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.

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

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...

Between the earthquake/tsuanmi scare, the UnitedHealthcare shooting and the South Korea martial law stuff this week, it feels like Bluesky is getting more and more critical mass around breaking events that made Twitter so sticky and useful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The first known detention by the US Marines in their recent Los Angeles deployment is of... a US Army veteran on his way to an office at the Department of Veteran Affairs building. www.reuters.com/world/us/us-...

Exclusive: US Marines carry out first known detention of civilian in Los Angeles, video shows

Marines deployed to Los Angeles carried out the detention of a civilian on Friday, the U.S. military confirmed after being presented with Reuters images, in the first known detention by active-duty troops deployed there by President Donald Trump.

This is horrific and feels like it should be a bigger deal. Business Insider reports that people who have worked at xAI have seen Grok create images and written material with child sex abuse material.

www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-gr...

Behind Grok's 'sexy' settings, workers review explicit and disturbing content

Workers say they've faced sexually explicit content while xAI has marketed Grok to be deliberately provocative. Experts say the company should be cautious.

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...

It speaks to the interest in Epstein that a detail from Dems today has created a frenzy about Peter Thiel. But anyone already following knows there are many ties between Thiel and the pedophile.

As my colleague @mattgoldstein26.bsky.social reported: Epstein invested w/ Thiel as recently as 2016.

Jeffrey Epstein Invested With Peter Thiel, and His Estate Is Reaping Millions

The Trump administration used Benny Johnson's claims that his house was "burned to the ground" and that "people were murdered in my front yard" to justify its federal takeover of DC.

@kenbensinger.bsky.social found out that Johnson made it all up.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/b...

He Plagiarized and Promoted Falsehoods. The White House Embraces Him.

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...

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.

Russell Vought, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and one of the authors of Project 2025, just ordered the agency's staff to effectively cease all operations in an org wide email.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/u...

Federal Financial Watchdog Ordered to Cease Activity

In an email to staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency’s acting director ordered workers to cease “all supervision and examination activity.”

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.

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.

In the last 48 hours, Musk's reactions to the Epstein release show exactly why he bought Twitter.

He's used the platform to call coverage of his emails with Epstein as "lies," elevated his fans who have defended him, and gotten positive reinforcement from his AI chatbot.

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.

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

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.

Big scoop from @kirstengrind.bsky.social, @ericlipton.nytimes.com and @sheeraf.bsky.social: There are at least 3 federal reviews into Elon Musk for failing to report the details of his foreign relations as required by his security clearance

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/t...

Elon Musk and SpaceX Face Federal Reviews After Violations of Security Reporting Rules

Federal agencies have opened at least three reviews into whether the company and its leader complied with disclosure protocols intended to protect state secrets, people with knowledge of the matter sa...