Semiconductor Sitrep, Fukushima Frictions, Prigozhin Perishes, and More
Unpacking some recent big recent events
Welcome back to Weaponized. For this edition, I’m keying in on semiconductors, the geopolitics of Fukushima’s wastewater discharge, and the unseemly demise of Yevgeny Prigozhin, among many other areas.
Please enjoy!
Semiconductor Sitrep: Scalebacks, Nvidia, Arm IPO, Huawei
Back in 2017, I was living in Taipei and finishing up my Master’s thesis at one of the major universities there. Trump had just come into the White House following a shock election upset. The DC policy establishment was bracing itself for wholesale changes to America’s foreign policy orientation. At the time, however, a lot of the administration’s focus was on China’s smaller, more erratic neighbor: North Korea. Despite some notably super-heated campaign rhetoric directed at the Middle Kingdom, it remained an open question as to how the Trump team would handle the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
The focus of my research was Chinese techno-industrial policy; essentially looking at how the country’s strategic planners thought about critical technologies and their intimate intersection with national security prerogatives. Computer chips featured early and often. What came through crystal clear over the course of my research was Beijing’s long-standing obsession with building out an indigenous semiconductor supply chain—motivated, in no small part, by a desire to curtail its extensive reliance on geopolitical rivals like the United States, Taiwan, and Japan.
At the same time, it became equally clear to me that the techno-nationalist playbook—subsidies, export controls, investment restrictions, and the like—was making a comeback; not just in China but across across APAC and the Western world. The return of great-power competition—this time in an era of complex interdependence linking together rival superpowers in dense networks of trade, technology, and capital—was, in my mind, likely to bring about increasingly disruptive effects for global supply chains, with chipmakers bearing the brunt of the fallout.
Fast forward to 2023 and the world is in a fundamentally different place. The centrality of semiconductors to literally everything—from EVs and AI to weapons systems and the global power balance—is now much better understood and an inescapable element of the weekly news cycle. I don’t believe it’s an overstatement to say that chipmaking geography is at the epicenter of national security—in Beijing, Brussels, Tokyo, and DC!
Apologies for the long-winded introduction, but I hope it provides a bit of context. There are lots of consequential developments in “Semiconductor World” right now, many of them with a pronounced China angle. Let’s get into it:
Scaling Back
Leading chipmakers are reducing investment for the first time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall capital investment levels may fall as much as 16% on the year—the sharpest decline in the last decade—with memory chips taking the biggest hit.
Some reasons for the drop:
Slowing demand among Chinese consumers—especially in the PC market.
Ongoing US-China trade tension and evolving supply chain dynamics.
A growing inventory backlog amid sluggish prices and declining global smartphone sales.
A weak US talent pipeline has led to a shortage of technical personnel to staff newly built fabs.
Looking ahead, medium-to-long-term growth forecasts for the sector remain (very) rosy. The chipmaking industry projects to grow upwards of 70%—becoming a trillion-dollar industry—by 2030 on the back of strong demand for AI and EV-use chips.
The Nvidia Boom
Those rosy projections were emphatically affirmed last week when Nvidia smashed Wall Street’s expectations on the back of a blockbuster earnings report that “beat estimates for its fiscal second quarter and issued optimistic guidance for the current period.” The FT’s Robert Armstrong categorized the report as “an absolute monster” where “the results were miles ahead of expectations and the outlook was too.” Reported revenue came in at roughly double last year’s Q2 level.
Undergirding the Nvidia euphoria: surging investment in generative AI systems. Sales of Nvidia’s A100 and H100 AI chips—critical to operating the cloud infrastructure that trains LLMs—are booming, and, for now, Nvidia’s integrated “full-stack” product approach grants it a formidable competitive moat (and substantial market pricing power) against would-be rivals and buyers alike.
The catch? As Exponential View points out, “acute supply shortages of cutting-edge chips like Nvidia’s H100 mean availability severely lags behind demand”; acting as a brake on the rollout of AI-backed services across industries.
The Arm IPO x Blackbox China
Another major AI player making waves this week is Arm. The SoftBank-backed chip designer’s impending IPO isn’t just the largest public listing in years; much like Nvidia’s earnings report, it will also provide a key litmus test of the market’s AI sentiment writ large. One emerging point of concern in the run-up: Arm’s China exposure, which is reportedly unnerving some big fund managers.
This bit from FT turned heads:
One significant issue for some investors is a warning in the prospectus that neither Arm nor SoftBank controls the operations of its Chinese business.
“Despite our significant reliance on Arm China through our commercial relationship with them, both as a source of revenue and as a conduit to the important [Chinese] market, Arm China operates independently of us,” the prospectus warned, adding that Arm did not have any direct management rights or the right to representation on Arm China’s board.
David Gibson, an analyst who covers SoftBank at MST Financial, said the China risk described in the prospectus was larger than the market was expecting and also flagged deteriorating licence payments from customers.
Big picture, it’s hard to overstate how quickly and profoundly China-related risks have permeated every layer of the highly globalized tech ecosystem. Those risks take many forms, including:
Political encroachment into private sector operations, particularly when it comes to sensitive technologies;
Crackdowns on data transfer and information flow, leading to an increasingly opaque overall business (and political) environment;
The ruling Communist Party’s centralization of power and economic decision-making under President Xi, whose seemingly arbitrary crackdowns on Big Tech have drawn pointed criticism for undermining regulatory clarity and market stability.
Corporate sector politicization and the subordination of commercial considerations to (expansive and vaguely defined) national and regime security imperatives—evidenced in new legislation around national security, anti-espionage, and cybersecurity.
Together this constellation of forces forms what I deem “Blackbox China,” an emerging dynamic that poses significant challenges to a broad array of commercial stakeholders within and outside the country. Here’s the WSJ from earlier this year:
China’s party-state, long steeped in secrecy, is creating a black box around information on the world’s second-largest economy, alarming global businesses and investors.
Prodded by President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on national security, authorities in recent months have restricted or outright cut off overseas access to various databases involving corporate-registration information, patents, procurement documents, academic journals and official statistical yearbooks.
Back to the IPO, it looks as though Arm’s China operation suffers from two interrelated Blackbox China risks: concerns over insufficient information flow (the prospectus notes that “in the past, we have had issues obtaining timely and accurate information from Arm China”) and an alarming lack of on-the-ground operational control.
Hunting Huawei in a Weaponized World
In keeping with the overall China theme, Bloomberg reports that Huawei, the controversial telecom and computing equipment maker that has repeatedly found itself in DC’s crosshairs, is “building a collection of secret semiconductor-fabrication facilities across China, a shadow manufacturing network that would let the blacklisted company skirt US sanctions and further the nation’s technology ambitions.”
Huawei’s actions speak to the ongoing high-stakes cat-and-mouse game between America’s national security apparatus and one of China’s marquee “national champions.” Keep in mind that the US Department of Commerce placed Huawei on the dreaded “entity list” back in 2019, essentially cutting off access to vital foreign-branded semiconductors and chipmaking technology. Left for dead at the time, Huawei is now attempting to revive its fortunes (with billions of dollars in funding support from the Chinese state) by building out an indigenous 5G mobile chip supply chain that operates independently of any US control regime.
Going forward, I think it’s worth paying attention to the (increasingly heated) debate over the efficacy of US policy in hamstringing China’s high-tech ambitions. While the new paradigm around tariffs, export controls, targeted industrial policy, and investment restrictions enjoys robust bipartisan support in DC, there’s been a notable chorus of skeptics who argue the current approach is ineffective at best and actively counterproductive at worst.
Exhibit A: The Economist. Earlier this month, in a piece provocatively titled “Joe Biden’s China strategy is not working,” the publication argued that the new paradigm is failing to deliver results, writing:
The consequences of this new thinking are now becoming clear. Unfortunately, it is bringing neither resilience nor security. Supply chains have become more tangled and opaque as they have adapted to the new rules. And, if you look closely, it becomes clear that America’s reliance on Chinese critical inputs remains. More worrying, the policy has had the perverse effect of pushing America’s allies closer to China.
Tech Analyst Dan Wang (for my money one of the sharpest people in the business) has also flagged concerns; arguing that rather than keeping China in a permanently weak and subordinate position vis-a-vis the United States, restrictions on trade, tech, and investment will prompt Chinese firms to increasingly align with their home government—channeling market share towards (less reputable) domestic alternatives, and, over time, helping upgrade indigenous capacity across key sectors. The net effect, per Wang: “it is likely that in a decade, China will have made greater technological advancements under the U.S. export-control regime than it would have had the United States not forced China’s leading companies to buy from weak domestic firms." It’s hard not to see at least some echoes of Wang’s argument in the latest news around Huawei.
Regardless of how you feel about the Biden team’s current approach, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on this evolving conversation as the trade and tech war rumbles on.
Meanwhile, one particularly ominous manifestation of these evolving techno-security dynamics is playing out in Silicon Valley, where ethnically Chinese founders are facing growing scrutiny over VC funding. Per an illuminating bit of recent Nikkei reporting:
"For Chinese and Chinese American founders, one sector where fundraising is currently more challenging is AI," said Megan Ruan, a general partner at Gold House Ventures, a venture fund built to back startups by Asian and Pacific Islander (API) founders.
"Given the current geopolitical tensions, there is a lot of fear -- whether the sentiment is coming from the investors themselves or their limited partners -- around investing in companies building an AI that might empower Chinese leadership," she added.
Having a founder with Chinese ancestry or who immigrated from China is an automatic red flag for investors looking at certain sectors like AI as the U.S. and China race for tech dominance, according to Ruan.
My thinking: risk, paranoia, and fear of blowback and reprisals—in short, the overriding logic of national security—has firmly embedded itself in the US-China relationship. Trump’s tariffs, the Huawei entity listing, and the Biden EOs targetting chips, semiconductor equipment, and investment flow were just the opening acts in what will likely be a multi-decade struggle for supremacy. Buckle up, this is what great-power competition in the AI Age will look like going forward.
The Rundown
Moscow: Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the controversial Wagner mercenary group, and mastermind behind a dramatic (albeit brief) mutiny against the Kremlin that captivated global attention and humiliated Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this summer, has met a brutal, fiery, and (very) high-profile demise—allegedly perishing in a plane crash north of Moscow earlier this week. Wagner’s top operational commander Dmitry Utkin is also rumored to have been among the victims.
Exact details remain somewhat murky, but US intelligence officials have deemed the incident an “intentional explosion.” Russia expert (and former US ambassador to Moscow) Michael McFaul writes: “Based on what I have read and what Russians and Russian experts have told me, I believe today that Putin ordered the assassination of his long-time associate.” Over at WAPO, Max Boot notes: “What’s striking about Prigozhin’s apparent demise is that it lacked any of the ambiguity that normally accompanies the removal of those who run afoul of Putin.”
Yes, Prigozhin’s violent death sends an unambiguously brutal signal to Russia’s political elite over the costs of dissent. What remains to be seen is what long-term effects, if any, his removal will have on Putin’s grasp on power, the Ukrainian war effort, Wagner’s future operations (the group remains active in Belarus and parts of Africa), and the Kremlin’s ability to project power and influence outside its national borders.
Bangkok: breaking months of impasse following May’s inconclusive general election, Pheu Thai nominee Srettha Thavisin has been installed as the next prime minister; helming an unwieldy coalition government comprised of 11 different political parties with a history of bad blood between them. The coalition deal helped pave the way for the return of former PM Thaksin Shinawatra—a longtime scourge of the conservative establishment and a man widely understood as the power behind Pheu Thai—to the Kingdom after years spent in exile.
The outcome also serves up a severe setback for the reformist Move Forward Party (and likely Thailand’s democracy writ large). Despite winning the most seats in May’s vote on the back of widespread public demand for wholesale change to the country’s political system, Move Forward’s positions on altering the country’s draconian lese majeste laws (essentially prohibiting open conversation of the Thai royal family), military, and economic structure alienated too many powerful interests. The party was ultimately outmaneuvered by (one-time ally) Pheu Thai, who sidelined the pro-democracy camp in favor of an array of smaller parties closely aligned with the country’s deeply conservative military and royalist establishment, to seize the political initiative.
The new coalition government’s formation smacks of the kind of insider horsetrading ordinary Thais mostly loath and polling suggests overwhelming disapproval of the new parliamentary permutation. Thailand faces numerous economic headwinds and there’s considerable skepticism as to whether the various parties will be able to effectively work together. Markets will be following closely for signs of tension and instability.
Guatemala City: one spot of good news for liberal democracy comes out of Central America. In a landmark win for progressivism, Guatemalans handed anticorruption advocate Bernardo Arévalo a clear ruling mandate as he defeated conservative candidate (and former first lady) Sandra Torres in a landslide last weekend. The outcome goes against the grain of spreading regional illiberalism (which I’ve written about in greater depth here).
Major challenges loom, however. Arévalo will likely struggle to parlay his considerable political capital into broad-based reforms in the face of pronounced hostility from the country’s conservative political establishment. As Vox points out, the race “unfolded amid a crackdown by the current conservative administration targeting not only prosecutors and judges, but also nonprofits and journalists.” Prosecutor Rafael Curruchiche, who has “obstructed investigations into acts of corruption by disrupting high-profile corruption cases,” according to the US State Department, is attempting to have Mr. Arevalo’s party banned on legally dubious grounds.
LatAm: more good news for Latin America came as the IMF revised upward its recent growth forecast for the region. All positive right? Yes and no. Shannon O’Neill and Will Freeman over at CFR note that “the upside reflects external shocks, not internal dynamism.”
Big picture, the region’s future likely hinges on three critical factors, which I’ll call 3G:
Governance: democratic consolidation, corruption eradication, reducing inequality, and improving overall institutional capacity.
Growth: fostering innovation, embracing new digital technologies, improving economic productivity, and implementing pro-growth structural reforms.
Green: leveraging an abundance of mineral wealth to successfully capitalize on the green energy transition and cleantech boom.
EVs: Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast, the country’s answer to BYD and Tesla, has seen its share price surge 85% since its listing on August 15. Despite the market hype, it’s worth noting that VinFast’s US product rollout has been marred by criticism over its sales and marketing approach, vehicle recalls, and poor customer reviews. Across the Pacific, Vietnam's domestic EV market looks poised for strong growth in 2023 as consumers snap up both VinFast and Chinese-branded models. Nonetheless, challenges remain in building out a viable EV ecosystem. Vietnam’s relative lack of charging infrastructure is widely seen as a major impediment to greater buyer uptake.
India: Will India get its own version of WeChat? That question is top of mind right now as Reliance Industries, the mega-conglomerate with an extensive footprint across retail, telecom, and energy, is branching into India’s nearly $2tn financial services sector. Via newly listed Jio Financial Services, Reliance is hoping to build out a “super-app that centralizes online shopping, video streaming, digital financing and stock trading,” per Bloomberg.
Reliance’s dominant position in telecom services and retail, coupled with a strong brand ID, gives it a potentially massive edge over the competition in shaking up India’s consumer finance space and winning over an enormous customer pool of unbanked citizens. None of this is a sure thing, however. Keep in mind that the superapp concept has largely struggled to gain traction outside of China (just ask America’s tech giants). New Delhi’s data compliance regime and tough financial regulatory system are likely to throw up additional roadblocks.
Wisconsin: The GOP primary season kicked up a gear, as a spate of candidates gathered in Milwaukee for the first debate (of many) on Wednesday evening. Frontrunner Donald Trump’s refusal to participate loomed large over the event. Despite some notable differences over the war in Ukraine, the entire thing was a mostly muted affair as the candidates on stage remained mostly deferential to the former POTUS.
The big question looming in the foreground: does any of this matter? Trump holds gigantic advantages in fundraising, voter enthusiasm, brand ID, media attention, and state/national-level polling (note his commanding lead in the all-important Iowa Poll). Given that meta-dynamic, the debate is unlikely to have any significant effect on the contours of the race.
Fukushima Frictions
Science, public health, geopolitical antagonism, and heated public posturing are colliding over Japan’s decision to begin discharging treated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The water—which has been stored on site for over a decade—was used to cool down radioactive debris after the plant tragically suffered from the three nuclear meltdowns back in March 2011 following a series of earthquakes and tsunamis.
It’s worth noting here that the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is closely monitoring the situation in collaboration with the Japanese government, has signed off on the water release plane, describing the potential radiation effects on humans as “negligible.”
Unsurprisingly, none of this is going over well across the East China Sea, where Chinese government officials have aggressively criticized the decision and moved to immediately suspend all seafood imports from Japan last week. China’s weaponization of the seafood supply chain is broadly in keeping with past precedent. Again and again, we’ve seen Beijing wield coercive economic instruments—tourism bans, consumer boycotts, and import/export controls—against regional trading partners as a means of applying geopolitical pressure.
It’s impossible to disaggregate the Fukushima water release from broader tensions in the Sino-Japanese relationship. Whereas South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol—who is currently spearheading something of a rapprochement between Seoul and Tokyo (with an eye on addressing the security challenges presented by China’s rise)—has signed off on the water release plan, Beijing remains implacably hostile.
US-China: Department of Decoupling
Along with technology, Taiwan, and COVID, human rights issues have emerged as a serious (and highly durable) irritant in Sino-American relations. The latest flashpoint: Tibet. The State Department announced sanctions on unnamed Chinese officials over their “involvement in the forcible assimilation of more than one million Tibetan children in government-run boarding schools.” Beijing reliably bristles at external criticism over its handling of Xinjiang and Tibet—which it sees as undue interference on key issues of national security and domestic sovereignty.
A growing lack of on-the-ground visibility into the two regions by outside observers, which I think must be situated into the broader context of a chilling political climate and the long-term exodus of foreign journalists and NGOs from the People’s Republic, continues to erode confidence and fuel mistrust regarding Beijing’s behavior and intentions.
In keeping up with that Blackbox China angle, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, speaking with reporters earlier this week, warned China over its increasingly opaque business environment:
We have watched, over the course of the past months, a reduction in the level of transparency and openness with respect to reporting basic things — like, for example, the youth unemployment numbers — or cracking down on firms in China that had a practice of providing basic information to the world on the puts-and-takes in the Chinese economy.
These are not, in our view, responsible steps. We believe in openness and transparency and reporting. That is what we practice here in the United States. That’s what the other major economies practice. And we think, for global confidence, predictability, and the capacity of the rest of the world to make sound economic decisions, it’s important for China to maintain a level of transparency in the — the publication of its data as well.
Curation Corner: Worth Your Time
The à la carte world: our new geopolitical order — FT
Welcome to the à la carte world. As the post-cold war age of America as a sole superpower fades, the old era when countries had to choose from a prix fixe menu of alliances is shifting into a more fluid order. The stand-off between Washington and Beijing, and the west’s effective abandonment of its three-decade dream that the gospel of free markets would lead to a more liberal version of the Chinese Communist party, are presenting an opportunity for much of the world: not just to be wooed but also to play one off against the other — and many are doing this with alacrity and increasing skill.
The Complex Implications of Prigozhin’s Assassination — McFaul's World (Substack)
Putin’s grip on power within his regime is stronger as a result of this assassination. Putin eliminated a threat -- a charismatic leader who commanded thousands of trained soldiers. He also sent a strong signal of deterrence, as I wrote back in June, to future would-be coup plotters.
At the same time, we should not overstate the upside of this assassination for Putin and his power over the long run, especially his ability to project power abroad.
Most obviously, Putin has now weakened if not destroyed a key instrument for his power projection overseas. Wagner fighters in Africa, Syria, and Ukraine advanced Putin’s foreign policy objectives. A weakened or a dismantled Wagner takes that tool away from Putin. Ukrainians are rightly celebrating Prigozhin’s assassination. Wagner thugs are unlikely to ever kill Ukrainians again. That’s a good outcome for Ukraine and a bad outcome for Putin.
The AI Power Paradox — Foreign Affairs
Like past technological waves, AI will pair extraordinary growth and opportunity with immense disruption and risk. But unlike previous waves, it will also initiate a seismic shift in the structure and balance of global power as it threatens the status of nation-states as the world’s primary geopolitical actors. Whether they admit it or not, AI’s creators are themselves geopolitical actors, and their sovereignty over AI further entrenches the emerging “technopolar” order—one in which technology companies wield the kind of power in their domains once reserved for nation-states. For the past decade, big technology firms have effectively become independent, sovereign actors in the digital realms they have created. AI accelerates this trend and extends it far beyond the digital world. The technology’s complexity and the speed of its advancement will make it almost impossible for governments to make relevant rules at a reasonable pace. If governments do not catch up soon, it is possible they never will.
Ricardo Hausmann Explains Why Economic Complexity Is So Important — Odd Lots (Bloomberg)
Why do some countries become rich while others stagnate? And can you predict which countries become wealthy in advance of them actually increasing their collective GDP? The answer may lie in the complexity of each nation's domestic economy. On this episode we speak with Ricardo Hausmann, a professor and director of the Growth Lab at Harvard University. He helps us understand what economic complexity is, how it's measured, and the process by which countries can move from being less complex to more complex over time.
What Happens When Great Power Conflict and Climate Action Collide? — The Ezra Klein Show (NYT)
The global decarbonization effort is colliding headfirst with the realities of great power politics. China currently controls more than 75 percent of the world’s electric vehicle battery and solar photovoltaic manufacturing supply chains. It also processes the bulk of the so-called critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt and graphite, that are essential to building out clean energy technologies. There is no clean energy revolution without China.
What would happen if China decided to weaponize its clean energy resources in the same way Russia recently weaponized its oil and gas? Is it possible for the U.S. to end its energy dependency on China by investing in clean energy at home? What does this geopolitical reality mean for the prospect of meeting the world’s climate goals?
Run It Cold: Why Xi Jinping Is Letting China’s Economy Flail — Bloomberg
But where Biden has opted to run his economy hot, spending trillions of dollars on household stimulus and infrastructure to goose the economy, Xi is running his cold in a bid to finally break China’s addiction to fueling growth with speculative apartment construction and low-return projects funded by opaque local borrowing. If China is a “ticking time bomb,” Xi’s aim is to defuse it.
The clash of economic philosophies between the world’s two largest economies is already shifting investment flows and may delay the date at which China overtakes the US, or perhaps mean that moment will never arrive. The risk for Xi and his team, led by Premier Li Qiang and Vice Premier He Lifeng, is that the determination to avoid excessive stimulus undermines confidence across the nation’s 1.4 billion people.
Why China's economy ran off the rails — Noahpinion
So anyway, this is my simple story for why China’s economy slowed down so early in its development and then experienced a crash in the early 2020s. Export-led and FDI-led growth can’t go on forever, and when they run out, it’s better to divert capital toward building a well-balanced economy of high-tech manufacturing and services than to shower it on property developers and shadow banks. Pivoting to real estate will come back to bite an economy eventually. For all the talk of China’s “100-year plans” and whatnot, they fell into a pothole that was right in front of their feet.
The real story is going to be more complicated than that, but if you want a quick-and-dirty explanation of why China’s crash is on everyone’s minds right now, I think the story of the pivot to real estate is probably the best simple story you can tell.
Booming Trade With China Helps Boost Russia’s War Effort — WSJ
China is playing an increasingly important role in propping up Russia’s economy and helping boost its war effort, with recent trade data showing Beijing providing a range of goods, including some with potential military applications such as microchips and trench-digging excavators.
China has become the principal source of many of the goods and components Russia’s sanctions-hit economy needs, while also giving Moscow a buyer for its oil and gas. The growing economic relationship is a central piece of the efforts by the two countries to unite against what their leaders describe as Western efforts to contain them.
The first GOP debate reveals a disturbing level of climate change denial — Vox
Early into the televised eight-candidate forum, Fox News moderators lobbed a question pressing the presidential hopefuls for their positions on addressing climate change, an issue of growing importance for young voters in particular: “Do you believe human behavior is causing climate change? Raise your hand if you do.”
None did. That the question came up at all was surprising; it remains unusual for a Republican debate to even attempt an acknowledgment of the climate crisis. What wasn’t surprising was that the discussion immediately devolved into distraction, denial, and misinformation.
Collective climate change denial in the Republican Party is not new. But the debate illustrates how the GOP’s claims are becoming increasingly audacious — as signals from human-caused climate change become all the more apparent.
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule — The New Yorker
The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truth - The Atlantic
Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’'s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.
As free press withers in El Salvador, pro-government social media influencers grow in power — AP
Guzmán is part of an expanding network of social media personalities acting as a megaphone for the millennial leader. At the same time Bukele has cracked down on the press, his government has embraced those influencers. As the president seeks to hold onto power, he has harnessed that flood of pro-Bukele content slowly turning his Central American nation into an informational echo chamber.
“A news organization doing an investigation can’t compare to the sounding board that these influencers have because they flood your social media with the government’s narrative,” said Roberto Dubon, a communications strategist and congressional candidate for Bukele’s former party, FMLN. “What you have is an apparatus to spread their propaganda.”