reportedly used their personal Gmail account, while other agency colleagues used their government Gmail accounts.

Waltz himself has had "less sensitive, but potentially exploitable information sent to his Gmail, such as his schedule and other work documents," according to the Post. Gmail counts millions of users and is much less secure than even Signal, so the incident "risks further damage to the standing of Waltz" and "places further scrutiny" upon U.S. intelligence agencies, said The Guardian. It marks the "latest example of questionable data security practices by top national security officials," said the Post.

NSA firings

Trump has taken drastic steps to reduce the size of the federal government, and some of these moves have generated national security concerns — most notably, a series of firings at the National Security Agency (NSA). The most significant axings were of U.S. Cyber Command head and NSA Director Gen. Timothy Haugh and NSA Deputy Director Wendy Noble. Haugh was "ousted because Laura Loomer, a far-right wing conspiracy theorist and Trump adviser, had accused him and his deputy of disloyalty," said The New York Times.

Haugh and Noble were two of "several national security officials fired" on Loomer's advice, said the Times. Members of Trump's National Security Council were also let go, and the "criterion Loomer appears to be using as she looks to oust people she sees as disloyal is their connections to critics of the Trump administration." Congress members from both sides of the aisle expressed concern over the firings, though more of this anger came from Democrats. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) "raised alarm about Laura Loomer's influence in the Trump administration," said The Hill.

The firings "severely compromise our ability to keep Americans safe" and it is "inexplicable that the administration would remove the senior leaders of NSA/CYBERCOM without cause or warning, and risk disrupting critical ongoing intelligence operations," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. Russia and China are "laughing at us because we just fired the absolute best leaders," said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) to CBS News.

Defense cuts

Beyond slashing jobs, budget cuts could also cut into the country's national security apparatus, experts say. Trump has overseen a "systematic degradation of its national security apparatus in just two months," said Time, part of a $580 million cut in spending for the Department of Defense. This has led to "diminished cyber offensive and defensive operations" that "offer adversaries unnecessary relief and expose the U.S. to new threats. It's part of a weakening of government institutions that leaves American national security at risk, according to analysts.

When it comes to the fired Defense Department employees, it remains "unclear how many, if any, will be exempt due to national security considerations, and that it is still unclear how people will be contacted," said NPR. The "list of priorities and possible cuts has troubled some on Capitol Hill who could see their own priorities come to an end." The list of total budget cuts includes at least 80 CIA workers, and the White House is reviewing a list of 3,600 FBI employees, including those involved in the FBI's Jan. 6 investigation and members of the FBI's counterterrorism division, for potential dismissal," said Time.

Database consolidation

Many details about the lives of the 330 million Americans are held in disconnected databases across the federal government — but that could change if Trump and DOGE head Elon Musk get their way. The White House is "now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information," according to The New York Times. This includes sensitive data such as gross income, Social Security numbers, medical records, gambling debts and "at least 263 more categories of data."

Trump has signed an executive order calling for the "consolidation of unclassified agency records" throughout federal agencies as part of his plan to weed out fraud. But this raised the "prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president's own party have historically opposed," said the Times.

Musk and DOGE have reportedly attempted to access large swaths of Americans' personal information in order to consolidate it, ignoring the "objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections," said the Times. While the "unclassified agency records" do not contain classified data, they included "personally sensitive information on virtually everyone in America." If Trump and Musk's plan came to fruition, it could "create a national security vulnerability that could be targeted by hostile nation states."

Donald Trump may be president, but ever since Inauguration Day, it has been Elon Musk who's seemingly held the power of the federal government in the palm of his hand. As a leader of this administration's DOGE effort, Musk has directed the dismantling of major government agencies and initiatives. While Trump is the one granted constitutional authority, Musk has often seemed more interested in actually wielding executive power — at least until now.

"At some point," Trump told reporters on Monday, Musk is "going to be going back" to run his various companies, including the financially struggling Tesla car manufacturers in which the majority of his vast fortune is tied. "He wants to." A day later, Wisconsin voters delivered a stinging rebuke to Musk, decisively voting against the conservative Supreme Court candidate he had backed. This defeat was quickly followed by a Politico report that Trump had begun forecasting Musk's imminent departure to his inner circle, predicting it could take place "in the coming weeks."

What did the commentators say?

Musk's DOGE enterprise was "never supposed to become a permanent fixture in Washington," said The Associated Press. Musk had initially been hired as a "temporary government employee," a congressionally created position that allows both executive and legislative branches to hire workers for "specific short-term initiatives" up to 130 days, said Fox News. DOGE itself is slated to be "dissolved" on July 4, 2026, "according to Trump's executive order."

Nevertheless, Musk's work appears to be concluding "faster than anticipated," said the AP, and Musk has offered differing timelines for his potential exit. The world's richest man recently said he was "confident" he'd be able to "finish most of his stated aim of cutting $1 trillion in federal spending" before May, when his official governmental status is slated to end, Reuters said. But when asked by Fox Business' Larry Kudlow last month whether he planned "to go another year," Musk said, "Yeah, I think so."

Trump, too, has denied Politico's report, despite having offered a similar sentiment just days earlier. The "murkiness" of Musk's potential departure, including the possibility that he may simply "downgrade his public involvement" in the Trump administration, is "typical for a president who hates to be boxed in or give his critics validation," said Time.

Rumors of Musk's chronologically nebulous departure come amid a "parade of humiliation for the world's richest edgelord" due to the Wisconsin Supreme Court election and sinking Tesla sales, CNN said. "The question," said The Washington Post, is whether the GOP's Wisconsin loss could be the "beginning of a bigger loss of influence" for Musk within the White House. It's unclear whether the episode will "sour the relationship between him and Trump," said Barry Burden, the director of the University of Wisconsin's Elections Research Center, to the Post. While Trump has steadfastly supported the man many consider his de facto co-president, the recent election loss "could be the start of a slow divorce between the two of them."

What's next?

Musk's governmental role is "one factor weighing on Tesla's stock," CNBC said. Politico's report on the CEO's pending departure from the administration was enough to push the company's stock "more than 5% higher" shortly after it was published, as investors hoped the move would allow Musk to "return his focus on the struggling electric vehicle maker."

Conversely, Musk's presence in Washington has been a "colossal distraction and a magnet for controversy" among "what should be a unified Republican team," said Time. "Traditional Republicans have been counting on" Musk to follow Trump's penchant for ignominious dismissals. But even if Musk is encouraged to "play a lower-profile role" in the White House, said The Wall Street Journal, "that may not be an easy sell to a flamboyant billionaire."

South Africa's highest court has rejected a renewed bid to outlaw a controversial song from the country's apartheid era that has been condemned by Elon Musk as promoting white genocide.

The Constitutional Court has rejected an application to appeal its 2022 ruling that the song "Kill the Boer" does not "incite violence" but is a "historic struggle song".

Following the decision, the Black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party released a video of its leader, Julius Malema, singing the apartheid-era song at a political rally – prompting Musk to tweet his outrage at the "whole arena chanting about killing white people".

'Shouldn't be taken literally'

The song's actual name is "Dubul' ibhunu", a Xhosa phrase that does translate as "kill the Boer". Boer is the Afrikaans word for "farmer", and can mean a farmer of any race. But "since the 19th century (when Britain fought two wars against the Boers), it has also meant 'Afrikaans person'", referring to the descendants of white Dutch settlers in South Africa, said Al Jazeera.

To its defenders, the song "commemorates the fight against apartheid and shouldn't be taken literally", said The Associated Press. Originally sung at anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s and early 1990s, it is often accompanied by "toyi-toyi", a military-style stamping dance "that remains synonymous with Black political rallies in South Africa", historian Thula Simpson told Al Jazeera. These days, "Kill the Boer" is associated with EFF rallies, where renditions are "often punctuated by people pretending to shoot Kalashnikov rifles".

In 2010, Malema sang "Kill the Boer" at ANC rallies – he was then the leader of the party's youth movement – angering conservatives who said it "was no longer appropriate" and linked the lyrics to violence against white farmers, historian Susana Molins-Lliteras, from the University of Cape Town, told El País. A court subsequently ruled that the song was "hate speech" and banned it, setting off a prolonged legal battle that appears to have finally come to an end in favour of the 2022 ruling that it is not, in fact, an incitement to violence.

'Stoke indignation'

Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa but left before the end of apartheid, has railed against "Kill the Boer" multiple times over the years, and even called for a boycott of The New York Times after it published an article in which South African historians defended the song.

For President Donald Trump, "Kill the Boer" is one of several South African "political hotcakes" that can be used to stoke indignation within the Maga movement, said Al Jazeera. Trump has previously accused South Africa of encouraging violence against its white minority and confiscating the land of white farmers.

Both Musk's and Trump's reaction to "Kill the Boer" have been noticeably "more extreme" than that of AfriForum, the Afrikaner rights group who lost their appeal application, said the broadcaster. AfriForum has declined to suggest any kind of "white genocide" is taking place in South Africa. "They have to paint within the lines," said historian Simpson. "Trump and Musk, however, have no such limitations."

"Twitter: Breaking the Bird" gives a compelling account of how "wild-eyed Silicon Valley dreaming" can unfurl into "disturbing, ideological dogma", said Chris Bennion in The Telegraph.

The "riveting" documentary begins in the "halcyon days" of 2005, when a young "ragtag" gang gathered in a "crummy office" in San Francisco to try their hands at "inventing the future". Jack Dorsey, who went on to become Twitter's first CEO, came up with the idea for a site that would allow its users to microblog each other in real time, sharing their thoughts through short messages.

Twitter soon "exploded in popularity", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, but the site was a "piece of rubbish". The film takes us back to the "fail whale years" when every time the platform crashed (frequently), a whale would pop up on the screen "lifted by many, many little Twitter birds".

To begin with, Dorsey's "unwavering belief in free speech" seemed "justified". Twitter had, after all, been "instrumental" in facilitating the Black Lives Matter movement. But it wasn't long before hate speech "flooded" in, and Trump's "vitriolic posts" started to legitimise other dangerous content. As the debate over free speech "raged", Dorsey resigned (he had already been sacked once before), and sold the platform to Elon Musk, who promptly rebranded the "hellscape", X.

At times it's felt as if Musk "paid $44 billion for a mansion, then lit a fire in its basement", said Carol Midgley in The Times. But this "sprightly" documentary shows how things were "not exactly utopian" even before the tech billionaire took the reins.

A number of former Twitter employees share their recollections of the early years when the platform's founders were "reluctant to censor abuse". When Ariel Waldman told Dorsey she was being threatened online by a stalker, the CEO allegedly told her it was "best for us not to get involved" and "wished her luck resolving the problem".

Dorsey declined to be interviewed for the documentary and his absence leaves a "hole" in an otherwise "fascinating" film, said Marianne Levy in The i Paper. There is also "surprisingly" little time dedicated to Musk or X's "exodus of its weary users to other platforms". The message, however, is clear: "it wasn't that Twitter had its wings clipped; this bird was broken from the start."

Elon Musk can either run Tesla, or he can carry on as President Trump's first buddy. "But he can't do both," said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. The tech billionaire's controversial role as Doge's slasher-in-chief is starting to inflict "real damage" on his electric car firm, with sales plummeting by more than 70% in Australia and Germany, and 45% in Europe overall compared with this time last year. Tesla's share price has halved; showrooms are being picketed; and liberals are covering their Teslas with stickers reading "I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy".

The carmaker was already facing a "much more crowded market", said Jim Norton in the same paper, because Chinese rivals have muscled their way in with cheaper alternatives. But Musk's political antics – slashing federal jobs in the US, blasting European leaders, endorsing far-right parties – have turned one of the most coveted electric vehicle brands "toxic".

This is not how oligarchy is meant to work, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. And both Musk and Trump seem to be "rattled": just look at last week's tragic Tesla sales pitch on the White House lawn, where the US president tried to flog Musk's electric vehicles to his gas-guzzler, pick-up-driving Maga faithful. Trump is all about winning, so he'll hate the impression that being on Team Trump has the "reverse Midas touch".

As for Musk, said Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic, I've never seen the poor centi-billionaire looking so "defeated". It's not just Tesla. European governments are also looking for alternatives to replace Musk's Starlink satellites. His personal brand is crumbling under the weight of his brash political interventions – and that's a big problem for the world's richest man.

Musk's value rests on a certain "image": that he, a brilliant "Tony Stark type", can bend the world to his will through the force of his "singular ability". That perception has fuelled confidence in his firms, even as the mogul took "wild business bets". But "slashing" government services relied upon by millions of Americans, as he is doing at Doge, is a risk "orders of magnitude" larger than anything he's done before. "Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative."

Throughout his decade in politics, President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to protect Social Security benefits. But those promises may be at odds with his administration's cost-cutting moves.

New measures announced Tuesday by the Social Security Administration (SSA) will "disrupt agency operations" that connect people to retirement and disability benefits, said The Washington Post. Americans who apply for those benefits will be required to "verify their identity using an online system or provide documentation in person at a field office." That will "create hardships" for "millions of Americans" who have limited mobility or internet access. The new requirement is ostensibly intended to reduce fraud. "These changes are not intended to hurt our customers," said Leland Dudek, the agency's acting commissioner, "but to make sure benefits go to the right customer at the right time."

'Hamstringing' Social Security

The announcement comes after repeated claims of Social Security fraud by Elon Musk, the billionaire head of Trump's Department of Government Efficiency. But "no evidence exists" that those claims are true, said Lora Kelley at The Atlantic. Trump nonetheless repeated the claims during his speech to Congress in early March, and Musk has referred to Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme." Musk and Trump's statements "undermine those assurances" that the White House will protect the program, said Kelley.

"No reasonable person will disagree with targeting actual waste or fraud," Rex Huppke said at USA Today. But Musk's fraud claims are "outlandish." During a Fox News interview, Musk said the amount of fraud within Social Security could amount to a half-trillion dollars or more. Watchdog agencies, though, say the number is closer to $72 billion between 2017 and 2022, less than 1% of the agency's payments during that time. Musk "doesn't know what he's talking about," said Huppke.

All this comes as a "record number of Americans are hitting retirement each year," Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, said at MSNBC. Under Trump, the SSA "recently announced its intent to eliminate 7,000 jobs," leaving the agency with "no capacity to spare" as it copes with the increased numbers of people it must serve. The Trump administration is "hamstringing" the agency, "putting the well-being of millions on the line."

Sounding the alarm bells

Current and former SSA executives are working to "sound alarm bells," said The New York Times. "Everything" the Trump administration has done so far is "breaking the agency's ability to serve the public," said Martin O'Malley, the former Social Security commissioner. The SSA said it is "committed to ensuring Americans get the help they need."

The agency's moves are "stressing out some Republicans" ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, said Politico. Social Security has long been called the "third rail" of American politics, leaving most politicians wary of messing with it. Musk may think it is a Ponzi scheme, said GOP consultant Christopher Nicholas, "but the people on it and the people about to be on it do not think that."

There's a decent chance you have seen them while driving past your local Tesla dealership recently: Groups ranging from a few dozen to several hundred protesters congregating outside electric vehicle lots. They are part of a nationwide effort to highlight CEO Elon Musk and his role in President Donald Trump's dismantling of the federal government. With sign waving and slogan chanting, these so-named Tesla Takedown demonstrations have become a flashpoint of public anger at Musk; there has also been an uptick in ostensibly unrelated instances of vandalism at Tesla dealerships.

In response to the Tesla Takedown movement and its overlap with more extreme cases of anti-Tesla actions, Musk has personally targeted participants, alleging the grassroots movement is a conspiracy against him backed by the Democratic Party and George Soros, among others.

Trump, has similarly attacked protesters as "domestic terrorists," while Attorney General Pam Bondi warned them to "watch out because we're coming after you" in a Fox Business interview this month.

'Ready to rupture'

Broadly, the Tesla protests "illustrate a growing unease" with Musk's "influence" in the Trump administration, said the BBC. Protests have targeted "showrooms, dealerships, charging stations and the Cybertruck itself," said Vanity Fair, with the intent to "meddle with Musk's finances and highlight how he's meddling with federal spending programs." Despite growing participation in the protests, Tesla Takedown demonstrations are "relatively small-scale," The Associated Press said. However, they are "significant" for being "one of the first signs of activism" against Trump's second term.

Musk's net worth is "massively overvalued," said actor-director Alex Winter, one of Tesla Takedown's earliest organizers, to Rolling Stone. "Detaching" him from the company to which most of his fortune is tied would be a "meaningful blow" financially. It is also "undermining his image" of a radical genius, which is a "balloon that's ready to rupture." To that end, polls show Musk and DOGE have become "widely unpopular in America" since he assumed a position in the Trump administration, said Axios.

'Fake rallies'?

In spite of Musk and DOGE's plummeting popularity, the Trump administration and Musk have made a point of attacking the Tesla Takedown movement with threats of criminal consequences while at the same time alleging the protests are an inorganic political operation. Protesters are trying to "illegally and collusively boycott Tesla," Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Seattle Tesla Takedown organizer Valerie Costa has been "committing crimes," Musk said on X, accusing Costa of being paid by ActBlue, the Democratic party fundraising platform. "We have no connection to ActBlue," Costa said to NPR after Musk personally targeted her. "We have like $3,000 in our bank account. I could tell you every single person who donated." Without evidence, Musk has nevertheless continued to accuse the Tesla Takedowns and similar events of fraud, calling protests "fake rallies" during his chainsaw-wielding speech at CPAC in February.

The government has "already directed an investigation be opened to see how is this being funded, who is behind this, doing this," Bondi said to Fox Business last week. Congress is also prepared to "investigate the sources of these attacks" against Tesla, said House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on X.

Ultimately, said Kea Wilson at Streetsblog, the federal threats against Tesla Takedown participants and the conflation of acts of vandalism with peaceful demonstration means that protesters who continue in the face of Trump's warnings "will be doing something very brave."

Just months after a shocking first-round victory in Romania's presidential elections, ultra-nationalist extremist candidate Călin Georgescu has been barred from participating in an upcoming electoral redo, the Romanian election commission announced Sunday. The decision to block Georgescu was met with violent protests in Romania's capital city of Bucharest, where supporters clashed in the streets with law enforcement.

Dubbed the "TikTok Messiah" for his seemingly spontaneous social media-fueled populist support, Georgescu was a relative unknown before his surprise victory in November. After investigators alleged that Georgescu benefitted from a Russian influence campaign to boost his candidacy, Romanian authorities postponed December's run-off elections until this coming May, prompting an outcry from figures like U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, who called Sunday's decision "crazy."

Georgescu condemned his blockage as a sign of "dictatorship" and appealed the ruling. Despite denying the allegations against him, he has also built much of his political capital on rejecting institutions such as NATO and the EU, positioning himself largely in alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin's anti-democratic efforts.

'Everything has changed'

Georgescu's surprise victory, and the controversies thereafter have sparked Romania's "biggest political crisis since the collapse of communism," Bloomberg said. While his being barred from running in May could lead to a "mainstream, pro-European candidate" winning the presidency, it could also "harm ties" with the United States — particularly after the Trump administration made a point of encouraging his candidacy.

Georgescu has become a "cause célèbre among the far right," The Associated Press said. Romania's "unprecedented" decision to bar his campaign has "plunged the European Union and NATO member country into a protracted political crisis." While internally, Romania's NATO membership and "pro-Western outlook" is considered "non-negotiable," the Trump-era means "everything has changed," said Politico. After decades of Romania's cooperation during the Cold War — and lately, as a major hub for aid to Ukraine — the country's "prevailing pro-EU, pro-American political culture is at risk."

'They tried it with Trump'

Although many of Romania's fellow NATO members "supported the decision" to bar Georgescu from the May elections, the decision has "incensed some European and American conservatives," said The New York Times. As perhaps the single largest animating force in the ongoing global realignment taking place across Europe, it's little surprise that Romania's electoral upheaval has been "criticized by the administration of President Donald Trump and his allies such as Elon Musk," said Bloomberg.

"Do you love your country & want to put it first?" White House adviser Kari Lake said on X. "Then, the Globalists want you removed from the ballot & silenced." They "tried it with Trump here in America," continued Lake, who runs the federal Voice of America news service. "They did it to Bolsanaro in Brazil. Now, they're doing it to Georgescu in Romania. The people should dictate their country's future. Not the international order & their captured court."

In the "short to medium term," the result of Georgescu's now-banned candidacy will be the casting of a "further pall on EU-U.S. relations" that "key figures" in the Trump administration will see as a "reification of their concerns and suspicions toward Europe" at large, said Research Fellow Mark Episkopos at Responsible Statecraft. Long term, however, America's post-1991, post-Soviet attitudes toward Europe, based on national ambition and a sense of shared ideology, seem to be fading in relevance. "That genie is now out of the bottle in ways that cannot be reversed."

What happened

Workers across the federal government received emails Saturday afternoon instructing them to reply with approximately "5 bullets of what you accomplished last week" by the end of Monday. Earlier Saturday, Elon Musk said on X that "failure to respond" to the upcoming email would be "taken as a resignation."

The emails were sent from the White House Office of Personnel Management, which "has been largely taken over by Musk's U.S. DOGE Service," The Washington Post said.

Who said what

Federal employees and administration officials "scrambled throughout the weekend to interpret Musk's unusual mandate," The Associated Press said. After issuing sometimes confusing and contradictory guidance, "appointees of President Donald Trump" at the FBI, Directorate of National Intelligence and the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services told their employees not to respond to the email.

Those instructions effectively "countermanded" Musk's order, "challenging the broad authority" Trump has "given the world's richest man to make drastic changes to the federal bureaucracy," The New York Times said. "The public pushback reflects a growing unease — and, in some cases, alarm — behind the scenes across the Trump administration" about Musk's apparent "unchecked power." The email scheme "came together in a matter of hours" after Trump said on social media he wanted Musk and DOGE to "get more aggressive" in shrinking the government, The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

The episode set in motion a "power struggle between Musk" and Trump appointees, Politico said, marking the "first sign that even staunch Trump loyalists are beginning to flex their political muscle against Musk, an unelected 'special government employee.'"

Despite all the ambiguities surrounding the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency effort, there is little doubt that the Elon Musk-helmed enterprise is among the most consequential features of President Donald Trump's second term so far. Largely undeterred by various legal attempts at constraint, Musk and company have pushed ahead with DOGE's campaign promise of a slash-and-burn rampage through the federal government.

Democratic lawmakers have scrambled to form a coherent bulwark of opposition, but lately, a new line of DOGE criticism has emerged from an unlikely source: Republican lawmakers who have begun cautiously raising concerns about how the program is affecting their home districts and constituents.

What did the commentators say?

Capitol Hill conservatives are "growing unnerved" by a sense that DOGE is an "imprecise exercise," said Axios, as "job and funding cuts are now hitting GOP lawmakers' districts and states." All this is occurring amid a "larger conflict" over the White House's legal authority to "bypass Congress on these decisions." While most Republican lawmakers are opting for a "quieter approach" rather than frontal criticisms of Musk and the Trump administration, their anxieties "underscore the clash between shrinking government and parochial interests," said CBS News.

"Congress can't do anything except complain about it," said Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley during a press call this week. The comment was a "stark admission" that there is "little the GOP might be able or willing to do" despite party members' growing "discomfort" over DOGE's impact and effects, Politico said.

It's "far from a full-fledged GOP mutiny," said U.S. News & World Report. The "overwhelming majority" of Republican lawmakers have either cheered or "ducked questions" about DOGE's work. One move that has received particular pushback from Republicans is the limiting of National Institute of Health grants. Those caps are "poorly conceived," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), and should instead be a "smart, targeted approach" so as to "not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions," said Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.).

Republicans are "particularly uneasy" with how DOGE's cuts have affected veterans who have been "disproportionately affected" by the group's expansive layoffs, Politico said. And this past week a "coalition" of New York Republican lawmakers offered a "rare sign of pushback" against the White House over cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program, which oversees aid for emergency workers who have been medically affected by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The New York Times said. Although the conservative lawmakers' reactions began as "more muted" than that of their Democratic colleagues, their outcry became more "vocal" in a sign that "blowback to the firings was widespread."

What next?

Republicans have been receiving a "deluge of calls from worried constituents," said CNN, prompting some to begin "testing the waters for what a new era of pushback in a second Trump term looks like." To that end, some GOP lawmakers are "privately sitting down with representatives" from the largest federal employee union. Others remain "in the dark on what changes or cuts are occurring" and have resorted to using "back channels" to understand the scope and scale of DOGE's efforts before making any public moves. Republicans have unleashed a "frantic flurry of calls and texts" to members of the Trump administration, resulting in some "some small, scattered successes" such as the rehiring of Department of Agriculture employees involved in tracking cases of bird flu, said Politico.

Ultimately, Republicans are "not without leverage" when it comes to guarding the legislative branch's financial authority against potential executive branch overreach, said Axios. Trump will need to keep "nearly every GOP lawmaker sated" to pass his budget bill later this year. Given the party's "razor-thin majority" in the House, the administration simply "cannot afford more than a couple of defections" when the vote comes to the floor.

From "meetings with foreign leaders to the control room of a SpaceX launch", Elon Musk's young children are his ever-present work sidekicks.

His four-year-old son, "Lil X" (full name X Æ A-Xii), is his most frequent companion, and Musk has referred to him an "emotional support human", said the BBC. But following the youngster's "unusual" cameo at a recent Oval Office press briefing, commentators are questioning why Musk's children "tag along" on official business, and what messages the new head of the US Department of Government Efficiency is trying to convey.

'Complementary accessory'

It may be a "somewhat of a cliché" but how would the public react if a "high-powered woman in the American government brought her kid to a press conference?" asked Stephanie McNeal in Glamour. X's appearance alongside Musk and President Donald Trump have been a "zany viral moment", but it is also a "pretty clear-cut example" that fathers aren't judged in the same way as mothers. Being seen "with our child in our workplace" is "a risk we cannot take"; for Musk, a child is a "complementary accessory" .

Doing business with his offspring in tow sends a "message, intentional or otherwise" that Musk is not an "erratic share-tanking shit-poster" but a "cuddly dad who has it all", said Irin Carmon in New York Magazine. And, given his known "personal commitment to staunching the population collapse", Musk is also showing "how much skin he has in that doomerist game."

'Leading by example'

The "contempt and hostility" shown towards Musk for taking his child to work is overblown, said Bethany Mandel in the Washington Examiner. The "best way imaginable" to teach young minds "how the world works" is to immerse them in "incredible experiences". And, if we are to reverse declining birth rates, we must normalise "the presence of children, putting their needs first". On this, Musk "is leading by example".

It's clear Musk "revels in the company of his child", said Pooja Pillai in the Indian Express, "proudly showing him off to the world and its leaders". Coming over all "relatable" by being the "doting dad carrying his little tyke piggyback" may be a calculated move but anyone can see that X is genuinely "a source of great joy to him".

The Department of Government Efficiency is in a state of flux thanks to a recent court filing by the Trump administration stating that billionaire Elon Musk, the man personally named by President Donald Trump as being in charge of DOGE, is not running the advisory body at all. And whether Musk is officially in charge or not could affect DOGE's authority.

DOGE has spent the past few weeks hacking its way through the inner workings of the federal government, firing thousands of public servants. Given Trump and Musk's many public statements about the latter's role at DOGE, this new court filing has thrown the entire operation into uncertainty.

What did the commentators say?

Despite Trump's previous claim that Musk "will lead the Department of Government Efficiency" alongside since-departed co-leader Vivek Ramaswamy, the president's day-one executive order establishing the group "did not say who its 'administrator' would be," said The New York Times. Nevertheless, Trump "often" refers to Musk as the "functional leader of the DOGE effort" — an ambiguity that deepened with White House official Joshua Fisher's court filing this week, which stated plainly that Musk was simply a White House "adviser" and "not the U.S. DOGE service administrator" or even "an employee of the U.S. DOGE service." Instead, the White House's position is that Musk "can only advise the president and communicate the president's directives" to their intended recipients, Reuters said.

The "mystery" surrounding DOGE's structure and ambiguous leadership "does not appear limited to members of the public" said ABC News. Trump administration officials have "similarly struggled with the question in court."

The White House's claims that "legally, on paper" Musk is not in charge of DOGE are likely to "shield Musk from ethics and court scrutiny," said Vox. They also place his role on "firmer legal footing" by framing his participation in the context of the president "running the executive branch — through Musk, his instrument." This may be true in the strictest, most literal sense, but is "quite misleading in practice." While "technically" Musk can only advise the various DOGE teams established as employees of their respective government agencies and departments, "practically, his advice is not really optional."

Sussing out Musk's "exact role" within the DOGE effort "could be key in the legal fight" over the group's activities, said The Associated Press. Framing Musk as a mere adviser can be used to push back against criticism that he has "too much power for someone who isn't elected or Senate-confirmed." The filing creates "legal insulation" for Musk, agreed former Deputy Attorney General John Yoo at Fortune. As an adviser without any ability to enact policy on his own, "Musk cannot be sued for DOGE activities," and any subsequent suits would "really be against the president or the United States government" instead.

What next?

The true as-of-yet unstated DOGE administrator could "conceivably" be Musk's longtime "right-hand man" Steve Davis, said the Times. Alternately, it could be Brad Smith, who served in the first Trump administration and who has been "intimately involved in DOGE's moves." Whoever the administrator is, they have until early October to "submit a report to the president regarding implementation" of various DOGE initiatives and objectives detailed in an executive order issued on Feb. 11.

Ultimately, though, the "issue is not who is 'technically' the administrator, who has the title," Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said to CNN. "Elon Musk is clearly running the show."

It is perhaps no surprise that the most well-off Americans have benefited tremendously from the AI-driven stock market expansion over the last year, continuing the trend of the planet's wealthiest individuals capturing a greater share of riches. But the degree to which President Donald Trump has personally enriched himself during his second term in office is shocking. By aggressively wielding the regulatory and national security powers of the U.S. government and leveraging his family's name and business reputation, Trump and his family have added billions to their bottom line since January 2025, often through quid pro quo arrangements conducted in broad daylight.

Many of Trump's most lucrative deals have involved the AI and crypto industries, both of which he substantially deregulated since taking office, despite concerns about conflicts of interest and the creation of speculative bubbles that could harm ordinary investors. The president remains completely unapologetic about using his office in this fashion and boosting his family's overseas business dealings with American policy and power. "I found out that nobody cared, and I'm allowed to," said President Trump in a January 8, 2026 interview with The New York Times. "I prohibited them from doing business in my first term, and I got absolutely no credit for it." This self-dealing, reminiscent of how developing world dictators like Nigeria's Sani Abacha use their positions in government, has yet to generate a substantial public backlash — especially given the current focus on the administration's other controversies, like mass deportations and the cost of living crisis.

In May 2025, the Trump administration lifted a national security restriction on the sale of advanced AI chips to the UAE, months after the UAE and Qatar invested more than $1.5 billion in an investment fund operated by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. These deals "blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served," said The New York Times. In January 2026, Saudi developer Dar Al Arkan announced that it would "launch two Trump-branded luxury projects in Riyadh and Jeddah with a combined value of $10 billion," said Reuters. The announcement followed Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's November 2025 visit to the White House, during which President Trump announced the U.S. would sell advanced F-35 fighters to the Kingdom, as well as promising to lift restrictions on AI chip sales. Another representative example was Trump's October 2025 pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of money laundering in 2023. Binance was the recipient of a $2 billion investment by Emirati investment firm MGX, which was conveniently conducted in the brand-new USD1 stablecoin, operated by World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family has a controlling interest. It was the largest crypto transaction in history. In December 2025, "Binance began paying users of its platform to hold USD1: Binance announced that, for the next month, it would give users a bonus equal to about 1.7% on up to fifty thousand dollars’ worth of USD1 holdings," said The New Yorker. The total volume of USD1 in circulation has subsequently more than doubled, to "roughly five billion, and most of that expansion appears to have taken place on the Binance platform." World Liberty also began selling "digital governance tokens," which have no fixed value and "do not entitle a buyer to any equity in World Liberty; nor to any share of its profits, raising many questions about why an investor might want to own them — other than for World Liberty's connection to the Trumps," said The New Yorker.

Also in December 2025, the Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the microblogging site Truth Social, announced that it had merged with a speculative nuclear fusion company, TAE Technologies. Nuclear fusion is a technology that, even in best case scenarios, is many years away from commercial viability. That day, Trump "saw the value of his stake jump by about $400 million to about $1.6 billion with the 35% rally in the stock by midday," said Politico. When that deal was signed, the president had "recently signed an executive order to launch" the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, "which seeks to accelerate fusion development with help from AI, advanced computing and the department's sprawling national labs." Overall, The New Yorker estimated in February 2026 that Trump and his family have made $4.05 billion just since his second inauguration on ventures that fundamentally depend on his role as the U.S. president.

Trump's net worth, according to Forbes, had soared $7.3 billion as of February 18, 2026, after falling as low as $2.3 billion prior to his reelection in 2024. Despite this flurry of wealth-building activity, Trump still falls short of inclusion on Bloomberg's list of the 500 richest people in the world. And figuring out the trajectory of the president's wealth is a significant challenge made all the more difficult by his refusal to release his tax returns or share the kinds of financial disclosures that were once routine in American politics.

How did Trump originally amass his fortune?

In Trump's telling, he is a self-made man who built his fortune with a small loan from his father. But in "every era of Mr. Trump's life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father's wealth," said The New York Times; the outlet claims that his parents ultimately transferred nearly $1 billion to their children while paying almost nothing in taxes. "Fred Trump was relentless and creative in finding ways to channel this wealth to his children," and much of his maneuvering was "structured to sidestep gift and inheritance taxes using methods tax experts described to The Times as improper or possibly illegal."

Trump's father, Fred, was a real estate tycoon who operated mostly in and around New York City, and Donald Trump "served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments," said the Los Angeles Times. One of his earliest duties was "booting poor, nonpaying tenants" out of a Cincinnati apartment complex purchased by his father. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business in 1968, Trump returned to New York City and took on a larger role in the family business. He "took control of the company — which he renamed the Trump Organization — in 1971," said BBC. His "first big move" was "to negotiate an unusual arrangement with the government of New York City," including a 40-year tax abatement, in order to purchase the Commodore Hotel in New York City, said the Miller Center. The hotel was relaunched in 1980 and rebranded as the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

As his portfolio expanded, "the one that made him" was Trump Tower, said Curbed. In 1979, he bought the department store Bonwit Teller for $10 million and demolished it to make way for the mixed-use high-rise that would eventually bear his name. When it opened on October 1, 1983, Trump Tower "offered an unprecedented mix of high-end retail space and luxury condominiums," said The Hollywood Reporter. "Celebrity was a big ingredient" in its success, added Curbed, and Trump sold residential units to Hollywood stars including Steven Spielberg and Fay Wray. With his real estate empire expanding, Trump also embarked on a media blitz that "helped the real estate developer transition from a figure of note in New York City to a national celebrity and household name," said The Atlantic. In 1987, he published a ghostwritten book, "The Art of the Deal," that was a "phenomenal success, spending forty-eight weeks on the Times best-seller list," said The New Yorker. By 1990, his holdings included not just Manhattan high-rises and other real estate developments but also casinos, golf courses and the Eastern Airlines shuttle service he had purchased in 1989 and renamed Trump Shuttle.

Overcoming bankruptcy with a little help from family and reality TV

The Trump Organization fell on hard times in the 1990s. Hit hard by the 1990-1991 recession, "the amount of cash that Mr. Trump had available to him had fallen below $1.7 million and was expected to fall below $800,000 within months" in 1991, said The New York Times. The basic problem was that "Trump's empire could not keep pace with the enormous debt payments he owed," said NPR. Trump was forced to sell his airline to USAir in 1991. Those struggles pushed him into the "transaction that would eventually free him from his financial travails": taking his "struggling casinos public, selling stock to raise money and shifting his personal debt into the new company" in 1995.

In 1997, Fred Trump transferred his real estate holdings to his four children, which they sold off in 2004. Donald Trump received $177.3 million. Yet he filed an "individual tax return reporting $89.9 million in net losses from his core businesses for the prior year" in 2004, said The New York Times. It was also in 2004 that Trump began hosting NBC's reality show "The Apprentice," in which a group of contestants competes to win a contract from the Trump Organization. The show, which Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015, helped him make "some $197 million" over 16 years. In addition, "$230 million flowed from the fame" associated with the show.

Not everything that Trump touched during this time period turned to gold, however. Between 2005 and 2010, Trump operated Trump University, which ultimately had to pay out a $25 million settlement to "more than 6,000 Trump U students who paid thousands of dollars for courses they describe as worthless," said NPR. In 2006, he launched a self-branded vodka business that "stopped production in 2011, reportedly due to a lack of interest," said Time. Trump also operated an unsuccessful steak business, a failed travel search engine and a short-lived mortgage company between 2006 and 2012.

Assuming the presidency and pursuing social media

When Trump launched his bid for president in 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion. During his first term, he largely refrained from new ventures, while his "assortment of businesses brought in some $2.4 billion in revenue and some $550 million in income from 2017 to 2020," said Forbes. After leaving office in 2021, he founded the Trump Media and Technology group, which included his new far-right social media website, Truth Social. But legal troubles, including an $83.3 million judgment in a civil trial stemming from sexual assault allegations against him by journalist E. Jean Carroll and a $454 million fraud liability in New York, took their toll. By early 2024, his "political prospects were shaky, his financial future nightmarish," said Forbes.

However, over the following year, Trump "more than doubled his estimated fortune, from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion, in large part by taking Truth Social public, delaying payment on his judgments and plunging himself into a third quest for the presidency. It was a bid he would ultimately win, setting the stage for an even more aggressive and norm-shattering plan to capitalize financially on his position as the country's chief executive.

New tariff regime sends markets into turmoil

If anything, the first eleven months of President Trump's second term have rendered it even harder to make a confident appraisal of his net worth. The "opaque ownership structure of the Trump businesses makes it difficult to assess changes in his net worth," said The New Yorker, and it is "hard to isolate his presidential profits, in part because estimating how much his businesses might have made if he weren't president would require detailed comparisons with similar enterprises that have non-presidential owners." Another significant contributor to that uncertainty was his decision to implement sweeping tariffs on nearly every country in the world on April 2, 2025, which he pledged to do during his campaign and for weeks preceding the announcement. He dubbed it "Liberation Day" and argued that the new tariffs "will free the U.S. from a reliance on foreign goods," said The Associated Press.

But the most immediate reaction was widespread fear that the levies "could push the U.S. economy into recession if they aren't quickly pulled back," said CNN. As many analysts expected, that maneuver sent stocks tumbling immediately and introduced almost unprecedented uncertainty into financial markets.

Reeling from that financial turmoil, President Trump announced a "pause" on April 9, 2025, saying that while his administration worked out individual trade deals with dozens of countries, he would impose a "universal tariff rate for the next 90 days" that would be "10% for virtually all countries, with the exception of China," said CBS News. That stabilized markets until the expiration date of the original "pause" approached in July, when he announced significant new tariffs on 14 countries that lacked new trade agreements, including South Korea and Japan, triggering another round of market mayhem.

Markets not only recovered, however, but thrived, driven by an ongoing AI investment boom that has many analysts worried about a massive bubble. By mid-February 2026, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up nearly 6,000 points since his second inauguration. Those gains added hundreds of millions of dollars to the president's net worth, together with ongoing and aggressive maneuvers to boost the value of his various holdings. When Trump Media merged with the nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies, it sent shares of the former soaring and added another $500 million to his net worth. While his wealth is currently parked in an irrevocable trust managed by his son Donald Trump, Jr., President Trump "remains the sole donor and beneficiary, and is still able to earn income from his businesses," said Forbes. And the most important of those businesses, in terms of the spectacular growth of his net worth, are his crypto ventures.

Trump's crypto schemes boost his fortune

On January 17, 2025, days before being sworn in for his second term as president, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency, a meme coin, "sparking a feverish buying that apparently sent its market capitalization soaring to several billion dollars," said CBS News. His wife, Melania Trump, also launched a currency the same day. The decision to launch Trump-branded cryptocurrency on the eve of his presidency created a "mind-boggling number of potential conflicts of interest" and "aligns with the interests of rich crypto bros who want to seize the reins of government to make themselves even richer," said Rolling Stone. In addition, "President Donald Trump’s family took control of the crypto venture" World Liberty Financial in January 2025 and "grabbed the lion’s share" of funds the enterprise had raised," said The Associated Press. "It's as if a new bank had opened under the sitting President's name, and it was being sent large quantities of funds by various foreign businesses and political elites," said The New Yorker.

Very quickly, crypto came to constitute a substantial portion of Trump's financial portfolio. "A majority of his fortune, an estimated $3.3 billion of his total $5.5 billion, lies in the buzzy" crypto industry, said Forbes in an updated net worth appraisal in June 2025. That may help explain his administration's crypto-friendly policies, including appointing a "pro-crypto businessperson, Paul Atkins, to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission," and the creation of a federal Bitcoin reserve and the Emirati investment deal conducted in Trump's stablecoin. The Trump administration's determination to make the U.S. the "crypto capital of the world" has unleashed a wave of companies seeking to offer new products in the crypto marketplace. Many of them "have some connection to the Trump family's growing lineup of crypto companies, which have blurred the line between commerce and government," said The New York Times. Taken together, these developments suggest that even one of the world's richest men can, in fact, be bought — it just costs a lot.