Last night, X’s “For You” algorithm offered me up what felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. It was a post from Elon Musk, originally published hours earlier. “This is the first time humans have been in orbit around the poles of the Earth!” he wrote. Underneath his post was a video shared by SpaceX—footage of craggy ice caps, taken by the company’s Dragon spacecraft during a private mission. Taken on its own, the video is genuinely captivating. Coming from Musk at that moment, it was also somewhat depressing.

X fed me that video just moments after it became clear that Susan Crawford, the Democratic judge Musk spent $25 million campaigning against, would handily win election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Given Musk’s heavy involvement—the centibillionaire not only campaigned in the state but also brazenly attempted to buy the election by offering to pay voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges”—the election was billed as a referendum of sorts on Musk’s own popularity. In that sense, it was a resounding defeat. Musk, normally a frenetic poster, had very little to say about politics last night, pecking out just a handful of terse messages to his 218.5 million followers. “The long con of the left is corruption of the judiciary,” he posted at 1:23 a.m. eastern time.

In the light of defeat, the SpaceX post feels like a glimpse into what could have been for Musk—a timeline where the world’s richest man wasn’t algorithmically radicalized by his own social-media platform. It’s possible that Musk’s temperament and personal politics would have always led him down this path. But it’s also easy to imagine a version where he mostly stayed out of politics, instead leaning into his companies and continuing to bolster his carefully cultivated brand of Elon Musk, King of Nerd Geniuses.

[Read: The “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the United States government]

Unfortunately, he surrendered fully to grievance politics. Like so many other prolific posters, he became the person his most vocal followers wanted him to be and, in the process, appears to have committed reputational suicide. Since joining President Donald Trump’s administration as DOGE’s figurehead—presiding over the quasi-legal gutting of the federal government—Musk has become not just polarizing but also genuinely unpopular in America. Now his political influence is waning, Tesla is the object of mass protest, and sales of his vehicles are cratering. This morning, only hours after his candidate lost, Trump reportedly told his inner circle and Cabinet members that Musk will be “stepping back” from his perch in the administration for a more “supporting role.” In Trumpworld, nothing’s over until it’s over, but Elon Musk seems to have overstayed his welcome. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred me to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s post calling the report that Musk is stepping back “garbage”; Musk posted on X that the reporting is “fake news.”)

Musk’s appeal to Trump has always been about two things: money and optics. As the richest man in the world, Musk is both a cash cow and a kind of enforcer: His checkbook and closeness to Trump remind Republicans in Congress that they can and will be primaried if they break from the administration. But Musk’s reputation is just as important to Trump, who respects great wealth and clearly enjoys being shadowed and adored by a man of Musk’s perceived stature and technological acumen (although Trump is easily impressed—take, for example, “Everything’s Computer!”) Musk’s image in Silicon Valley was useful to the Trump campaign, bringing in new fanboy voters and sending a message that the administration would transform the government and run it like a lean start-up.

But although his money is still good, the Wisconsin election suggests that Musk himself is an electoral liability. A poll released today, conducted in Wisconsin by Marquette University Law School, showed that 60 percent of respondents view Musk unfavorably, and a recent Harvard/Harris poll shows that his national favorability dropped 10 points from February to March. (He now has a net favorability rating of –10 percent.) An aggregation of national polls shows that the approval rating of his DOGE efforts has also dipped dramatically: Just 39 percent of Americans approve of his work, nearly 10 points lower than in mid-February.

To many observers, it seemed inevitable from the outset that, over time, Musk would clash with, and alienate himself from, Trump, a man who does not like to share the spotlight. But behind Musk’s low favorability rating is a simple notion: Americans (including Trump supporters) are uncomfortable and resentful of an unelected mega-billionaire rooting through the government, dismantling programs and blithely musing about cutting benefit programs such as Social Security. Musk has long behaved in business as though laws and regulations don’t apply to him—a tactic that seems to backfire more easily when applied to politics. His posts, which use captions such as “Easy money in Wisconsin” to offer thinly veiled bribes to state residents for posing outside polling locations, aren’t just questionably legal; they’re blatant reminders that the world’s richest man was attempting to purchase an election.

There is also, perhaps, a creeping sensation that Musk’s efficiency hunt into the government has not yielded the examples of corruption that Trump supporters crave. During a Q&A at Musk’s rally in Wisconsin on Sunday, one attendee asked if DOGE had found any evidence that “radical left” Democrats have received money from USAID, and if so, whether Musk planned to share the evidence. Musk stammered, explaining only that USAID’s money flowed circuitously and that it was suspicious that members of Congress were so wealthy. Throughout the rally, Musk seemed more interested in role-playing as a politician, delivering “extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence,” as The New York Times reported.

[Read: Elon Musk looks desperate]

Trump may be realizing that though tech products and services may be quite popular, their creators are often less appealing. (Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even as billions of people around the world use his platforms.) To those outside of the techno-optimist bubble, plenty of the obsessions of the tech elite (artificial general intelligence, cryptocurrency) can come off as weird or inscrutable. “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence,” Musk posted on X in the wee hours today, as if to prove the point.

Musk seems, at least outwardly, unable to reckon with his current position. Just days after framing this race as a hinge point for “the entire destiny of humanity,” Musk said on X that “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for positional gain.” From the outside, though, it’s difficult to see what he’s gained. Last week, protesters demonstrated outside hundreds of Tesla locations; Musk has long been erratic, but his dalliance with DOGE has alienated environmentally conscious liberals, a major demographic for electric vehicles. And by seeming so focused on DOGE, he’s frustrated investors who worry that Tesla is losing its first-mover advantage in the United States. Foreign rivals, such as China’s BYD, are quickly gaining steam. Tesla’s stock price instantly rose 15 points on the reports that Musk would soon leave the administration.

There is a case to be made that Musk’s cozying up to Trump will ultimately benefit Musk’s empire—avoiding regulations that may help with Tesla’s self-driving plans or SpaceX and Starlink contracts, for example. But so many of the signs point to a less desirable outcome. Musk’s outsize support of Trump was always a political risk, but his decision to come aboard the administration and, at one time, position himself as a kind of shadow president is arguably the biggest bet of his career. In the short term, it does not appear to be paying off.

Musk woke up this morning less popular than he’s been in recent memory. He’s alienated himself from an American public that used to widely revere him, and his political capital seems to be fading rapidly. The only question now is whether, after getting a taste of the political spotlight, he’ll be able to give it up without a fight.

If your virtual kart-racing life was missing something, you’re in luck. Nintendo, the Japanese electronics manufacturer, announced its new Mario Kart appliance today. The Switch 2, which can be used handheld or connected to a television, allows players to race go-karts piloted by characters from the company’s entertainment franchises: Mario, Yoshi, Princess Peach.

The karting games that ran on previous appliances allowed racers to compete on only a series of discrete tracks. But the updated hardware allows for something else: Mario Kart World, as the new software is called, presents its users with the tantalizing prospect of a digital commute. Racers may now convey from one track to the next through a large and continuous simulated world. This new capacity will unlock other new ways to kart, among them 1980s-style arcade racing and more contemporary, open-world kart tourism.

Longtime kart racers will surely celebrate the opportunity to kart anew. Someone who might have played Mario Kart 8—the previous fully original home release in the franchise—in 2014, when they were 12, has now graduated college. In the gaps between soul-crushing weeks at an investment bank or a management consultancy, karting sons and daughters who became karting adults might sneak in a nostalgic trip or race with their aging parents or once-baby siblings, now adolescents.

To facilitate the process, Nintendo has finally improved its online kart-racing infrastructure. Its competitors Sony and Microsoft, whose entertainment appliances mostly facilitate simulated sports or ritualistic arena murder, have allowed players to connect by voice or even video while playing, both to coordinate matches and to issue racist or homophobic taunts. The Switch 2 finally adds this capacity to kart racing, deployed via a “C” (“Cart”? No, “Chat”) button on its controllers.

[Read: Video games are better without stories]

All of this kart racing comes at a hefty price: $450 for the appliance itself, or $500 for the device bundled with the Mario Kart software. Those who would choose to forgo the bundle in favor of purchasing inscrutably updated rehashes of previous works, such as embarrassing fantasy-adventure games and insipid party titles, will have to hand over $80 for Mario Kart World if they choose to add it later. That might put kart-based home entertainment out of reach for many Americans. But others will surely see the value in the Switch 2, given the appeal and frequency of these karting delights.

Games such as Mario Kart World will be delivered on cartridges matching the size and shape of those from the previous appliance. Those carts may not contain software, instead acting as dummy keys that will unlock a probably time-consuming download. In exchange for this inconvenience, players will be able to “gameshare” some software titles with up to four friends, allowing the games to trickle down, Reaganomics-style, from the wealthy to the aspirant underclasses (though even these paupers will apparently still have to pay for a separate Nintendo Switch Online subscription to voice- or videochat with their game-giving overlords). But not Mario Kart World, which is ineligible for gameshare. All citizens must purchase their own access to karting.

[Read: The quiet revolution of Animal Crossing]

Nintendo has also updated the guts of the Switch 2 kart appliance. It will finally be capable of using the entire 4K resolution of the televisions that were being sold back when your college graduate was still 12. Note that the appliance itself features an LCD screen rather than the rich OLED displays that have been commonplace in smartphones for the past decade or so.

Nintendo has also failed to heed the lessons from its previous Mario Kart appliance. That device, the Switch, featured finicky, removable Joy-Con kart-racing controllers. Inevitably, kart-racing fanciers elected to pay exorbitant prices for traditional, add-on controllers instead. A new version of those controllers is also on offer for the Switch 2, requiring a new investment of $80 each for a racing tether that features the new “C” button.

Will this new kart chaos be worthwhile? Emphatically yes. I spent $1,600 on a new washer-dryer this year, and I use it only once a week, whereas I kart (or long to kart) far more often. Similarly, a good countertop air fryer might cost hundreds of dollars; why not a karting appliance too? And like an air fryer, which can toast and roast in addition to convection bake, the Switch 2 Mario Kart appliance is also capable of supporting other Nintendo-crafted experiences, such as an ape-oriented romp game announced today and, perhaps eventually, attempts to rehabilitate the non-karting titles from which the Mario character and his kindred had been mercifully liberated.

Steve Bannon seems resigned to sharing power with the “tech bros,” as he calls them. Last week, when I spoke with President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and continued ally, he was clear about his disagreements with Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites on the so-called tech right. “Nationalist populists,” Bannon’s self-identified political clan, “don’t trust these oligarchs,” he told me. But, he added, “we see the usefulness of working together on broad things.”

It was a noticeably different tone for Bannon. In recent months, he has taken every opportunity to bash Musk. In January, Bannon said that the billionaire is a “truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” and that he’d have Musk “run out” of Trump’s inner circle by Inauguration Day. Musk and other “techno-feudalists,” Bannon said later that month, “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.” In February, he called Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” (Musk seemingly isn’t a fan of Bannon, either: “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer,” he posted on X in February. “What did he get done this week? Nothing.”)

The nationalist right and the tech right came together to elect Trump in November, but the MAGA coalition has seemed on the verge of falling apart ever since. The nationalist right sees social conservatism—such as mass deportations, heavy immigration restrictions, and a more explicitly Christian government—as paramount, even if it comes at the expense of free markets. Prominent members of the tech right, including the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, prioritize private-sector technological progress above all else. In December, during a public spat with the nationalists over highly skilled immigrants, Musk posted on X that anyone who disagreed with him should “fuck” themselves “in the face.” Billionaire cosmopolitans who want to hire immigrants don’t mix easily with vehemently nativist populists who want to ratchet up taxes on said billionaires. Last month, in a speech at a tech summit in Washington, D.C., Vice President J. D. Vance said that he would “like to speak to these tensions as a proud member of both tribes.” This is not a thing you would feel the need to say about a relationship that is running smoothly.

[Read: The MAGA honeymoon is over]

But to assume that a fallout is inevitable is a mistake. The two sides don’t love each other, but for now, they are still together. Musk continues to be one of the most consequential people in government, and Bannon and other nationalists continue to hold sway over a White House that is cracking down on immigrants. Rather than split up, this new MAGA coalition might persist for years to come.

What the tech right and nationalist right are going through looks like an update to how conservatism has long worked. Especially before the Trump era, being “conservative” meant a commitment to free markets and traditional social views. This alliance wasn’t always a given. During the mid-20th century, traditionalists were suspicious of the potential harms of unchecked businesses, while libertarians saw excessive government encroachment as constraining the lives of Americans. But in spite of the difference, they still managed to stay together under one coalition. “Fusionism,” as the National Review editor Frank Meyer famously called it, worked because both sides had a clear, binding tie: opposition to communism.  

The current moment looks a lot like fusionism 2.0: The uniting through line of opposing communism has been replaced by an opposition to “wokeness,” as the University of Virginia historian David Austin Walsh has observed. The similarities between the political moments provide a rough model for how the new MAGA coalition might persist. In the original fusionism, communism was almost always a bigger deal than whatever libertarians and social conservatives didn’t see eye to eye on. This worked because “communism” never just meant one thing. It could be invoked to oppose the Soviet Union and the literal ideology of communism, to thwart the supposedly communist-infilitrated civil-rights and anti-war movements, or to refer to anything related to left-wing politics.

Wokeness now serves that function on the right. It’s no coincidence that wokeness is a rebranded version of the right’s previous bogeyman: “cultural Marxism.” As Musk has ripped up federal agencies in a supposed effort to reduce government waste, a lot of what DOGE has actually focused on is rooting out perceived wokeness. Musk has enthusiastically helped carry out Trump’s anti-DEI executive order by targeting related programs for cuts, sometimes taking this to an almost-comic level of absurdity: DOGE reportedly placed one government worker whose job involved managing relationships with private-equity firms on administrative leave, seemingly mistakenly believing that the employee’s work was related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Andreessen, who played an early role in staffing DOGE, has also railed against wokeness. Charlie Kirk, the right-wing podcast host and member of the conservative power elite, loves to talk about how much he hates wokeness, and has applauded DOGE for “hunting down those insane DEI departments.”

[Read: Charlie Kirk is the right’s new kingmaker]

In many cases, the two factions detest wokeness in the same specific ways. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and tech investor who is also a large donor to right-wing causes, recently posted that Columbia University “delenda est,” Latin for “must be destroyed.” Similarly, Bannon told me that he has urged Trump and other administration officials to target public universities such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Purge the faculties and purge the administrators,” he said. “The states have no money to back up universities, so hold federal funding until they purge.”

Wokeness is even vaguer and more malleable than communism, which makes it especially useful. DEI hiring practices and critical race theory in schools count as wokeness on the right, but depending on whom you talk to, so is something as simple as a TV show or a movie with gay people. It can be bent into a passionate opposition to anything that might have the faintest traces of being liberal, left-wing, or progressive. “As long as there are common enemies,” Walsh, the UVA historian told me, the new MAGA coalition “will remain stable.”

People within the coalition at least partially agree. To the right, wokeness “is the glue that holds the left together,” Jeremy Carl, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, told me. Carl, a self-proclaimed nationalist who worked in the first Trump administration, explained that both factions of the right sincerely don’t like the rough assemblage of things they deem to be woke, but they also lean on it because they see it as a unifying point. “My nationalist group chats are not filled with people spewing anger at Elon,” he said. “They like Elon. They think he’s doing a great job."

None of this means that the tech right and nationalist right are destined to stay together. The groups in the original fusionism were often on a similar footing in terms of power. That’s not the case now. The tech elites hold a disproportionate amount of leverage in their ability to influence elections through massive donations. Musk is still throwing his money around, funneling millions of dollars to try to sway a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. His influence does not seem to be waning, even as he has continued to pursue an agenda at DOGE that has reportedly irritated a number of Trump’s other senior administration officials. This power imbalance gives the tech right an advantage. Even if the relationship still benefits the nationalists, they become the political equivalent of a group of suckerfish riding a whale.

When we spoke, Bannon rejected the entire idea of fusionism 2.0. “Let me say it bluntly: Fuck fusionism,” he said. At another point in the conversation, he referred to Silicon Valley as an “apartheid state” in which white-collar tech jobs are filled by immigrants instead of native-born Americans. In Bannon’s view, MAGA is not fusing together so much as begrudgingly forced to stick together—the way that the Democratic Party was once a coalition between northern liberals and southern Dixiecrats.

But even if Bannon’s view is right, it still suggests a MAGA coalition that is far more robust than it seemed just a few months ago. The Silicon Valley elite, Musk especially, has already moved closer to the nationalist right over the past several years. The nationalists, however wary of the tech right, have welcomed them. They understand that Musk and the rest of the tech right are deep-pocketed, powerful allies against wokeness in all its forms. Each faction still has every reason to keep putting its differences aside.

In Los Angeles, where I live, you don’t expect to be heckled while driving an electric car to the grocery store. But on a recent afternoon, a couple of men on bikes saw the Tesla logo on the front of my car and shouted, “Fuck you, Tesla guy” as I rolled by with the windows down.

I bought my Tesla Model 3 in 2019, after my wife and I moved from New York to L.A. and needed a car. Not willing to burn gasoline, we got the most practical EV we could afford. Six years later, that car carries a different connotation.

In the aftermath of Elon Musk’s MAGA embrace and his scorched-earth tactics running DOGE, Tesla has become a primary target for protests. On Saturday, demonstrators marched outside all 277 Tesla showrooms and service centers in the United States; Teslas across the country have been vandalized and even destroyed in recent weeks. Even in Los Angeles, where Teslas are as familiar as Fords and not primarily viewed as right-wing totems, this wasn’t the first time I’d been shouted at since the election. Tesla owners who don’t support Musk are playing defense. Some have begun to slap on bumper stickers such as I bought this before Elon went crazy. Others are simply done. Sheryl Crow sold her Tesla and donated the money to NPR; Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona also got rid of his, saying he couldn’t stand to own a car that is a “rolling billboard for a man dismantling our government and hurting people.” Teslas that are eight years old or newer now account for 1.4 percent of all car trade-ins, up from 0.4 percent a year ago, and EV brands such as Lucid and Polestar offer tantalizing deals to Tesla drivers looking for an out. “You’re definitely seeing a lot of people say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to be associated with the trash that’s going on right now around Elon Musk,’” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at AutoPacific, told me. “‘I’m just going to get rid of my car.’”

The Great Tesla Sell-Off is producing a glut of politically tainted pre-owned cars. Used Teslas are now shockingly cheap: One 2021 Model 3 for sale near me, which would have cost more than $50,000 new, is going for less than $20,000. Even if you resent Musk, you should consider buying one. In this moment of DOGE madness, it’s difficult to see a Tesla as anything other than an avatar of Musk. But Elon doesn’t make any money off the Model Y you get secondhand. Strip away the symbolism, and an old Tesla is just a good, affordable car.

[Read: My day inside America’s most hated car]

No, you shouldn’t buy a new Tesla if you’re enraged at Musk. The boycotters are correct that rejecting these vehicles directly hurts him. It drives down sales numbers, which hurts Tesla’s bottom line and saps the company’s stock price. Tesla’s remarkable valuation, buoyed as much by a cult of personality as by the company’s sales figures, has made Musk the world’s richest person: The company was worth three times more than Toyota in 2024, despite selling six times fewer vehicles. Even so, collapsing sales, not only in the U.S. but also across Europe and Australia, have wiped out billions of dollars from Tesla’s stock.

Buying a pre-owned Tesla might feel just as unseemly. But it’s not. Start with the sustainability question. Anti-Musk liberals would surely agree that more Americans should go electric to cut carbon emissions. Only about one in 10 registered vehicles in America is an EV, so it’s likely that a used-Tesla buyer will be replacing an old gas-burner. The switch might be permanent: More than 90 percent of EV owners say they won’t go back to combustion. For the most part, Tesla refugees aren’t retreating to the polluting purr of the V-6; they’re switching to electric cars from other brands, such as Chevy, Lucid, and Kia.

Used Teslas also help solve the main problem with getting Americans to go electric, which is price. Even with government tax credits, EVs tend to cost a premium compared with gas cars or hybrids. Pre-owned EVs, though, are shockingly affordable. Electric cars in general depreciate faster than gas-powered cars for a number of reasons, including fading battery life and used-car buyers’ unfamiliarity with the technology, Brian Moody, a senior staff editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. All of this is bad for sellers but good for buyers.

[Read: America finally has the answer to the biggest problem with EVs]

Even before the Great Tesla Sell-Off, the bulk of used EVs were Teslas. The math doesn’t lie: Just five years ago, Tesla sold nearly 80 percent of the electric cars in America. Now that virtually every major car company offers EVs, Tesla’s dominance is waning, but most of those non-Tesla EVs have yet to reach their second owners. Used Teslas were already pretty affordable, but now they are getting even cheaper. Moody said the average transaction price for a used Tesla dipped from nearly $32,000 in November to about $30,400 in early March as more flooded the market. Tesla’s resale value is reportedly falling three times as fast as the rest of the used-car market.

Perhaps most important of all: Unless you purchase a used Tesla directly from the company, Musk isn’t getting your money. It’s possible to buy a pre-owned Tesla and avoid his other revenue streams too. Just like every carmaker, Tesla maintains a network of service centers to repair its vehicle, and because so few car mechanics specialize in electric vehicles, paying Tesla to do the work is much easier (and can feel safer) than taking a gamble on your neighborhood repair guy. However, a used car is likely to be past its four-year basic warranty, so you could take your old Model Y to an independent shop without voiding any coverage.

Then there is the question of charging. Tesla’s Supercharger network is admittedly excellent and convenient. But that is relevant for more than Tesla owners. Over the past couple of years, the rest of the industry has adopted Tesla’s plug standard, and many other brands’ EVs can now visit the company’s fast-charging stations. Musk-hating Rivian owners might still find themselves paying him for kilowatt-hours in a pinch. Still, avoiding them is easier than you might think. EV newbies tend to fret about charging, given that plugging in a car is still not as simple or quick as pulling into the nearest Shell. But the anxiety tends to be exaggerated. Something like 80 percent of EV owners primarily charge at home, which provides enough electricity for daily driving. On road trips, drivers can plan ahead to make a point of visiting charging stations that aren’t owned by Tesla.

Of course, a used Tesla may not spare you from getting shouted at while you’re getting groceries. Buying any kind of Tesla in 2025 can practically feel like an invitation to get graffitied, or at least a tacit endorsement of the brand. But set aside the optics—no simple task—and a pre-owned Tesla is just as climate-virtuous as all the Chevy Bolts and Ford Mustang Mach-Es that aren’t carrying around any MAGA baggage. Refusing an old Model 3 doesn’t hurt Elon or help the planet. But it does stop you from getting a good deal. If you’re still feeling trepidation, consider an apology bumper sticker: I bought it from someone who bought it before Elon was crazy.

Photographs by Kent Nishimura

On the first Sunday of spring, surrounded by row houses and magnolia trees, I came to a horrifying realization: My mom was right. I had been flipped off at least 17 times, called a “motherfucker” (in both English and Spanish), and a “fucking dork.” A woman in a blue sweater stared at me, sighed, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” All of this because I was driving a Tesla Cybertruck.

I had told my mom about my plan to rent this thing and drive it around Washington, D.C., for a day—a journalistic experiment to understand what it’s like behind the wheel of America’s most hated car. “Wow. Be careful,” she texted back right away. Both of us had read the stories of Cybertrucks possibly being set on fire, bombed with a Molotov cocktail, and vandalized in every way imaginable. People have targeted the car—and Tesla as a whole—to protest Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s administration. But out of sheer masochism, or stupidity, I still went ahead and spent a day driving one. As I idled with the windows down on a street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, a woman glared at me from her front porch: “Fuck you, and this truck, and Elon,” she yelled. “You drive a Nazi truck.” She slammed her front door shut, and then opened it again. “I hope someone blows your shit up.”

Earlier that day, my first stop was the heart of the resistance: the Dupont Circle farmers’ market. The people there wanted to see the organic asparagus and lion’s-mane mushrooms. What they did not want to see was a stainless-steel, supposedly bulletproof Cybertruck. Every red light created new moments for mockery. “You fucker!” yelled a bicyclist as he pedaled past me on P Street. The diners eating brunch on the sidewalk nearby laughed and cheered. Then came the next stoplight: A woman eating outside at Le Pain Quotidien gave me the middle finger for a solid 20 seconds, all without interrupting her conversation.

The anger is understandable. This is, after all, the radioactive center of DOGE’s blast radius. On the same block where I was yelled at in Mount Pleasant, I spotted a hand-drawn sign in one window: CFPB, it read, inside of a giant red heart; and at one point, I tailed behind a black Tesla Model Y with the bumper sticker Anti Elon Tesla Club. But the Cybertruck stands out on America’s roads about as much as LeBron James in a kindergarten classroom. No matter where you live, the car is a nearly 7,000-pound Rorschach test: It has become the defining symbol of the second Trump term. If you hate Trump and Musk, it is a giant MAGA hat, Pepe the Frog on wheels, or the “Swasticar.” If you love Trump and Musk, the Cybertruck is, well, a giant MAGA hat. On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel called Tesla vandalism “domestic terrorism” as he announced a Tesla task force to investigate such acts. Alex Jones has trolled Tesla protesters from the back of his own Cybertruck, bullhorn in hand. Kid Rock has a Cybertruck with a custom Dukes of Hazzard paint job; the far-right podcaster Tim Pool owns one and says he’ll buy another “because it will own the libs”; and Kanye West has three. Trump’s 17-year-old granddaughter was gifted one by the president, and another by Musk.

When I parked the car for lunch in Takoma Park, where I support federal workers signs were staked into the grass, I heard two women whispering at a nearby table: “Should we egg it?” (In this economy?) Over and over again, as pedestrians and drivers alike glared at me, I had to remind myself: It’s just a car. And it’s kind of a cool one, too. It can apparently outrace a Porsche 911, while simultaneously towing a Porsche 911. Or it can power a house for up to three days. My day in the Cybertruck wasn’t extremely hard-core, but the eight onboard cameras made city driving more bearable than I was expecting. Regardless of what you do with it, the car is emissions-free. “The underlying technology of the Cybertruck is amazing,” Loren McDonald, an EV analyst at the firm Paren, told me. And the exterior undersells just how ridiculous it is. Just before I returned the car on Monday morning, I took an impromptu Zoom meeting from the giant in-car touchscreen. It has a single windshield wiper that is so long—more than five feet—that Musk has compared it to a “katana.”

After 10 hours of near-constant hazing, I navigated to an underground parking lot to recharge the truck (and my battered self-image). Someone had placed a sticker just beneath the Tesla logo: Elon Musk is a parasite, it read. Still, even in D.C., I got a fair number of thumbs-ups as my Cybertruck zoomed by the areas most frequented by tourists. Near the National Mall, a man in a red bandanna and shorts yelled, “That’s awesome!” and cheered. Perhaps it was an attempt at MAGA solidarity, or maybe not. Lots of people just seemed to think it looked cool. One guy in his 20s, wearing a make money, not friends hoodie, frantically took out his phone to film me making a left turn. Even in the bluest neighborhoods of D.C.—near a restaurant named Marx Cafe and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mural—kids could not get enough of the Cybertruck. One girl in Takoma Park saw me and started screaming, “Cybertruck! Cybertruck!” Later, a boy spotted the car and frantically rode his scooter to try to get a better look. Just before sunset, I was struggling to change lanes near George Washington University when two teens stopped to stare at me from the sidewalk. I was anxiously checking directions on my phone and clearly had no idea where to go. “Must be an Uber,” one said to the other.

[Read: Admit it, the Cybertruck is awesome]

By 9 p.m., I’d had enough. I valeted at my hotel, with its “Tibetan Bowl Sound Healing” classes, and got a nervous look from the attendant. I can’t blame anyone who sees the car as the stainless-steel embodiment of the modern right. This week, a county sheriff in Ohio stood in front of a green Cybertruck and derided Tesla vandals as “little fat people that live in their mom’s basement and wear their mom’s pajamas.” But it is also a tragedy that the Cybertruck has become the most partisan car in existence—more so than the Prius, or the Hummer, or any kind of Subaru. The Cybertruck, an instantly meme-able and very weird car, could have helped America fall in love with EVs. Instead, it is doing the opposite. The revolt against Tesla is not slowing down, and in some cases people are outright getting rid of their cars. Is it really a win that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona exchanged his all-electric Tesla sedan for a gas-guzzling SUV?

Then again, Republicans aren’t buying the Cybertruck en masse. It is too expensive and too weird. Buying any Tesla might be a way to own the libs, but the right has proved maddeningly resistant to going electric. “Your average MAGA Trump supporter isn’t going to go buy a Tesla,” McDonald, the EV analyst, said. Before the car shipped in November 2023, Musk predicted that Tesla would sell 250,000 a year. He hasn’t even sold one-fifth of that in total—and sales are falling. (Neither Tesla nor Musk responded to a request for comment.)

Musk made a lot of other promises that haven’t really panned out: The Cybertruck was supposed to debut at less than $40,000. The cheapest model currently available is double that. The vehicle, Musk said, would be “really tough, not fake tough.” Instead, its stainless-steel side panels have fallen off because Tesla used the wrong glue—and that was just the most recent of the car’s eight recalls. The Cybertruck was supposed to be able to haul “near infinite mass” and “serve briefly as a boat.” Just this month alone, one Cybertruck’s rear end snapped off in a test of its towing power, and another sank off the coast of Los Angeles while trying to offload a Jet Ski from the bed.

The Cybertruck, in that sense, is a perfect metaphor for Musk himself. The world’s richest man has a bad habit of promising one thing and delivering another. X was supposed to be the “everything app”; now it is a cesspool of white supremacy. DOGE was billed as an attempt to make the government more nimble and tech-savvy. Instead, the cuts have resulted in seniors struggling to get their Social Security checks. So far, Musk has only continued to get richer and more powerful while the rest of us have had to deal with the wreckage. Let that sink in, as he likes to say. The disaster of the Cybertruck is not that it’s ugly, or unconventional, or absurdly pointy. It’s that, for most people, the car just isn’t worth driving.

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On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.  

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.” After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

To be clear, the actions of the second Trump administration—the dismantling of the federal government via DOGE, the apprehension and detainment of immigrants and green-card holders with seemingly no due process—are of far more consequence than what it posts on social media. But White House posts are not random missives either: They’re official government communications from the executive branch, sent out to 1.4 million followers, to say nothing of whatever additional reach these posts receive via algorithmic recommendation and ad hoc sharing.

The account’s true obsession is immigration: @WhiteHouse has posted dozens of mugshots of immigrants arrested by ICE. Each one lists an offense they’ve been arrested for in big block letters, and usually the catchphrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” is appended. Earlier this month, after the Department of Homeland Security commented on the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University—a violation of a court order temporarily protecting her from expulsion—the White House account responded by posting a photo of Trump waving goodbye from a McDonald’s drive-through window. (The picture was taken during a 2024 campaign stunt.) On Valentine’s Day, the account wrote, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.”

And in an infamous example, on February 18, the White House account posted a 41-second video of faceless men being shackled and marched onto planes. The post’s caption read, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” (ASMR is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or the titillating sensation caused by certain noises, such as whispering, tapping, or crinkling; videos of people making such noises are enormously popular across social media.) The subtext of the White House post is far from subtle and is reminiscent of something out of 4chan’s notoriously bigoted politics message board: Watching allegedly undocumented immigrants bound in chains is a pleasurable, even sensual experience. Like any trolling post, it’s meant to be simultaneously taken seriously and played off as a dumb online joke. Even those inside the Trump administration seemed taken aback by the audacity of the post. Even some MAGA supporters appeared uncomfortable by @WhiteHouse’s brazenness. “If you guys could stick with the grim shock and awe, and leave the edgy gloating to those of us who don’t work in the White House I think that would probably be better for optics,” one user wrote on X. The “ASMR” deportation video, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 104 million times on X.

Exactly who is running the White House X account is an object of fascination for close observers. Some accounts fantasize that Trump’s college-age son, Barron, is running it. Those outside of Trump fandom have insisted that it is being run by edgelords—one post referred to the operator as an “incel reddit user.” One Bluesky user described the account as “lowkey goebbelsmaxxing,” a reference to the Nazi propagandist. (The White House did not respond to a request to identify who writes the account’s posts.) What all the speculation suggests is that at least someone with access to the account is intimately familiar with far-right internet spaces and culture, specifically Groypers, a term for the loose online movement that has succeeded the alt-right. Earlier this year, the writer John Ganz argued that “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” He and others have suggested that the culture is present in the offices of Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., including in the White House. (A Trump staffer was fired in the first administration for associating with white nationalists; he’s now back, in a role at the State Department.) Although the identities of whoever is running the account are, at present, unknown, what’s clear is that their output appears to delight prominent extremists online. The message coming from the account, to borrow language from one far-right X user, is clear: The posters are in control.

[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

The White House is after something more than just shock value. It’s propaganda, and Trump’s allies are learning the playbook. This week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on X from a prison in El Salvador where deported immigrants are being held. Behind Noem are dozens of men in one jail cell, many shirtless with tattoos; their heads have all been shaved during intake. The prisoners are props, a backdrop for Noem’s message of intimidation to undocumented immigrants: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” Like the ASMR post or the Ghibli cartoon, the implication is that these deportees are utterly undeserving of any shred of human dignity. There are many other examples, such as FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent posts, one of which features him walking around in camouflage, set to rock music, as FBI agents blow open doors with explosives. Taken together, the posts offer a bracing but useful insight into how the administration sees itself, and the message of casual cruelty and overwhelming force it wants to project to the rest of the world.

That this administration should fully embrace the tactics and aesthetics of online far-right extremists and technological tools like generative AI to further its message makes perfect sense. These are reliable ways to increase engagement, gain attention, and illustrate a precise vision of the future they want to usher in. Even so, the account is chilling. Those who’ve spent enough time in the online spaces that have clearly influenced this administration—or at least whoever runs its social accounts—know how this goes. This is a game of accelerationism and nihilism, using tools and platforms that excel at depersonalizing, thus rendering empathy for others ever more difficult. That this sociopathic posting style is coming out of this administration—that it has been so thoroughly mainstreamed by the right—suggests that the cultural architecture of the internet has changed. There is still a fever swamp, but now the White House sits on top of it.

In 1962, the CIA had a driver’s license made for one of its officers, James P. O’Connell. It gave him an alias: James Paul Olds. We know this because the document containing the information was released to the public in 2017—part of an effort to declassify information related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump calling for the release of all the classified information pertaining to the incident, we know a bit more. It was, specifically, a California driver’s license.

This is an irrelevant detail in an irrelevant document. As far as anyone knows, O’Connell had nothing to do with the assassination; the inclusion of his story was probably just a by-product of an overly broad records request. But there it was on Tuesday evening, when the National Archives and Record Administration uploaded to its website about 63,400 pages of “JFK Assassination Records.” Given Trump’s order, the release of all this information sounded dramatic, but much of what has been revealed is about as interesting as that driver’s-license detail. Many of these documents were already public with minor redactions, and many of them have almost nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination and never did. This is why the Assassination Records Review Board, which processed them in the 1990s, labeled so many of them “Not Believed Relevant.”

Hundreds of thousands of such documents have been released since the ’90s, including thousands released during Trump’s first term and the Biden administration. (This is thanks to the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which was passed in response to overwhelming public interest in the case after the release of the Oliver Stone movie JFK.) But one of Trump’s 2024 campaign promises was to release all the rest; he said that it was “time for the American people to know the TRUTH!” His health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—John Kennedy’s nephew—has been animated about the issue and framed the secrecy around the last files as evidence to support his conspiratorial view of history.

[Read: RFK Jr. won. Now what?]

There are still some documents that the Archives could not make public, because they are subject to IRS privacy laws or because they come from sealed grand-jury proceedings. These may come out eventually, but they will likely follow the same drip, drip, drip as all the rest. It seems possible that the public’s curiosity will never be fully satisfied, at least in my lifetime. A new batch will always come out, but there will always be something left.  

I’m one of the people who cares a lot about the Kennedy assassination. I’m currently finishing a book about the case. On principle, and out of selfish personal interest, I agree that the government should make all of the documents public if it can. Of course I scanned this new batch to see whether there was anything exciting. There wasn’t, but some of it was kind of funny.

In many cases, the removed redactions reveal proper nouns that a reader could have easily inferred before or that seem totally inconsequential. For instance, there is a 1974 memo about the Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s history with the CIA. A previously released version of the document mentions that the Office of Finance had asked a CIA station whether Hunt had received payments from it while he was living in Madrid. We did not know which station had been asked. Now we know it was the Madrid station. (Wow!) A 1977 document about the New York Times reporter Tad Szulc includes a rumor about Szulc being a Communist; in previous versions of the document, this information was “apparently from a [REDACTED] source.” With the redaction removed, we now know that it was “apparently from a British source.”

Some of it was less funny. The files also contain the unredacted personal information—including Social Security numbers—of dozens of people, seemingly published accidentally, though the National Archives site now suggests this was an inevitable result of the transparency effort. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged the problem to The New York Times on Thursday, saying, “At the request of the White House, the National Archives and the Social Security Administration immediately put together an action plan to proactively help individuals whose personal information was released in the files.” The National Archives did not respond to my request for comment.

In my scan, I came across the late-’70s personnel files of dozens of staff members of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, all of which contained Social Security numbers. A good number of those people are likely still alive. The document dump contains the Social Security number of a journalist who was active in the anti-war movement during the ’60s. There are, by my count, 19 documents about his personal life and employment history; none of the documents about him appears to have the faintest relevance to the assassination. Bizarrely, the new release also contains an unredacted arrest record for a Dealey Plaza witness who testified in front of the Warren Commission in 1964. This record—for the alleged theft of a car in 1970—has nothing whatsoever to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet it is reproduced in full and it includes the man’s Social Security number and a full set of his fingerprints.

[From the February 1964 issue: A eulogy for John F. Kennedy]

Relatively few of the documents even mention Kennedy. I saw only one addressed to him: a June 30, 1961, memo from his special assistant, confidant, and eventual biographer, Arthur Schlesinger about the growing power of the CIA. Most of it has been public since 2018, but the version released on Tuesday removed a final redaction about the agency’s extensive use of State Department jobs as cover for its agents. Schlesinger informed Kennedy that about 1,500 CIA agents abroad had State-provided cover stories at the time—too many, in his opinion; he wrote that “the effect is to further the CIA encroachment on the traditional functions of State.” The Paris embassy had 128 CIA people in it at the time, he added as an example. “CIA occupies the top floor of the Paris Embassy, a fact well known locally; and on the night of the Generals’ revolt in Algeria, passersby noted with amusement that the top floor was ablaze with lights.” Again, this is at best “kind of interesting” and at most trivia. It doesn’t meaningfully affect the historical understanding of President Kennedy’s tense relationship with the CIA, which is very well documented elsewhere.

After decades of releases, it may be that these are the only kinds of secrets the Archives still hold about the Kennedy assassination—tiny bits of color on things that are already well understood and boring details about people whose connections to the event are minimal if they even exist. But there’s no way to know until we see everything … if we see everything, if we ever can. Even then, when the count of secret things ticks down to zero, how will we know that was really, really all? We won’t, of course. We never will.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Careless People, the new tell-all memoir by the former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, is that a book chronicling the social network’s missteps and moral bankruptcy can still make news in 2025.

The tech giant—now named Meta—seems determined to make this happen itself. The company filed an emergency motion in court to halt the book’s continued publication, and in numerous statements, Meta’s communications team has derided it as the work of a disgruntled ex-employee. All of this has only generated interest: On Thursday, the book debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction and, as of this writing, was the third-best-selling book on Amazon.

A general theme of the pushback is that Wynn-Williams, who worked on global policy at Facebook, is guilty of the same sins she documents in the book. “Not only does she fail to take any responsibility for her role in all of this,” Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook wrote on her Substack, “but she is also careless in her account. She also gives no recommendations on how to do things better other than to say they should be done differently.” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, called the book “a mix of old claims and false accusations about our executives.” He has also shared posts from current and former employees that cast Wynn-Williams as an unreliable narrator. In one post, a former colleague expresses frustration that the book seems to take credit for his efforts at the company.

Given Wynn-Williams’s privileged position as Facebook’s first executive focused specifically on global policy, her perspective might differ from that of employees on other teams. Meta is a huge organization, after all. But the debates over the more gossipy anecdotes obscure the larger trends that surface through the book. I’ve never spoken with Wynn-Williams for a story or otherwise—she is currently under a gag order after Meta pursued legal action against her, claiming that the book violates her nondisclosure agreement—but her descriptions of Facebook taking actions in foreign countries without regard for consequences are similar to anecdotes told to me over the years by current and former employees. These stories are even more relevant in 2025, when tech’s most powerful figures have assumed an outsize role in American politics. All of us are living in a world that’s been warped by the architecture and algorithms of Silicon Valley’s products, but also by the egos of the people who have made fortunes building them.

I tore through Careless People despite being intimately familiar with many of the broad storylines—Facebook’s push into politics and the fallout from the 2016 election, its global efforts to expand in China, the platform’s bungled expansion in Myanmar that contributed to a genocide in the region. Wynn-Williams’s perspective provides crucial dimensionality to a well-trodden story, given her proximity to the company’s leadership.

But although it explores serious subject matter, the book is also not nearly as strident or sanctimonious as some other whistleblower memoirs. Wynn-Williams is comfortable reaching for an absurdist register: She recounts, for example, a scheduling nightmare that brought her to the brink of tears while trying to get Mark Zuckerberg a last-minute spot at the Global Citizen Festival in 2015: In her attempts, Wynn-Williams manages to anger an actor dressed as Big Bird and create logistical “issues for Malala and Beyoncé.” The spectacle culminates with a sweaty Zuckerberg onstage, “looking around desperately, like an animal in a trap.” The book is filled with similar anecdotes that capture the peculiar indignities of those catering to the whims of the most powerful people in the world. (When reached for comment, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for Meta, referred to past statements the company has made about the book and cast doubt on Wynn-Williams’s status as a whistleblower: “Whistleblower status protects communications to the government, not disgruntled activists trying to sell books.”)

Early in Careless People, Wynn-Williams says Facebook asked her if “Mark should take credit for the Arab Spring.” In passages about Facebook’s expansion in Myanmar, she cites the executive team’s incuriosity about the country’s culture and politics. Later, when viral fake news stories on Facebook lead to riots and killings in Myanmar, Wynn-Williams details that the company had just one moderator who spoke Burmese, never posted its community standards in Burmese, and did not translate core navigation features of the platform into Burmese, including the button you use to report hateful content. News coverage in the aftermath of the genocide supported many of Wynn-Williams’s claims.

Wynn-Williams offers a few explanations for these problems over the course of Careless People. She suggests that executives like Zuckerberg simply don’t care about Facebook users once they’re on the platform. But there is also the company’s relentless pursuit of growth. Facebook’s obsession with gaining access to Myanmar and other Southeast Asian countries came around the same time that Facebook’s growth and stock were flagging post-IPO. Internally, stagnant user growth was referred to as “running out of road.” She describes Facebook’s growth team as willing to do almost anything to extend that road.

Nearly every insight and example provided in Careless People—the allegations that former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the Irish prime minister secretly schemed on ways to dodge corporate taxes, the documentation of Facebook’s attempts to work with China to collect data on its citizens—traces back in one form or another to a blind obsession with scaling the business. All of it, of course, is meant to achieve Zuckerberg’s vague yet relentless mission to connect the world. When asked about these allegations, Arnold, the Meta spokesperson, told me, “We do not operate our services in China today. It is no secret we were once interested in doing so as part of Facebook’s effort to connect the world.”

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

Wynn-Williams’s assessment of Facebook’s mission aligns with what I know. In 2018, while reporting for BuzzFeed News, my colleagues and I obtained a memo written by Andrew Bosworth, one of Zuckerberg’s most loyal executives, outlining his personal strategy of growth at any cost. In the memo, Bosworth suggests that people could get hurt or killed as a result of Facebook’s expansions. Still, he is unequivocal: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.” This same tone of self-assuredness, short-sightedness, and binary thinking are present in most of the conversations with Facebook executives that Wynn-Williams writes about (on Threads, Bosworth called Careless People “full of lies. Literally stories that did not happen”). It’s captured memorably early on in the book, when Wynn-Williams details the company’s young policy team’s struggle to come up with a mission statement of its own:

[For] Mark and Sheryl, it’s obvious. We run a website that connects people. That’s what we believe in. We want more. We want it to be profitable and to grow. What else is there to say? There is no grand ideology here. No theory about what Facebook should be in the world. The company is just responding to stuff as it happens. We’re managers, not world-builders. Marne just wants to get through her inbox, not create a new global constitution.

Reading Careless People, I became fixated on a question: What is left to say about Facebook? The company has been through more than a decade of mega-scandals, congressional hearings, apologies, and Zuckerbergian heel turns. Many people have experienced the ways that the platform has algorithmically warped and influenced our culture, politics, and personal relationships. It is difficult to say something new about the company that has, in large part, succeeded in connecting the world. A book revealing, in 2025, that Facebook has behaved recklessly or in morally reprehensible ways feels akin to arguing at length that oil companies are substantially responsible for climate change—almost too obvious to be very interesting.

And yet, something about Careless People—beyond the court order, the messy PR spectacle, and Wynn-Williams’s formidable storytelling abilities—feels urgent, even necessary right now. It’s not just that Zuckerberg is in the news for cozying up to Donald Trump, though that’s part of it. Paging through the book makes clear that even recent history rhymes with the present. Careless People is a memoir, but even Wynn-Williams’s most personal anecdotes speak to the power and authority that tech executives, their platforms, and their massive fortunes wield over so many.

American politics, in the second Trump administration especially, is as much a tech story as it is a political one. Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government via DOGE is a product of the same Silicon Valley ideology that Zuckerberg coined with his infamous “move fast and break things” motto. Similarly, Musk’s self-described obsession with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse to make the government efficient shares a platitudinal vagueness with Zuckerberg’s long-standing mission to connect the world. Both ideas sound good on paper but are ultimately poorly defined (and executed even worse), leaving the same question unanswered: connection for what? Efficiency at what cost?

[Read: The rise of techno-authoritarianism]

Careless People illustrates how this ideological vacuum is filled by its leaders’ fleeting whims and governed by their fragile egos. Zuckerberg, whose “disregard for politics is a point of pride” at the beginning of the book, is ultimately enamored by the power it brings. Slowly, Wynn-Williams notes, he becomes more involved in global affairs, eventually asking to make complex content-moderation decisions on his own. “In reality it’s just Mark,” she writes. “Facebook is an autocracy of one.”

The chaos of the past two months—the looming constitutional crises, the firings and rehirings—is what it feels like when a government is run, at least in spirit, like a technology company. Wynn-Williams’s book isn’t prescient; much of it is, as Meta notes, older news. What’s most disorienting about Careless People is that it is packaged as a history of sorts, but its real utility to the reader is as a window into our current moment, a field guide to tech autocracy.

In her epilogue, Wynn-Williams notes of the Facebook executives that “the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become.” Does that sound familiar? For now, the careless people have won. They’re in charge. The chaos Wynn-Williams has documented—we’re just living through a different version of it.

Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on March 21, 2025

Editor’s note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here.

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

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Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set.

This act, along with other information outlined and quoted here, recently became a matter of public record when some of Meta’s internal communications were unsealed as part of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought against the company by Sarah Silverman, Junot Díaz, and other authors of books in LibGen. Also revealed recently, in another lawsuit brought by a similar group of authors, is that OpenAI has used LibGen in the past. (A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation against the company. In a response sent after this story was published, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “The models powering ChatGPT and our API today were not developed using these datasets. These datasets, created by former employees who are no longer with OpenAI, were last used in 2021.”)

Until now, most people have had no window into the contents of this library, even though they have likely been exposed to generative-AI products that use it; according to Zuckerberg, the “Meta AI” assistant has been used by hundreds of millions of people (it’s embedded in Meta products such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram). To show the kind of work that has been used by Meta and OpenAI, I accessed a snapshot of LibGen’s metadata—revealing the contents of the library without downloading or distributing the books or research papers themselves—and used it to create an interactive database that you can search here:

There are some important caveats to keep in mind. Knowing exactly which parts of LibGen that Meta and OpenAI used to train their models, and which parts they might have decided to exclude, is impossible. Also, the database is constantly growing. My snapshot of LibGen was taken in January 2025, more than a year after it was accessed by Meta, according to the lawsuit, so some titles here wouldn’t have been available to download at that point.  

LibGen’s metadata are quite disorganized. There are errors throughout. Although I have cleaned up the data in various ways, LibGen is too large and error-strewn to easily fix everything. Nevertheless, the database offers a sense of the sheer scale of pirated material available to models trained on LibGen. Cujo, The Gulag Archipelago, multiple works by Joan Didion translated into several languages, an academic paper named “Surviving a Cyberapocalypse”—it’s all in here, along with millions of other works that AI companies could feed into their models.

Meta and OpenAI have both argued in court that it’s “fair use” to train their generative-AI models on copyrighted work without a license, because LLMs “transform” the original material into new work. The defense raises thorny questions and is likely a long way from resolution. But the use of LibGen raises another issue. Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. (Meta has claimed that it “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files” and that there are “no facts to show” that it distributed the books to others.) OpenAI’s download method is not yet known.

Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

It is easy to see why LibGen appeals to generative-AI companies, whose products require huge quantities of text. LibGen is enormous, many times larger than Books3, another pirated book collection whose contents I revealed in 2023. Other works in LibGen include recent literature and nonfiction by prominent authors such as Sally Rooney, Percival Everett, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Haidt, and Rachel Khong, and articles from top academic journals such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet. It includes many millions of articles from top academic-journal publishers such as Elsevier and Sage Publications.

[Read: These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech]

LibGen was created around 2008 by scientists in Russia. As one LibGen administrator has written, the collection exists to serve people in “Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, China, Russia and post-USSR etc., and on a separate note, people who do not belong to academia.” Over the years, the collection has ballooned as contributors piled in more and more pirated work. Initially, most of LibGen was in Russian, but English-language work quickly came to dominate the collection. LibGen has grown so quickly and avoided being shut down by authorities thanks in part to its method of dissemination. Whereas some other libraries are hosted in a single location and require a password to access, LibGen is shared in different versions by different people via peer-to-peer networks.

Many in the academic world have argued that publishers have brought this type of piracy on themselves, by making it unnecessarily difficult and expensive to access research. Sci-Hub, a sibling of LibGen, was launched independently in 2011 by a Kazakhstani neuroscience student named Alexandra Elbakyan, whose university didn’t provide access to the big academic databases. In that same year, the hacktivist Aaron Swartz was arrested after taking millions of articles from JSTOR in an attempt to build a similar kind of library.

Publishers have tried to stop the spread of pirated material. In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against LibGen, Sci-Hub, other sites, and Elbakyan personally. The court granted an injunction, directed the sites to shut down, and ordered Sci-Hub to pay Elsevier $15 million in damages. Yet the sites remained up, and the fines went unpaid. A similar story played out in 2023, when a group of educational and professional publishers, including Macmillan Learning and McGraw Hill, sued LibGen. This time the court ordered LibGen to pay $30 million in damages, in what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions we’ve seen from a U.S. court.” But that fine also went unpaid, and so far authorities have been largely unable to constrain the spread of these libraries online. Seventeen years after its creation, LibGen continues to grow.

[Read: There’s no longer any doubt that Hollywood writing is powering AI]

All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?

This article has been updated to include a comment from OpenAI.

Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here.

Disclaimer: LibGen contains errors. You may, for example, find books that list incorrect authors. This search tool is meant to reflect material that could be used to train AI programs, and that includes material containing mistakes and inaccuracies.

It’s impossible to know exactly which parts of LibGen Meta used to train its AI, and which parts it might have decided to exclude; this snapshot was taken in January 2025, after Meta is known to have accessed the database, so some titles here would not have been available to download.

Forever 21 opened in my hometown when I was in middle school, when the opening of a new store at the mall was still a big deal. When the sign first went up, nobody knew what “Forever 21” was. I remember thinking that it would be a store marketed to retirement-age women who felt young at heart—Forever 21! This was wrong, but not so far off: Do Won Chang, one of its founders, has said he chose the name because 21 is “the most enviable age.” And it is, especially if you are 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, or 20, which are the ages at which I bought most of my clothes there. I can still smell the polyester and hear the White Rabbits on the sound system.

The clothes were, in theory, inexpensive versions of the latest trends. In practice, they were usually inexpensive versions of recently passed trends, and sometimes they were items so odd that they seemed to have been imported from a different reality (crop top with suspenders; Cheetos bathing suit). But for a suburban teenager with a little bit of cash, the store still felt like a place of possibilities. Yes, Forever 21 was always a disaster: Its racks and racks of cheap merchandise were “arranged” according to surrealist organizing principles that were impossible for the amateur to comprehend, and much of what was for sale was hideous. But I did not have taste—what I had was an after-school job in the mall food court that paid $7.25 an hour. I received paychecks every other week of about $150 that I could “save for college,” or that I could spend on statement necklaces and bubble skirts.

[Read: Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk?]

I think of that store fondly, and now it is closing. All of the Forever 21 stores remaining in the U.S. are expected to close as well. The company filed for bankruptcy this week—not for the first time, although this one is truly the end. “We have been unable to find a sustainable path forward, given competition from foreign fast fashion companies,” Brad Sell, the company’s CFO, said in a statement. He also mentioned “rising costs, economic challenges impacting our core customers, and evolving consumer trends.”

Forever 21 grew rapidly in the 2010s, opening hundreds of stores—many of them in enormous spaces—and reporting billions in annual sales. For a solid decade, Forever 21 was a common feature of the American landscape. At that time, finding a Forever 21 seemed as easy as finding a library. The highlighter-yellow shopping bags were an indelible symbol of the accessibly cool Millennial lifestyle. Some Forever 21 locations even became true destinations. For myself and many of my classmates, the four-story Forever 21 in Times Square was the most exciting part of our senior-class trip to New York City—not joking!

Now the 20- and 30-somethings who learned to shop by wading through their local Forever 21 locations are mourning the brand and marking the “end of an era.” You can find many “RIP” comment threads right now in regional Reddit forums, where people often discuss their local malls. Most are lighthearted (“I guess they turned 22”). Nobody is in a state of shock, because there is obviously not a place in the culture anymore for something like Forever 21.

Today’s young people still like in-person shopping, but they like to do it in secondhand and thrift shops or, at the other end of the spectrum, in gorgeous stores that make shopping feel like an Instagrammable excursion. They still like fast fashion too, but they like it faster than Forever 21 does it—online-only brands such as Shein, Fashion Nova, and ASOS can turn out hundreds or even thousands of new styles every week and sell them at unbelievably low prices.

[Read: The mysterious, meteoric rise of Shein]

In the past several years, cultural awareness has grown about the reality of the fast-fashion business model, which relies on paying factory workers shockingly low wages and takes a multifaceted approach to furthering the ruination of the planet. (Barely used clothes pile up in landfills; synthetic fabrics shed microplastics into the water supply; the manufacturing of polyester drives greenhouse-gas emissions up and up.)

Today, young people shop fast fashion in spite of themselves. They know it’s bad, but they’re accustomed to convenience and limitless choice, so they do it anyway. Maybe the difference is that now they can buy it from their phone, which is less uncomfortable than looking at it all piled up around them in one physical place. When Forever 21 declared bankruptcy for the first time, six years ago, a retail consultant suggested something like this to The New York Times. “The emotional and physical aesthetic of it is not something that the current shopper wants as much,” WSL Strategic Retail’s Wendy Liebmann told the paper. You can’t go home again, and it can’t be 2010 again.

As an adult, I now realize that the items I impulse-bought at Forever 21 on my 15-minute breaks were (1) contributing to human misery and (2) not worth even the paltry sums I paid for them. I almost never got substantial use out of anything, either because the items were poorly made and fell apart or because I quickly realized that they were ugly and unflattering. The only purchase I remember clearly is a dress I picked out to wear as a bridesmaid in a high-school friend’s wedding, for which I paid $12. I thought it was genuinely chic; I couldn’t believe my luck, and I was impressed with myself for pulling a needle from a galaxy-size hayfield.

But I wore it only once, and I suppose it is in a landfill now. There, it will last a long, long time. Not forever, but much longer than Forever 21 did.

I need you to watch this 13-second video of ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith walking to his courtside seat at a Los Angeles Lakers game. I need you to notice how Smith, perhaps the biggest voice in sports—in sheer decibels, if not reach—savors the see-and-be-seen pleasures of the courtside experience. That was two years ago. Now imagine how he might have floated into the Lakers’ home arena the night of March 6. Only hours earlier, it had been reported that ESPN had agreed to a new contract with Smith worth more than $100 million. To celebrate, Smith’s agent, Ari Emanuel, had invited him to the game. Larry David would join them courtside, near the end of the Lakers bench. This should have been the perfect atmosphere for Smith to revel in his ascent to the pinnacle of sports media. Instead, his night took a bad turn.

Early in the game, Smith made eye contact with Bronny James, a rookie reserve guard on the Lakers and, crucially, the son of the Lakers’ star LeBron James. Bronny has had a rough season. He has been dogged by accusations that he would not be playing in the NBA were it not for his last name. On the road, opposing crowds engage in mocking chants, begging the Lakers coach to put him in. In January, he had his worst game of the season; in 15 minutes, he missed all of his shots and turned the ball over three times. The next morning, on First Take, ESPN’s flagship morning show, Smith made Bronny the subject of one of his trademark rants. For more than four uninterrupted minutes, he pleaded with LeBron—as a father—to stop exposing his son. “Stop this,” he said. “Stop this.”

LeBron does not seem to have taken kindly to Smith’s unsolicited counsel. At the March 6 game, near the end of the third quarter, he approached Smith in his courtside seat. Looming over Smith in a manner that does not usually accompany friendly chatter, he barked something. His exact words can’t be heard in a fan video of the encounter, but his menacing tone is legible. According to Smith’s account of the exchange, LeBron said, “Stop fucking with my son. That’s my son.”

Smith did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did LeBron, so the details of what he said that night are unconfirmed. But even going by the body language and by related comments that LeBron later made on a hot mic, it does appear that his goal was to intimidate. By confronting Smith, LeBron sent a message not just to Smith but also to members of the wider NBA press corps, few of whom have Smith’s stature and influence: Criticize my son, and there will be consequences. Like many rich and powerful people, LeBron seems to want the fruits of global media stardom for himself and his kids, but not the corresponding scrutiny.

LeBron has himself to blame for the sad media spectacle of Bronny’s first season. In the months leading up to last year’s NBA draft, Bronny told reporters that it was his life’s great dream to be drafted by a pro team, any team. In off-the-record interviews, league executives made clear that because Bronny does not have his dad’s skill or size, he wasn’t all that draftable. In his short career at the University of Southern California, which was interrupted by a scary incident of cardiac arrest, he averaged only five points a game.

By all appearances, it was LeBron who made sure Bronny got drafted, first by puffing him up, saying publicly that his son was already better than many active NBA players. LeBron also made it known that he himself would play for whichever team drafted Bronny. (No prospect has ever been packaged so attractively, with the NBA’s first or second all-time best player as a throw-in.) On draft day, the Lakers selected Bronny in the second round. That night, Bronny shed tears; his dream had come true. At a press conference a few days later, the team’s coach, JJ Redick, tried to quiet any doubts. Bronny had earned the pick, he said, with hard work.

At the time, some of LeBron’s critics saw this as contemptible. I wasn’t one of them. Why appoint yourself to the meritocracy police just to make LeBron and his son your first arrests? LeBron’s own father was never in his life. He was still sleeping on friends’ couches late into his childhood. Parenthood means something deep to him; he has described playing with his son as the biggest accomplishment of a career that includes four NBA titles and four MVP awards. There was something beautiful about him using the leverage that he’s amassed in the basketball world to make that happen, by dragging his first-born boy into the league. Was it nepotism? Sure, but human life is shot through with all kinds of advantages of birth, and Bronny’s didn’t seem the most important or unfair.

LeBron deserves some empathy, even in the way he dealt with Smith. Nearly all parents experience something akin to his naive desire, a wish to give their kid the future of their dreams while shielding them from pain and disappointment. LeBron may have felt some anguish as he watched his son this season. Few things are as excruciating as watching your kids suffer. No amount of money or fame can insure against it. LeBron may well be haunted by his role in bringing about that suffering.

But even one of the greatest athletes of our age doesn’t—and certainly shouldn’t—have the power to protect his adult son from criticism. Indeed, what power LeBron has derives from the intense public curiosity about him as a basketball player and as a person. He was able to conjure a plus-one for a family member on an NBA roster precisely because he has been the league’s main character for a generation now. The media were always going to be interested in Bronny’s performance on the court, even if he’d made it there according to his own ability—and all the more so because he seemingly did not.

[Read: The secret code of pickup basketball]

LeBron has had more exposure to the NBA’s media ecosystem than any other active player. He knows that it rewards viral rants that lionize or denigrate a player based on their most recent game. And he should have known that Bronny would not be exempt from that dynamic, no matter how fiercely his father was protecting him.

Now, by appearing to threaten Smith, LeBron has not only acted like a petty strongman; he has drawn new attention to his son’s disappointing season, enlarging the very story that he sought to suppress. It’s a rare misstep for someone so media-savvy, who has amassed an enormous personal fortune while staying almost entirely scandal-free across a long career that began when he was still a teenager. The mistake is, perhaps, understandable. The emotions of parenthood are gigantic. They can knock anyone off their game, even the great LeBron James.

Illustration Sources: Tim Heitman / Getty; Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty; Nathaniel S. Butler / Getty

The automated future just lurched a few steps closer. Over the past few weeks, nearly all of the major AI firms—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Amazon, Microsoft, and Perplexity, among others—have announced new products that are focused not on answering questions or making their human users somewhat more efficient, but on completing tasks themselves. They are being pitched for their ability to “reason” as people do and serve as “agents” that will eventually carry out complex work from start to finish.

Humans will still nudge these models along, of course, but they are engineered to help fewer people do the work of many. Last month, Anthropic launched Claude Code, a coding program that can do much of a human software developer’s job but far faster, “reducing development time and overhead.” The program actively participates in the way that a colleague would, writing and deploying code, among other things. Google now has a widely available “workhorse model,” and three separate AI companies have products named Deep Research, all of which quickly gather and synthesize huge amounts of information on a user’s behalf. OpenAI touts its version’s ability to “complete multi-step research tasks for you” and accomplish “in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.”

AI companies have long been building and benefiting from the narrative that their products will eventually be able to automate major projects for their users, displacing jobs and perhaps even entire professions or sectors of society. As early as 2016, Sam Altman, who had recently co-founded OpenAI, wrote in a blog post that “as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs,” new economic models might be necessary, such as a universal basic income; he has warned repeatedly since then that AI will disrupt the labor market, telling my colleague Ross Andersen in 2023 that “jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”

Despite the foreboding nature of these comments, they have remained firmly in the realm of speculation. Two years ago, ChatGPT couldn’t perform basic arithmetic, and critics have long harped on the technology’s biases and mythomania. Chatbots and AI-powered image generators became known for helping kids cheat on homework and flooding the web with low-grade content. Meaningful applications quickly emerged in some professions—coding, fielding customer-service queries, writing boilerplate copy—but even the best AI models were clearly not capable enough to precipitate widespread job displacement.

[Read: A chatbot is secretly doing my job]

Since then, however, two transformations have taken place. First, AI search became standard. Chatbots exploded in popularity because they could lucidly—though frequently inaccurately—answer human questions. Billions of people were already accustomed to asking questions and finding information online, making this an obvious use case for AI models that might otherwise have seemed like research projects: Now 300 million people use ChatGPT every week, and more than 1 billion use Google’s AI Overview, according to the companies. Further underscoring the products’ relevance, media companies—including The Atlantic—signed lucrative deals with OpenAI and others to add their content to AI search, bringing both legitimacy and some additional scrutiny to the technology. Hundreds of millions were habituated to AI, and at least some portion have found the technology helpful.

But although plain chatbots and AI search introduced a major cultural shift, their business prospects were always small potatoes for the tech giants. Compared with traditional search algorithms, AI algorithms are more expensive to run. And search is an old business model that generative AI could only enhance—perhaps resulting in a few more clicks on paid advertisements or producing a bit more user data for targeting future advertisements.

Refining and expanding generative AI to do more for the professional class—not just students scrambling on term papers—is where tech companies see the real financial opportunity. And they’ve been building toward seizing it. The second transformation that has led to this new phase of the AI era is simply that the technology, while still riddled with biases and inaccuracies, has legitimately improved. The slate of so-called reasoning models released in recent months, such as OpenAI’s o3-mini and xAI’s Grok 3, has impressed in particular. These AI products can be genuinely helpful, and their applications to advancing scientific research could prove lifesaving. Economists, doctors, coders, and other professionals are widely commenting on how these new models can expedite their work; a quarter of tech start-ups in this year’s cohort at the prestigious incubator Y Combinator said that 95 percent of their code was generated with AI. Major firms—McKinsey, Moderna, and Salesforce, to name just a handful—are now using it in basically every aspect of their businesses. And the models continue getting cheaper, and faster, to deploy.

[Read: The GPT era is already ending]

Tech executives, in turn, have grown blunt about their hopes that AI will become good enough to do a human’s work. In a Meta earnings call in late January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent” that’s as skilled as “a good, mid-level engineer.” Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently said in a talk with the Council on Foreign Relations that AI will be “writing 90 percent of the code” just a few months from now—although still with human specifications, he noted. But he continued, “We will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can,” in every industry. (Amodei, it should be mentioned, is the ultimate techno-optimist; in October, he published a sprawling manifesto, titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” that posited AI development could lead to “the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights.”) Altman has used similarly grand language recently, imagining countless virtual knowledge workers fanning out across industries.

These bright visions have dimmed considerably when put into practice: Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to replace human civil servants with AI may be the clearest and most dramatic execution of this playbook yet, with massive job loss and little more than chaos to show for it so far. Meanwhile, all of generative-AI models’ issues with bias, inaccuracy, and poor citations remain, even as the technology has advanced. OpenAI’s image-generating technology still struggles at times to produce people with the right number of appendages. Salesforce is reportedly struggling to sell its AI agent, Agentforce, to customers because of issues with accuracy and concerns about the product’s high cost, among other things. Nevertheless, the corporation has pressed on with its pitch, much as other AI companies have continued to iterate on and promote products with known issues. (In a recent earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the firm has “3,000 paying Agentforce customers who are experiencing unprecedented levels of productivity.”) In other words, flawed products won’t stop tech companies’ push to automate everything—the AI-saturated future will be imperfect at best, but it is coming anyway.

The industry’s motivations are clear: Google’s and Microsoft’s cloud businesses, for instance, grew rapidly in 2024, driven substantially by their AI offerings. Meta’s head of business AI, Clara Shih, recently told CNBC that the company expects “every business” to use AI agents, “the way that businesses today have websites and email addresses.” OpenAI is reportedly considering charging $20,000 a month for access to what it describes as Ph.D.-level research agents.

Google and Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment, and a Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment. An OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to an essay from September in which Altman wrote, “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do.” He could well be right; the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects AI to substantially increase the demand for computer and business occupations through 2033. A spokesperson for Anthropic referred me to the start-up’s initiative to study and prepare for AI’s effect on the labor market. The effort’s first research paper analyzed millions of conversations with Anthropic’s Claude model and found that it was used to “automate” human work in 43 percent of cases, such as identifying and fixing a software bug.

Tech companies are revealing, more clearly than ever, their vision for a post-work future. ChatGPT started the generative-AI boom not with an incredible business success, but with a psychological one. The chatbot was and is still possibly losing the company money, but it exposed internet users around the world to the first popular computer program that could hold an intelligent conversation on any subject. The advent of AI search may have performed a similar role, presenting limited opportunity for immediate profits but habituating—or perhaps inoculating—millions of people to bots that can think, write, and live for you.

For years, Donald Trump’s critics have accused him of behaving like a crooked used-car salesman. Yesterday afternoon, he did it for real on the White House South Lawn.

Squinting in the sun with Elon Musk, Trump stood next to five Tesla vehicles, holding a piece of paper with handwritten notes about their features and costs. Trump said he would purchase a car himself at full price. Then Trump and Musk got into one of the cars. Musk explained that the electric vehicle was “like a golf cart that goes really fast.” Trump offered his own praise to the camera: “Wow. That’s beautiful. This is a different panel than I’ve—everything’s computer!”

This was a stilted, corrupt attempt to juice a friend’s stock, and certainly beneath the office of the presidency. But you ought not to overlook just how embarrassing the spectacle was for Musk. The subtext of the event—during which Trump also declared that the White House would label any acts of violence against Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism—was the ongoing countrywide protests against Tesla, due to Musk’s role in the Trump administration. In some cities, protesters have defaced or damaged Tesla vehicles and set fire to the company’s charging stations. Tesla’s stock price has fallen sharply—almost 50 percent since its mid-December, postelection peak—on the back of terrible sales numbers in Europe. The hastily assembled White House press event was presented as a show of solidarity, but the optics were quite clear: Musk needed Trump to come in and fix his mess for him.

And Tesla isn’t the only Musk venture that’s struggling. SpaceX’s massive new Starship rocket has exploded twice this year during test flights. And Ontario, Canada, has canceled its contract with his Starlink internet company to provide service to remote communities, citing Trump’s tariffs. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk is $148 billion poorer than he was on Inauguration Day (he is currently worth $333.1 billion).

Just 17 days after wielding a chain saw and dancing triumphantly onstage at CPAC, the billionaire looked like he was about to cry on the Fox Business channel earlier this week. He confessed that he was having “great difficulty” running his many businesses, and let out a long, dismal sigh and shrugged when asked if he might go back to his businesses after he’s done in the administration.

The world’s richest man can be cringe, stilted, and manic in public appearances, but rarely have I seen him appear as defeated as he has of late, not two months into his role as a presidential adviser. In the past few weeks, he’s been chastised by some of Trump’s agency heads for overstepping his bounds as an adviser (Trump sided with the agency heads). Reports suggest that some Republican lawmakers are frustrated with Musk’s bluster and that the DOGE approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy is angering constituents and making lawmakers less popular in their districts. DOGE has produced few concrete “wins” for the Trump administration and has instead alienated many Americans who see Musk as presiding over a cruel operation that is haphazardly firing and rehiring people and taking away benefits. Numerous national polls in recent weeks indicate that a majority of respondents disapprove of Musk’s role and actions in the government.

Musk’s deep sighs on cable TV and emergency Tesla junkets on the White House lawn are hints that he may be beginning to understand the precariousness of his situation. He is well known for his high risk tolerance, overleveraging, and seemingly wild business bets. But his role at DOGE represents the biggest reputational and, consequently, financial gamble of his career. Musk is playing a dangerous game, and he looks to be losing control of the narrative.

And the narrative is everything. Elon Musk is many things—the richest man in the world, an internet-addled conspiracy theorist, the controller of six companies, perhaps even the shadow president of the United States—but most importantly, he is an idea. The value of Musk may be tied more to his image than his actual performance. He’s a human meme stock.

A CNN clip from late October captures this notion. In it, a reporter is standing outside one of Musk’s America PAC rallies in Pennsylvania, interviewing the CEO’s superfans, most of whom are unequivocal that Musk is “the smartest man in the world.” He has an engineer’s mindset, one attendee claims, meaning he sees the world differently. Two other men in the clip say that Musk got them to pay attention to politics (and to Trump, specifically). These people had fallen hard for a cultivated image of Musk as a Thomas Edison or Tony Stark type, a great man of history who is single-handedly pushing the bounds of progress. Musk has had great success popularizing electric vehicles and building new rockets (though many still debate his direct involvement in the engineering). These supporters might have been fans of his companies, but they seem to have also fallen for the myth of his genius, a story born out of years of hagiographic books, news articles reporting his hyperbolic claims, and Musk’s own ability to command attention.

[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]

The image of Musk as a true visionary has proved surprisingly durable. In the early to mid-2010s, Musk took advantage of a different era of technology coverage—one that was more gadget-focused and largely uncritical—to hype his ideas for the future of transportation and interplanetary exploration. At that time, Tesla, his signature project, was coded as progressive and marketed as being in line with climate-change goals. The cultural dynamic of these ideas has changed, but the fundamental product being sold by Musk has not: one man with a singular ability to brute force his way to the future.

Musk’s trajectory changed after Trump was first elected president. It was during this period that Musk—already an incessant poster—realized how Twitter could be used to command an unbelievable amount of attention. Even when that attention was negative, the process of repeatedly making himself the main character on the platform elevated Musk’s profile. He became more polarizing (for chastising journalists, behaving erratically, making a supposed weed joke on Twitter that got him in trouble with the SEC, and getting sued for defamation for calling somebody a “pedo guy”), yet this somehow only added to Musk’s lore.

For years, valid criticisms of the Tesla executive came with an asterisk: He’s erratic, crude, even a little unstable, but that’s all part of the larger visionary package. Kara Swisher showcased this dynamic well in a 2018 New York Times column titled “Elon Musk Is the Id of Tech.” “I find the hagiography around him tiresome and even toxic,” she wrote. But also, “Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.” As Swisher noted, Musk’s attention-seeking at the time had a secondary effect of alienating him from some of his peers and fans. But tweet by tweet, Musk found a different audience, one eager to embrace his visionary image, provided he took up their crusade against “wokeism.”

During the pandemic, Musk’s posting frequency intensified considerably as he began to stake out more reactionary territory. He called the COVID-19 panic in March 2020 “dumb” and later that year tweeted that “pronouns suck.” Musk endeared himself to the right wing by positioning himself as a free-speech warrior, a posture that ultimately led him to purchase Twitter. Right-wing influencers and the MAGA faithful saw Musk’s turn as proof of their movement’s ascendance, but what has happened since Musk turned Twitter into X is nothing short of audience capture: Musk has fully become the person his right-wing fanboys want him to be, pushing far beyond a mere  dalliance with conspiracy theories and “Great Replacement” rhetoric. It is hardly controversial to suggest based on Musk's posts and blatant political activism that the centibillionaire has been further radicalized by his platform, which he then turned into a political weapon to help elect Trump.

Musk’s X and MAGA bets mostly paid off, at least in the near term. Before Musk bought Twitter, I highlighted a comment from Lily Francus, then the director of quant research at Moody’s Analytics, who noted, “I do think fundamentally that a significant fraction of Tesla’s value is due to the fact that Elon can command this attention continuously.” Francus doesn’t go as far as to say that Tesla behaves like a meme stock—which can surge in price after going viral as a result of coordinated efforts online—but that Musk himself has this quality. Musk’s Twitter purchase was a bad deal financially and has been detrimental to X’s bottom line, but his ownership of the platform helped boost his cultural and political relevance by keeping him in the center of the news cycle. Similarly, Musk going all in on Donald Trump, becoming a megadonor to Republicans, and ultimately getting the DOGE gig all resulted in Tesla stock soaring—up until a point.

You can argue that there’s a flywheel effect to all of this. Musk’s polarizing, upsetting, attention-seeking behavior has made him unavoidable and increased his political influence, which, in turn, has increased his net worth overall. This has only improved Musk’s standing with Trump, who both respects great wealth and appears flattered by the notion that the richest man in the world wants to spend his time shadowing him around Washington and Mar-a-Lago.

Musk is used to being leveraged, trading on his reputation or his illiquid assets to keep the flywheel spinning. To his credit, he tends to make it work. He’s flouted the law when that has been advantageous to his business interests and taken advantage of a culture of elite impunity. He’s long been unafraid to get sued or reprimanded by a government agency. But two important things are different in his current situation. The first is the stakes of his reputational bet—rather than alienating himself from progressives or the media, Musk is threatening to meddle with essential government services, such as Social Security, that millions of Americans rely on. Indeed, Musk floated the idea of cutting Social Security benefits in his Fox Business interview on Monday. Whether he’s in charge of cuts or not, as DOGE’s figurehead, Musk risks infuriating countless people who object to the federal firings. Breaking the government is orders of magnitude different than buying a niche but influential microblogging platform.

[Read: There are no more red lines]

The second difference is the man he’s tied his reputation to: Trump. Musk’s attention-seeking and fondness for organizational chaos are usually unmatched, giving him an advantage in most of his dealings. This is not the case with Trump, whose shamelessness and penchant for discarding close confidants when they become liabilities are well documented. Musk is rich and powerful, but he is not the durable, singular political figure that Trump is. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario where this ends poorly for Musk. The flywheel could reverse: Musk could become universally reviled, causing the protests to increase and his net worth to shrink. The richest man in the world is valuable to Trump, as is the myth of Musk as the modern Edison. But mere billionaires? They are fungible tokens and easily interchangeable dais members in Trump’s eyes—just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

It would be foolish to suggest with any certainty that Musk is cooked. Historically, he’s managed to wriggle out of trouble. Perhaps the most hopeful outcome for Musk is that Trump has too much of his own presidency tied to Musk to throw him under the bus. It’s too early to say.

Yesterday’s White House stunt had all the hallmarks of Trump corruption, but there was something else, too—an air of desperation. It was a tacit admission that the protests are working and that Musk and Trump are rattled enough by current sentiment that they’re willing to turn the South Lawn into a showroom. Watching Musk clam up on Fox Business or quietly idle next to Trump in front of the White House, it’s even easier than normal to see past Musk’s trademark bullshitting and bluster. These moments make clear that this time, Musk has wagered the only thing he can’t easily buy back—the very myth he created for himself.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.

A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.

The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday—meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software’s code base, which is visible on GitHub.

[Read: DOGE has ‘god mode’ access to government data]

The bot, which GSA leadership is framing as a productivity booster for federal workers, is part of a broader playbook from DOGE and its allies. Speaking about GSA’s broader plans, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently installed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), GSA’s IT division, said at an all-hands meeting last month that the agency is pushing for an “AI-first strategy.” In the meeting, a recording of which I obtained, Shedd said that “as we decrease [the] overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there’s still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.” He suggested that “coding agents” could be provided across the government—a reference to AI programs that can write and possibly deploy code in place of a human. Moreover, Shedd said, AI could “run analysis on contracts,” and software could be used to “automate” GSA’s “finance functions.”

A small technology team within GSA called 10x started developing the program during President Joe Biden’s term, and initially envisioned it not as a productivity tool but as an AI testing ground: a place to experiment with AI models for federal uses, similar to how private companies create internal bespoke AI tools. But DOGE allies have pushed to accelerate the tool’s development and deploy it as a work chatbot amid mass layoffs (tens of thousands of federal workers have resigned or been terminated since Elon Musk began his assault on the government). The chatbot’s rollout was first noted by Wired, but further details about its wider launch and the software’s previous development had not been reported prior to this story.

The program—which was briefly called “GSAi” and is now known internally as “GSA Chat” or simply “chat”—was described as a tool to draft emails, write code, “and much more!” in an email sent by Zach Whitman, GSA’s chief AI officer, to some of the software’s early users. An internal guide for federal employees notes that the GSA chatbot “will help you work more effectively and efficiently.” The bot’s interface, which I have seen, looks and acts similar to that of ChatGPT or any similar program: Users type into a prompt box, and the program responds. GSA intends to eventually roll the AI out to other government agencies, potentially under the name “AI.gov.” The system currently allows users to select from models licensed from Meta and Anthropic, and although agency staff currently can’t upload documents to the chatbot, they likely will be permitted to in the future, according to a GSA employee with knowledge of the project and the chatbot’s code repository. The program could conceivably be used to plan large-scale government projects, inform reductions in force, or query centralized repositories of federal data, the GSA worker told me.

Spokespeople for DOGE did not respond to my requests for comment, and the White House press office directed me to GSA. In response to a detailed list of questions, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for GSA, wrote in an emailed statement that “GSA is currently undertaking a review of its available IT resources, to ensure our staff can perform their mission in support of American taxpayers,” and that the agency is “conducting comprehensive testing to verify the effectiveness and reliability of all tools available to our workforce.”

At this point, it’s common to use AI for work, and GSA’s chatbot may not have a dramatic effect on the government’s operations. But it is just one small example of a much larger effort as DOGE continues to decimate the civil service. At the Department of Education, DOGE advisers have reportedly fed sensitive data on agency spending into AI programs to identify places to cut. DOGE reportedly intends to use AI to help determine whether employees across the government should keep their job. In another TTS meeting late last week—a recording of which I reviewed—Shedd said he expects that the division will be “at least 50 percent smaller” within weeks. (TTS houses the team that built GSA Chat.) And arguably more controversial possibilities for AI loom on the horizon: For instance, the State Department plans to use the technology to help review the social-media posts of tens of thousands of student-visa holders so that the department may revoke visas held by students who appear to support designated terror groups, according to Axios.

Rushing into a generative-AI rollout carries well-established risks. AI models exhibit all manner of biases, struggle with factual accuracy, are expensive, and have opaque inner workings; a lot can and does go wrong even when more responsible approaches to the technology are taken. GSA seemed aware of this reality when it initially started work on its chatbot last summer. It was then that 10x, the small technology team within GSA, began developing what was known as the “10x AI Sandbox.” Far from a general-purpose chatbot, the sandbox was envisioned as a secure, cost-effective environment for federal employees to explore how AI might be able to assist their work, according to the program’s code base on GitHub—for instance, by testing prompts and designing custom models. “The principle behind this thing is to show you not that AI is great for everything, to try to encourage you to stick AI into every product you might be ideating around,” a 10x engineer said in an early demo video for the sandbox, “but rather to provide a simple way to interact with these tools and to quickly prototype.”

[Kara Swisher: Move fast and destroy democracy]

But Donald Trump appointees pushed to quickly release the software as a chat assistant, seemingly without much regard for which applications of the technology may be feasible. AI could be a useful assistant for federal employees in specific ways, as GSA’s chatbot has been framed, but given the technology’s propensity to make up legal precedents, it also very well could not. As a recently departed GSA employee told me, “They want to cull contract data into AI to analyze it for potential fraud, which is a great goal. And also, if we could do that, we’d be doing it already.” Using AI creates “a very high risk of flagging false positives,” the employee said, “and I don’t see anything being considered to serve as a check against that.” A help page for early users of the GSA chat tool notes concerns including “hallucination”—an industry term for AI confidently presenting false information as true—“biased responses or perpetuated stereotypes,” and “privacy issues,” and instructs employees not to enter personally identifiable information or sensitive unclassified information. How any of those warnings will be enforced was not specified.

Of course, federal agencies have been experimenting with generative AI for many months. Before the November election, for instance, GSA had initiated a contract with Google to test how AI models “can enhance productivity, collaboration, and efficiency,” according to a public inventory. The Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, as well as numerous other federal agencies, were testing tools from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and elsewhere before the inauguration. Some kind of federal chatbot was probably inevitable.

But not necessarily in this form. Biden took a more cautious approach to the technology: In a landmark executive order and subsequent federal guidance, the previous administration stressed that the government’s use of AI should be subject to thorough testing, strict guardrails, and public transparency, given the technology’s obvious risks and shortcomings. Trump, on his first day in office, repealed that order, with the White House later saying that it had imposed “onerous and unnecessary government control.” Now DOGE and the Trump administration appear intent on using the entire federal government as a sandbox, and the more than 340 million Americans they serve as potential test subjects.

So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential election, when just a little more than half of America (and a surprisingly diverse group for an anti-DEI candidate) decided to give the job once again to the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

But what was quite different this time was the growing participation from the tech elite, with some falling in line before the election, some waiting until after, and one—Elon Musk—taking an even more prominent role, effectively gaining control of the U.S. government for the price of getting Trump back into power.

For tech leaders at this moment, the digital world they rule has become not enough. Leaders, in fact, is the wrong word to use now. Titans is more like it, as many have cozied up to Trump in order to dominate this world as we enter the next Cambrian explosion in technology, with the development of advanced AI.

I cannot explain fully why a small majority of U.S. voters did what they did, because it is for many and varied reasons, including inflation, immigration, a ginned-up panic over trans athletes, and post-pandemic yips, in which I have only glancing expertise. There is no doubt we all are muddling through unusually aggrieved times. But I can tell you how we got that way, because of the part I do know about, which has been a crucial element to what has happened: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech moguls, and their willful carelessness and sometimes-filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence in managing it.

When combined with a lack of empathy and enormous financial self-interest—which I’ve been pointing out at least since Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: greed (of the few) over need (of the many).

And that has resulted in the damaging and warping and siloing of us all, courtesy of many of the people I wrote about in my book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, about the promise and then souring of Silicon Valley. It is these characters who want to reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once. To update the old Facebook maxim of “Move fast and break things”: Move fast and crush everyone. This was bad enough as a business axiom, but when it’s applied to the entire apparatus of our democracy, it’s terrifying.

My memoir of my decades covering these people—from when they had nothing to now, when they have it all—focused on a range of characters, including the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who was by far the person I most thought of as a true tech visionary. While some might disagree—not everyone was keen on his use of what was jokingly called a “reality-distortion field” conjured up to sell his always nifty hardware—Jobs stood far and away above the men who followed him, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and, of course, Elon Musk of, it’s fair to say, Elon Musk Inc.

Jobs, who was definitely a crafty and manipulative charmer, also had a set of basic values he stayed true to, from protection of privacy to making quality products, unlike this trio for whom the acquisition of wealth, the hoarding of power, and endless self-aggrandizement have become the goal. Unlike Jobs, who left behind a legacy of innovation and even wonder, the titans who followed him are so poor, all they have is money.

To be fair, Musk’s efforts were once certainly loftier— pushing into existence an electric-car industry that had not previously had any traction; cutting the costs of rockets and space travel and much more. Let me clearly acknowledge that this was all indeed inspiring. That is, until his epic megalomania, personal foibles, and other deep-seated character flaws—which had always been there, lurking—took over his mind completely and sent it into the outer limits.

After years of mocking Trump, Musk changed drastically during COVID and became ever more manic and cruel, as he swung hard right down conspiracy highway. That was why I predicted on my book tour in March 2024 that Musk would back Trump extravagantly, even after he had just as vehemently said he would remain politically neutral and promised not to donate to either candidate.

Hello, he is lying, I thought at the time. Under a Biden administration—and then, after he stepped down as nominee, a Harris administration—Musk would have received the usual scrutiny of his businesses. He must have known that under Trump, if he ponied up time and money, and, most especially, if he deployed the platform formerly known as Twitter to power Trump’s propaganda machine, an unfettered billionaire’s paradise awaited him.

Soon enough, besides funding a PAC and taking over Trump’s ground game in swing states, Musk was showing off his stomach while bizarrely jumping up and down on a variety of stages across the nation. And, of course, he was pushing a flood of inaccurate information on X and puckering up to Trump like a particularly enthusiastic remora, sometimes referred to as a suckerfish or shark sucker. (Hey, I don’t make up the words.)

As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, even if it meant cosplaying as a beta to Trump’s alpha. It’s paid off: His net worth has nearly doubled after Trump’s victory—it sits at $348 billion today—with billions more possible as he remakes the government in his image. Soon after Trump’s victory, the president announced the formation of the jokingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—which I suggested might more accurately stand for “Department of Grandstanding Edgelords”—to be run by Musk and (briefly) a fellow look-at-me billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. With its power, staff, and efficacy undefined, it sounded more like an episode of The Apprentice.

Initially, a number of people theorized that this unelected commission was a clever way for Trump to sideline the billionaire who had helped to take him over the line to victory. I myself was not sure Trump would tolerate anyone taking attention off him. But so far, he has.

As of this writing, tens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies. Musk has gotten rid of regulators who just happen to oversee his businesses, in agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and USAID. While Trump has recently made noises about reining in Musk’s power, he also said that if Cabinet members don’t shrink their own agencies, “Elon will do the cutting.” And, anyway, Musk has a long track record of doing whatever he wants.

What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism, and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. As I often point out, the opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.

Before the stakes got even higher, there was a warning about what was happening as AI expanded. With trillions of dollars there for the taking, investments are being made by the same small coterie of companies and people that now controls the entire federal government. So are the important decisions about safety and more, which should be made by an independent and fair government and its citizens.

There are no laws regulating almost any of it, though the Biden administration gave it a shrugging try for a little bit. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention.

“The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy,” wrote one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio. “This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.” This seems vanishingly unlikely today.

Where is the hope, then? One glimmer came to me this past year in an interview I did with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, in which he pointed out that science and illumination were not the immediate beneficiaries of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, in about 1440, though some tie those developments together. In fact, even a century later, Copernicus’s groundbreaking On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres sold only 500 copies. What was a best seller right after the press was in heavy use was a book by an obscure writer named Heinrich Kramer titled “The Hammer of Witches,” a demented treatise on satanic women who stole men’s penises and hid them in a nest in a tree, I kid you not. When we spoke, Harari noted that the popularity of the book spurred witch hunts, in which tens of thousands of people—mostly women—were killed.

“The thing is the printing press did not cause the scientific revolution. No,” Harari told me. “You have about 200 years from the time that Gutenberg brings print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until the flowering of the scientific revolution.”

He went on: “How did, in the end, we get to the scientific revolution? It wasn’t the technology of the printing press; it was the creation of institutions that were dedicated to sifting through this kind of ocean of information, and all these stories and developing mechanisms to evaluate reliable information and to be trusted by the population.”

That is, indeed, the possible exit from the mess we now find ourselves in—swimming in oceans of information with an ever-decreasing number of facts to keep us afloat. Except, unlike the expansion that tech gave to the enlightened before, the institutions of today, such as media, science, and education, are being slowly destroyed by technology. And there seems to be no way out of this world, especially as egomaniacal entrepreneurs like Musk and others fork over small pieces of their vast fortunes to buy up everything from global media to, yes, a president of the United States.

And there they are, thus, everywhere we look, running everything, a fate that Paul Virilio predicted in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct technology journal CTHEORY, when he worried that “virtuality will destroy reality.” That is precisely what is happening 30 years later, although it is much worse than I think we are prepared to acknowledge, even now as Musk presides over Oval Office press conferences and White House Cabinet meetings as Trump’s enforcer and sees himself as a kind of global superhero.

In our many interviews over the years, Musk often referenced science fiction, which he looked to for inspiration. During that 1994 interview, Virilio referenced a short story that I imagine Musk knows, “in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow, which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.”

The interviewer then asks the single best question I have ever heard—a question that I wish I would have had the perspicuity to ask of the many tech leaders I have known over three decades, especially Musk, who via DOGE now is building what techies call a “God view” dashboard of our nation and the world: “But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?”

And from Virilio, the best answer: “We’ll dream of being blind.”

It’s not the worst idea.

This essay has been adapted from the epilogue of Swisher’s book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks like a bearded baby or Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes, he is holding a lollipop and wearing a child’s baseball cap with a propeller affixed to the top. One meme takes his edited baby face and adds lusciously curly locks, while another changes his skin tone to a gentle purple hue, making him look like a Willy Wonka–inspired human blueberry. In every image, Vance has been reanimated as an utter doofus.

These memes first appeared in October, when a user on X posted an image of Vance captioned: “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” But baby-faced Vance has gone fully viral since last week, when the vice president clashed with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Many of the photos, the most popular of which have received tens of thousands of likes on platforms such as X and Instagram, include captions that imagine Vance talking like a small child who cannot yet properly pronounce his words: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.”

Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party’s second in command.

No, the right doesn’t appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance’s recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).

So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. “They’re just funny,” he told me when I asked him about them. For what it’s worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are “funny.” Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they’re actually helping him. “The right is having so much fun roasting Vance’s baby fat that it’s just completely neutered the left’s capacity to make fun of him,” one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. “This feels like a precursor to Vance’s inevitable presidency,” Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. “He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.

Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. Biden supporters made memes that earnestly portrayed him as a savvy, Machiavellian political operator (with laser eyes, of course). Harris supporters started putting coconut and palm-tree emoji in their display names on social media, calling themselves “coconut-pilled.” This strategy seemed successful at the time. As my colleague Charlie Warzel noted when people first started coconut posting, the memes had an “authentic” and “maybe even fun” energy to them. In both instances, it felt like Democrats could take a joke and even spin it around to their favor. In the end, this tactic did not work out. Biden’s age caught up with him, and Harris’s folksy awkwardness didn’t seem to charm voters.

The Vance memes might work against the vice president even more. There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus. As trivial as they might seem, memes about politicians can be telling. “Dark Brandon” memes wouldn’t have been quite as funny if Biden was actually sharper and quicker than he seemed. “Coconut-pilled” memes wouldn’t have endured if Harris didn’t frequently say bizarre and confusing things. Whether or not they consciously realized it, by spreading such memes, liberals were copping to some uncomfortable truths about the politicians they supported. The Vance memes seem to contain an admission as well: that even some conservatives do not see him as essential to the current MAGA movement.

Consider the fact that Democrats have long tried to embarrass Trump with memes and images of him as an infant, a Cheeto, and other forms. None of it has really stuck, even ironically, on the right. Trump’s own base just doesn’t see him that way, and they instead often make memes portraying him as heroic and muscular. But for a vice president who was picked with widespread support in his party, Vance, at times, has almost seemed like a fringe figure in Trump’s second term. He is, of course, overshadowed by the president himself—but also by Elon Musk, who is gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, and by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has legions of fans as part of his “Make America healthy again” movement. Vance might nominally be more powerful than Musk and Kennedy, but he’s easier to forget about.  

That might be why the memes of baby-faced Vance have been so popular. Vance has taken such a back-seat role in the administration that when he tried to assert himself in the Zelensky meeting, it did look slightly forced and unnatural—like a child trying to boss around a group of adults. The best jokes always have a kernel of truth in them. The same goes for memes.

Donald Trump wants to get back into the casino business. These days, the onetime owner of the infamous Taj Mahal casino is not interested in slot machines. He is set on a much newer kind of gambling: crypto. Yesterday, the president signed an executive order creating both a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and a “Digital Asset Stockpile” made up of different kinds of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin stockpile, which presumably will be the larger of the two, amounts to “a virtual Fort Knox for digital gold,” Trump said during a crypto summit at the White House earlier today. “‘Never sell your bitcoin.’ That’s a little phrase that they have. I don’t know if that’s right or not. Who the hell knows.”

There are reasons for governments to stockpile essential commodities. America has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve to protect against disruptions in the global oil market or for use during natural disasters or other emergencies. China’s strategic pork reserve helps the government keep prices stable, and South Korea recently had to pull from its strategic cabbage reserve during peak kimchi season. But a crypto reserve would serve none of these functions. The ostensible idea is that stockpiling crypto could help “drive economic growth and technological leadership,” as a fact sheet for the executive order states. But unlike oil or even cabbage, crypto does not serve the core functioning of society. It’s a volatile, highly speculative asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for. It’s hard to think of anything that would be less useful for America to stockpile.

“Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” is a lofty name for what Trump’s executive order actually has done: taking crypto the government already owns and counting it. Over the years, the United States has seized crypto assets as part of criminal and civil proceedings. The current value of bitcoin alone is estimated to be $17 billion. Why Trump seems set on pushing forward with this idea isn’t hard to see. The mere existence of something called a crypto reserve could benefit the president. Trump himself has gone all in on the crypto industry of late—even releasing his own memecoin, $TRUMP. On Sunday, he previewed his executive order on Truth Social: “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World,” he wrote. “We are MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Many other powerful members of his administration have crypto ties. That includes David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is now Trump’s crypto and AI czar, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. (Sacks has said he sold all crypto holdings prior to the start of the administration; Lutnick has agreed to divest his business interests by mid-May.) Elon Musk has previously indicated that he owns crypto assets, but hasn’t publicly addressed possible conflicts of interest since the crypto reserve was announced. I reached out to Musk, the White House, and the Department of Commerce for comment but did not hear back.

A government stockpile could boost crypto prices. In crypto-speak, the ethos of the industry is: “Number go up.” In plain English, that means pushing the price of crypto assets higher and higher. The way to do that is to find buyers who will pay more, a phenomenon sometimes called the “greater-fool theory.” Investing in something that is overvalued or intrinsically worthless might be the smart thing to do, if you can eventually find someone on whom to pawn it off at a higher price. A crypto reserve effectively turns the U.S. government into the next greater fool. Trump’s executive order also calls for the government to look into buying more bitcoin, a move that could push up the value of crypto. (Trump said that the actions taken to establish the new reserve would not cost taxpayers any money, but provided few details on how this would be achieved.)

Trump already has had an effect on crypto values. In his Truth Social announcement on Sunday, he named five coins that would be included in the stockpile: bitcoin, ether, solana, cardano, and XRP. This is exactly what you would not do if you wanted to efficiently and affordably assemble a government crypto reserve; naming the specific coins that the United States intends to later include in a stockpile should cause the prices to immediately spike. And that’s just what happened. The coins Trump mentioned shot up in value. Crypto holders had the chance to make a tidy profit selling off some of their coins—despite the fact that the stockpile in the end simply included bitcoin and all other crypto assets seized by the government, rendering the details in Trump’s posts moot.

Any government that trades in crypto raises concerns about how the currency could be used. Because crypto transactions can be done anonymously, they provide an almost unparalleled mechanism for bribery and corruption. Investing in crypto doesn’t mean a nation is using the currency as an illegal back door, but the problem is the difficulty in knowing if it were.

Now that the president has created a crypto reserve, he will want crypto prices to keep rising—otherwise the stockpile will be worthless. Driving the prices higher would require a steady stream of positive news. But the good news is already drying up, it seems. Trump’s executive order did not go over well with crypto traders, who were hoping that the government would do more than shift around the coins it owns: The price of bitcoin plummeted immediately after the order was announced.

At a certain point, even good news isn’t quite good enough. Buy the rumor; sell the news, as the old saying goes. Eventually, the U.S. government will be stuck with a bunch of crypto, searching for ways to drive the price higher and having no one to sell it to. If Trump keeps feeding the crypto hype machine, he may benefit—and the rest of us may be stuck with the bill.

Generative-AI companies have been selling a narrative of unprecedented, endless progress. Just last week, OpenAI introduced GPT-4.5 as its “largest and best model for chat yet.” Earlier in February, Google called its latest version of Gemini “the world’s best AI model.” And in January, the Chinese company DeepSeek touted its R1 model as being just as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model—which Sam Altman had called “the smartest model in the world” the previous month.

Yet there is growing evidence that progress is slowing down and that the LLM-powered chatbot may already be near its peak. This is troubling, given that the promise of advancement has become a political issue; massive amounts of land, power, and money have been earmarked to drive the technology forward. How much is it actually improving? How much better can it get? These are important questions, and they’re nearly impossible to answer because the tests that measure AI progress are not working. (The Atlantic entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI in 2024. The editorial division of The Atlantic operates independently from the business division.)

Unlike conventional computer programs, generative AI is designed not to produce precise answers to certain questions, but to generalize. A chatbot needs to be able to answer questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained to answer, like a human student who learns not only the fact that 2 x 3 = 6 but also how to multiply any two numbers. A model that can’t do this wouldn’t be capable of “reasoning” or making meaningful contributions to science, as AI companies promise. Generalization can be tricky to measure, and trickier still is proving that a model is getting better at it. To measure the success of their work, companies cite industry-standard benchmark tests whenever they release a new model. The tests supposedly contain questions the models haven’t seen, showing that they’re not simply memorizing facts.

[Read: The words that stop ChatGPT in its tracks]

Yet over the past two years, researchers have published studies and experiments showing that ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Llama, Mistral, Google’s Gemma (the “open-access” cousin of its Gemini product), Microsoft’s Phi, and Alibaba’s Qwen have been trained on the text of popular benchmark tests, tainting the legitimacy of their scores. Think of it like a human student who steals and memorizes a math test, fooling his teacher into thinking he’s learned how to do long division.

The problem is known as benchmark contamination. It’s so widespread that one industry newsletter concluded in October that “Benchmark Tests Are Meaningless.” Yet despite how established the problem is, AI companies keep citing these tests as the primary indicators of progress. (A spokesperson for Google DeepMind told me that the company takes the problem seriously and is constantly looking for new ways to evaluate its models. No other company mentioned in this article commented on the issue.)

Benchmark contamination is not necessarily intentional. Most benchmarks are published on the internet, and models are trained on large swaths of text harvested from the internet. Training data sets contain so much text, in fact, that finding and filtering out the benchmarks is extremely difficult. When Microsoft launched a new language model in December, a researcher on the team bragged about “aggressively” rooting out benchmarks in its training data—yet the model’s accompanying technical report admitted that the team’s methods were “not effective against all scenarios.”

One of the most commonly cited benchmarks is called Massive Multitask Language Understanding. It consists of roughly 16,000 multiple-choice questions covering 57 subjects, including anatomy, philosophy, marketing, nutrition, religion, math, and programming. Over the past year, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and DeepSeek have all advertised their models’ scores on MMLU, and yet researchers have shown that models from all of these companies have been trained on its questions.

How do researchers know that “closed” models, such as OpenAI’s, have been trained on benchmarks? Their techniques are clever, and reveal interesting things about how large language models work.

[Read: The GPT era is already ending]

One research team took questions from MMLU and asked ChatGPT not for the correct answers but for a specific incorrect multiple-choice option. ChatGPT was able to provide the exact text of incorrect answers on MMLU 57 percent of the time, something it likely couldn’t do unless it was trained on the test, because the options are selected from an infinite number of wrong answers.

Another team of researchers from Microsoft and Xiamen University, in China, investigated GPT-4’s performance on questions from programming competitions hosted on the Codeforces website. The competitions are widely regarded as a way for programmers to sharpen their skills. How did GPT-4 do? Quite well on questions that were published online before September 2021. On questions published after that date, its performance tanked. That version of GPT-4 was trained only on data from before September 2021, leading the researchers to suggest that it had memorized the questions and “casting doubt on its actual reasoning abilities,” according to the researchers. Giving more support to this hypothesis, other researchers have shown that GPT-4’s performance on coding questions is better for questions that appear more frequently on the internet. (The more often a model sees the same text, the more likely it is to memorize it.)

Can the benchmark-contamination problem be solved? A few suggestions have been made by AI companies and independent researchers. One is to update benchmarks constantly with questions based on new information sources. This might prevent answers from appearing in training data, but it also breaks the concept of a benchmark: a standard test that gives consistent, stable results for purposes of comparison. Another approach is taken by a website called Chatbot Arena, which pits LLMs against one another, gladiator style, and lets users choose which model gives the better answers to their questions. This approach is immune to contamination concerns, but it is subjective and similarly unstable. Others have suggested the use of one LLM to judge the performance of another, a process that is not entirely reliable. None of these methods delivers confident measurements of LLMs’ ability to generalize.

Although AI companies have started talking about “reasoning models,” the technology is largely the same as it was when ChatGPT was released in November 2022. LLMs are still word-prediction algorithms: They piece together responses based on works written by authors, scholars, and bloggers. With casual use, ChatGPT does appear to be “figuring out” the answers to your queries. But is that what’s happening, or is it just very hard to come up with questions that aren’t in its unfathomably massive training corpora?

Meanwhile, the AI industry is running ostentatiously into the red. AI companies have yet to discover how to make a profit from building foundation models. They could use a good story about progress.

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In the ever-expanding universe of obsolete sounds, few can compare to the confident yawp of a dial-up modem. Back in the early days, the internet was slow, but we didn’t know it yet. Or at least we didn’t care. And why should we have? The stuff of the web was organic, something you had to plant and then harvest. It took time. Websites popped up like wildflowers. Far-flung enthusiasts found one another, but gradually. Nobody owned the web, and everybody did. It was open, and everything seemed possible. Everything was possible. Maybe it still is.

Strange things are happening online these days. Strange bad, clearly. But also strange good. One unexpected development is that Reddit, long dogged by a reputation for mischief and mayhem, has achieved a kind of mass appeal. If you ask your friends where they’ve been hanging out online lately, you’re likely to hear some of them say Reddit, actually, perhaps with a tinge of surprise.

Reddit’s founders didn’t set out to save the web. College roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian wanted to create a mobile food-ordering service. But their idea didn’t make sense, at least not at the time. It was 2005; the iPhone didn’t exist yet. So they built something else, no less ambitious: a site that promised to be “the front page of the internet.” Reddit was a place to share all manner of memes, photographs, questions, embarrassing stories, and ideas. Users could upvote posts into internet virality, or sometimes infamy. Eventually, they built their own communities, known as subreddits.

For the first decade of its existence, Reddit was not exactly a respectable place to hang out. Like its spiritual cousin 4chan, Reddit was primarily known for, among other things, creepshots, revenge porn, abject racism, anti-Semitism, and violent misogyny. Endearing corners of Reddit existed, but you couldn’t get to them without stumbling over some seriously disturbing material.

Some of that disturbing material is still there if you look for it, but lately, the gross stuff has been crowded out by the good stuff, and more and more people have congregated on Reddit. Last year the company went public, saw a huge swell in audience, and became profitable for the first time in its history. And though its runaway growth slowed last quarter, Reddit says it now has more than 100 million daily users and more than 100,000 active communities.

The joy of Reddit comes from it being simultaneously niche and expansive—like an infinite world’s fair of subcultures, fandoms, support groups, and curiosities. There seems to be a subreddit for everyone and everything. There are mainstream subreddits with popular appeal, such as r/askscience (26 million users) and r/technology (18 million users). But there are also more esoteric forums, such as r/rentnerzeigenaufdinge, the German-language subreddit that’s devoted to context-free photos of retirees pointing at random things. (That group’s stated purpose: Hier bekommen alte Menschen die Bühne, die sie verdienen. “Here, old people get the stage they deserve.”) There’s r/notablueberry, where people share images of berries that are not blueberries, which other people often warn them not to eat. Some subreddits exist just to deliver a punch line, like r/Lurkers, a community with more than 41,000 members in which no one posts anything at all.

Asking someone where they spend time on Reddit opens a window onto their personality that can be surprisingly intimate. Here, I’ll go: I love r/whatisit, where users share photos of confusing objects they encounter; r/Honolulu, which is a mix of island news and extremely local references; r/tipofmytongue, where people ask for help finding or identifying “un-googleable” songs, movies, books, or other scraps of cultural memory; r/metropolis, dedicated entirely to Fritz Lang’s 1927 film of the same name; and r/MildlyVandalised, a place to share milquetoast visual pranks, such as a shelf of World Book Encyclopedias rearranged so their spines lined up to say WEIRD COCK. (Reddit may be less hateful these days, but it is still juvenile.)

There is a subreddit where violinists gently correct one another’s bow holds, a subreddit for rowers where people compare erg scores, and a subreddit for people who are honest-to-God allergic to the cold and trade tips about which antihistamine regimen works best. One subreddit is for people who encounter cookie cutters whose shapes they cannot decipher. The responses reliably entail a mix of sincere sleuthing to find the answer and ridiculously creative and crude joke guesses.

Not everything on Reddit is merely cute, of course. I have lost count of the number of friends who have mentioned to me that they add the word Reddit to their Google searches—a shortcut to the place where they know they’ll find the best information online. Google, once the unsurpassed King of Search, has become hostile to its users, surfacing hilariously unhelpful AI responses (including telling people to eat rocks and glue) and making it woefully difficult to retrieve credible information, even when you know exactly what source you’re looking for. Reddit, by contrast, offers truly specialized knowledge for every need. It provides travel tips to every conceivable destination and practical advice for every imaginable home-improvement project. One friend told me about using Reddit to find the right tension for his tennis-racket strings and the best embroiderer for a custom hockey jersey. And although the wisdom of the crowd is not fact-checked, Reddit’s culture tends to be equal parts generous and skeptical—meaning that good, or at least helpful, information often rises to the top.

Recently, on the r/creepy subreddit, someone posted about having found a tiny skeleton under the floorboards in their house. “Am I cursed for eternity now?” they wanted to know. The top reply came from someone who explained that they were a zooarchaeologist and could therefore be “95% certain this is a mouse skeleton,” and offered to send their own photo of a mouse skeleton for reference. “Hell yeah,” someone else chimed in. “Ask a random question and get an answer from someone who specializes in the exact niche. Amazing.”

How did this happen? How did Reddit go from being a disgusting fever swamp to an oasis of happiness, expertise, exuberance? Excising the most egregious subreddits was the first step, and not an uncontroversial one. Good and necessary free-speech debates followed. But the site has always given its users more control than other major social platforms. Reddit’s moderators are almost exclusively volunteers, and they are power users. They set the rules for the subreddits they run, and they tend to take their job seriously. The subreddit r/AskHistorians has a reputation for being one of the most heavily moderated communities on Reddit—rather than deleting some comments, it seems to delete most of them. If you don’t like that, and there are plenty of people who don’t, you can join another subreddit for history buffs. Or start your own.

On Reddit, it’s people—not the platform—who decide what any one community should be. (Reddit does still ban whole subreddits sometimes, as it did recently with a group posting violent threats.) Even the most ridiculous forums make their expectations known. In the subreddit r/DivorcedBirds, which is for sharing images of birds that “look like serial monogamists,” moderators specify the following: “Please post pictures of birds who look like they are twice divorced (or more!) and an original caption about their backstory.” Also: No photos of “human women”; no art, paintings, or Photoshop; and “no dead birds.”

Giving users this much control over a major social platform is basically unheard-of anymore. It’s a throwback to the early web, when people had to tend to the sites they wanted to be a part of, and it’s a stark contrast to the way other social-media sites have evolved.

Reddit is surging at a time when much of the rest of the social web has curdled. The mainstream platforms are overrun with a combination of bots, bigots, and bad AI, especially because platforms such as X and Facebook have declared that the substance of what people post is of no concern to them. Which is how we got to the point that Reddit, of all places, has developed a reputation as a force for good, or at least a force for reminding people of the promise of a decentralized open web.

The social giants that worship at the altar of megascale—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X—have chosen to do so at the expense of humanity. They train their algorithms to feed people the things that make them angry and afraid and keep them scrolling. Reddit has its own ambitions for exponential growth, but so far it has managed to retain a small-group feeling while still operating at scale.

The question is whether this is a sustainable model. What if this golden moment for Reddit is not a renaissance but a last hurrah—one final reminder of what could have been, before a tsunami of AI wipes out the places that once sparkled with humanity? Reddit recently unveiled its own AI product, Reddit Answers, to the disgust of many of its users. And some long-time users worry that something essential will be lost as normies flock to the platform.

[Read: Is this how Reddit ends?]

For now, though, Reddit remains wildly original and startlingly generous, which is to say, deeply and gorgeously human. It provides connection to others, stokes curiosity, and—at least in some subreddits—leaves you with a feeling of time well spent, a rarity on other social platforms. Because as different as each Reddit community is, every good subreddit is irrepressibly captivating for the same reason: the people.

Recently, someone posted a question on r/AskReddit: “What have you done on this platform that you’re most proud of?” The answers ranged from earnest to irreverent. People described feeling good about having used Reddit to read more, and to challenge their understanding of the world. Others praised themselves for not posting mean comments when they had the impulse to. One person described having spent two years on a guitar subreddit learning 100 different solos. Another described how they’d posted a cookbook of reverse-engineered Panda Express recipes to the delight of other users (though not, apparently, to the delight of Panda Express). Somebody else felt proud of having taught fellow Redditors how to open a box filled with packing peanuts without making a mess. One wrote: “I’ve been helping strangers with their various math questions for over ten years!” Another: “I make people laugh from time to time.”

What Reddit does, it turns out, is give people a space that they can create and collectively control, and where they can ask one another question after question after question, in every possible permutation. The place is flooded with expertise and genuine wisdom, and it’s filthy with rabbit holes. But the only two questions that people ever really ask on Reddit, if you think about it, are these: Am I alone? Am I okay? And after all these years, in subreddit after subreddit, no matter what the topic at hand is, the same answers keep coming: You aren’t alone. And you might not be okay. But we’re here.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Internet Can Still Be Good.”

Updated at 3:20 p.m. on March 2, 2025.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.

Late Friday night, the Trump administration, as part of its push to modernize the government with software, laid off roughly 90 people from the General Services Administration—all federal technologists whose role was to modernize the government with software. Employees on the 18F team, a group formed in the Obama era to build and improve software for other agencies, were notified around midnight that their roles are being eliminated, according to several former 18F workers I spoke with. Team members were emailed termination letters, copies of which I obtained, stating that their position “is being abolished as part of an agency reduction-in-force.” (Last month, Elon Musk hinted at the group’s demise when he wrote on X that 18F “has been deleted.”)

For some of the workers, it was their second time being fired in a month. At least some of 18F’s probationary employees, who typically have been in their government role for only one to two years, had previously been terminated in the Trump administration’s mass firings, then reinstated this week, and then fired again Friday night, according to former 18F staff I spoke with.

The role of 18F was to help federal agencies improve their digital services. The group has worked on federal and state projects used by millions of Americans. It was, in essence, an internal consulting group within the federal government, deployed to other agencies to solve technical problems. By acting, essentially, as an in-house contractor for the federal government, the team did not need to directly spend taxpayer dollars and was instead reimbursed by partner agencies. 18F worked on projects including IRS Direct File, a new service that allows citizens to file tax returns online; covid.gov, which allowed Americans to apply for and receive free COVID tests during the pandemic; weather.gov, which provides weather forecasts and alerts to the entire nation; and a new way to file civil-rights complaints with the Department of Justice, among others. Without 18F staff to continue the work, many of these projects are now in jeopardy, former agency workers told me; current efforts under way, such as with weather.gov, will likely cease or face delays, and completed services could degrade as they stop being monitored or updated.

The team was tailor-made for government efficiency and technology—something the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency and its allies might, in theory, uplift. But as Trump and his surrogates continue to centralize power over government operations, it makes sense that DOGE would want to rein in, or simply bulldoze, 18F. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who is now the director of Technology Transformation Services, an IT division of GSA that houses 18F, lauded the team as a “gold standard” for improving federal technology at a team all-hands last month. But in the same meeting, Shedd also described TTS as a failing start-up. (I obtained a recording of the meeting.) That was the day that Musk, DOGE’s leader, reshared a post on X describing 18F as a “far left government wide computer office” and wrote that 18F “has been deleted.” This led to confusion for the team and its partner agencies; at the time, 18F persisted, but its X account vanished. At 1 a.m. Saturday, roughly an hour after employees were terminated, Shedd sent a message to TTS stating that 18F had been deemed “non-critical” as part of agency-wide downsizing.

The Obama administration initially formed 18F, alongside the United States Digital Service, in 2014 to help with healthcare.gov, a health-care marketplace established under the Affordable Care Act. These projects have cut costs for some federal agencies by as much as 50 percent, according to a 2016 GSA press release, although the team has struggled to recover its own costs in the past. Past federal audits also found that the team failed to comply with some IT regulations. Musk’s comment about deleting 18F referenced previous X posts alleging that the team was “a far-left agency that viciously subverted Trump during his first term,” and singled out TTS’s “Inclusion Bot,” which sent automated messages about inclusive language on Slack. (TTS removed the Inclusion Bot shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration this January, one employee told me.)  

Jeff White, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, told me in a written statement that 18F was eliminated in accordance with several executive orders mandating a reduction in the size of the federal workforce. “GSA will continue to support the Administration’s drive to embrace best in class technologies to accelerate digital transformation,” he wrote.  

The lead-up to Friday’s layoffs was drawn out and harried, according to the former employees. TTS workers had already received numerous messages from the new administration that they told me resembled phishing attempts—from a new email server, without standard headers and footers, also sent as late as 1 a.m.—reminding them about the Deferred Resignation Program, an offer for federal employees to quit ahead of expected layoffs. Several federal employees described the emails, which I have reviewed, as pressuring them to resign. In one message, Stephen Ehikian, the newly appointed director of GSA, stressed that the offer “is real and EVERYONE has to” consider it seriously. He wrote twice that every GSA employee needed to “make the best decision for you and your families.”

Amid talk of termination, TTS workers were subjected to brief interviews with DOGE staffers—who frequently showed up late and without revealing their last name—asking about the federal workers’ responsibilities, with questions such as “What’s your superpower?” GSA employees were also told they would need to work from a federal office, but without specifications of where; much of 18F worked remotely. One former 18F worker told me, “It’s chaotic, and it feels like it’s chaotic on purpose.”

The experience of 18F echoes a pattern of chaos in DOGE’s actions across the federal government—at USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Human Health and Services, and elsewhere. DOGE has exposed potentially sensitive data on its website, and fired and then tried to rehire nuclear-security, bird-flu, food-safety, and medical-device experts. As my colleagues and I have reported, DOGE has flouted cybersecurity protocol to access data and IT systems at a number of federal agencies—potentially including sensitive information on U.S. citizens, defense technologies, and infectious diseases.

DOGE’s actions have been widely compared with the playbook that Musk used to decimate and remake Twitter into X: The inefficiency is the point. Asking workers to resign or justify their work through scrambled, aggressive messages almost inevitably prompts exodus and collapse, voluntary or not. But another useful comparison might be the playbook that Musk follows from space programs for his company SpaceX. Government teams, their staff, and the citizens they serve are like test launches of rocket prototypes: Try a new ship design uncrewed, knowing it could well explode, and repeat. But in this case, people are aboard.

Correction: This article previously misstated Thomas Shedd’s title at TTS as acting director.

When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post almost 12 years ago, he went out of his way to assuage fears that he would turn the paper into his personal mouthpiece. “The values of The Post do not need changing,” he wrote at the time. “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” For much of his tenure, Bezos kept that promise. On Wednesday, he betrayed it.

In a statement posted on X, Bezos announced an overhaul of the Post’s opinion section, expressly limiting the ideology of the department and its writers: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In response, the Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned.

This is the second time in the past six months that Bezos has meddled in the editorial processes of the paper—and specifically its opinion page. In October, Bezos intervened to shut down the Post’s presidential-endorsement process, suggesting that the ritual was meaningless and would only create the perception of bias. Many criticized his decision as a capitulation to Donald Trump, though Bezos denied those claims. Several editorial-board members resigned in protest, and more than 250,000 people canceled their subscription to the paper in the immediate aftermath. Some interpreted this week’s announcement similarly, saying that the Amazon founder is bending the knee to the current administration; the Post’s former editor in chief, Marty Baron, told The Daily Beast that “there is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.” Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[Chuck Todd: Jeff Bezos is blaming the victim]

Whatever Bezos’s personal reasons are, equally important is the fact that he is emboldened to interfere so brazenly. And he’s not alone. A broader change has been under way among the tech and political elite over the past year or so. Whether it’s Bezos remaking a major national paper in his image or Elon Musk tearing out the guts of the federal government with DOGE, bosses of all stripes are publicly and unapologetically disposing of societal norms and seizing control of institutions to orient the world around themselves. Welcome to the Great Emboldening, where ideas and actions that might have been unthinkable, objectionable, or reputationally risky in the past are now on the table.

This dynamic has echoes of the first Trump administration. Trump’s political rise offered a salient lesson that shamelessness can be a superpower in a political era when attention is often the most precious resource. Trump demonstrated that distorting the truth and generating outrage result in a lot of attentional value: When caught in a lie, he doubled down, denied, and went on the offensive. As a result, he made the job of demanding accountability much harder. Scandals that might otherwise have been ruinous—the Access Hollywood tape, for example—were spun as baseless attacks from enemies. Trump commandeered the phrase fake news from the media and then turned it against journalists when they reported on his lies. These tactics were successful enough that they spawned a generation of copycats: Unscrupulous politicians and business leaders in places such as Silicon Valley now had a playbook to use against their critics and, following Trump’s election, a movement to back it. Wittingly or not, nobody embodied this behavior better than Musk, who has spent the past decade operating with a healthy contempt for institutions, any semblance of decorum, and the law.

[Read: The flattening machine]

Trump’s first term was chaotic and run like a reality-television show; as a policy maker, he was largely ineffectual, instead governing via late-night tweets, outlandish press conferences, and a revolving door of hirings, fallings-out, and firings. But it wasn’t until the 2020 election and the events leading up to January 6 that Trump truly attempted to subvert American democracy to retain power. Although he was briefly exiled from major social-media channels, Trump got away with it: The narrative around January 6 was warped by Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters, and he continued to lead the Republican Party. This, along with the success of Trump’s 2024 campaign—which was rooted in the promise of exercising extreme executive authority—was a signal to powerful individuals, including many technology executives and investors, that they could act however they pleased.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

Trump winning the popular vote in November only amplified this dynamic. CEOs including Mark Zuckerberg pledged to roll back past content-moderation reforms and corporate-inclusivity initiatives, viewed now as excesses of the coronavirus-pandemic emergency and an outdated regime of overreach. Bosses in Silicon Valley, who saw the social-justice initiatives and worker solidarity of the COVID crisis as a kind of mutiny, felt emboldened and sought to regain control over their workforce, including by requiring people to return to the office. Tech executives professed that they were no longer afraid to speak their mind. On X, the Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia (who now works for Musk’s DOGE initiative) described the late 2010s and the Joe Biden era as “a time of silence, shaming, and fear.” That people like Gebbia—former liberals who used to fall in line with the politics of their peers—are now supporting Trump, the entrepreneur wrote, is part of a broader “woke-up call.”

The Great Emboldening has taken many forms. At the Los Angeles Times, the billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong paved the way for Bezos, spiking a Kamala Harris endorsement and pledging to restore ideological balance to the paper by hiring right-wing columnists and experimenting with building a “bias meter” to measure opinions in the paper’s news stories. For some far-right influencers, this supposed MAGA cultural shift offers little more than the ability to offend with no consequences. “It’s okay to say retard again. And that’s great,” one right-wing X personality posted in December. Musk and others, including Steve Bannon, have taken this a step further, making what appear to be Nazi salutes while mocking anyone in the media who calls them out.

The DOGE incursion into the federal government is the single best example of the emboldening at work—a premeditated plan to remake the federal government by seizing control of its information and terrorizing its workforce with firings and bureaucratic confusion. It is a barely veiled show of strength that revolves largely around the threat of mass layoffs. Some of DOGE’s exploits, as with a few of Trump’s executive orders, may not be legal, and some have been stopped by federal judges. As my colleagues and I have reported, some DOGE staffers have entered offices and accessed sensitive government data without the proper clearances and background checks, and have bypassed security protocols without concern. But the second Trump administration operates as though it is unconcerned with abiding by the standards and practices of the federal government.

Bezos’s long-term plans for the Post beyond overhauling its opinion section aren’t yet known. But the timing of his decision to change the direction of its op-ed coverage tracks with the behavior of his peers, many of whom are adhering to the tenets of the Elon Musk school of management. When Bezos acquired The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, its value to the tech baron was largely reputational. The purchase solidified Bezos as a mogul and, perhaps just as important, as a steward and benefactor of an important institution. Not meddling in the paper’s editorial affairs wasn’t just a strategy born out of the goodness of his heart; it was a way to exercise power through benevolence. Bezos could be seen as one of the good guys, shepherding an institution through the perils of an internet age that he profited handsomely from. Even if he stewed privately at the paper’s “Democracy dies in darkness” pivot in the first Trump administration, stepping in to influence coverage likely would have felt like too big a risk—an untenable mixing of Church and state.

But the DOGE era offers a permission structure. In a moment of deep institutional distrust, Trump 2.0 has tried to make the case that anything goes and that previously unthinkable uses of executive power—such as, say, dismantling USAID—may be possible, if executed with enough shamelessness and bravado. Bezos may or may not be turning the Post’s opinion section into a state-media apparatus for Trump and his oligarch class. Either way, the pivot is a direct product of the second Trump era and mirrors the president’s own trajectory with the United States government. Become the figurehead of an institution. Try to control it by the old rules. When that doesn’t work, take it by force, break it down, and rebuild it in your image.

For all the norms Donald Trump flouted in his first term, his approach to filling out his administration was familiar. He rooted around the same sets of professions as his predecessors, hiring lawyers, CEOs, academics, and military leaders, among others. Liberals may not have liked his picks—Jeff Sessions for attorney general, say, or Michael Flynn for national security adviser—but regardless of ideology, most of his top advisers had recognizable credentials. In his second term, Trump has found a new talent pool to draw from: podcasters.

In the past week, Trump has tapped two podcasters, Dan Bongino and Graham Allen, for high-ranking jobs in his administration. Bongino, who hosts one of the most popular right-wing podcasts in the country, will become the deputy director of the FBI. Allen, of the Dear America Podcast, will serve as a top communications official at the Defense Department. Even accounting for their unconventional backgrounds, their appointments are surprising. Each has used his platform to trade in extreme conspiracist beliefs. On his show, Bongino has claimed that the pipe bombs found near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually an “inside job,” that the results of the 2020 presidential election were false, and that checks and balances in the government matter less than “power.” (Though a former Secret Service agent, Bongino has no previous experience at the FBI—a departure from those who have held the role in past administrations.) Allen has reportedly claimed that climate change is part of a liberal plot to control people and has called Taylor Swift “a witch and a devil.”

Bongino and Allen, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, are part of a cohort of right-wing media figures who have been assigned top roles within the administration. That includes Darren Beattie, the founder of the conspiracist website Revolver News, who joined the State Department, and Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now secretary of defense. Many, if not most, of these figures earned Trump’s loyalty by using their platforms to be obsequious stewards of MAGA—in effect, creating a quasi–state media. But as these figures make the move to government, the Trump administration is also now becoming a media-run state.

[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump’s public diplomacy]

It’s hardly unprecedented for media journalists to make the jump into politics—especially in communication roles. In his first term, Trump picked Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News, as his chief strategist, and then–CNBC host Larry Kudlow as the head of the National Economic Council. In 2008, Jay Carney left Time to join Barack Obama’s administration, eventually becoming the president’s press secretary. But something odder is going on now within the Trump administration: a breakdown of the barriers between media and government.

Trump’s recent appointments are only part of the melding. Consider the likes of Charlie Kirk, who doesn’t have an official government position but still seems to hold influence. In November, Politico reported that Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder and right-wing media figure, advised Trump on whom he should select for significant roles in his then-forthcoming administration. Jack Posobiec, a right-wing influencer who rose to prominence by pushing conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, was invited by Pentagon officials to travel on Hegseth’s first trip overseas. He then claimed to have joined Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on a trip to Ukraine, meeting with the country’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky.

The right-wing media’s formal and informal roles in the administration mark a new kind of singularity. The podcasters now do policy and dabble in politics. And some right-wing politicians, including Ted Cruz and Dan Crenshaw, have their own podcasts. So do some politicians on the left, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom, who announced a new show this week. But on the right, politicians and media figures more explicitly mingle and work toward the same goals.

That is especially the case now that the Trump administration has barred media outlets including the Associated Press from covering many White House events, while welcoming in right-wing media figures such as Lara Logan. Although Fox News and Newsmax have cut ties with Logan for her extremist views, she was recently included in a State Department listening session. Similarly, yesterday, the Department of Justice chose to first give documents regarding the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein to right-wing influencers—including Posobiec and Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, a high-profile right-wing account on X—instead of actual journalists. (The documents reportedly contain little new information.)

This blurring is indicative of a substantive shift in how the contemporary right operates. The conservative media ecosystem has long functioned as the id of the right wing. But in the media-state singularity, there is not even the pretense of space between the two worlds. President George H. W. Bush hosted Rush Limbaugh overnight in the White House, in a likely attempt to ingratiate himself with the radio host. Trump doesn’t need to do such a thing, because the modern equivalents of Limbaugh are inside his administration as high-ranking staff members. (After Limbaugh’s death, in 2021, Bongino took over his slot on many radio stations.)

The practical effect of this union is an ongoing rightward lurch. That the conservative media has infiltrated the White House explains some of the current administration’s policies—proposed mass deportations, vindictive tariffs, attempts to gut entire federal agencies. The new direction of the executive branch is a far-right podcaster’s fever dream. As Bongino posted in November: “We are the media now.” Since the election, the phrase has become popular among an online right distrustful of legacy news outlets. It’s only partially correct. Right-wing influencers such as Bongino are the media to swaths of America. They are also now the government itself.

The rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk is entering its Apprentice era. Both men have the ambition to redefine how the modern world works—and both are jockeying for President Donald Trump’s blessing to accelerate their plans.

Altman’s company, OpenAI, as well as Musk’s ventures—which include SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI—all depend to some degree on federal dollars, permits, and regulatory support. The president could influence whether OpenAI or xAI produces the next major AI breakthrough, whether Musk can succeed in sending a human to Mars, and whether Altman’s big bet on nuclear energy, and fusion reactors in particular, pans out.

Understanding the competition between these two men helps illuminate Trump’s particular style of governing—one defined by patronage and dealmaking. And the rivalry highlights the tech giants’ broader capitulation to the new administration. Executives who have sold a vision of the future defined by ultra-intelligent computer programs, interplanetary travel, and boundless clean energy have bowed to a commander in chief who has already stifled free expression, scientific research, and the mere mention of climate change in government work. Why? Simply because doing so will advance their interests. (And, in some cases, because tech leaders are true believers—ideological adherents to the MAGA worldview.)

Altman’s MAGA turn is best understood as a search for a lifeline. In 2017, as Trump’s first term was just beginning, Altman tweeted, “I think Trump is terrible and few things would make me happier than him not being president.” This time around: “I think he will be incredible for the country in many ways!” In the months before the election, Altman and OpenAI leaned on connections to Trump allies to curry favor, according to The New York Times. In June, two of the start-up’s executives met with Trump in Las Vegas, showcasing their technology and emphasizing its land and energy needs. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s technological lead over xAI, Google, Anthropic, and other firms has dwindled.

The company’s relationship with its main financial backer, Microsoft, has also frayed so much that OpenAI is actively courting other corporate partners. (Microsoft, despite approving OpenAI’s ability to find other data-center partners, maintains that it will remain a key partner going forward.) Over the past year, a number of senior researchers have departed, and the start-up faces several lawsuits and investigations. A new and friendly administration, then, could provide Altman with a much-needed boost to maintain his firm’s shrinking edge in the AI race. (The Atlantic recently entered into a corporate partnership with OpenAI.)

And Musk, for all his criticism of federal bloat, is plenty dependent on the government. Over the past decade, his companies have been awarded at least $18 billion in federal contracts. SpaceX relies heavily on NASA for its rocket business and as of Monday is reportedly testing its Starlink technology to improve the Federal Aviation Administration’s national airspace system, despite an existing $2 billion contract that the FAA has with Verizon. Tesla, with shrinking sales and a relatively stagnant lineup of models, could benefit mightily from friendly regulation of self-driving cars. Musk also appears jealous of Altman’s it-boy reputation in Silicon Valley and beyond: He started xAI within months of ChatGPT’s launch, has taken to calling his rival “Scam Altman,” and recently led an unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI (which the start-up’s board refused). “Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman told Bloomberg Television the next day. “I feel for the guy.”

Anything that OpenAI might gain from Trump, xAI could reap as well. Altman and Musk both hope to build data centers that use a tremendous amount of electricity—each one potentially requiring as much as would be provided by a large nuclear reactor or even several, a demand equal to millions of American homes. The government can open federal lands to data-center and power-plant construction, and it can expedite the construction of natural-gas or nuclear plants (or the now-less-likely renewable-energy sources). Trump could attempt to cut down the sometimes interminable permitting process for the transmission lines that carry that electricity to data centers. He might intervene in or make it difficult to enforce the outcomes of AI copyright litigation, and generally make the regulatory environment as friendly as possible for the industry and its investors.

[Read: For now, there’s only one good way to power AI]

Musk, of course, has cemented his place in the president’s inner circle, acting as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and now leading his efforts to remake the civil service. He has fused his political ideology—reactionary, authoritarian, nativist—with Trump’s. But Altman, too, has quietly gained the president’s confidence, albeit with a much narrower appeal to American-AI dominance. His company has ramped up its public messaging and lobbying about the importance of America’s AI leadership over China—a goal that Trump has repeatedly emphasized as a priority.

The maneuvering is already starting to pay off. The day after the inauguration, Altman stood beside Trump in the White House as the president announced Stargate, a new company planning to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure, and in which OpenAI is a principal investor. According to the Times, Altman had struggled to raise money for Stargate for months—potential investors worried that government approval for the necessary, extensive construction would be too slow—until Trump’s victory, when sentiment flipped. During the press conference, Trump said the government’s job would be “to make it as easy as it can be” to build. Altman was sure to signal gratitude, saying that “with a different president, [Stargate] might not have been possible.”

Within hours of the announcement, Musk, not to be excluded or outdone, chimed in on X. “They don’t actually have the money,” he wrote, suggesting that Stargate’s main investors could not fund the project. Altman denied this, writing on X, “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role i hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”

[Read: OpenAI goes MAGA]

For Musk to break ranks with his newfound presidential ally suggests that the world’s richest man is still focused on an old grudge and affront to his ego. After being one of OpenAI’s initial investors, Musk left its board in 2018, at the time citing potential conflicts of interest with future AI projects at Tesla. Four years later, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and kicked off the generative-AI boom, Musk was caught off guard—not just behind in the race, but not even an entrant. Within weeks, he was suggesting that the chatbot was too “woke.” Soon after, Musk formed his own AI start-up, xAI, and last year, he sued OpenAI for betraying its original nonprofit mission. In response to the lawsuit, OpenAI released old emails from Musk suggesting he had departed because he thought that without merging with Tesla or otherwise securing substantially more funding, OpenAI’s chance of “being relevant” was “0%. Not 1%. I wish it were otherwise.” (Oops.)

Ever since he left, Musk has been playing catch-up. The first and second iterations of xAI’s model, Grok, lagged behind the most powerful versions of ChatGPT. Musk’s latest, Grok 3, appears to be in the same ballpark as OpenAI’s new, state-of-the-art “reasoning” models—but xAI accomplished this months later and likely with far more computing resources. Despite, or perhaps because of, repeatedly coming up short, Musk has evinced a willingness to use any tactic to maintain his own relevance, or at least slow down his competitors. In late March 2023, Musk signed a widely circulated letter calling for at least six months’ pause on training AI models more powerful than OpenAI’s then-just-released GPT-4—even though he had incorporated xAI weeks earlier and was actively recruiting staff. Musk’s lawsuit denounces OpenAI as profit-hungry and secretive, and he has dubbed the start-up “ClosedAI,” but the code and training data underlying Grok 3 are as opaque as that of ChatGPT. And despite Musk’s claims that Grok 3 is the “smartest AI on Earth,” OpenAI researchers have accused his start-up of misrepresenting the chatbot’s performance to make it appear on par with their own top model, o3-mini (a sort of manipulation common in the generative-AI industry, and one that OpenAI itself has been accused of as well). Still, he is now closer than ever to catching Altman, and his position at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency and his perch on Trump’s shoulder could push him over the edge.

The president, for now, seems content to keep both relationships open; certainly, his association with two tech executives considered visionaries has its perks. Altman, with his tunnel vision on AI, seems unlikely to affect or sour Trump and Musk’s ideological bond and attempt to reshape the federal government. Perhaps the greater risk to xAI is that Musk overstays his MAGA welcome and attracts the president’s ire. And Musk does not appear to have turned Trump against OpenAI. When asked about Musk’s criticism of Stargate, the president shrugged it off: “He hates one of the people,” Trump told reporters. “But I have certain hatreds of people, too.”

Federal workers are scared. They don’t know whom to trust. As President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have hacked away at federal agencies over the past few weeks, I’ve spoken with more than a dozen workers who have outlined how the administration is pushing a new ideology and stoking paranoia within the government’s remaining ranks. My sources work, or until recently worked, across six different agencies, including the State, Commerce, and Defense Departments and USAID; most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak or they feared being targeted. “People are terrified,” one worker told me, “not for losing their jobs but for losing democracy.”

The workers described a fundamental transformation in the character of the government: Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security. One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings—no phones, watches, computers, or other connected devices. (Representatives for the Commerce and Defense Departments, USAID, DOGE, and the White House did not respond to my requests for comment.)

[Read: There’s a term for what Trump and Musk are doing]

The widespread paralysis has been driven not just by the terminations and the crippling of entire agencies—which workers say has followed no apparent logic or process—but by executive orders and internal communications. Take the first diplomatic cable sent by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on January 21, the day after the inauguration. The message, which was sent to all members of the State Department, and which outlined various priorities, takes an “Orwellian” tone, as one State Department employee described it to me. Next to a priority labeled “Stopping Censorship and Prioritizing Truth,” Rubio wrote that although the State Department has been “combatting malign propaganda from hostile states” since the Cold War, the agency has also recently worked to promote “censorship, suppression, and misinformation” targeting Americans—perhaps motivated by “an excess of zeal or misguided attempts to control discourse.” The email, a copy of which I obtained, goes on:

This Department will forever stand in support and defense of Americans’ natural and First Amendment rights to free speech. We will combat genuine enemy propaganda, but always and only with the truth: that America is a great and good and just country, whose people are generous, and whose leaders now prioritize our core interests while respecting the rights and interests of other nations. Above all, programs that lead or in any way open the door to the censorship of the American people will be terminated.

My sources were disturbed by the idea that the administration would dictate “the truth” and accuse workers of censoring Americans. (What censorship Rubio is referring to is unclear, and a State Department spokesperson, who replied to my email inquiry without giving their name, said only, “As a general matter, we do not comment on internal personnel matters.”) Those working on behalf of Trump have already hidden information and engaged in censorship themselves, deleting scientific data and prompting researchers to scrub terms related to gender and sexuality from their work, in addition to purging information related to climate change and more. Because of this, one worker said, colleagues at his agency have considered replacing the generic word including with such as in reports, given the word’s proximity to inclusion, or excising terms like vulnerable groups, which are often used to refer to children, out of concern that they could be flagged under the administration’s sweeps to eradicate anything pertaining to diversity.

Transitions of power always lead to changes in priorities, but that is not what the workers say they are witnessing. Instead, the new Trump administration is engineering what some feel could be described only as ideological obedience.

Secretary Rubio’s message is just one example of the many ways the Trump administration has made these red lines apparent. Many Republicans have spoken out against any group or agency that could be perceived as censoring conservative voices. Shortly after the election, for instance, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an operation for countering foreign disinformation and propaganda established by President Barack Obama, shut down after a Republican-controlled House didn’t re-up its funding. Federal workers I spoke with now say that neither they nor their colleagues want to be associated in any way with working on or promoting disinformation research—even as they are aware that the U.S. government’s lack of visibility into such networks could create a serious national vulnerability, especially as AI gives state-backed operations powerful upgrades. Some are even discussing whether they should revise existing technical documents to scrub references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.” As one source told me, “If this administration is dictating the truth and dismantling disinformation efforts, you can’t bring it up anymore. You just don’t want to put a target on your back. Whether it’s intended or not, self-censorship emerges.”

Federal workers told me that this self-censorship started with issues related to DEI. On the third day of the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agency heads to email their employees a notice asking them to report one another for violations of President Trump’s executive order. Both the fear of being reported by colleagues and the fear of being punished for not reporting colleagues quickly led to a pervasive loss of trust and communication, my sources told me. Many employees stopped speaking openly in meetings in front of unfamiliar co-workers. Pronouns were dropped from emails; Pride flags were taken off desks; references to Black History Month and promoting women in STEM were excised from office discussions, they said. Several workers told me they believed this was the intention: “Make people question what is safe—Where can I speak? Who can I speak to? How can I speak? You create a culture of chaos, fear, and confusion,” Stephie-Anne Duliepre, a former Science for Development fellow at USAID, told me. “I think that was the strategy because it was effective: wearing people out, stripping people’s will or faith that if they ever speak up they would be safe.”

This feeling may be by design. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of Project 2025, said in private speeches obtained by ProPublica that “we want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

Some federal workers who collect health and medical data from Americans to support a wide array of downstream research, including cancer-drug discovery, are discussing whether to continue recording if patients are transgender, or information about pregnancies and abortions, an employee told me. The absence of that information will limit the kind of research that scientists can do, like studying how a drug affects pregnant women, or gender-based health disparities. But the workers are wrestling with whether having these data will put Americans in danger of being targeted by their own government, the employee said. Although workers have often asked patients about illegal behavior in the past, including illicit drug use, this time feels different: “It’s not just because it’s illegal in some places,” the employee said, referring to abortions. “It’s because it’s political.”

[Read: DOGE has God-mode access to government data]

Climate change has become another perceived taboo, sources told me. At the Department of Defense, the direction has been explicit. On January 27, several staffers received an email from superiors, according to a copy I reviewed, stating that the director of Army staff was working to suspend any activities “associated with, but not limited to the following areas: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory, Climate and climate change, Transgender, and Abortion policies." In other cases, workers are drawing their own conclusions. Some are discussing how to reframe climate-related policy documents, or even research on issues that could have downstream climate implications, into other kinds of energy and environmental issues that are more in line with the Trump administration’s priorities. (Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to pay “particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources,” for example.)

For any communications related to climate and other sensitive topics, the team that has stopped bringing internet-connecting devices to in-person meetings has also shifted from email to Signal messages, a worker in the group told me. “All I have ever wanted to do was help the American people become more resilient to climate change,” the worker told me. “Now I am being treated like a criminal.”

During my conversations, many workers referred to George Orwell’s 1984, and its portrayal of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a minor government bureaucrat, to explain the scope and scale of their experience. They referenced the Ministry of Truth, doublethink, and Newspeak as they described what was happening. Six terminated workers at USAID conveyed to me how the agency’s rapid dismantlement represented an example of the worst of what could happen in this environment: DOGE swept in, Trump froze virtually all aid spending, and Musk began blasting USAID publicly as a “criminal organization.” Agency staff were slow to grasp the full scope of what was happening and to react—they told me that they wish they’d organized protests or sounded the alarm to the outside world more quickly. Under the new regime, the staff became more afraid to talk to one another in large groups and stopped connecting their personal devices to the government Wi-Fi for fear of being surveilled. “USAID is a canary in a coal mine,” a terminated USAID worker told me. “It felt like being hunted by your own government.”