Tag: billionaires

Ukraine Regained Territory After Cutting Russia’s Black Market Starlink Terminals

According to a newly declassified U.S. defense intelligence assessment first reported by Bloomberg, Moscow’s frontline command-and-control structures suffered a catastrophic blackout earlier this year due largely to coordinated crackdown that disabled thousands of black market Russian Starlink terminals.

The Pentagon document highlights just how deeply Russian forces had come to rely on Elon Musk’s commercial satellite terminals to patch over their own spotty military communication systems. For months, Russian units bypassed international sanctions via shadow supply networks to source the hardware.

The Friday Bloomberg report claims that a “Ukrainian offensive against Russia earlier this year retook about 400 square kilometers after thousands of portable Starlink internet terminals operated by Russian forces were deactivated,” citing analysis from the US Defense Intelligence Agency. 

The document, authored jointly by the DIA and US European Command, states that “Russian military capabilities in Ukraine were temporarily yet significantly degraded following Ukrainian officials’ efforts in February to deactivate thousands of Starlink terminals that were illicitly used by Russian forces to coordinate movements and unmanned aircraft strikes in areas where communications were unreliable or easily jammed.”

Ukrainian forces then made their first territorial gains since 2023, after years of steady Russian gains, with Russia military comms now said to be “temporarily yet significantly degraded” due to the loss of the terminals.

The report further describes that Kiev forces working in tandem with SpaceX were able to deploy sweeping geographic restrictions that target-locked and deactivated unauthorized terminals operating inside the combat zone. This resulted in “instant” results.

What also didn’t help is the Kremlin’s own tightening restrictions on the use of Telegram by Russian forces, and so also the recent lack of this favored encrypted messaging platform among military units left frontline commanders totally isolated.

While US intelligence noted that Russia still maintains an overall structural advantage in raw combat functions, and of course manpower and firepower remains on Moscow’s side, the incident demonstrates that communications are still a vital backbone to any modern warfare and command system.

SpaceX has long sought to officially bar Russian consumers from using Starlink, due to long-running sanctions, and to prevent military use against Ukraine.

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Bezos Torches AOC, Says Billionaires “Earn Every Penny”

Jeff Bezos sat down for a wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box this morning at a Blue Origin facility in Merritt Island, Florida – where he rattled off lots of thoughts, including how billionaires are made, slammed AOC, and opined on the relative impact of for-profit innovation versus charity, taxes, and bureaucratic inefficiency. 

On Wealth Creation and “Unearned” Billionaires

Bezos directly responded to criticism from figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who has argued that accumulating $1 billion is inherently “unearned.” He rejected the notion with a straightforward analogy:

“Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you start a burger joint, and you have 10 employees, and you make a little bit of money… Until you have – this is just one outlet. And by the way, these are the most delicious burgers in the world. People love your burgers, Andrew. And so then you open a second outlet… and now you’re making a little bit more money, and you have 20 employees. And you open a third outlet. By the time you’ve opened a thousand outlets, you are a billionaire… This is a real life story. It happens all the time. It’s In-N-Out Burger, it’s Raising Cane’s Chicken… The way you make a billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, or 10 million dollars, or anything, is you create a service that people love. And if millions of people choose your service, you’re going to end up with a billion dollars… But your chicken has to be good.”

For-Profit Companies vs. Charitable Giving

Bezos argued that the societal impact of successful businesses far outweighs traditional philanthropy when done right:

“If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.”

He pointed to customer testimonials, including letters from new mothers who relied on Amazon as an essential service—especially during the pandemic—and noted that innovations like fast delivery and broad access create broad-based value that philanthropy alone cannot match. Bezos added that he plans to give away the vast majority of his wealth during his lifetime.

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The Steyer Smear

Billionaire Tom Steyer used his money to attack a lone climate researcher.

Roger Pielke Jr.’s research on climate and disaster policy wins awards and is cited by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“My views are entirely mainstream,” says Pielke. “My work is cited by all three working groups of the IPCC. There’s nothing contrarian.”

Both Steyer and Pielke agree that “greenhouse gases warm the climate,” but Pielke’s sin was saying, “it’s not the apocalypse.”

Because of that, “the Center for American Progress decided to make me a target,” he says.

The center is a lefty group that pushes climate hysteria, running articles claiming, “Climate change is fueling more deadly and destructive floods,” “Extreme weather is only intensifying,” etc.

Anyone who disagrees is labeled a “climate denier.”

Steyer, now running for governor of California, gave the center enough money to run hit piece after hit piece that describes Pielke’s work as “fantastical falsehoods,” and calls him a “disinformer” who “ignores the data on climate science.”

Pielke didn’t know who funded the smears until WikiLeaks revealed an email to Steyer from ThinkProgress’s editor: “Thanks for your support of this work … it’s fair to say, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change.”

Think about that.

“Progressive” activists are proud to stop a researcher from writing about what he knows.

Pielke describes his persecution in my new video.

It began after Al Gore’s Oscar-winning movie in which Gore claimed that temperature increases create stronger storms.

Pielke had the nerve to disagree.

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Trump Praises Liberal Billionaire Mark Cuban at White House TrumpRX Event, Says Kamala Harris Endorsement Was “a Big Mistake”

Mark Cuban, the liberal former Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank co-host, made an appearance alongside President Trump at the White House on Monday to announce an expansion of the President’s TrumpRX website. 

Cuban’s online pharmacy, Cost Plus Drugs, along with Amazon Pharmacy and GoodRx, are set to list over 600 generic drugs on TrumpRX at lower costs for consumers. Cuban said 559 of the drugs come from his company.

“I’ve been the biggest proponent of TrumpRX.com,” Cuban said in brief remarks at the event. “Republicans want cheaper drugs. Independents want cheaper drugs. Democrats want cheaper drugs. And together, I think we’re going to do something special.”

However, Cuban has never supported Trump, frequently attacking him and supporting Kamala Harris in 2024.

One America News Network’s Daniel Baldwin asked the President about Cuban’s history as a Never Trumper, and Trump squashed the beef.

“he’s got a good company, and he’s going to do a lot of business with this,” Trump said, describing Cuban as “very gracious.” He continued, “I think I have a lot of respect for Mark, frankly, and I always have.”

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Jury Sides Against Musk in OpenAI Lawsuit

A federal jury in Oakland, California, went against Elon Musk Monday in a case he brought against OpenAI, alleging the company’s leadership “stole a charity” when they converted it into a for-profit entity.

Through his lawsuit, Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, sought the removal of Sam Altman as CEO and company president Greg Brockman from their leadership roles, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk also wanted an “unwinding of the company’s recent conversion to a more traditional governance structure and damages worth more than $180 billion to be paid into an OpenAI foundation,” the news outlet added.

The jury found all of Musk’s claims fell outside the statute of limitations.

Fox Business reported that Musk left OpenAI in 2018 when he was unable to persuade the company’s leadership to merge with Tesla. OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT.

“In his lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI of violating its founding mission as a nonprofit to develop AI for the benefit of humanity when the startup created a for-profit entity in 2019,” Fox Business said.

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X Agrees to Review Illegal “Hate” Within 48 Hours Under UK Online Safety Act

X has agreed to process the vast majority of content flagged as illegal “hate” under the UK’s Online Safety Act within 48 hours, giving Ofcom, Britain’s speech regulator, a significant new enforcement win.

The platform committed to “review and assess UK suspected illegal terrorist and “hate” content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool on average within 24 hours of it being reported, to be calculated as a mean” and to “review and assess at least 85% of UK suspected illegal terrorist and hate content reported through its dedicated UK illegal content reporting tool within a maximum of 48 hours.”

The deal is a notable reversal for a platform that, less than a year ago, publicly accused Ofcom of taking a “heavy-handed approach” and warned that the Online Safety Act was “seriously infringing” on free expression.

X’s August 2025 statement, titled “What Happens When Oversight Becomes Overreach,” called out regulators by name and argued that the law amounted to a “conscientious decision to increase censorship in the name of ‘online safety.’” That language is gone now. What’s left is a compliance agreement with specific performance targets and a 12-month reporting obligation.

The commitments go beyond speed of review. X also agreed to block access to accounts in the UK if they are reported for “posting UK illegal terrorist content” and deemed to be “operated by or on behalf of a terrorist organisation proscribed in the UK.”

The platform will share quarterly performance data with Ofcom so the regulator can audit compliance. And following complaints from organizations that couldn’t tell whether X had received or acted on their reports, X agreed to “engage with experts regarding reporting systems for illegal hate and terror content.”

Who those experts are tells you something about the direction of travel. Ofcom’s own press release names the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) as one of the organizations it worked with to “gather evidence about suspected illegal terrorist content and illegal hate speech online.”

The CCDH is a pro-censorship campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney, who went on to become UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

McSweeney stepped down from CCDH’s board two days after Starmer became Labour leader. The organization maintains close ties to the current government and has stated that its goal was to “kill Musk’s Twitter,” according to leaked internal documents reported by Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker.

Ahmed himself was sanctioned by the US State Department in December 2025 over concerns that his organization had led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” A federal court blocked his deportation with a temporary restraining order.

This is the organization Ofcom chose to help build the evidence base for pressuring X into compliance. Ahmed, for his part, welcomed the deal. Speaking to POLITICO, he said CCDH will be “watching closely to ensure this results in meaningful action, not just words.”

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NAACP Sues Musk’s xAI Over Memphis Data Center Pollution

The NAACP has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, alleging that the company’s massive Memphis data center is causing harmful air pollution in surrounding communities. The legal challenge targets the facility that Musk has positioned as critical infrastructure for xAI’s ambitious AI development plans, raising questions about the environmental cost of the AI boom. The lawsuit marks a significant collision between Silicon Valley’s race to build AI supercomputers and environmental justice concerns in communities hosting these energy-intensive facilities.

xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, is facing a federal lawsuit from the NAACP over alleged air pollution stemming from its Memphis data center operations. The civil rights organization filed the complaint targeting the facility that Musk has described as essential to xAI’s efforts to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Meta in the race to build more powerful AI systems.

The Memphis facility represents a massive bet by Musk on scaling AI infrastructure quickly. The world’s richest person selected the greater Memphis area as a hub for xAI’s computational buildout, drawn by available industrial space, power capacity, and local tax incentives. But that rapid expansion is now colliding with community concerns about environmental impact.

The NAACP’s lawsuit alleges that emissions from the data center are degrading air quality in nearby neighborhoods, many of which are predominantly Black communities that have historically borne disproportionate environmental burdens. The legal challenge puts a spotlight on an often-overlooked aspect of the AI boom: the physical infrastructure required to train large language models consumes enormous amounts of electricity and generates substantial heat, requiring extensive cooling systems that can impact local environments.

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Bombshell: Left-Wing Tech Billionaires Are Paying the Full Salaries of Dozens of ‘Journalists’ at Top Media Companies

If you want to talk about media corruption, how about the discovery that a left-wing political organization has embedded 80 “journalists” in the corporate media by paying their full salaries?

Breitbart News has previously reported on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s dark money election meddling, as well as Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s deep penetration of President Joe Biden’s administration with AI activists.

Behind this corruption is a far-left, globalist organization called Effective Altruism (EA), which the New York Post describes as a “billionaire-backed movement [that] aims to solve the world’s problems” which wants to send the message that “unchecked AI will destroy us all,” and that we must “prioritize causes like climate change, global health, poverty, [and] pandemics.”

EA wants to end factory farming. Okay, and replace it with what — insects? We have to feed 8.3 billion people every single day.

No one should blame EA. These fascist tech bros are merely doing whatever it takes to further their fascist cause. If you believe in something, you take every advantage to promote it.

What is obscene here…

What is indefensible here…

What is inexcusable here is this:

To spread their message the group has the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism — funded in part by EA foundations — which pays full salaries of journalists placed inside such newsrooms as Time, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and The Guardian, NBC News, and The Verge.

Then there’s Ezra Klein at the New York Times:

New York Times superstar columnist Ezra Klein has maintained deep, longstanding ties to EA and its billionaires, and even uses his widely read NYT column to solicit donations to them.

How can you call yourself a progressive if you solicit donations to an organization run by… billionaires?

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Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI make their final case in a trial that could shape AI’s future

Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their final arguments Thursday in the landmark trial whose outcome could shape the future of artificial intelligence.

Musk, the world’s richest man, was a co-founder of OpenAI, which started in 2015 and went on to create ChatGPT. His lawsuit filed in 2024 accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his top deputy of betraying a plan to keep it as a nonprofit and shifting into a moneymaking mode behind his back.

The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that increasingly has raised fears about its potential impacts on the economy, society and even humanity’s survival. Scrutiny of Altman’s leadership comes at a crucial time for the company and its competitors, Musk’s own AI firm and Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders.

All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be among the largest ever. Musk is seeking damages and changes to OpenAI’s business structure, as well as Altman’s ouster from company leadership. If Musk wins, it could derail OpenAI’s IPO plans.

Timing of lawsuit is key question
One of the jury’s tasks is to decide if Musk filed his lawsuit in time. Much of the testimony has centered on OpenAI’s early years after its founding, but there’s a relatively short timeline to allege the claims Musk is making of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment.

OpenAI has argued that Musk waited too long and cannot claim harms that occurred before August 2021.

The judge wrote in a court filing last month that “if the jury finds that Musk failed to file his action within the statute of limitations, it is highly likely” that she will “accept that finding and direct verdict to the defendants.”

If the jury decides the lawsuit was filed in time, it then has to decide if OpenAI had a “charitable trust” that was broken by OpenAI and its executives. Musk’s other claim means jurors must determine whether Altman, Greg Brockman — co-founder and president — and OpenAI unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense.

For Microsoft, a co-defendant in the trial, the jury has to decide whether the company aided and abetted that breach. Musk invested $38 million in OpenAI during its first years, and Microsoft became OpenAI’s biggest investor after Musk’s departure.

Musk lawyer focuses on Altman’s credibility
Altman and Brockman were in the courtroom Thursday, while Musk was in China with President Donald Trump and other prominent tech executives.

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Billionaire Friend of Swalwell and Dem Donor Stephen Cloobeck Arrested in Los Angeles

Lefty casino and timeshare mogul Stephen Cloobeck, who once called Swalwell his “little brother” and poured over $1 million into his failed campaign for California governor, was arrested in Los Angeles on Tuesday on a felony charge of attempting to prevent or dissuade a witness from testifying.

Last month, Cloobeck dramatically cut all ties and kicked Swalwell out of his luxurious $26 million Beverly Hills mansion.

Cloobeck also demanded every penny of his cash back after explosive allegations that Swalwell sexually assaulted multiple women, including a former staffer who claims the Democrat raped her while she was too drunk to consent.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported that Swalwell had missed votes in Congress while running for California governor, spending his time hanging out at a multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills mansion owned by one of his top campaign donors.

Swalwell visited the lavish 9,700-square-foot estate on Roxbury Drive on at least 10 different days since September.

Cloobeck’s property features six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a tennis court, double gates, and luxury artwork that Swalwell has used as a backdrop for social media videos and TV interviews.

Congressional records show Swalwell missed House floor votes on at least three days when he posted content from the mansion.

Swalwell missed more votes in 2025 than any other active member of Congress, more than even the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who died in March.

Cloobeck was a major backer of Swalwell’s gubernatorial campaign. He contributed $1 million to a supporting committee, provided resources from his own short-lived 2025 governor bid, and previously spent $31,000 on a trip flying Swalwell to Nice, France, according to congressional gift reports.

Cloobeck publicly referred to Swalwell as his “Little Brother” and confirmed the use of his home for campaign work, saying of one televised hit, “That’s my backdrop. Mi casa, su casa.”

On Tuesday, Cloobeck was arrested in Los Angeles just weeks after booting Swalwell from his mansion.

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