Here Are All the Tech Bros Helping Elon Musk Gut the Government

A small cohort of unelected Silicon Valley investors have been quietly helping Donald Trump and Elon Musk interview personnel for the incoming administration.

Marc Andreessen was among those directly involved in recruiting and interviewing efforts for positions in Trump’s incoming administration, three people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, under the condition that they remain anonymous. Andreessen hasn’t just been making decisions about tech or economics, two fields which he might have some knowledge of—he’s also been advising on candidates for defense and intelligence posts as well, said one of the people.

The technocrat is one-half of Andreessen-Horowitz, a venture capital firm invested in tech companies, such as Facebook, Coinbase, and Musk’s X. Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their plans to support Trump in July. At the time, Andreessen claimed that his decision to support Trump did not “have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” meaning immigration or inflation, but was motivated purely by his own personal gain as one of the self-proclaimed “world’s largest crypto investors.”

So, in addition to getting an administration that would alleviate some of the Biden administration’s pressure on cryptocurrency and other technologies (Andreessen said Trump’s victory felt like a “boot off the throat”), he has successfully bought himself a seat at the table.

As an investor in X and a fellow Silicon Valley ghoul, Andreessen has a personal connection to Musk, the unelected and unqualified czar of the Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to remove unelected and unqualified federal employees. During an interview in a December episode of Bari Weiss’s podcast, Andreessen said that he was an “unpaid volunteer” for DOGE, and said the caliber of people he’d spoken with about government positions was “very high.”

Others technocrats who have been lending a hand with DOGE are Shaun Maguire, general partner of Sequoia Capital; Baris Akis, the founder of Human Capital; and Vinay Hiremath, the founder of Loom, according to The New York Times.

Hiremath described the highly technical process of working with DOGE in a very strange and personal blog post shared on X on January 2.

“Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said ‘yes’. Then he said ‘cool’ and I was in multiple Signal groups,” Hiremath wrote.

“The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast,” he wrote.

He added that while the mission of DOGE was “extremely important,” he chose to leave the project after four weeks to focus on himself. “What is wrong with being insignificant? Why is letting people down so hard? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out,” he mused.

Like Andreessen, it seems that Maguire also paid for his seat at the table. He previously donated at least $500,000 to Trump’s campaign through Musk’s shady America PAC.

Donald Trump’s lobbyist friends are starting a nationwide campaign to convince the public that Republicans’ lopsided 2017 tax cuts—which benefited large corporations and the wealthy—should be renewed.

In a minute-long TV ad, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, described the Trump tax cuts as “a landmark law that gave hardworking Americans much-needed relief.” It then rattled off a list of statistics before blaming Bidenomics for inflation while scary music played.

AFP’s version of events goes against every piece of evidence that emerged after the tax cuts went into effect.

If the law is extended, households in the top 1 percent of income on average will receive tax cuts of more than $60,000, while households in the bottom 60 percent will get only $500, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Wage growth is tepid … and gross domestic product growth is slowing and projected to revert to its long-term trend or below,” the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019. “Meanwhile, budget deficits are higher due to revenue losses—which have largely been triggered by the massive corporate tax cut at the heart of the TCJA [Trump’s tax cut bill].”

And yet AFP is committing to its own fictional story, even describing its Koch-funded initiative as “grassroots.” But not everyone is buying it.

“Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families,” Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl told Common Dreams. “But don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me.”

Some unexpected musicians are slated to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, including some with long histories of beefing with the president-elect.

So far, country singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood and disco group the Village People have agreed to perform at the forty-seventh president’s inaugural ceremony.

“We are announcing today that VILLAGE PEOPLE have accepted an invitation from President Elect Trump’s campaign to participate in inaugural activities, including at least one event with President Elect Trump,” Victor Willis, a founding member of the group, wrote on Facebook, arguing that the event would be an opportunity to bring the country together. “We know this wont make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics.”

That is in spite of the group’s legal history with the former president. Willis himself issued a cease and desist letter to Trump in 2020 after the Republican presidential candidate refused to stop playing “Macho Man” and the “Y.M.C.A.,” calling Trump’s repeated use of the song a “nuisance.” (Willis later defended Trump’s use of the song, claiming he didn’t “have the heart” to tell Trump to stop dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”)

The Village People were among dozens of artists who sued Trump for playing their music without permission (or compensation) at his campaign rallies. Other offended artists included Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Underwood, meanwhile, is expected to sing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” at Trump’s ceremony. The country music star has skirted political labels for years, but in 2017, she took an open jab at Trump during the Country Music Awards, parodying her song “Before He Cheats” to include a controversial line about Trump’s incendiary social media habits.

“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure/’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war … and then maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” Underwood sang alongside Brad Paisley.

Still, in an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Underwood attempted to claim that her politics were undefined.

“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said at the time. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”

Trump struggled to find musicians to perform at his last inauguration, with reports circulating that some of his favorites—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Garth Brooks, and Sir Elton John—roundly rejected the invites.

Judge Aileen Cannon has slapped down an attempt to block special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case.

That will effectively make Smith’s summation of the failed criminal investigation available to the public. The dissemination of Trump’s classified documents case will be set to a hearing, per Cannon’s Monday memo.

In a filing last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the memo, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report. But Garland never intended to make the so-called second volume on Trump’s classified documents case public, instead planning to hand the report to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Cannon had initially ordered on January 7 that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect.

Cannon’s ruling stated that Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after the Eleventh Circuit ruled on the case.

The decision was a score for two of Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who argued that the release of the reports would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

But the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Cannon’s decision last week, leaving Cannon with little option but to rescind her order.

The first volume of Smith’s report will likely become public after Cannon’s initial temporary injunction expires at midnight—unless the Eleventh Circuit intervenes again.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election. He resigned from the Justice Department last week.

This story has been updated.

In the weeks leading up to Mark Zuckerberg’s sweeping changes to Meta’s content moderation policies, the billionaire technocrat had plenty of time to talk to Donald Trump, but apparently no chance to run the decision past his oversight board.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor on Meta’s oversight board, told NPR’s All Things Considered Friday that his advisory group had not even been consulted on the decision to remove content filters for some bigoted and dangerous language targeting women, ethnic and religious minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ+.

“This actually came as a surprise to us. We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,” McConnell said.

This is particularly troubling, considering that the oversight board’s primary function is to review cases on appeal from Meta users to see whether the company’s decisions are in line with its values—something that seem to be rapidly changing.

While Zuckerberg may not have floated Meta’s rightward policy shift past those involved in adjudicating those actual policies, he did apparently have plenty of time to talk to Trump.

Senator Markwayne Mullin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on an episode of The Benny Show Thursday that Zuckerberg had begun speaking regularly with the president-elect.

“Mark met with President Trump the day before he announced that they were going to change the way they do censorship, essentially,” Mullin said.

“The big announcement that he made the other day, President Trump, and spoke about that, and Mark had been down to see the president several times already,” the Oklahoma Republican added.

Elon Musk was fact-checked on his own livestream after making false statements about the California wildfires, and Gavin Newsom was quick to call out the tech mogul on social media.

In a post on X Sunday night, the California governor posted an excerpt from the livestream, where Musk was receiving a briefing with the command team handling the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Musk asked an emergency official twice about water to fight the fires being available in the Malibu area but not in the Palisades.

The official corrected Musk, pointing out there was not a water shortage but that the fire required much more water than could be pumped.

Right-wing pundits and commentators have come up with a number of different reasons at the root of the wildfires, from attacking California Democrats for their “far-left policies” to making the racist claim that “DEI” was a major cause. In reality, while better prevention measures could have been taken, Musk, Donald Trump, and other conservative personalities are using the disaster to score political points without offering much help.

Even the conservative claim that better water management could have mitigated the wildfires doesn’t hold up. Experts in the area told CNN last week that the magnitude of these fires, among the worst in U.S. history, makes it impossible for even the best preparation and equipment to put out the blazes.

“I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA, said to the network.

Musk, Trump, and conservative actor James Woods, among others, have all made the false claim that water reservoirs in the affected areas are empty, even as the state of California said they were “brimming.” It’s no surprise that Newsom would seize upon Musk getting corrected to his face by an emergency management official, on his own livestream to boot. Perhaps the tech mogul and the rest of the opportunistic right should stop spreading misinformation and leave the firefighting to the experts.

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is being chastised by MAGA faithfuls after saying some January 6ers shouldn’t be pardoned. 

“If you protested peacefully on January the 6th and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned,” Vance said on Fox News. “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned. And there’s a little bit of a gray area there, but we’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”

This statement got some immediate backlash online. 

“Telling your own supporters that the election was stolen and then not giving them a pardon or commutation after you sent them into what you call a ‘fedsurrection’ and ‘trap’ is a betrayal,” wrote Philip Anderson, an  insurrectionist who was arrested for misdemeanor charges connected to January 6. “All of the J6 defendants must be saved. JD Vance is wrong and I hope Trump will save his own supporters.”

“If Trump got a ‘get out of jail free’ card, then so should EVERY ONE of his supporters who rallied for him on January 6th,” alt-right grifter Nick Fuentes said on X.

An X account alleging to be incarcerated January 6er Jake Lang wrote angrily, “The J6 Hostages families have been CRUSHED by the mixed messaging coming from the White House on the J6 Pardon Process recently. WE ARE UTTERLY CONFUSED!!”

Vance later tried to walk back his comments. “I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial,” he wrote on X. 

Vance’s statement was much softer than Trump’s, who has recently reaffirmed that he was looking at “major pardons” for insurrectionists even if they were charged with violent offenses. 

Over 1,200 people have been charged for their actions on January 6, according to the Department of Justice. Of that number, 120 people were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer, while 11 were charged with assaulting a member of the media. Approximately 140 police officers were injured.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s phony science is starting to piss off people actually in the business of weather.

On Sunday, the renowned conspiracy theorist claimed that manufacturing rain would be the obvious solution to ending the devastating Los Angeles blaze that has so far killed 24 people and burned more than double the acreage of Manhattan.

“Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?” Greene wrote on X. “They know how to do it.”

Cloud seeding involves releasing aerosols, such as silver iodide particles, into clouds to encourage more rain or to change the type of precipitation into hail or snow, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which Project 2025 wants to gut. (That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions, which would include national weather alert systems for emergencies including flash flooding, extreme heat, wildfires, and earthquakes.)

But Greene’s antidote to the inferno totally misunderstands the advanced weather modification practice, which is completely dependent on preexisting moisture in the air as well as nearby storms to seed. It also misses the fact that California is in the middle of a historic drought, which impedes the presence of either of those things.

“Please keep politicians away from weather,” Bryce Jones, a meteorologist with WDRB News in Louisville, Kentucky, posted on X. “And keep politics entirely out of it. This is exhausting.”

It’s not the first time Greene has cooked up some unorthodox ideas about California’s wildfires. In a 2018 Facebook post (two years before she took office), Greene linked alleged sightings of “lasers or blue beams of light” to the cause of the Golden State’s fires. She then, apropos of nothing, further tied those sightings to the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish banking family often targeted by antisemitic conspiracies, who she believed were clearing the land for rail stations.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is going for the jugular on Elon Musk.

In an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published Wednesday, Bannon lambasted the world’s richest man as a “truly evil guy” who would be out of Trumpworld by Inauguration Day.

“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time [Donald Trump is] inaugurated,” Bannon told the paper. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon continued. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

Bannon was himself, at one point, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe. He served as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight. Bannon has been developing his ire against Musk since he finished a four-month stint in the clink in October for a contempt conviction.

It is currently unclear what formal role, if any, Bannon will hold in Trump’s new administration. But despite his fall from grace, Bannon has continued to posit his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur similarly assumed he’d continue to wield power under a future Trump administration, promising to slam MSNBC with “prosecutions and accountability” for reporting that Trump lost the 2020 election.

At the heart of Bannon’s rift with Musk is the Tesla CEO’s staunch defense of the H-1B visa work program, which Musk has insisted serves as a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor.

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon told Corriere della Sera, slamming Musk as a “techno-feudalist.”

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,” Bannon said. “His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on.”

Bannon also took a jab at Musk’s heritage, questioning why a white South African—whom he described as the “most racist people on earth”—would be allowed to have any role of authority on “what goes on in the United States.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso wants to use the relief for those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles County as an opportunity to reform liberal policies in California.

During an interview Sunday on CBS News, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed the Wyoming Republican on whether he thought Republicans were at all interested in helping those who had lost their homes, businesses, and belongings, despite the fact they live in a liberal state.

“Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don’t like their local politics in the party?” Brennan asked.

“I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time,” Barrasso replied.

Barrasso claimed that the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” though did not explain what policies specifically he was talking about. It’s not entirely clear what liberal policies would have contributed to the widespread devastation, only that the fast-moving fire quickly depleted the water reserves in the Pacific Palisades.

But Barrasso has a loose grip on liberal policies anyway: He once baselessly claimed that the Green New Deal would ban livestock, marking an end to cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

Last week, MAGA Representative Warren Davidson said that he didn’t see how congressional Republicans could possibly support aid to struggling Californians without enforcing some of their own policy changes.