Bless

 

Look at the man.  He IS AI.  I want to know who built HIM.  Hybrid?

Techbro bullshit

It's not unusual for tech company CEOs to make the journey to Washington, DC, and announce billion-dollar investments to curry favor with politicians in power. Apple CEO Tim Cook was in the Oval Office last month, a piece of Apple-shaped glass and a 24-karat gold base in hand, to pledge another $100 billion in US investment over the next four years, for a total of $600 billion.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg perhaps had that number on his mind this week when he joined his fellow Silicon Valley heavy hitters at the White House for a dinner with President Trump. Zuckerberg was seated next to the president, who at one point leaned over and asked him, "How much are you spending, would you say, over the next few years?"

A flustered Zuckerberg responded, "Oh gosh, um, I mean, I think it's probably going to be something like, at least $600 billion through '28 in the US, yeah."

"That's a lot, that's a lot," Trump said.

It is indeed. Once the discussion concluded, Zuckerberg leaned over to Trump to privately admit the president had caught him off guard. "I'm sorry I wasn't ready...I wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with," Zuckerberg said in a revealing moment caught on a hot mic.

  PCMagazine

Total bullshit 24/7.

Fuck Zuck

 

Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, opened the schools to help communities of color. Some families wonder if the shutting of the schools is related to his D.E.I. retrenchment.

  NYT

Sounds like a logical guess.

Got stock?

Breakthroughs from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek have stunned Silicon Valley and could bring turbulence to Wall Street, as they were accomplished at a fraction of what the U.S. giants are spending and despite export bans on top-of-the-line chips.

  Axios

The Magnificent 7 stocks — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla — were also down sharply in premarket trading, dragged lower by Nvidia but also the broad tech sell-off in general.

[...]

The S&P 500's incredible run the last two years has been heavily tied to the Magnificent 7 — but as a result, the market's gains are more heavily concentrated in that small handful of stocks than they've been in decades.

In a period of such heavy concentration, what goes up can come down very, very quickly.

[...]

The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks are heavily leveraged to hundreds of billions of dollars in planned AI investment — and the entire market, in turn, hangs on their performance.

[...]

Investors worldwide stand to lose more than $1 trillion on Monday because of the sudden fear that the market-sustaining AI spending boom might have been for nothing.

[...]

There's a global rout in tech stocks Monday, caused by a panic linked to the new Chinese AI platform DeepSeek.

Last week the company released its R1 model, which competes with the world's very best from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — but it's free, open-source, and was developed at a tiny fraction of rivals' costs.

That's driving fears that the planned AI spending boom, with its hundreds of billions of dollars in capex on data centers and chips and power, might not be necessary if there's a way to do it faster, cheaper and better with old hardware.

As of 6am ET, shares of AI chip giant Nvidia were down more than 13% in premarket trading, implying a loss of more than $500 billion in market capitalization at the open.

S&P 500 futures were pointing to a drop of more than 2%, an unusually heavy decline seen only a few times a year.

  Axios

How is this Joe Biden's fault?  Because, I'm sure we'll hear it is.

American techbro billionaires might be in a spot of bother.

DeepSeek's rise is alarming the likes of Meta, which announced Friday that it plans $60 billion-$65 billion in capital investment this year as it scales up its own AI projects.

  Axios

Is that wasting money?

[I]t could potentially also be bad news for Nvidia, which designs the world's most advanced AI chips, because DeepSeek is proving that rapid advances are possible even with fewer and less sophisticated chips.

Nvidia's stock slid on Friday and again in overnight trading last night, pulling the Nasdaq down with it.

[...]

DeepSeek created and released its entirely open source project for about $6 million in training costs ("a joke of a budget," in one expert's words). OpenAI is spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 04:09 pm:

U.S. tech stocks are plummeting as China looks to be exposing American companies involved in AI as wildly overvalued. It’s a predictable consequence of how the American government has approached Silicon Valley and vice versa. This isn’t the kind of thing we normally cover, but we don’t quite trust the U.S. media to tell this story accurately.

[...]

Lina Khan, as chair of the Federal Trade Commission under former President Joe Biden, became a folk hero as she warned that greed and consolidation weren’t just harming consumers and workers, but that the sclerotic companies themselves would eventually suffer from the lack of competition. “Our history shows that maintaining open, fair, and competitive markets, especially at technological inflection points, is a key way to ensure America benefits from the innovation these tools may catalyze,” Khan said in 2023.

Now it’s become clear that the moat the U.S. built to protect its companies from domestic competition actually created the conditions that allowed them to atrophy. They got fat and happy inside their castles. Their business pivoted from technological innovation to performing alchemy with spreadsheets, turning made-up metrics into dollar valuations detached from reality. Now DeepSeek has exposed the scam. With a tiny fraction of the resources, and without access to the full panoply of U.S. chip technology, the Chinese company DeepSeek has pantsed Silicon Valley.

[...]

DeepSeek is ironically fulfilling OpenAI’s original mission by providing an open-source model that simply performs better than any in the market.

[...]

Meanwhile here in the United States, Trump is celebrating a (possibly exaggerated) $500 billion investment in Texas to fuel AI computer power that appears to be made obsolete—or much less relevant—thanks to DeepSeek’s innovation. And Trump is stacking his administration with crypto bros, tech moguls refusing to divest, and even launched his own scam meme coin. Trump’s senior tech advisers like Elon Musk meanwhile have extensive commercial ties directly with China. You don’t have to squint too hard to see which of these countries is going to win this competition.

[...]

It’s common to say that most people don’t own individual stocks, but that understates the exposure we all have to this scam. It’s in our IRAs or 401ks and the rise of those stocks made up nearly all of the growth of the stock market in recent years.

[...]

Big tech companies have also been telling the government and investors that building AI is very very expensive. In his first week in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has announced $500 billion in private sector investment in AI under a project called Stargate—a collaboration between OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle.

In the past OpenAI founder Sam Altman has claimed that he would need as much as $7 trillion to create his dream AI and was raising investment using that target. For context, no man in the entire history of the world has ever spent that amount of money on a single thing. But the underlying message seems to be: this is a magical technology and a force more powerful than any the world has ever seen, we need astronomical amounts of money to build it and we need the protection of the U.S. government while doing so.

[...]

[DeepsSeek] used $5.5 million worth of computational power.

[...]

They released the DeepSeek-V3 model last month, a model that outperforms OpenAI GPT-4 and all other models in the industry in most benchmarks. There isn’t any significant development in the basic technology, they just use hardware efficiently and train their model better.

[...]

DeepSeek has released its model and training methods as open source software, meaning anyone can see how they made their model and replicate the process. It also means that users can install DeepSeek models on their own machines and run them on their own GPUs, where they seem to be performing very well.

[...]

“The accusations/obsessions over DeepSeek using H100 sound like a rich kids team got outplayed by a poor kids team, who weren't even allowed shoes,” tweeted Jen Zhu, an AI investor, “and now the rich kids are demanding an investigation into whether shoes were used instead of training harder to improve themselves.”

[...]

The social contract struck between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley—which the American people became an involuntary party to—was straightforward: We will let a handful of tech bros become unfathomably wealthy and in exchange they will build a tech industry that keeps America globally dominant. Instead, the tech bros broke the bargain. They took the money, but instead of continuing to innovate and compete, built monopolies to keep out competition—even getting the help of the U.S. national security state to block Chinese access to our tech. But they couldn’t keep out of the competition forever. Lina Khan was right. And now here we are.

  DropSite

Can we get our $500 billion back, or is that just up in smoke? Rhetorical question.

UPDATE 02/03/2025:

Meta super lawyer quits

He’s not a famous name in the wider world, but copyright lawyer Mark Lemley is equal parts revered and feared within certain tech circles. TechDirt recently described him as a “Lebron James/Michael Jordan”-level legal thinker. A professor at Stanford, counsel at an IP-focused law firm in the Bay Area, and one of the 10 most-cited legal scholars of all time, Lemley is exactly the kind of person Silicon Valley heavyweights want on their side. Meta, however, has officially lost him.

Earlier this month, Lemley announced he was no longer going to defend the tech giant in Kadrey v. Meta, a lawsuit filed by a group of authors who allege the tech giant violated copyright law by training its AI tools on their books without their permission.

[...]

Lemley said on LinkedIn and Bluesky that he still believes Meta should win the lawsuit, and he wasn’t bowing out because of the merits of the case. Instead, he’d “fired” Meta because of what he characterized as the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.” The move came on the heels of major policy shifts at Meta, including changes to its hateful conduct rules that now allow users to call gay and trans people “mentally ill.”

  Wired

There will be no DEI in Trumpworld

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meta messaging: What this country needs is more testosterone

A lawyer representing Meta in a copyright case said he was dropping the company as a client due to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “descent into toxic masculinity.”

[...]

Mark Lemley, a partner at law firm Lex Lumina PLLC and director of Stanford Law School’s Program in Law, Science & Technology said he was firing the social media giant as a client in a social media post on Monday.

[...]

The move comes as employees and associates of the social media company grapple with their founder’s apparent attempts to pivot rightward before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration next week.

[...]

Lemley was previously defending Meta in an ongoing copyright infringement case filed by writers including novelist Richard Kadrey and comedian Sarah Silverman, who claim the company trained their generative AI model Llama using their copyrighted works obtained through piracy websites.

  Daily Beast

Last week, Meta announced a series of changes to its content moderation policies and enforcement strategies designed to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. The company ended its fact-checking program in the United States, stopped scanning new posts for most policy violations, and created carve-outs in its community standards to allow dehumanizing speech about transgender people and immigrants. The company also killed its diversity, equity and inclusion program.

Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation.

[...]

The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.

[...]

[A]fter the company’s own analyses found that [its AI] classifiers could reduce the reach of these hoaxes by more than 90 percent, Meta is shutting them off.

[...]

The company plans to replace its professional fact-checking program with volunteers from the user base appending information to posts in a system modeled after X’s community notes. But Meta has offered few details on how the program will work, and has not said when it will become available.

[...]

For now, these changes only apply to the United States.

[...]

Zuckerberg announced today that he would cut another 5 percent of his workforce, or around 3,600 people, targeting “low performers.” Most layoffs inspire a significant number of demoralized employees to quit; this move should be taken as another push toward the door for employees who believe in newly taboo ideas such as that Meta should employ men and women in equal numbers.

  Platformer

Mark Zuckerberg lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies that have sought to distance themselves from “masculine energy”, adding that it’s good if a culture “celebrates the aggression a bit more”.

“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Mr Zuckerberg said during an almost three-hour-long conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan published on Friday.

  Financial Review

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/17/2025:

Trump is about to lie all over Threads

No doubt Zuck is looking to capture some of the Trump posting engagement Twitter and Truth Social have.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Time to quit Facebook if you haven't already

Companies Meta owns.  (Includes Instagram and Messenger)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/10/2025:

I never noticed before that Mark Zuckerberg is painting his face orange, too.  Is this new?

MAGA

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 01/10/2025:

I never noticed before that Mark Zuckerberg is painting his face orange, too.  Is this new?

Bending the knee - Part whatever

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 1/6/25:

Filming on the Melania bio-pic began last month and will be directed by Brett Ratner. It is based of her autobiography ‘Melania’, which was released earlier this year. Ratner has been out of work for the last 10 years since Warner Brothers cut all ties with him after he was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, including actors Natasha Hensridge and Olivia Munn.

  Meidas Touch

UPDATE 01/07/2025:

Oh, we are in a new era, for sure.

UPDATE 01/10/2025:

I never noticed before that Mark Zuckerberg is painting his face orange, too.  Is this new?

The million dollar club

One million gets you six tickets to the inauguration and a dinner with Trump. Or something like that. Obviously, that's not what Altman is really buying.

Bezos and Zuckerberg have both also contributed $1 million to the inauguration fund.  

Watch for Google and other corporations to donate their million soon.

Thing is, the fund has to name its donors and the amounts they give, but it doesn't have to say how it spends the money.  An accounting for Trump's first inauguration leaves some question as to where the money went.  We know some of it was improperly spent, because Trump had to pay a settlement to the District of Columbia for funneling donations to the Trump Hotel.

Where do you think all the money is going?

But what will one BILLION get you?

President-elect Donald Trump vowed Tuesday that people or companies who invest at least $1 billion in the U.S. will get “fully expedited approvals and permits.”

Trump said in a post on Truth Social that environmental approvals are included as part of that investment incentive.

“Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” Trump wrote.

  CNBC

Yes, America - indeed the earth's environment - is for sale.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

No smooth transition possible in Trumpworld

Trump [...] announced he was dropping William McGinley as his WH Counsel, who he nominated three weeks ago, and is replacing him with David Warrington. That is now 3 Trump nominees who have already been replaced as the chaotic shit show rolls on.

[...]

Apparently, the reason for Mark Zuckerberg’s secret meeting over the weekend with Trump at Mar-a-Lago is that he is concerned about rival Elon Musk having complete sway over tech and AI policy moving forward and he wants a seat at the table. As we know with Trump, that all depends on what Zuck is willing to do for him.

[...]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he isn’t worried that Elon Musk might try to use his new political power and influence with Trump to gain any unfair advantages for his private businesses: “It would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt your competitors. I don’t think Elon would do it.”

  Meidas Touch

Foolish or sarcastic?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12/06/2024:  That didn't take long...

Vivek Ramaswamy said that it is likely that the DOGE committee run by himself and Elon Musk will recommend that the $6.6 billion loan to Tesla competitor Rivian be revoked. The loan is being made so Rivian can build a new plant in GA. Not too much of a conflict of interest here. Maybe GA Gov Brian Kemp will have something to say about this.

  Meidas Touch

And what difference would that make?

Irony is still not dead

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Zuckerberg takes a page out of Musk's playbook

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, confused a lot of people last weekend when it said it will begin selling $12-a-month subscriptions starting in Australia and New Zealand, and eventually the United States. No, it is not going to charge everyone for using its social networks.

Instead, Meta is testing a paid account “verification” service. That will come with a blue check mark after they’ve checked your ID and something desperately needed by everyone on Facebook: access to real-human customer service to deal with rampant account lockouts and hacker takeovers. They see your vulnerability as a business opportunity.

  WaPo

To be fair, they see EVERYTHING as a business opportunity, so don't take it personally.

Elon Musk’s Twitter recently said it will start charging for a basic security feature that used to be free. Going forward, Twitter says that two-factor text-message authentication will only be available to people who subscribe to its $8 Blue service.

[...]

While the details are different, both companies’ moves remind me of the protection rackets run by mobsters: force people to make regular payments in exchange for “security.”

Again, to be fair, mob tactics have been proven to work.

Twitter’s shift, [Rachel Tobac, the CEO of SocialProof Security] said, is the equivalent of secretly undoing someone’s seat belt while they’re driving; Facebook’s money grab is like charging them extra to send help when they get in a crash.

Twitter users can move to Post (Pulitzer) or Mastodon. And Facebook users can probably quit Facebook. Unless, of course, you use it for business.

“One of the reasons Facebook accounts are taken over so frequently is because so few users have the second step when they log in. They are easily phished or tricked,” [said a security expert]. (You can, and should turn this on now here.)

Yes, you should.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

LOL

Good with a caveat

Guardian explains

The caveat: It wasn't a ban.  It was an indefinite suspension, something the Board says isn't in Facebook's rule book, so it sent the matter back to Zuckerberg...

Rather than accepting, or rejecting, the suspension, the oversight board referred the decision back to Facebook. Its rationale is well-argued: Facebook doesn’t have anything in its rulebook about “indefinite suspensions”, and so it clearly has not applied its rules to Trump at all.

[...]

The entire point of the oversight board was to insulate Facebook from the consequences of its power – and the entire point of that was to insulate Mark Zuckerberg from the consequences of his power. By creating the board, Zuckerberg ensured that the most controversial calls would be out of his hands, allowing him to wield sole control over the most important communications network in the world without taking sides on questions of what should be on that network.

Now, for a second time, Zuckerberg will find himself chairing a meeting to decide whether or not to ban Donald Trump from Facebook. For a second time, half of America will never forget his decision, whichever choice he makes. And for a second time, he runs the risk of whatever choice being overturned down the line by the independent body he set up to overrule him.

“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” Trump said in a statement just hours after the decision was announced by Facebook's Oversight Board.

“The People of our Country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our Electoral Process,” he continued.

  The Hill

Again with the projection. Also, social media can't take away anyone's free speech.

Twitter has similarly banned Trump from posting on the platform, but that suspension is permanent.

Facebook should do the same.

Is Mark Zuckerberg a white supremacist?

In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, “Political Influences on Content Policy.” Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that [Facebook]’s policy team “regularly protects powerful constituencies” and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

[...]

In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet’s most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened.

Jones had gained infamy for claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a “giant hoax,” and that the teenage survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were “crisis actors.” But Facebook had found that he was also relentlessly spreading hate against various groups, including Muslims and trans people. That behavior qualified him for expulsion from the social network under the company's policies for "dangerous individuals and organizations," which required Facebook to also remove any content that expressed “praise or support” for them.

But Zuckerberg didn’t consider the Infowars founder to be a hate figure, according to a person familiar with the decision, so he overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones’ legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world’s largest social network.

"Mark personally didn’t like the punishment, so he changed the rules,” a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

  Buzzfeed

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Facebook buckles to advertising pressure

Facebook Inc said on Friday that it will start labelling newsworthy content that violates the social media company's policies, and label all posts and ads about voting with links to authoritative information, including those from politicians.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the company's new policy would have covered a link on United States President Donald Trump's post about mail-in ballots last month, to which Facebook's smaller rival Twitter affixed a fact-checking label.

  alJazeera

Zuckerberg had bold reasons of morality and integrity to resist until advertisers started dropping.

The policy change follows an advertising boycott campaign by several US civil rights groups pressuring the company to act on hate speech and misinformation gains traction.

Shares of Facebook and Twitter both fell more than seven percent on Friday after Unilever PLC said it would stop US ads on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for the rest of the year, citing "divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the US."

Unilever, which owns brands like Dove soap and Lipton tea, and Japanese carmaker Honda Motor Co Ltd's US subsidiary both joined the growing ad boycott against Facebook as part of the "Stop Hate for Profit" campaign started after the death of George Floyd.

[...]

More than 90 advertisers including Unilever's Ben & Jerry's, Verizon Communications Inc and The North Face, a unit of VF Corp, have joined the campaign, according to a list by ad activism group Sleeping Giants, a partner in the campaign.

[...]

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a live-streamed company town hall that Facebook would ban ads that claim people from groups based on race, religion, sexual orientation or immigration status are a threat to physical safety or health.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Facebook helped Trump in 2016

James Barnes spoke with the Wall Street Journal over the last three weeks to detail how he helped guide the Trump campaign to use Facebook tools and products to Trump’s advantage. Barnes left Facebook this spring, and says he is now dedicated to using the same digital-ad strategies he helped Trump exploit to get him out of office in 2020.

  The Daily Beast

Well, thanks, asshole. Now everbody knows what those are and can defend against them.

Barnes told the Journal that he felt pressure while at the company and described in detail how he felt Facebook’s role helped launch Trump to victory. While he says he remains supportive of Facebook’s mission, he said he is uneasy about the reach of the company’s political influence. He told the paper the one question that nags him about his time with Facebook is, “Did I actually do the right thing?”

Obviously, no. And particularly since you're doing the opposite now.

Barnes, a Facebook employee embedded with the campaign and who was once called its “MVP,” took his digital talents to the liberal group Acronym. He came to the organization as it charts out a $75 million plan to help liberals close the gap with Trump online.

“I was absolutely crushed the morning after the election,” Barnes said on Acronym’s podcast, FWIW.

[...]

Barnes, previously a Republican, supported Trump’s campaign through Facebook’s program to help political candidates use the platform. Hillary Clinton also had support from Facebook.

  Vice

Zuckerberg isn't stupid. Like any corporation, they're going to grease palms on both sides so they're always in position no matter which side wins.

“It just was not adopted on the left as it was on the right,” [Tatenda Musapatike, a staffer who worked with Democrats' campaigns] said of Facebook’s efforts. “There were established ways of doing things and I think Democrats were really, really cautious to change — to, I think, our detriment.”

The boot-strapped Trump campaign, however, embraced Barnes’ guidance. It pumped out torrents of cheap, at-times divisive ads to highly targeted audiences, spreading its message and culling small-dollar fundraising.

[...]

Facebook will be even more central to the 2020 contest. Trump has vastly outspent his Democratic rivals so far, crushing fundraising records and enticing users to share all-important personal data.

[...]

“One thing I want to be really clear on is that I voted for Hillary Clinton,” he added. “I despised Donald Trump from the moment I learned of him. And my commitment in the 2016 election had much less to do with supporting him or his platform and a lot more to do with supporting Facebook’s commitment to democracy.”

Keep telling yourself that.

President Donald Trump hosted a previously undisclosed dinner with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook board member Peter Thiel at the White House in October, the company told NBC News on Wednesday.

[...]

Zuckerberg also gave a speech at Georgetown University the week before, detailing his company’s commitment to free speech, and its resistance to calls for the company to crack down on misinformation in political advertisements.

[...]

It is unclear why the meeting was not made public or what Trump, Zuckerberg and [Facebook board member Peter] Thiel discussed.

[...]

The dinner was the second meeting between Zuckerberg and Trump in a month. Zuckerberg also met with the president in the Oval Office during a September visit to the capital.

  NBC

Gee...let me think...what could they be talking about?

A major donor to Trump’s campaign, Thiel is also the chairman of Palantir, a private data technology company that has become one of the largest recipients of government defense contracts with the United States government since Trump took office.

Thiel famously bankrolled an invasion of privacy lawsuit that effectively bankrupted the gossip website Gawker. Zuckerberg’s speech at Georgetown, which he delivered on the same trip in which he met with Trump, was titled “Standing for Voice and Free Expression.”

Probably never batted an eye at the contradiction.

On Wednesday, Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook toured an Apple manufacturing plant in Austin, Texas.

Trump and Cook have maintained a very public working relationship as the Apple CEO seeks to keep Apple products exempt from the president’s tariffs on China.

What's the quid pro quo?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Sorry, I can't get to the WSJ because it's behind a pay wall.  If I find another article that quotes more of it, I'll post below.

UPDATE: