#sequoia capital

[alanshemper]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The unsolicited proposal from Elon Musk’s tunnel-building venture arrived in January 2020. To the local transportation authority, it felt like finding Willy Wonka’s golden ticket.

Officials had started planning for a street-level rail connection between booming Ontario International Airport and a commuter train station 4 miles away, with an estimated cost north of $1 billion. For just $45 million, Mr. Musk’s Boring Co. offered to instead build an underground tunnel through which travelers could zip back and forth in autonomous electric vehicles.

Dazzled by Boring’s boasts that it had revolutionized tunneling, and the cachet of working with the billionaire head of EV maker Tesla Inc., red down pointing triangle the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority dumped plans for a traditional light rail and embraced the futuristic tunnel.

When it came time to formalize the partnership and get to work, Boring itself went underground—just as it has done in Maryland, Chicago and Los Angeles. Boring didn’t submit a bid for Ontario by the January 2022 deadline.

The six-year-old company has repeatedly teased cities with a pledge to “solve soul-destroying traffic,” only to pull out when confronted with the realities of building public infrastructure, according to former executives and local, state and federal government officials who have worked with Mr. Musk’s Boring. The company has struggled with common bureaucratic hurdles like securing permits and conducting environmental reviews, the people said.

“Every time I see him on TV with a new project, or whatever, I’m like: Oh, I remember that bullet train to Chicago O’Hare,” said Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack. Boring had backed away from its proposal for a high-speed tunnel link to the airport there.

Mr. Musk and Steve Davis, president of Boring, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Boring’s only tunnel open to the public is a 1.6-mile “loop experience” under the Las Vegas Convention Center. There, Teslas with hired drivers ferry convention-goers through neon-lit white tunnels at speeds of about 30 miles an hour.

Boring has yet to make good on its most ambitious pitch: that it can design tunnel-boring machines that are so fast to operate that they will drive down costs and shake up the industry. Tunneling industry veterans question some of Mr. Musk’s claims.

The company has believers. This spring, tech-focused venture-capital firms Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital led a $675 million fundraising round that valued Boring at $5.7 billion. Major real-estate firms including Brookfield, Lennar and Tishman Speyer are among the investors.

“Their technology is now past the state-of-the-art, and improving at an exponential rate,” Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire wrote in a post on the firm’s website, announcing the round.

Mr. Maguire declined to comment and the other investors didn’t respond to detailed requests for comment.

Mr. Musk has frequently criticized government regulation, calling it an impediment to building new infrastructure. At a WSJ CEO Council event in 2020, he said he had moved from California to Texas, where Tesla was building a new factory, in part because of government regulations. Government should “just get out of the way,” he said.

The Boring Co., based in Pflugerville, Texas, occupies an odd place in Mr. Musk’s business empire, which includes Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and most recently Twitter Inc. He launched the tunneling venture with a tweet in December 2016 that many took as a joke. “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Mr. Musk wrote.

“I am actually going to do this,” he added in a second tweet.

At Boring’s helm is Mr. Davis, a longtime lieutenant to Mr. Musk who came from SpaceX. Some of the space contractor’s investors have complained about Boring soaking up SpaceX’s resources, including employees and equipment purchased with SpaceX funds.

Mr. Musk’s leadership style—he recently told his Twitter employees they must be “extremely hardcore” or resign—pervades Boring, too, several former senior executives said. Boring employees work long hours and weekends, and the company has struggled to retain employees, particularly in technical positions such as engineering, they said.

For years, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority had sought a solution to an enviable problem: Freight-focused Ontario International was steadily gaining passengers. Airport officials decided a link to a nearby commuter rail station would help it grow even more.

The authority issued a request for proposals for a light rail line, estimated to cost between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, when Boring’s pitch showed up.

The authority struck a preliminary deal with Boring in February 2021 for a narrow-diameter tunnel filled with autonomous EVs for $45 million.

“When I went to the public and shared this, the enthusiasm was overwhelming, just for something new and different,” said Janice Rutherford, a county supervisor and transportation authority board member. “And it’s the Boring Company, so Elon Musk brings that kind of sexiness to it, if you will.”

Over time, the company and the transportation authority dropped references to autonomous vehicles. By late 2021, cost projections rose to almost $500 million, agency documents show.

The authority asked for a third-party environmental review, required by state law, of the Boring proposal’s impact, records show. That’s when the process came to a halt.

“We tried to reach agreement with them,” said Carrie Schindler, the authority’s deputy executive director. “We went through the standard request for proposal process. And ultimately at the end of that process, they decided not to propose.”

Boring had powerful boosters from the time Mr. Musk declared his war on traffic in late 2016. Trump administration officials counseled the billionaire on how to pursue his stated goal of building an underground Hyperloop from New York to Washington. The Hyperloop, a concept Mr. Musk revived based on a proposal from the 1970s, calls for moving passengers through vacuum tubes at around 700 miles an hour. Despite an influx of investor interest, no commercial system has ever been constructed.

Mr. Musk tweeted in July 2017 that he had “verbal govt approval” for Boring to begin building the Hyperloop. Besieged by calls from the media and government officials, White House staff helped come up with a follow-up tweet, according to former government officials. “Still a lot of work needed to receive formal approval, but am optimistic that will occur rapidly,” Mr. Musk later tweeted.

That fall, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan was standing at a fenced-off site affixed with Boring signs near Fort Meade and telling a videographer to “get ready” for a high-speed train from Baltimore to Washington. Mr. Hogan declined to comment.

An aide to Mr. Hogan toured a parking-lot test site at the company’s then-headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport, getting a look at a tunnel-boring machine the company purchased secondhand. Boring named it Godot, the title character in Samuel Beckett’s play about a man who never shows up.

The Republican Hogan administration sped up the bureaucratic process for Boring, granting a conditional permit in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later.

All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot.

Boring deleted the Maryland project from its website last year.

The company also captured the attention of Chicago’s then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who wanted a high-speed rail link between O’Hare International Airport and the downtown business district.

In 2017, Mr. Musk proposed a Hyperloop-like solution, in which 16-passenger pods would be propelled through an underground tunnel on electric “skates” moving up to 125 miles an hour. Mr. Musk said he could do it for less than $1 billion, and that Boring would finance the job and keep the fare revenue for itself.

Mr. Emanuel’s Democratic administration selected Boring to develop the system. At a press conference with Mr. Musk, the mayor dismissed “doubters,” who he said also would have questioned other landmark projects, like the 1900 reversal of the flow of the Chicago River.

Mr. Waguespack, the alderman, and other elected officials challenged the cost estimates as absurdly low, warning that taxpayers would be on the hook if Boring couldn’t build as cheaply as it proposed. “It was a lot of flash and dash and not any kind of public discussion about whether it was even necessary or not,” Mr. Waguespack said.

Mr. Emanuel said in an interview that the company had promised to assume financial risk for building the proposed tunnel. The proposal didn’t go any further after Mr. Emanuel decided not to seek a third term.

Other Boring projects announced with fanfare, including a 3.6-mile underground high-speed transportation link from the Hollywood subway line to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, also have failed to materialize.

Some sites where Boring once courted public attention are now abandoned. The entrance to its first demonstration tunnel sits behind a chain-link fence in a lot near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. In the California desert town of Adelanto, where city leaders once hailed the arrival of a Boring research operation, stacks of concrete lining segments sit alongside a short U-shaped section of tunnel partially blocked off with plywood amid rattlesnake warning signs.

For the past year, Boring has been directing potential clients to its work in Las Vegas as a showcase for what systems in their cities could look like.

“We’re fans of the Boring Company,” said Steve Hill, chief executive of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “We’re fans of clean transportation systems that are great. So we want to help.”

The convention authority paid Boring about $50 million to build two 0.8-mile single-direction tunnels connecting different wings of the sprawling convention center. It opened in the spring of 2021. This year, Boring completed a short offshoot between the facility and Resorts World casino and hotel.

The Clark County and Las Vegas city government councils have approved a 34-mile loop of tunnels that Boring will finance. Private casino and resort owners are being asked to pay for stations. The company plans to break ground soon on segments, Mr. Hill said.

Boring signed a 50-year contract to operate the Vegas loop and will collect revenue from ticket sales, sharing a small percentage with the city and county after crossing a quarterly revenue threshold.

To get a permit to begin operating the convention loop, Boring had to run a demonstration showing that it could move 4,400 passengers an hour.

Boring passed the test and received its permit, in a category called ATS, for Amusement and Transportation Systems—the same one that local officials award to roller coasters.

Crowds strain the network of individually driven cars far more than mass transit like light rail, according to some of the former executives. In social media postings, visitors have documented the loop’s Teslas sitting, underground, in traffic. The fleet of required accredited drivers adds to labor and administrative costs.

At the convention’s jam-packed auto products show this month, visitors queued in 10 lines in a subterranean station, waiting to hop into Teslas that drivers steered through a pair of tunnels just inches wider than the sedans themselves.

Boring employees directed attendees into cars. Mr. Davis, in a safety-orange sweatshirt, paced among them and talked to convention officials who later said he often manages operations on site. When approached by a reporter, he declined to comment.

Mr. Musk has lately tweeted videos of a Boring-designed machine, nicknamed Prufrock after the title character of the T.S. Eliot poem, digging test holes in the Texas dirt. Boring says Prufrock is designed to dig at one mile a week, and that a succeeding version will be able to dig 7 miles a day.

Boring says it can improve tunneling speeds with fully electrified machines and by digging continuously, rather than stopping to assemble sections of the tunnel wall. The company also says angling machines in from ground level will help avoid the cost of first digging a shaft to launch the machine.

Veterans of the tunneling industry note that tunnel-boring machines have been electrified for decades, and that neither continuous construction of the tunnel lining nor digging in from aboveground is new.

Boring’s speed claims are “totally unrealistic,” said Lok Home, president of the Robbins Co., a leading maker of tunnel-boring machines. “There’ll be improvements here, for sure, but there’s not going to be a revolution.”

Industry veterans said that in terms of cost, factors like property acquisition, permitting and engineering work, and the sheer complexity of digging through rock or soil matter far more than tunneling speed.

As for most of the tunneling Boring has done, in the desert soils of Las Vegas, Mr. Home said, “That’s about as easy as it gets.”

Public officials across the country remain eager to land Boring projects, and some are eyeing the roughly $1 trillion federal infrastructure law as a source of potential funding.

In Fort Lauderdale, Democratic Mayor Dean Trantalis is pointing to the availability of the funding as he tries to sell the public on a $100 million pair of Boring-built tunnels that would ferry beachgoers back and forth from downtown. Mr. Trantalis said that he was awe-struck by Boring’s Las Vegas project, which he toured last year.

North Miami Beach officials want to use federal infrastructure money to pay Boring for a tunnel project to reduce traffic.

On a lark, Vice Mayor Michael Joseph tweeted at Boring and Mr. Musk in February 2021. Company officials quickly expressed interest. “They just called me out of nowhere and said, ‘Hey, this is Boring,’” Mr. Joseph said. “I was very surprised they responded to my tweet.”

In Ontario, the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority hasn’t abandoned its tunnel dream. The authority is seeking bids from other construction companies to build tunnels, and from operators to run electric vehicles inside.

Ms. Schindler credited Boring with introducing local officials to the possibility of subterranean transportation that might cost less than more conventional aboveground systems.

“While I’m disappointed we’re not in design at this point and headed towards construction, I’m grateful for the disruption that I think got us going in a really viable direction,” she said.

The authority said it would still welcome a bid from the Boring Co.

[peak-xv-15]

Mama Earth Talk is a podcast that takes a deep dive into the three pillars of sustainability (environmental, social and economic)

[reportwire]

SNBL or BNPL? That is the question! 

For long, Buy Now Pay Later or BNPL has been a popular model for making purchases with consumers using the easily available option to buy stuff ranging from appliances to gadgets to practically everything.  But now a disruption seems to be happening in the segment and a bunch of start-ups – the most common category of disruptors – are taking the BNPL model head-on by offering a Save Now Buy Later…

[deadrlngers]

i love kicking out from their homes families that have kids/infants on the sims, i'm like oh sorry go eat trash under the rain with your stupid baby i need this spot to build a coffee shop

[jupiterscythe]

Feeding each of my limbs into a slow meat grinder would be much more preferable than these malicious Temu ads every 2 fucking posts

[msclaritea]

Some Prominent Silicon Valley Investors Shift to the Right (SHOCKER!) 🙄

- The New York Times

Some Prominent Silicon Valley Investors Shift to the Right

Marc Andreessen, Chamath Palihapitiya and several other tech venture capitalists are increasingly criticizing President Biden and making their disaffection known in an election year.

Credit...Barbara Gibson

By Erin Griffith

May 23, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

In 2021, David Sacks, a prominent venture capital investor and podcast host, said former President Donald J. Trump’s behavior around the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had disqualified him from being a future political candidate.

At a tech conference last week, Mr. Sacks said his view had changed.

“I have bigger disagreements with Biden than with Trump,” the investor said. Mr. Sacks said he and his podcast co-hosts were working on hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, which could include an interview for their “All In” show. They also extended an invitation to President Biden, he said, but the Trump camp was more open to it.

Such public support for Mr. Trump used to be taboo in Silicon Valley, which has long been seen as a liberal bastion. But frustration with Mr. Biden, Democrats and the state of the world has increasingly driven some of tech’s most prominent venture capitalists to the right.

Some investors, like Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital, backed Democrats in the past. (He is set to co-host the fund-raiser for Mr. Trump alongside Mr. Sacks.) Others, like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Shaun Maguire of Sequoia Capital, have criticized Mr. Biden without expressing support for Mr. Trump. Still others, like Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, are focusing their efforts on electing Republicans to Congress.

The activity may amount to more noise than formal support or personal donations for Mr. Trump’s campaign. And it is by no means everyone. Much of Silicon Valley, including prominent donors like the investors Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla, remains loyal to Democrats. Peter Thiel, the investor who backed Mr. Trump in the past, has said he is disillusioned with politics and plans to stay out of the 2024 race.

Jacob Helberg, Vinod Khosla and Senator Todd Young are seated in blue armchairs on a stage, with U.S. flags behind them.

Jacob Helberg, left, an adviser to Palantir, spoke with the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, center, and Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, at a forum in Washington. Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

But the tech investors who are leaning right are influential, with enormous followings on social media and lots of money — and they are becoming more politically engaged. That reflects how the start-up industry has grown — soaring eightfold between 2012 and 2022 to $344 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups — with more of the industry’s issues turning political in nature.

“When I started, everybody cared about tax issues and immigration issues,” said Bobby Franklin, who has led the National Venture Capital Association, a trade group, since 2013. “Now it is so much more complex.”

Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, the investment firm founded by Mr. Thiel, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted. This month, Mr. Trump made a virtual appearance at a venture capital conference in Washington. There, he thanked attendees for “keeping your chin up” and said he looked forward to meeting them.

“Four years ago you had to issue an apology if you voted for him,” Mr. Asparouhov wrote on X.

Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted in tech.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Mr. Sacks, Mr. Palihapitiya and Founders Fund did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia Capital declined to comment.

The comments and activity by the group of tech investors are particularly noticeable given Silicon Valley’s blue background. The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.

But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.

Mr. Thiel’s loud and enthusiastic support for Mr. Trump in 2016, which included a $1.25 million donation and a speech at the Republican National Convention, came as a shock. Even more surprising to some in the industry was the way that, after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who is a Democrat.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

That feeling has hardened under President Biden. Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments..."

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED. THEY'RE WORRIED... ABOUT THEIR MONEY; ABOUT THEIR BILLIONS. America has been under relentless assault from SILICON VALLEY since it's inception. You saw the reports from Keri Kukral an SV whistleblower. The place was teeming with criminal behavior. Foreign money flowing in from foreign adversaries like China Russia India, etc. There were prostitution rings and access run rampant, as Main Street kept having everything stolen from it. Practically every Cryptocurrency company was engaged in illegal activities.

Perhaps Mr Thiel (who is very much NOT out of politics. He's a backer of NYC Eric Adams) should not have tried to crash our Banks and the Stock Market and allow me to find the article where some of these 'former liberals' including Thiel, used to wax on about wanting a Monarchy; about wanting to 'REPLACE GOVERNMENT ' With THEY'RE OWN VERSION. He is also close to the Fascist wing of the Catholic Church They're all full of shit. And I don't know how impressive Al Gore is with that WEF leash. Tech is/was working with the World Economic Forum to gain more control.

#VoteBlue #BidenHarris2024 because our country desperately needs to get some of these billionaires under control or they will NEVER leave us alone. I'll admit to not being happy about everything right now, but I'm smart and adult enough to know that right now, it's not about me. It's about saving this country from Silicon Valley.

#SanFrancisco #KhoslaVentures #SequoiaCapital #ToddYoung #JacobHelberg #Palantir #ScottMcNealy #SunMicrosystems; #MegWhitman #Ebay #CarlyFiorina #hewlettpackard #larryellison #Oracle #dougleone #airbnb #GooglePlay #uber #apple #Obama #LinaKhan #garygensler

[rebeccadumaurier]

it's always the evilest companies with the best-looking websites...

[peterbordes]

AI powered developer tools beyond Copilot, where else will AI change how software is made?

Generative AI stands to change how work happens in one industry after another. But software engineering’s transformation isn’t done yet.

There are many opportunities here. Some founders are iterating on the in-editor, get-help-while-you’re-coding experience Copilot popularized, trying different interaction patterns or different models. Think of Replit’s Ghostwriter, Soucegraph’s Cody, TabNine and others.

[probablyasocialecologist]

This is it. Generative AI, as a commercial tech phenomenon, has reached its apex. The hype is evaporating. The tech is too unreliable, too often. The vibes are terrible. The air is escaping from the bubble. To me, the question is more about whether the air will rush out all at once, sending the tech sector careening downward like a balloon that someone blew up, failed to tie off properly, and let go—or more slowly, shrinking down to size in gradual sputters, while emitting embarrassing fart sounds, like a balloon being deliberately pinched around the opening by a smirking teenager. But come on. The jig is up. The technology that was at this time last year being somberly touted as so powerful that it posed an existential threat to humanity is now worrying investors because it is apparently incapable of generating passable marketing emails reliably enough. We’ve had at least a year of companies shelling out for business-grade generative AI, and the results—painted as shinily as possible from a banking and investment sector that would love nothing more than a new technology that can automate office work and creative labor—are one big “meh.” As a Bloomberg story put it last week, “Big Tech Fails to Convince Wall Street That AI Is Paying Off.” From the piece: Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc. had one job heading into this earnings season: show that the billions of dollars they’ve each sunk into the infrastructure propelling the artificial intelligence boom is translating into real sales. In the eyes of Wall Street, they disappointed. Shares in Google owner Alphabet have fallen 7.4% since it reported last week. Microsoft’s stock price has declined in the three days since the company’s own results. Shares of Amazon — the latest to drop its earnings on Thursday — plunged by the most since October 2022 on Friday. Silicon Valley hailed 2024 as the year that companies would begin to deploy generative AI, the type of technology that can create text, images and videos from simple prompts. This mass adoption is meant to finally bring about meaningful profits from the likes of Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The fact that those returns have yet to meaningfully materialize is stoking broader concerns about how worthwhile AI will really prove to be. Meanwhile, Nvidia, the AI chipmaker that soared to an absurd $3 trillion valuation, is losing that value with every passing day—26% over the last month or so, and some analysts believe that’s just the beginning. These declines are the result of less-than-stellar early results from corporations who’ve embraced enterprise-tier generative AI, the distinct lack of killer commercial products 18 months into the AI boom, and scathing financial analyses from Goldman Sachs, Sequoia Capital, and Elliot Management, each of whom concluded that there was “too much spend, too little benefit” from generative AI, in the words of Goldman, and that it was “overhyped” and a “bubble” per Elliot. As CNN put it in its report on growing fears of an AI bubble, Some investors had even anticipated that this would be the quarter that tech giants would start to signal that they were backing off their AI infrastructure investments since “AI is not delivering the returns that they were expecting,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria told CNN. The opposite happened — Google, Microsoft and Meta all signaled that they plan to spend even more as they lay the groundwork for what they hope is an AI future. This can, perhaps, explain some of the investor revolt. The tech giants have responded to mounting concerns by doubling, even tripling down, and planning on spending tens of billions of dollars on researching, developing, and deploying generative AI for the foreseeable future. All this as high profile clients are canceling their contracts. As surveys show that overwhelming majorities of workers say generative AI makes them less productive. As MIT economist and automation scholar Daron Acemoglu warns, “Don’t believe the AI hype.”

6 August 2024

[darkeagleruins]

Come on journalists! Do better! You all know Kamala Harris is a sacrificial lamb, being fed to the wolves.

Why aren’t you reporting all of the comings and goings at Michelle’s War Room since Thursday?

Literally dozens and dozens of Democrat billionaire donors (Fred Eychaner, Reid Hoffman, James and Marilyn Simons, Michael Mortiz (Sequoia Capital and the Chinese Communist Party) Elizabeth Heising, Wayne Jordan, Jeffrey Skill, Patty Quillin, etc., etc.) K Street and Washington, D.C. royalty have been taking turns kissing Barack Hussein Obama II’s ring.

Anyone that doesn’t admit Barack is in charge is either ignorant or lying. His silence and then refusing to endorse Kamala Harris should tell you all you need to know.

I said previously, Barack Obama is the most powerful man in the Democratic Party. Period. End of story. He is going to do whatever it takes to be President a 4th term by proxy, using Michelle.

Michelle Obama’s War Room: 2446 Belmont Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008.

After Harris is slaughtered by Americans, Washington, DC and the media, Michelle Obama will step up, telling the country, ‘after much reflection and soul searching, talking endlessly with Barack and our girls, I have come to the conclusion that my country needs me’, she will be the chosen one at the Chicago Democrat National Convention in August. As close to a coronation as you can get.

The Obama’s and DNC have opposition research that will put any chance of a viable Kamala Harris campaign but they need her to languish on the vine for the next 4-5 weeks.

Michelle wants the honeymoon to extend right to the election. She isn’t even interested in a debate with President Trump.

[tomorrowusa]

Get your lame ass off of Twitter/X. Why would you want to ultimately help Trump on what has become a far right platform?

Elon Musk’s new super PAC is collecting scores of voters’ personal information under the guise of inviting them to register to vote, as part of his effort to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Earlier this month, Musk denied reports that he would be donating $45 million a month to Trump’s campaign during an interview with right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson. Instead, the technocrat clarified that he had created a new super PAC, called the America PAC. Musk’s America PAC is a door-to-door canvassing operation, which allows it to work in direct coordination with the Trump campaign, according to an FEC advisory from earlier this year. This allows Musk, and his fellow Silicon Valley donors, to stick their hands—and their cash—right into the presidential race on Trump’s behalf. How exactly they plan to do this is even more disturbing. The America PAC has launched a series of digital ads using the image of Trump’s assassination, to invite people browsing Google to “register to vote,” CNBC reported Friday. In states where the outcome is certain, such as California, the ads actually do direct them to a voter registration site. But in key battleground states, users are directed to a very different page, which prompts them to enter their phone number, address, and age. Once complete, users are then greeted by a “Thank You” page, with no actual link to voter registration in sight. Musk’s America PAC has poured $800,000 into digital advertisements to target voters in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to AdImpact. The information collected from user responses to this ad campaign will inform the PAC’s canvassing efforts in those states. Musk’s America PAC has already attracted the financial support of a few Silicon Valley billionaires. Douglas Leone and Shaun Maguire, general partners at Sequoia Capital, donated a whopping $1 million and $500,000 respectively, according to The American Prospect.

In short, Musk is using ads to harvest information from voters without actually registering them.

Musk and fellow broligarchs are motivated strictly by personal greed. They are willing to throw democracy to the jackals just so they can get even more enormous tax brakes from a second Trump administration.

They already have enough money to buy Pacific Islands and never lift a finger for the rest of their lives. But they want even more as well as the power to shape society to their un-elected whims.

We need to do more than usual this election cycle in order to defeat Trump and the Axis of Avarice. And we have to work quickly, Election Day is only three months away. This is a good time to take note of all the people we know personally in swing states; it doesn't matter if we've been out of touch for five years – as long as we are still on decent terms with them. Reach out and ask if they are registered. Remind them that voter registration is strictly geographical and based on home address – you need to register every time you move. And if someone hasn't voted in years they may have been removed from the voter rolls; those people need to register again.

Here are a couple of legit sites which will help register voters.

I Will Vote

Be a voter | Vote Save America

I have always felt that the best way to register is to do so in person. That way you can take a picture of your registration or maybe even get some sort of receipt. And when you register in person, you'll be informed immediately whether you've provided sufficient identification and have completed the forms correctly.

We can beat the wannabe planetary tech tyrants but it's necessary to put more effort into it and not take anything for granted.

[mariacallous]

Some of Donald Trump's biggest and newest supporters from finance and Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, have spent the past several weeks trying to whitewash comments the former president and current Republican presidential nominee made in relation to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

In the past week, the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and President Joe Biden both highlighted Trump’s August 15, 2017 comment, when the former president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes that followed the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.

For years, Trump supporters have defended his comments, claiming he was speaking about a nonexistent group of nonracist rallygoers who were there just to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

While Trump did condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who took part in the rally, those who covered the event have repeatedly pointed out that only extremists were involved in the march, including members of the so-called alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Trump’s “fine people” comments were at best misleading and at worst tacit support for extremists, despite his subsequent disavowal. Trump has consistently been slammed by critics for his comments, but false claims from Trump supporters have persisted. They resurfaced earlier this year when a Snopes fact check titled “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’” Snopes later added an editor’s note, clarifying that those covering the rally said it was “conceived of, led by, and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong.”

But over the past few weeks, Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—some of whom began officially supporting the former president following his assassination attempt last month—have also tried to rewrite history.

David Marcus, the crypto entrepreneur and CEO of Lightspark who has been a Democratic Party supporter for years, posted last month that he was now backing Trump’s campaign.

In an X post last week that has been viewed 33 million times, Marcus claimed that Trump’s “very fine people” comment had been purposely taken out of context by the media. “Realizing that this was and continues to be a lie was a turning point for me,” Marcus wrote on X, quoting a post from the official Harris campaign account that marked the seven-year anniversary since Trump made the comments.

In response to Marcus’ post, Shaun Maguire, a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, wrote: “Totally agree.” Hours after the assassination attempt last month, Maguire said he was donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign.

This wasn’t the first time Maguire challenged what happened in Charlottesville: In June, Maguire cited a post from disinformation account End Wokeness and wrote on X: “Remember Charlottesville when Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people? I only saw the full clip for the first time today. It’s a must watch—he literally CONDEMNS the Neo Nazis and white nationalists.”

Elon Musk, who has been Silicon Valley’s loudest Trump supporter in the weeks since the attempted assassination, shared multiple posts related to this. Musk shared Marcus’ post on August 16, commenting: “Always view the source material.” Musk’s post has been viewed almost 30 million times.

Musk also shared a post this week from right-wing activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was responding to a reference to the “very fine people” comment during Biden’s DNC speech. “Dear Joe, for the 1000th time, the ‘very fine people’ story you keep repeating, is a debunked lie and a hoax,” wrote Kirk on X.

(Again, while Trump did condemn neo-Nazis and white supremacists, he also said there were “fine people” among those at the rally, where the crowd was made up only of extremists.)

Musk also shared a post from Mark Pincus, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur best known as the founder of mobile gaming giant Zynga. Pincus, who has said he has yet to decide on which candidate he will vote for, wrote on X last week: “​​This is the best example of how we have all been manipulated by MSM.” Pincus was quoting the June post from Maguire. Musk responded: “Yup.”

Pincus’ post was shared by Musk as well as David Sacks, an influential tech investor who is closely allied with the X owner. Musk’s different posts on the topic have been cumulatively viewed almost 80 million times.

Another Musk ally, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, was among the very first to publicly endorse Trump in the hours after the shooting. Last week, he shared a post from anti-LGBTQ hate account Libs of TikTok to his 1.4 million followers that claimed “Biden and Kamala both lied and spread the ‘very fine people’ hoax again this week. It’s easily debunked by watching the full video. This is the video they don’t want you to see.”

The suggestion that the full, unedited video of Trump’s comments has somehow been scrubbed from the internet over the past seven years is central to many of the claims being made in the past week—even though the video is widely available on any number of platforms.

[rebootgrimm]

Brands that are Pro-Israel under cut!!! Boycott them!!

Accenture

AccuWeather

ActionIQ

Ahava

AirBnB

Alaska Air

AllianceBernstein

Allianz

Amazon

Amdocs

American Airlines

American Eagle

American Wire Group

Amwell

Apollo

Apple

Aramis

ArentFox Schiff

Ariel

Atlassian

Authentic Brands

Aveda

Avery Dennison

Axel Springer

Bain & Company

Bank of America

Bank of New York Mellon

Baskin Robins

Bath & Body Works

Baupost Group

Bayer

BBC

BCG

Bioventus

Blackrock

Blackstone

Black & Decker

Bloomberg

Bobby Brown Essentials

Boeing

Bosch

Bounty

Bristol Myers Squibb

Bumble and Bumble

Burger King

Cadbury

Caltex

Capri Holdings

CareTrust REIT

Caterpillar

CeraVe

Chanel

Chapman and Cutler

Cisco

Citadel

Citi

Clinique

CNN

Coca-Cola

Comcast

Condé Nast

CV Starr

Cytokinetics

Davis Polk

Dell

Deloitte

Delta Air Lines

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Telekom

DeviantArt

DHL Group

Disney

Donna Karan Cosmetics

Douglas Elliman

Dove

Edelman

Eli Lily

Endeavor

Energizer

Estée Lauder

EY

Facebook

Fanta

Fiverr

Forbes

Ford

Fox Corp

Gamida Cell

GE

General Catalyst

General Motors

Genesys

Gillette

Goldman Sachs

Google

Hardee’s

Hearst

Henkel

Herbert Smith Freehills

Hewlett Packard

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

HP

HubSpot

Huntsman Corp

H&M

IBM

Insight Partners

Instacart

Instagram

Intel

Intermedia

Interpublic Group

Intuit

Jane

Jazwares

Jefferies

Johnson & Johnson

Jo Malone

JP Morgan

Kate Spade

Kenon Holdings

Kit-Kat

KKR

KPMG

La Mer

Lays

Lego

Lemonade

Levi Strauss

Lifebouy

LinkedIn

Lipton

Live Nation Entertainment

L’Oréal

MAC Cosmetics

Maggie

Major League Baseball

Mango

Manpower Group

Mars

Marsh & McLennan

Mastercard

Mattel

McDermont Will & Emery

McDonalds

McKinsey

Merck

Merck KGaA

Meta

MeUndies

Microsoft

Milo

Morgan Lewis

Morgan Stanley

Motorola

MRC

Nasdaq

National Basketball association (NBA)

National Geographic

NeoGames

Nescafé

Nestle (and anything that stems from them)

Netflix

NFL

Nido

Nike

Nokia

Novartis

Nvidia

Okta

Omnicon Group

Oracle

Oreo

Origins Natural Resources

Palantir

Pampers (Procter & Gamble)

Paramount Global

Paul Weiss

PepsiCo

Perishing Square

Pfizer

Philips (66)

Pillsbury

Prescriptives

Progressive

Pringles

Puma

PVH

Raytheon

Regeneration Pharmaceuticals

Related Companies

Revlon

Ribbon

Riskified

Sabra Hummus

Sales Force

SAP

Sequoia Capital

Seyfarth Shaw

Siemens

Signal

Simons Property Group

Skydance

Snickers

SodaStream

Sony

SoulCycle

Sprite

StagWell

Starbucks

State Street

Stila Cosmetics

Subway

Sweet Green

Synovus

Tang

Tesla

Teva Pharmaceuticals

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Tieks by Gavreli

Tide

Toblerone

Tommy Hilfiger Toiletries

Tory Burch

Tribe Hummus

Troutman Pepper

Twin

UBS

United Airlines

Universal Music Group

UPS

UpWork

US Chamber of Commerce

Verizon

Victoria’s Secret 

Vim

Volkswagon

Volvo

Vontier

Wall’s

Walmart

Warby Parker

Warner Brothers Discovery

Wells Fargo

WhatsApp

Winston & Strawn

WiX

WWE

Zara

Zoff Davis

Zoom

[ridenwithbiden]

CRYPTO CONS

Silicon Valley billionaires and crypto fans are throwing their support—and money—at former President Donald Trump.

“The Democratic Party has moved so far left that the Republican Party is now closest to the center,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted on X on Wednesday.

The tech bromance comes on the heels of Trump’s near-death experience and choice of J.D. Vance to be his vice presidential running mate. Musk recently promised to shovel $45 million a month into America PAC, a group that is backing the former president, the Wall Street Journal reported. Musk endorsed Trump minutes after the president survived an assassination attempt on Saturday.

In the lead-up to the endorsement, Musk and Trump had been shaping a potential administration gig for the billionaire, which would involve influencing economic policy, border security and voting integrity, according to the Journal. The two men purportedly talk on the phone multiple times a month.

America PAC’s other donors include the Winklevoss twins, billionaire Douglas Leone of Sequoia Capital, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who is taking part in leading the group, The New York Times reported.

Venture capital billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also plan to donate to Trump, Axios reported Wednesday. On their Tuesday podcast, the pair lamented how President Joe Biden’s policies around AI and cryptocurrency have hurt start-ups in those fields.

The Biden administration has sought to rein in crypto, suing Coinbase and Binance and vetoing a bill that would have scaled back regulations. Trump, meanwhile, has said he doesn't want to lose crypto business to other countries. He plans to release a fourth collection of non-fungible tokens soon.

Trump's new running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has been vocally critical of big tech, but he's pro crypto. He has drafted a bill to protect the industry and owns bitcoin himself. While a staunch critic of Biden, he has praised the president's Federal Trade Commission Chair, Lina Khan, who, like Vance, has been crusader against big tech.

The surge in support among the wealthy men of Silicon Valley may have helped sway Trump on Vance’s behalf—and Vance's selection may have helped win them over.

Musk and heavyweight venture capitalist David Sacks were among those who lobbied for Vance's VP selection, according to Axios. Sacks, a former PayPal executive who gave almost $1 million to a PAC supporting Vance’s 2022 Senate bid, boarded the Trump train in early June.

Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Musk and donated to Trump's previous bids, is another Silicon Valley titan who has a longstanding personal relationship with Vance. Thiel backed Vance's Senate bid with a record-breaking $15 million.

Thiel also facilitated the Vance-Trump relationship, arranging a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with the two men, as well as the president's son. Thiel told The Atlantic in 2023 that he wouldn't be giving to Trump again.

But some of Trump's earlier adopters are still chipping in. Among those who gave $1 million to America PAC last month is another PayPal co-founder, Ken Howery, the former president’s ambassador to Sweden.