Tag: elon musk

Musk donates $276M to GOP in massive midterms push, marking largest political donation in U.S. history

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and the wealthiest person in the world, has reportedly contributed $276 million to Republican political groups since July, according to a spokesperson.

America PAC is a political action committee founded by Musk in 2024 to support Republican candidates and conservative ballot initiatives. Powered by hundreds of millions of dollars in personal funding from Musk, the organization focuses primarily on large-scale voter canvassing and targeted digital media campaigns.

Ahead of the midterms, Musk is the largest known donor, contributing $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund this summer. The donation ranks among the largest political contributions in United States history, as first reported by The New York Times and later confirmed by Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for Musk’s super PAC.

After pouring more than $76 million into America PAC this summer, Musk saw those funds directed into a sprawling canvassing program targeting hard-to-reach Republican voters.

  • $20 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for House Republicans
  • $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, a group supporting Texas GOP Senate hopeful Ken Paxton (R-Texas.)
  • $10 million to the Republican Governors Association
  • $2 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association

The massive spending marks a sharp reversal from last May, when Musk said he planned to scale back his political contributions, stating, “I think I’ve done enough.”

The Tesla CEO’s substantial financial contributions exemplify his support for President Donald Trump and Republican candidates in the midterms. His super PAC has also confirmed plans to remain active in the 2028 presidential race, positioning Musk to continue playing a major role in Republican politics.

Musk’s massive donation follows President Trump awarding the National Medal of Science to Musk and other tech executives on Thursday.

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US Official Threatens: We Can Overthrow ‘Any Country We Want’

The US ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, threatened to overthrow the government in Athens if it didn’t follow orders from Washington.

Referring to the contemporary collapse of Romania’s government, Guilfoyle told a Greek minister, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here”.

The US ambassador reportedly said this at a dinner in Athens this March, which was attended by multiple US and Greek officials, according to the Washington Post.

Guilfoyle’s remarks recalled a notorious comment from the world’s richest oligarch, Elon Musk.

In 2019, the US government backed a coup against Bolivia’s democratically elected socialist president, Evo Morales.

Musk strongly supported the putsch. On Twitter, a critic responded to the oligarch and accused the US government of “organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there”.

Musk replied, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it”.

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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Taps Elon Musk for New Pentagon Role Focused on Futuristic Warfare

The world’s richest man, the legend, Elon Musk has returned to the Trump administration.

This time, the Tesla CEO is returning to the Trump administration in a new Pentagon role that could give him a direct hand in shaping the future of warfare.

On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Musk will co-lead a new government project that is tasked with studying the future of warfare.

The new project is being called Project Meridian, and according to the Pentagon, its goal is to “identify the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”.

Per The Hill:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced that SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) will lead a new Pentagon effort to study the future of warfare, dubbed “Project Meridian.”

The Pentagon chief said the project is meant to harness America’s innovators, senior leaders and technologists to look decades into the future and “forecast the creative solution for tomorrow’s conflicts.”

“It is futuristic on purpose,” he said of the project, noting it was not meant to develop new strategies or policies

“We should have the humility to recognize that the best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon,” Hegseth continued. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.”

The Department of War revealed that Project Meridian will be completed in 120 days, and that its final report will be unclassified and presented to the public.

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Report: Social Media Platforms Block Paid Advertising for Elon Musk Documentary

Major social media companies including Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok are reportedly refusing to accept paid advertisements for Alex Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Elon Musk, raising concerns that the Masters of the Universe are closing ranks to protect one of their own.

The Hollywood Reporter reports that Bleecker Street, the distributor of Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk, is facing an unprecedented challenge in promoting the film’s October 9 theatrical release. YouTube, TikTok, Meta’s platforms Instagram and Facebook, and Elon Musk’s own X platform have all declined to run paid advertisements featuring the documentary’s trailer, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The rejections have caught Bleecker Street by surprise, prompting the distributor to scramble internally to understand the reasoning behind the decisions. A person familiar with the company’s processes, who is not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that the studio is working to address the situation through appeals.

Perhaps most notably, X, the social media platform owned by Musk himself since 2022, has refused to engage with Bleecker Street representatives about the film or even accept advertising for any other films on the distributor’s upcoming slate. Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” since buying Twitter and renaming the platform.

All three companies that provided explanations cited concerns related to “political content” as their reason for rejection. TikTok and Meta maintain policies prohibiting campaign or other political advertisements. Meta’s policy stems largely from fallout following the Cambridge Analytica scandal during the 2016 election cycle. However, the Musk trailer, which was released on Thursday, does not appear to constitute the type of campaign advertising these policies were designed to prevent. The trailer contains only a shot of a political rally from 2024 and a reference to the 2024 election at its conclusion, elements commonly found in documentaries without constituting political advocacy.

YouTube’s rejection presents an even more puzzling case, as the platform does permit campaign advertisements, requiring only “paid for” disclosures from verified candidates.

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FBI Agent Pushed to Criminally Investigate Elon Musk For Asking About Government Employees’ Weekly Productivity

Senator Grassley on Tuesday released an email revealing a special FBI Agent tried to open a criminal investigation into Elon Musk for asking about government employees’ weekly productivity.

Last year, Elon Musk, through DOGE, asked federal employees to list “five things” they accomplished during the week.

The email was blasted out to federal employees with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”

Musk received intense backlash for asking federal employees to list their weekly accomplishments.

Elon Musk and the OPM later clarified that it was voluntary to respond to DOGE’s “five things” email and that a nonresponse would not trigger in a termination.

Then-Special Agent Kevin Gounaud urged FBI agents to investigate Elon Musk and said the billionaire violated information security policies.

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Elon Musk PAC Steps Up with Big Bucks to Fund Key Swing-State Races

With the midterm elections less than two months away, Elon Musk’s America PAC is funneling money into Maine congressional races to help maintain GOP control.

Musk’s PAC has dedicated $170,000 to ads, phone calls, mailers, and text messages supporting GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who is running against Democrat Troy Jackson, according to The Center Square.

Collins’ seat is crucial for Republicans and could determine which party controls the upper chamber for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 seat majority but have little room for error, given the Senate map.

Initially, Collins’ seat was thought to be safe after her original challenger Graham Platner was marred by scandal.

When he dropped out of the race in July, however, Jackson took his place and gave Democrats a fighting chance.

Platner was initially hailed as a populist hero and was able to survive revelations about a Nazi tattoo on his chest, offensive social media posts, infidelity, and allegations of abuse against former girlfriends.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when he was accused of rape by Maine Democrat Jenny Racicot.

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NHTSA Opens Investigation into Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybercab

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into Tesla’s Cybercab on Friday morning, just hours after the company put the first of the driverless vehicles on the streets of Austin, Texas.

TechCrunch reports that Elon Musk’s Cybercab has no steering wheel and no pedals. That runs headlong into federal vehicle safety rules requiring manual controls even in robotaxis. The Department of Transportation has proposed dropping those requirements for vehicles built to drive themselves, but the change hasn’t taken effect yet. Tesla told NHTSA it self-certified the Cybercab as compliant with all Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards anyway, which is the normal way automakers bring new vehicles to market.

NHTSA said it opened the investigation to “examine the process and technical data on which Tesla relied when certifying the Cybercab and related issues.”

This also happened to Amazon’s robotaxi company, Zoox. In 2022, Zoox self-certified its own vehicle, a cube-shaped robotaxi that also has no steering wheel or pedals. NHTSA hit back that year with a “special order” demanding information from Zoox, then formally launched an audit query in 2023, the same process now aimed at Tesla. Zoox was still deep in testing at the time, and the investigation stretched out its path to commercialization even as the company kept insisting its self-certification was sound.

The scrutiny didn’t stop there. In 2025, regulators granted Zoox an exemption to demonstrate its technology, though not to operate it commercially. Zoox had filed for a temporary Part 555 exemption from eight separate Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. That exemption got final approval in July 2026, clearing one of the last obstacles between Zoox and a commercial robotaxi launch, and letting the company add up to 2,500 vehicles a year to its fleet over the following two years. A few weeks later, Zoox opened commercial service and now charges for rides in Las Vegas

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COSMIC FLOP? Macron’s International Space Summit Not Going According to Plan After SpaceX and Blue Origin Pull Out of Event

A poorly coordinated event may become another Macron failure.

As we previously reported here on TGP, French President Emmanuel Macron’s failing international space summit is NOT going according to plan, with industry leaders like SpaceX and Blue Origin canceling their participation.

Yesterday, the French tried to downplay the American firms’ decision, but reports say the summit is a ‘poorly coordinated event with an unclear outcome’.

Politico reported:

“The U.S. snub is only one of several challenges facing the gathering on Wednesday and Thursday in the French capital. About 120 international delegations have been invited, with Chinese officials expected to attend.

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Elon Musk’s G20 Prediction: 1 Billion Humanoid Robots Will Outproduce All of Humanity in 10 Years

Elon Musk addressed a virtual session of the G20 yesterday, laying out predictions on AI, humanoid robots and regulation. According to Musk, within 10 years, 1 billion humanoid robots will outproduce all of humanity.

CNBC reports that Musk covered four topics: power constraints on AI, the technology’s economic potential, humanoid robotics, and how governments should regulate emerging tech.

Robotics is where Musk got more specific about mechanics. He described humanoid robot usefulness as the product of three factors: AI software, the onboard AI chip, and electromechanical dexterity, particularly in the hands. All three are improving exponentially, he said. Once robots start manufacturing other robots, growth turns recursive: slow at first, then explosive. He called his own ten-year forecast conservative, projecting well over a billion humanoid robots, each roughly five times as productive as a person. Combined, that fleet would outproduce all of humanity. This physical layer, he argued, not the digital economy, is where he expects overall economic output to grow by a factor of ten or more.

On power, Musk cited a consensus estimate that AI chips will face a shortfall of at least 15 gigawatts by 2027. AI chip production is climbing roughly 40 to 50 percent a year, he said, while power generation outside China grows only about 10 to 20 percent annually. That gap, in his view, is what actually limits the industry’s growth, not chip supply itself. Musk said Google, Anthropic and other companies are now leasing computing capacity from SpaceX, which built its own power plants to bring capacity online quickly. China has abundant electricity, he noted, but is blocked from importing the latest chips under GPU export bans. His advice to other countries: build out power generation, host AI data centers, then tax them or charge fees for the privilege.

Musk put a number on the economic upside too: a 20 to 30 percent boost to the global economy from digital AI alone, or roughly $20 trillion to $30 trillion a year. By the end of next year, he said, AI should handle any digital task that doesn’t require physically shaping atoms by hand. On software specifically, he predicted AI will reach “Stockfish-level” within about 12 to 18 months, invoking the chess engine as a benchmark and mentioning Magnus Carlsen, the five-time World Chess Champion, in the same breath. That same window, he said, applies more broadly to AI becoming extremely capable across engineering and other digital work. He also plugged X, the platform he owns, as the place where he said nearly all serious AI discourse happens.

On regulation, Musk’s position was that new technologies should be treated as legal by default rather than illegal by default. He pointed to the European Union as an example of heavy regulation that slows progress without stopping it. Using an image of young saplings against big trees in a forest, he compared startups to the saplings and incumbents to the established trees, arguing that most governments over-support the trees while starving the saplings. Large companies get access to political leaders that startups typically don’t, he said, and he thinks policy should be deliberately tilted toward young companies to correct that imbalance.

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What JPMorgan Saw Inside Tesla’s Fremont Factory As Humanoid Production Nears

Retail flows across Asia remained heavily concentrated in newly listed, high-beta names, most notably Chinese robotics maker Unitree following its blockbuster Shanghai debut. The retail craze surrounding physical AI merely shows Beijing’s accelerating push to dominate the humanoid market.

To close out the week, we pivot across the Pacific for a peek inside the US humanoid-robotics supply chain, where Tesla’s Fremont buildout provides a timely indicator of how quickly physical AI is advancing.

Rajat Gupta, a JPMorgan analyst who covers Tesla, recently toured Tesla’s Fremont factory and reported to clients this week that the facility, once the birthplace of the company’s electric vehicles, is now pivoting toward producing robotaxis and humanoid robots.

Gupta and his colleagues toured the roughly 5-million-square-foot facility and found that the discontinued Model S and Model X production lines are being replaced by manufacturing equipment for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid.

“On Optimus, production lines are being installed at Fremont (the area was tarped off at the time of our visit), and TSLA remains largely on schedule for the targeted four-month transition following the end of S/X production in May, with initial humanoid deployments in 2H26 expected to focus on Optimus Academy for training and data collection, followed by internal factory use and external sales as early as 2H27,” the analyst said.

He said that Optimus robots are not currently working inside the Fremont plant. Initial deployments in the second half of 2026 will instead take place at the “Optimus Academy,” where the robots will collect real-world training data before being deployed in factories.

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