Joined By Elon Musk, Trump Holds First Cabinet Meeting Of His Second Term

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, attends a Cabinet meeting at the White House (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

Calling in a favor

Report: FAA to cancel Verizon contract in favor of Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Remember when Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman said they didn’t think Musk would use his position in government to hurt competition?

Rani Molla

2/27/25 9:57AM

Remember a few long months ago when Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (who competes with Elon Musk in his AI and rocket businesses) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who competes with Musk in his AI business) downplayed the likelihood that Musk would use his government position to hurt competitors?

The Washington Post is reporting that the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling its 2023 $2.4 billion communications system overhaul contract with Verizon, and giving the contract instead to Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starlink satellite business competes with Verizon.

It appears Musk, who recently posted on his social media platform, “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” might in fact be using his leadership position at the Department of Government Efficiency to hurt others and help himself.

To reiterate, in December, Altman said:

“It would be profoundly un-American to use political power — to the degree that Elon has it — to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. I don’t think people would tolerate that and I don’t think Elon would do it.”

Bezos at the time said:

“I take it at face value what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I could be wrong about that but I think it could be true... I’ve had a lot of success in life not being cynical, and I’ve very rarely been taken advantage of. It’s happened a couple of times, but not very often.”

For what it’s worth, even Verizon doesn’t quite seem to understand what’s happening to it.

Verizon Executive Vice President Joseph Russo said at an event earlier this week that Starlink’s efforts at the FAA might work in unison with Verizon’s.

“I think that can be complementary to what we’re trying to build to really run the FAA infrastructure,” Russo said. “We’re in the midst of rolling out that network. It is not operational yet today but will be shortly as we continue to build in additional reliability and performance at the FAA.”

Jon Keegan9h

Apple poaches Meta’s chief legal officer

Just a day after Meta announced that it had hired away Apple’s user interface design lead, Apple has announced that it’s poached Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, to become Apple’s new general counsel. Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel since 2017, will be retiring late next year.

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Apple announces executive transitions

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Jon Keegan12h

EU calls for bids to build “AI gigafactories” in 2026

The European Union wants to shore up its domestic AI infrastructure and reduce its dependence on American tech companies.

To further this goal, the bloc is planning on accepting bids to build EU-based “AI gigafactories,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

As the AI arms race heats up, countries are racing to secure their own sovereign AI infrastructure, including building their own AI models that reflect their culture and language and offer control over cloud computing resources.

Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia in AI infrastructure. But it may be hard for the EU to fully break free of American tech — unlike the US and China, there is no European alternative for the powerful GPUs needed to train and run AI models. It’s very likely that any AI gigafactories in the EU will be filled with GPUs from Nvidia.

EU to Open Bidding for AI Gigafactories in Early 2026

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

Jon Keegan14h

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.

Alphabet’s AI Chips Are a Potential $900 Billion ‘Secret Sauce’

Rani Molla15h

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space

Billionaires, they’re just like us: they want to bring their terrestrial beefs to outer space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two billionaires have had numerous public feuds over the years that have played out in the courts and on social media. They also both lead AI companies that have insatiable needs for data centers and have publicly discussed building data centers in space.

Altman seems like he thinks this could be more than science fiction. He reportedly reached out to rocket maker Stoke Space to potentially make equity investments in the company to get a controlling stake, though the talks are no longer active, WSJ reports.

Or perhaps he just wanted a Sherwood bobblehead of himself.

Jon Keegan16h

Report: Meta to slash metaverse, VR spending by up to 30%

Four years after changing its name to reflect its focus on the loosely defined “metaverse,” Meta is planning deep cuts to the company’s money-losing virtual reality efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, home to the teams working on metaverse products — which include Quest VR headsets, Horizon Worlds, and its Ray-Ban Meta glasses — has lost about $70 billion since the company started breaking out the unit in 2020.

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts