Elon Musk (Oliver Contreras/Getty Images)

I spent $300 million to tilt an election and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

Elon Musk doesn’t have much to show for donating hundreds of millions of dollars and his time to Donald Trump.

6/5/25 3:47PM

The Donald Trump-Elon Musk levee finally broke, and the fallout is pretty epic.

In a move that is shocking, totally unexpected, and certainly unprecedented, the bromance between President Trump and Elon Musk detonated in spectacular fashion on Thursday. The pot had been boiling for a while, but now it’s spilling over. Trump publicly lambasted Musk for criticizing his “big, beautiful bill.” Musk fired back.

“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,” he posted on X. “Such ingratitude.” It was eerily reminiscent of JD Vance’s recent line, “Have you said thank you once?”

Trump, on his rival social network (it should be fun to watch THAT play out over the next several months, by the way), responded, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”

Musk then said Trump’s name was in the Epstein files. Yikes.

Grab your popcorn, folks. Neither Trump nor Musk is famous for reconciling or being particularly graceful, so it doesn’t seem like this relationship is coming back from the dead.

It’s time to ask ourselves: what does Elon Musk have to show for his nearly $300 million of Trump-related donations and less-than-yearlong dalliance into Trumpian politics?

He has alienated his very liberal Tesla customer base, causing sales to plunge.
He has now also probably alienated many of the conservatives who had started to come around on Tesla because of his involvement with Trump.

He has fallen far out of favor with many Americans because of his DOGE involvement.
Tesla’s stock, of which Musk owns… a lot, is down 17% today and has fallen 43% from its all-time high. (If you’re keeping score, it’s still up about 9% since Election Day last year, compared to a roughly 7% gain for the Nasdaq 100 over that time.)
He made friends and then enemies with a guy who constantly dumped on his industry and publicly planned to eliminate the $7,500 tax credit that was helping buoy Tesla sales.
Trump’s legislation already threatens a significant portion of Tesla’s profits, and now the president is threatening to end his government contracts. Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, make boatloads off government deals — The Washington Post pegged the number at at least $38 billion over the years.
A report from The Wall Street Journal said that Musk spent so much time away from his companies in pursuit of DOGE goals that Tesla’s board purportedly started looking for his successor.
A fractured relationship with Trump also potentially endangers the more open regulatory environment Tesla was expected to operate under during the Trump administration, which has been viewed as key to the company achieving its autonomous driving goals.

Tesla’s stock price has long soared on Musk’s distraction tactics, but it’s taking it on the chin now. We’ll see how things recover. But in the meantime, we’ll always have $10 trillion of demand for humanoid robots, right?

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5