Ryan Mac 🙃

My top Super Bowl memory is when Musk tweeted “Go Eagles” in 2023 from the game and then deleted it after a similar tweet from Biden got more engagement. Then he flew to Twitter HQ and demanded his workers find out why his posts were doing poorly, starting a multi-day fact finding mission.

As someone who spent years reporting on Zuckerberg, I've struggled to find something coherent to say about today. Then @cwarzel.bsky.social reminded me of my old reporting.

This is what a FB employee said to me in 2020 after Zuckerberg addressed workers following FB-enabled violence in Kenosha, WI.

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Ryan Mac 🙃 @rmac.bsky.social

Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships. We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/b...

Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Mingled With Silicon Valley Start-Ups

Honestly would have been more appropriate for Zuckerberg to have made his announcement yesterday so it was on the anniversary of an event his social media platforms helped foment.

I've reported on Musk for around 8 years. I've co-authored a book on him. I don't think folks understand the rate of his wealth accumulation.

Shortly after he helped elect Donald Trump in Nov 2024, his net worth was around $350 billion. That net worth has nearly tripled in less than two years.

We just published a 3,000 word feature on Elon Musk's incursion into the federal government.

Gift link here: www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...

My favorite Super Bowl memory is still when Elon Musk was at the 2023 game in Arizona and panicked about his Eagles tweet getting less engagement than Joe Biden's. He then flew immediately to Twitter's San Francisco office to start emergency meetings to fix the site's algorithm.

new communities like...

*checks notes*

women

All I can think about is Jeff Bezos saying that he slashed jobs at the Washington Post — including those of foreign correspondents in the Middle East — based on "the data," and a few weeks later a whole war breaks out in the Middle East that these laid off folks would have covered as true experts.

Interesting piece, but I resent how Peter Thiel is represented in the Gawker saga.

Thiel didn't "emerge from the shadows" to magnanimously tell the NYT he funded Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. He did it because my colleague and I exposed his involvement.

www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

For the first time in a long time, I think that Bluesky could have the juice

*picks up dirt and breathes in*

“There was a battle here.”

who hasn’t sent millions of dollars to someone who isn’t the mother of their child

This is the supreme irony of the MAGA schism over H-1Bs. Many workers who stayed at Twitter after Musk’s takeover did so because their status in the US was contingent on their employment. They kept a site running that was then used by MAGA folks to question why they were here in the first place.

(he hasn't tweeted in 3 hours)

Pretty incredible that Jeff Bezos' Amazon announced a "$5 billion-plus" partnership w/ a Saudi AI co launched by Mohammed Bin Salman and sent CEO Andy Jassy to meet with him less than 7 years after MBS murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for Bezos' Washington Post.

techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/a...

AWS enters into 'strategic partnership' with Saudi Arabia-backed Humain | TechCrunch

Amazon says it'll work with Humain, the AI company recently launched by Saudi Arabia’s ruler, to invest '$5 billion-plus' in a strategic partnership.

Zuckerberg/Meta launched Threads as an alternative to Twitter/X, capturing a largely liberal userbase unhappy w/ Musk's management. Now that Zuckerberg is supporting the Trump presidency, his replies on Threads are just a deluge of dunks. It's like someone creating their own personal wedgie machine.

For the last few days on X, people (mainly women, and sometimes children) have had nonconsensual images of them in swimsuits (or much worse) requested by users and created by Grok.

Musk's only apparent response thus far has been to crack jokes about it.

jae holzman @jael.bsky.social

so x dot com’s ai generated CSAM and they admitted it may violate US law and … i haven’t seen in anyone in power say much at all or call to stop using the platform

This shows that "doxxing" has become a meaningless, catch-all phrase for anything these guys do not like reported. @klong.bsky.social is an impressive reporter, who simply connected the anonymous postings of a self-declared racist to the public identity of someone directly altering government.

Much has been said about this post, but it's also interesting for non-obvious reasons.

His first person language — "my Starlink system" and "if I turned it off" — is extremely telling. We rarely see him speak so plainly about his unilateral power like this.

To go along with our piece today, we published an extensive list of folks associated with DOGE. It builds off and adds to the strong work that Wired, WaPo, ProPublica and other pubs have been doing.

The public has a right to know who is dismantling the government.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Who Is in DOGE? Tracking Its Staffers and Allies in the Federal Government

The Times identified 49 people within the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a group formed by Elon Musk that in a short few weeks has radically upended federal agencies.

Report on Musk long enough and you start to see him say the same things over and over.

He agreed to buy Twitter then made sweeping accusations about fraud and bots to try to break the deal. He also accused Twitter of harboring "ghost employees" who took paychecks.

www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02...

Signal HQ today

2025

Out: parasocial relationship with TikTokers

In: parasocial relationships with water-dropping helicopters