Just Billionaire Things

The trillionaire has given more than $445 million to Republican political groups this election cycle, as Democrats vow to investigate him.

Elon Musk gave his personal political committee, America PAC, more than $76 million in the first two weeks of October to boost Republicans in the final stretch of the midterms, according to a pre-election report the PAC filed Thursday evening with the Federal Election Commission.

The group spent nearly $43 million in the first two weeks of October, and entered the campaign’s last leg holding nearly $47 million in cash.

The Texas Senate race dominated the new spending. It drew $15.2 million, double what the PAC spent there all summer. That spending included $12.4 million to attack Democratic candidate James Talarico and $2.8 million to promote Republican Ken Paxton.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.

Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.

“To make this film, I set out to solve a mystery,” Gibney says in the documentary. “How could Musk assume so much power, and why had we given it to him?”

When Tesla introduced its first mass-market car, the Model 3, at an event in 2016, Elon Musk seemed like a different person from the one he is today. Boyish and trim, he started off his presentation by reminding the audience of Tesla’s mission and why everyone should care about what it was doing. “It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport . . . this is really important for the future of the world,” he said. A screen behind him showed a chart of rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere; Musk noted that the line was still moving sharply up. “What that CO2 increase results in is a steadily increasing temperature. So we’ve already increased by two degrees. In fact, that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the extremes of temperature increased by as much as twenty degrees, and that line is gonna keep going for some time into the future.” Tesla was a critical part of pushing the world to electrify its vehicles, Musk went on, citing a former executive at General Motors who’d said that competitive pressure from Tesla pushed G.M. to introduce a hybrid car, the Chevrolet Volt, and spurred Nissan to release an electric model, the leaf. Much of the rest of the industry soon followed.

A $111 billion merger clears its last legal hurdle, handing CNN and CBS oversight to a board picked by Paramount's own directors. Sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE will hold nearly half the company, while critics say the "independence" board mirrors past efforts that failed.

— via Truthout, Sharon Zhang

Waymo vehicles have racked up over 2,200 crashes reported to federal safety regulators, 14 times the next highest total. Meanwhile Sergey Brin pushes 60-hour workweeks, says AI makes management "the easiest thing," and spent $102 million fighting a California billionaire tax he dodged by moving to Nevada.

— via Revolving Door Project, Xaver Clarke