Elon Musk Just Hijacked Trump’s Saudi Visit to Land a Major Deal

Elon Musk announced Tuesday that Saudi Arabia had approved the use of Starlink, as part of his mounting efforts to use Donald Trump’s trip abroad to boost his many businesses. While speaking with Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Alswah on the White House–led trip, the billionaire bureaucrat thanked Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for approving his SpaceX–owned and operated satellite internet service for aviation and maritime use.

But Starlink wasn’t the only one of Musk’s businesses that got a plug to the president’s foreign friends. Musk said that he had shown Trump and MBS several of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, which are still undergoing development. Musk warned last month that China’s suspension of rare earth metals exports, amid Trump’s slowly deescalating trade war, could potentially delay manufacturing.

Musk also discussed his ambitions to bring Tesla’s robotaxis to Saudi Arabia.

“I think it would be very exciting to have autonomous vehicles here in the kingdom, indeed, if you’re amenable,” Musk said. The U.S. National Highway Safety Administration is still probing Tesla on how well these autonomous vehicles will function in poor weather conditions, including sun glare and dust, which could potentially decrease their utility in a city like Riyadh, which experiences frequent sand storms.

But it seems Musk had a solution for this: He pitched that the Saudi government construct tunnels with the help of his Boring Company. “In order to solve traffic, you really need to go 3D with roads,” Musk said, describing tunnels as a novel kind of “wormhole” and not a classic feature of public infrastructure.

Musk began to plug his infrastructure and tunnel service after being prompted by Alswah to discuss yet another one of his companies, xAI. He described the goal of that project as to produce a “maximally truth-seeking” artificial intelligence.

“What questions do we not know to ask? Once you know the question, the answer is the easy part,” Musk said.

Alswah called Musk a “lifetime partner” to the kingdom, and said they were “joining hands” on “XAi, Starlink, robotics, and Tesla.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s first day in Saudi Arabia was off to a sleepy start. The president was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with MBS, shutting his eyes and jerking awake.

The world record holder for oldest person to be sworn in as U.S. president can’t seem to keep up with the Saudis.

Donald Trump was filmed falling asleep during a briefing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tuesday. Trump could be seen shutting his eyes and jerking awake.

The meeting consisted of signing more than a dozen agreements between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, focusing on the governments’ economies, militaries, and cultural institutions, according to the Associated Press.

Podcaster Brian Allen torched the caught-on-camera faux pas as “surreal and frankly humiliating.”

“This isn’t jet lag—it’s a walking security risk with a nap schedule,” Allen posted on X.

The 78-year-old’s long-awaited medical report was released in April, describing Trump as being in “excellent health,” including neurological functioning.

“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State,” the report read. Prior to the report’s release, the president said he took a cognitive exam and “got every answer right.”

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several—but his recollections of the tests called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

While bragging about his results to the press, Trump would invariably tweak the questions he allegedly received on the test, at times boasting that he had correctly recited five words and performed basic multiplication while at other times insisting that he had passed thanks to correctly identifying a whale. That is in spite of the fact that the test’s authors reported that none of the three versions in circulation actually had a whale on them.

And Trump has struggled with staying awake in public before—even when all eyes are on him. In April 2024, Trump was caught shutting his eyes during pretrial hearings for his criminal case involving porn star Stormy Daniels.

Donald Trump is paving the way for white South African “refugees” to come to the United States, but they’re not all that interested in taking him up on his offer, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The U.S. president falsely claimed Monday that Afrikaners, the white descendants of mainly Dutch colonizers in South Africa, are facing a “genocide” in their home country. So then why don’t they actually want to leave?

Maritz Grobler, a tenth-generation South African on his father’s side who owns a sprawling 1,000-acre farm in Settlers, wasn’t interested in the offer to relocate. “This is my country,” Grobler told the Journal.

“But it’s good to know that [Trump] will back us … if shit happens,” he added.

While white South Africans are the target of horrific crimes, they are killed in significantly lower numbers than Black South Africans, according to the Journal.

White people account for roughly 7 percent of South Africa’s population of 63 million people, and of that number, Afrikaners make up about two-thirds, so roughly three million people in total. Despite having a vastly smaller population, white commercial farmers—the majority of whom are Afrikaners—still possess about half of the country’s land and produce a whopping 90 percent of its agricultural products. In 2024, South Africa’s agricultural exports were worth a record $13.7 billion.

Afrikaners have therefore maintained a hefty chunk of the nation’s wealth. Only 1 percent of white South Africans live in poverty, compared to nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans. This accumulated land and wealth is the direct result of systemic historical racial oppression under South African apartheid.

Despite one Trump official’s claim that white South Africans have been given an exception to Trump’s refugee ban because they would be supposedly easier to assimilate into the majority-white U.S. population than refugees from other countries, Grobler said that the cultural difference was still too great.

“I don’t want to speak English for the rest of my life,” Grobler said. White South Africans typically speak Afrikaans, not English. But it seems that language barrier likely won’t incense Vice President JD Vance the way it did when the hypothetical immigrant children he was mad at were brown.

Grobler told the Journal that politicians “seek power and money and get it through playing the race card and hammering on historic events.

“South Africans on the ground will be able to move forward together if politicians get out of the way and go do their bloody jobs,” he added.

Donald Trump’s appearances on several podcasts last summer helped him cinch important voting blocs, such as young male voters—but now the president’s economic plan could damage the audio industry.

All items on the consumer price index rose by at least 0.2 percent in April, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But some industries were hit even harder. Prices for audio equipment, for instance, rose by 8.8 percent, according to market columnist Sam Ro, who has a Substack called TKer.

“Podcasters are getting crushed,” Ro posted on X.

The president’s tariff rollout has been remarkably bad for business, sending investors on a roller-coaster ride since he first announced the plan in early April. As a result, working- and middle-class Americans have lost thousands of dollars in retirement savings, businesses have stalled on critical long-term decisions, and America has lost some of its most important international allies.

It was only the reversal of Trump’s corrosive tariffs on China—which on Monday dropped to 30 percent from 145 percent for the next 90 days—that rallied the markets.

The news also made the dollar flourish, surging 1.1 percent against several other currencies in the wake of the tariff pause to hit a one-month high. The dollar was still down 2.3 percent, however, since Trump first announced his sweeping plan.

“Now the conditions are falling into place for a deeper adjustment and a bigger recovery of the dollar to catch up with U.S. equities and bond yields,” Kenneth Broux, senior strategist at Societe Generale in London, told Reuters.

Still, market columnists have been quick to note that the 90-day truce between the two countries is “not a deal.” The Trump administration has promised sector-specific tariffs—something that could fundamentally undermine the fragile $600 billion trade agreement set in place over the weekend.

Trump has argued that tariffs are the best solution to closing the country’s trade deficits, which he has incorrectly likened to taxpayer-backed “subsidies” for other nations. He has claimed that without tariffs, the U.S. is transferring wealth to other countries while receiving nothing in exchange. He has also pitched that hiking tariffs on other nations would bring jobs and manufacturing opportunities back to American shores, but economists don’t agree with either point.

Instead, droves of financial and economic experts have insisted that tariffs on other nations will only serve to harm America and its markets, making products more expensive stateside and making American consumers less likely to spend their money (something that Trump doesn’t seem to have any problem with, actually). The Harvard Kennedy Business School even floated in April that America’s trade deficit basically doesn’t matter, writing that “Americans earn more from, or earn just about as much from, their total investments abroad as foreigners earn in the United States.”

Donald Trump announced a weapons deal with Saudi Arabia worth $142 billion Tuesday, bragging that it is the “largest” arms deal in history.

According to a fact sheet released by the White House, the deal, which was signed on the first day of Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, will provide “state-of-the-art warfighting equipment and services from over a dozen U.S. defense firms.” The U.S. will also help train the Saudi armed forces, including Saudi service academies and military medical services. The White House says the arms deal is part of a “historic $600 billion investment commitment” from the country.

The announcement comes after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged a $600 billion investment in the U.S. in January during Trump’s first phone call to a foreign leader as president. The White House is floating the idea of renaming the body of water to the “Arabian Gulf,” a move that will please Saudi and the U.S.’s other Arab allies.

Trump has extensive business ties with Saudi Arabia, with his company announcing the multimillion dollar Trump Tower Jeddah in December. Trump has also hosted Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments and events at his clubs, and an investment fund belonging to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has taken $2 billion from Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund.

Kushner has been advising White House officials about negotiations with Arab leaders in advance of Trump’s trip to the Middle East, specifically about normalizing ties with Israel. He reportedly speaks with bin Salman every week, and is trying to convince Gulf states, and particularly Saudi Arabia, to normalize ties with Israel.

The weapons deal could be part of a larger deal in which Saudi Arabia announces normalization with Israel, which has long been sought by the U.S. Right now, though, Trump and his associates are more concerned with deals that make money, regardless of whatever human rights concerns come from the Saudi regime.

This story has been updated.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is placing a hold on all political appointments at the Department of Justice until Attorney General Pam Bondi provides answers over Qatar’s $400 million luxury plane gift to Donald Trump.

Schumer plans to announce the move on Tuesday morning on the Senate floor, and it will be the first time that he will be placing a blanket hold on presidential nominees. The New York senator will also ask the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit to come clean on any Qatari foreign agents inside the United States who could benefit Trump or his businesses, which seems like an allusion to Bondi’s past job as a lobbyist for Qatar.

Punchbowl News reports that Schumer wants to know the specifics of the deal, including how it affects an existing contract with Boeing to provide the planes for Air Force One.

“Until the American people learn the truth about this deal, I will do my part to block the galling and truly breathtaking politicization at the Department of Justice,” Schumer will say, according to Punchbowl.

Trump has tried to explain away the jet gift as something other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, have also done, even though that isn’t true. In addition to Democrats, some of Trump’s biggest fans on the right have come out against the deal. Even though Trump claims the gift is “free,” it will likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in modifications to meet Air Force One standards.

In effect, this plane isn’t really a gift, but a bribe, especially considering that earlier this month, Trump’s businesses cut a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar. It’s good that Schumer is taking action, but it’s coming after many other ethical issues in the Trump administration that apparently didn’t warrant a hold on nominees.

Joe Biden’s decline was obvious in the final months of his presidential campaign, but new and intimate accounts by his staffers reveal that the president’s inner circle conducted a cover-up of his faltering mental acuity as early as 2023.

Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, doesn’t hit shelves until May 20. But some early glimpses at the book, published Tuesday by The Guardian, provide a more detailed picture of the chaos endemic to the end of Biden’s tenure.

“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023,” one unidentified senior aide, who quit the White House in protest of Biden’s campaign, told Thompson and Tapper.

“I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him,” the aide continued. “Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”

A Democratic strategist who spoke to the reporting duo was more blunt.

“It was an abomination,” the strategist said. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

“Since at least 2022,” Biden struggled to maintain his trains of thought. He wavered on his top aides’ names. His speeches dragged.

“When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious,” The Guardian reported.

His regression summoned prominent Democrats to issue stern warnings. In a 2023 visit to the White House, former President Barack Obama reportedly cautioned Biden: “Just make sure you can win the race.” Days before Biden dropped out, then–Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told him that, should he usher in another Trump era due to his own hubris, he would “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”

“You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden reportedly told Schumer as the senator left.

Power players on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team had searing reviews of the president’s performance.

“He totally fucked us,” David Plouffe told Thompson and Tapper. Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and had been tapped to help Harris’s 107-day-sprint to the White House, which he described as a “fucking nightmare.”

“It’s all Biden,” Plouffe said, remarking that Harris’s campaign had begun in a “deep hole,” thanks to Biden’s insistence on staying in the race.

Tapper and Thompson interviewed some 200 individuals for the book, but none of their perspectives swayed Biden—then or now. Last week, while speaking with The View, the 82-year-old continued to deny allegations that he had and was experiencing symptoms of mental decline.

“They are wrong,” Biden said. “There is nothing to sustain that.”

There’s no such thing as a free plane.

Donald Trump has claimed that he is receiving a “free, very expensive plane” from the Qatari royal family—but while it may be free to him, it will be very expensive to the American taxpayer, according to Politico.

The Qatari Defense Ministry is currently considering transferring a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet to replace Air Force One, which would be one of the largest gifts from a foreign government to a U.S. president ever. While the plane has the same base model as others used to transport the president, this plane wouldn’t be ready to fly day one; it would require costly modifications.

“This isn’t really a gift,” Connecticut Representative Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, told Politico. He warned that the jumbo jet would have to be completely rebuilt by the Department of Defense.

“You’d basically have to tear the plane down to the studs and rebuild it to meet all the survivability, security and communications requirements of Air Force One. It’s a massive undertaking—and an unfunded one at that.”

The plane would need to be outfitted with self-defense technology and electromagnetic shielding.

Former Air Force acquisitions chief Andrew Hunter told Politico that this massive, unfunded undertaking could end up costing a pretty penny. “The cost of a retrofit like this would likely be on the order of a heavy maintenance cycle for a VC-25A, which is in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Hunter noted that there would also need to be a complete security sweep of the plane’s software that could end up costing tens of millions. “That’s not a trivial thing to do,” he said.

Maintaining the plane could also prove expensive. According to a 2021 estimate from the Pentagon, each VC-25B plane costs more than $2.5 billion and will cost a projected $7.7 billion for long-term operations and support costs over the next 30 years.

Trump has claimed that the plane will be “decommissioned” into his Presidential Library Foundation at the end of his term.

The gargantuan gift has summoned criticism from Democrats and Trump’s usual critics, but even his far-right allies are infuriated by the blatant show of corruption. Receiving a luxury plane from Qatar looks like a bribe, especially considering the Trump family business’s recent deal to build a luxury golf resort in the Gulf nation.

Trump is replacing the first Black librarian of Congress with his own personal lawyer.

The Justice Department on Monday announced that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead defense lawyer in his Stormy Daniels hush-money case, will be acting librarian of Congress. Blanche will replace Dr. Carla Hayden, who held the position since 2016 until she was fired on Friday.

The White House blamed Hayden’s firing on her support for DEI.

“We felt she did not fit the needs of the American people,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” The Librarian of Congress is a research position, not a book-lending position. Hayden was not handing out “woke” books to children. She was leading the “Of the People”campaign, which aimed to showcase works from Black, indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander and other communities of color in the library collections.

Donald Trump made it easier to deport Afghans on the same day that he welcomed white South African “refugees” arriving in the country.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced Monday that the government is ending the temporary protected status for Afghanistan, putting the legal residency of 9,000 Afghans in the U.S. in jeopardy. Noem claimed in a statement that conditions in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have improved enough for TPS for Afghans to expire on May 20, with the program being terminated on July 12.

“Afghanistan has had an improved security situation, and its stabilizing economy no longer prevent them from returning to their home country,” Noem’s statement reads. “Additionally, the termination furthers the national interest as DHS records indicate that there are recipients who have been under investigation for fraud and threatening our public safety and national security.”

President Biden extended TPS to Afghans after the Taliban took over Afghanistan following the U.S. military withdrawal from the country in 2021. Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees, many of whom worked with the U.S. military, subsequently arrived stateside. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would not renew temporary protections for Afghans in the United States.

The Trump administration has considered one exception to its plan to deport Afghan refugees: Christians, who potentially face persecution if they return to the country. But that’s of little comfort to Afghans of various faiths who face an uncertain and dangerous future if they are deported to the hard-line authoritarian country, especially if they worked with U.S. forces.

“What the administration has done today is betray people who risked their lives for America, built lives here, and believed in our promises,” nonprofit group #AfghanEvac, which helps resettle Afghan families in the U.S., posted on X on Monday.

The move comes on the same day that the Trump administration is welcoming white Afrikaner “refugees” from South Africa while continuing to ban most other refugees. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said Monday that the Afrikaners were admitted because they could be “assimilated easily” into the U.S., a racist confirmation that the administration sees white South Africans as preferable to Black and brown immigrants.

Afghan refugees reading the news on Monday will likely feel betrayed by the U.S., especially those who put their lives on the line to assist the U.S. military during its two-decade presence in Afghanistan. It seems that the only threat they pose to “national security and public safety” is being the wrong race or following the wrong religion for the Trump administration.