Semafor reports that, along with other investors like board member Laurene Powell Jobs, “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.
After Ukraine said a Starshield slowdown had interrupted its military operations, Elon Musk claimed any limits “are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.” Then the president told reporters, “It wasn’t me... and I don’t think it was Elon.”
Now WSJ sources are pointing the finger back at Musk, with some claiming “Musk acted unilaterally.”
[Wall Street Journal]
According to the NYT’s sources, White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is out after just five days in the role, or, by our count, less than half of a Scaramucci. Her time in the role included prediction market intrigue and claims she may have misrepresented herself as an attorney despite failing the bar exam.
With public opinion broadly against AI data centers, the Today, Explained podcast from Vox brought on Nicole Thomas, a marketing and PR exec who represents data center companies.
The “for” arguments are familiar (tax dollars, not all data centers are XXL-sized hyperscaler AI projects, and that what is needed is more transparency), and they also look at some of the attempts to make data centers friendlier, like Microsoft’s biomimicry camouflage.
A suspected gas cylinder explosion at Intel’s Kiryat Gat facility in southern Israel, where it makes its most advanced chips, has killed two workers and injured a third. JPost and CTech report that police believe a gas cylinder malfunctioned while trucks were loading material into tanks, causing serious burns to the victims and a leak of nitrogen trifluoride (NF₃).
We’ve written about the risks fab workers face, including the death of a truck driver in 2024 while transporting sulfuric acid waste at TSMC’s Arizona facility, and an Intel employee who worried cost-cutting and downsizing were adding extra risk.
Yesterday, the DOJ and OpenAI revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national and former Facebook employee working for OpenAI, has been arrested and charged with installing a recording device behind a TV in an executive conference room.
Now Bloomberg points out court documents showing that the day before he was arrested, prosecutors asked to seal the information, arguing that “the defendant has the means—and will have an incentive—to flee the United States sooner if he learns about this case before he is arrested.”
Even if Russian or other bots continue to post on social media unabated, the head of Threads, Connor Hayes, mentioned that “We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those you follow. For creators, this should mean you see on average more reach to your followers.”
He didn’t specify when the algorithm change took effect, but I have an idea.
