Of Course Elon Musk’s Charity Is Skirting the Law

The private foundation of the world’s richest man failed to donate the legally required amount for the third consecutive year.

Per what’s known as “the 5 percent rule,” private foundations are required by law to direct at least 5 percent of their assets toward charitable causes. The Musk Foundation is among the largest of such foundations, boasting $9 billion in assets, including millions of shares of Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla.

But The New York Times reported Thursday that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the 5 percent rule in 2023, making it the third year in a row that it missed the mark. The foundation was short by $234 million in 2022 and $41 million in 2021, but later forked up to cover those gaps and avoid a penalty tax.

In contrast to the foundations of other wealthy philanthropists, which tend to focus on broad social causes and the public good, Musk’s private foundation is somewhat unconventional in its focus on serving the interests of its founder. The charity also has no hired staff and is instead run by a three-member volunteer board, including Musk himself.

As the Times reported in March, the Musk Foundation “has been haphazard and largely self-serving—making [Musk] eligible for enormous tax breaks and helping his businesses.” In 2021 and 2022, around half of the foundation’s donations were linked in some way to Musk himself, his businesses, or his employees, according to the Times.

For failing to meet the legal minimum, the foundation “can distribute more the following year as a make-good”—or pay a hefty penalty to the IRS.

But Musk recently indicated that the IRS could be on the chopping block of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency under the Trump administration. “The IRS just said it wants $20B more money,” Musk posted on his platform X last month, asking users to vote on whether its budget should be “increased,” “same,” “decreased,” or “deleted.” The latter won with 60 percent of users’ votes.

The ex-FBI informant who accused President Joe Biden and his son Hunter of netting millions of dollars in bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma has admitted that the whole story was a dud.

In a plea deal, Alexander Smirnov admitted to completely fabricating the conspiracy that became central to a Republican effort to impeach the sitting president. Smirnov agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges, which include one count of obstruction of justice and three tax evasion charges, in exchange for the end of two pending criminal cases against him, according to court documents.

In June 2020, Smirnov falsely reported to the FBI that Burisma executives had paid Biden and his son millions of dollars. The fake claim was part of a larger series of unfounded allegations that accused Biden of improperly leveraging his position as vice president (at the time) to prevent a corruption investigation into Burisma, of which Hunter sat on the board. The fraudulent tale also sparked an October surprise in the 2020 election about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon insisted contained evidence that Biden and a Burisma adviser had held a “meeting.” (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)

Smirnov could face anywhere between two to six years behind bars for fabricating the story, though Donald Trump could potentially commute his sentence or outright pardon the conservative witness once he returns to the White House.

In February, the Justice Department revealed that Smirnov admitted to prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in developing the Hunter Biden narrative.

In the ensuing fallout over the DOJ indictment, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”

Republicans had spent months building up the hype around Smirnov as a witness, isolating his allegation that Biden had pocketed millions of dollars from the Ukrainian company as the centerpiece of their probe. But in the end, Smirnov’s faux narrative—and its ability to capture and sway overzealous and power-hungry U.S. politicians—served as just another example of how effectively the Russian government can infiltrate and undermine U.S. elections.

“It targeted the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties in the United States. The effects of Smirnov’s false statements and fabricated information continue to be felt to this day,” prosecutors wrote at the beginning of the year.

Pete Hegseth has repeatedly criticized the U.S. military’s decision to repeal its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy because he thinks it is part of a broader leftist, Marxist agenda.

CNN published an extensive report Thursday detailing statements made by Hegseth, the television host facing allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, in which he grieves the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a Clinton-era policy that allowed gay and lesbian service members to join the military as long as they never told anyone about their sexual orientation. The rule was repealed under the Obama administration.

When asked Thursday whether he opposed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Hegseth said, “Oppose the repeal? No, I don’t.” He called CNN’s report “more false reporting.”

As it turns out, Hegseth has been talking about this for years. During a 2015 appearance on Fox News, Hegseth lamented the decision to allow women and people openly identifying as LGBTQ+ to serve in the military.

“What you’re seeing is a military right now that is more interested in social engineering led by this president than they are in war fighting. So, as a result, through ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ and women in the military and these standards, they’re going to inevitably start to erode standards,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth argued that this kind of change was made simply so military higher-ups “can put them on a recruiting poster and feel good about themselves, and has nothing to do with national security.”

Hegseth did not go so far as to explain exactly what standards these soldiers failed to meet, or how they were specifically detrimental to military operations. This vague criticism seems to be a pattern for Hegseth, who made similar comments disparaging female soldiers, specifically saying they were unfit for combat, but didn’t deign to explain why, simply citing “historical” precedent.

Even in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth provided no real evidence for the dire consequences of these supposedly eroding standards.

He wrote that while he was initially ambivalent about the rule change, he eventually decided that it was the beginning of the end for a military that was being driven to care about social issues more than fighting because, for some reason he never bothers to describe, no organization could do both.

He changed his view, “Not because I have a newfound ax to grind with gay Americans, but because I naïvely believed that’s what ending ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was all about. Once again, our good faith was used against us,” he added.

Ahead of Trump’s election he continued to tout “don’t ask, don’t tell” as part of the efforts of “leftists and Marxists,” and said it was only the beginning of liberal “tinkering” with the military.

A spokesperson for the Trump transition told CNN that, “like President Trump, Pete wants to see the U.S. military focus on being the world’s strongest fighting force—not on cultural and social issues. Bottom line: If you can meet the standards, you can serve.

“But given the threats we face, our priorities shouldn’t be lowering standards and wasting taxpayer money to meet arbitrary social quotas—our priorities should be readiness and lethality.”

This statement seemingly leaves the door open for Hegseth and others at the Defense Department to make way for changes to policies that promote the involvement of women and people identifying as LGBTQ+.

Donald Trump won’t rule out supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

The president-elect sat with Time magazine for a lengthy interview after being named their 2024 “Person of the Year” on Thursday. He was asked directly by the Time staff, “Do you want to get a two-state deal done, outlined in your Peace to Prosperity deal that you put forward, or are you willing to let Israel annex the West Bank?”

“So what I want is a deal where there’s going to be peace and where the killing stops,” Trump replied vaguely.

The Time staff doubled down, reminding Trump that he had stopped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from annexing the West Bank in 2020. Again, he refused to answer directly:

“I’ll say it again, I want a long lasting peace. I’m not saying that’s a very likely scenario, but I want a long lasting peace, a peace where we don’t have an October 7 in another three years. And there are numerous ways you can do it. You can do it two state, but there are numerous ways it can be done. And I’d like to see, who can be happy? But I’d like to see everybody be happy. Everybody go about their lives, and people stop from dying. That includes on many different fronts. I mean, we have some tremendous world problems that we didn’t have when I was president. You know, when I left, we had, we had an Iran that was not very threatening. They had no money. They weren’t giving money to Hamas. They weren’t giving money to Hezbollah.”

Israeli politicians have considered annexing the West Bank for decades, and in the last year, the right-wing government has looked the other way as settler violence in the territory has ramped up. Annexation of the West Bank would essentially kill any possibility of a two-state solution, as the area is considered key to a potential Palestinian state. Complete annexation would be yet another massive human rights violation on Israel’s part that would result in even more suffering and displacement of the Palestinian people.

Trump’s election victory has already invigorated Israeli settlers eager to take over the West Bank. “There has never been an American president that has been more helpful in securing an understanding of the sovereignty of Israel. I fully expect that to continue,” Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, said in a November interview with Israel Army Radio. The rest of Trump’s potential Cabinet, including defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, national security adviser pick Mike Waltz, and secretary of state pick Marco Rubio, are all pro-Israel hard-liners.

The West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. Despite a blatant violation of international law, the West Bank saw 33,000 new Israeli housing units in Trump’s first term, nearly three times as many as in Obama’s second term. His murky foreign policy plans and right-wing Cabinet likely mean that trend will continue.

A highly influential figure in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration has miraculously skirted public attention.

Sergio Gor, a former Fox News booker and onetime Matt Gaetz wedding officiant, will be the next director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, a position that will have him “find, vet, and hire” some 4,000 officials, according to The Washington Post.

Gor’s job will be to “diligently” comb through thousands of options, assessing their loyalty to Trump’s cause. Per Trump’s son Donald Jr., that means understanding their political positions dating back to 2015 and assessing their fealty to Trump in the wake of January 6, 2021.

“What were they doing and saying at that time?” Don Jr. told the Post.

But inside Trumpworld, Gor is his own kind of riot. The book publisher and conservative party DJ has been described by some of the people closest to the president-elect as a “fun presence,” overwhelmingly popular, and “ruthlessly efficient.”

“He gets along with everybody in Trump’s orbit,” Charlie Kirk told the Post. “Which is very unusual. Jared, Ivanka, Don, Eric, the president. He’s an incredibly agreeable figure in Trumpworld, which will make the personnel job a great fit.”

Kirk made note of Gor’s MAGA allegiance, commenting that Gor was one of the few individuals who stuck by Trump’s side during the former president’s “exile period after 2020.”

But it’s not all about affability for Gor, who has seemingly taken the meaning of social climbing to new heights. He visited Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, in prison. He performs Phantom of the Opera songs with the MAGA leader and has been dubbed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago” for his near-constant presence at Trump’s Florida estate.

“I imagine he’s had dinner more in the last year with my father than I have,” Don Jr. told the publication.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner described Gor as a “very easy personality” that people in their orbit trust.

But Gor has also cultivated a reputation for ruthlessness, cruelty, and extreme callousness. Former colleagues in Congress, where he worked as a spokesman for Senator Rand Paul, have painted the status seeker as a “sweet-talking backstabber, bent on accruing power,” who, at one point, tormented a former Paul staffer about her deceased husband, the acclaimed journalist Michael Hastings, after he discovered she had a higher salary than him, reported the Post.

It’s through this patchwork of skills, both opportunistic and cruel, that Gor has made himself an invaluable asset to Trump’s MAGA empire. His well-rounded Rolodex has ushered in a new age for the administration, which Kushner noted to the Post could “barely give away ambassadorships” in 2016, but which now has “basically 20 people competing for every job.”

“The benefit of him having a strong relationship with Donald Trump,” Kushner told the Post, “is that he knows him well enough to know what he’ll care about and what he won’t care about, so he doesn’t have to go to him with every little decision.”