Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tech Drop: the week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
The scale of Trump’s crypto self-enrichment
A new Reuters report breaks down the Trump family cryptocurrency empire, which Donald Trump and his children have promoted since his return to office, and finds that it has generated 17 times the income the Trump family generated just last year. The report, compiled from the “president’s official disclosures, property records, financial records released in court cases, crypto trade information and other sources,” says some of this wealth was generated via the investment of a bunch of characters that Reuters describes as having “histories of legal and regulatory entanglements related to their business endeavors,” including a Chinese crypto enthusiast who’s under investigation for alleged money laundering in Britain.
The details seem to offer the clearest view yet of the breadth of self-enrichment the president and his sons have engaged in since Trump’s election.
According to the report:
The Trump brothers’ efforts have been a whopping success. In the first half of this year, the Trump Organization’s income soared 17-fold to $864 million from $51 million a year earlier, according to Reuters calculations based on the president’s official disclosures, property records, financial records released in court cases, crypto trade information and other sources. Of the first-half total, $802 million — more than 90% — came from Trump crypto ventures, including sales of World Liberty tokens.
Read more at Reuters.
Thompson presses Trump ballroom donors
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., is pressing Big Tech and media companies over their financial contributions to Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make way for a golden ballroom. Some of the companies on the donor list, which includes MSNBC’s current parent company, Comcast, are trying to cozy up to the president by funding one of his self-aggrandizing pet projects — and during a government shutdown, no less.
Thompson sent letters to many of the major companies on the donor list, which you can read here.
Sequoia Capital fallout continues
Fallout at the tech firm Sequoia Capital last week reached the company’s chief operating officer, a practicing Muslim who resigned after leadership refused to reprimand one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, over a bigoted viral tweet, in which Maguire posted that New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” (Maguire later apologized on X.)
Read more at Forbes.
Trump Jr.’s company gets drone deal
The Pentagon has signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Unusual Machines, a drone company that counts Donald Trump Jr. as a member of an advisory board and part owner — an arrangement that raises a laundry list of ethical concerns. (A Trump spokesperson told The New Republic that “Don has never communicated with anyone in the administration on behalf of Unusual Machines or about the contract in question.”)
Read more at The New Republic.
Trump puts tech bros in the driver’s seat
After the president announced that some of his Big Tech associates had convinced him not to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco, Ars Technica reported on how tech billionaires such as Marc Benioff are shaping the administration’s militarization of American cities.
Read more at Ars Technica.
Expanded surveillance
The Trump administration is expanding the government’s surveillance of noncitizens at points of entry. A report from tech news site Biometric Update cites public documents on the Dec. 26 rollout of a new policy to acquire biometric data and photographs from noncitizens as they enter and leave the country. Civil liberties experts are sounding the alarm on the potential for civil rights violations that could occur as a result of this policy.
Read more at Biometric Update.
Copyright strike
After being blocked by an appeals court, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in and allow the president to fire the director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, who has suggested that her firing may have been linked to her views about the need for artificial intelligence companies to obtain copyright clearance before training their models on other people’s creations.
Read more at The New York Times.
Strange bedfellows
An eclectic mix of public figures, from Prince Harry to Steve Bannon, co-signed a letter urging a prohibition on developing “superintelligent” artificial intelligence tools, or tools that surpass the capabilities of expert humans.
Read more at NBC News.
European regulators target tech giants
Regulators with the European Commission allege that Meta and TikTok breached transparency rules outlined in the E.U.’s Digital Services Act that requires social media platforms to provide public access to data. The commission said both companies’ processes for requesting such data is “burdensome.”
Here’s how TikTok responded:
“We are reviewing the European Commission’s findings, but requirements to ease data safeguards place the DSA and GDPR in direct tension. If it is not possible to fully comply with both, we urge regulators to provide clarity on how these obligations should be reconciled,” a TikTok spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Here’s how Meta responded:
“We disagree with any suggestion that we have breached the DSA, and we continue to negotiate with the European Commission on these matters. In the European Union, we have introduced changes to our content reporting options, appeals process, and data access tools since the DSA came into force and are confident that these solutions match what is required under the law in the EU,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Sinema sparks furious backlash
Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., faced blowback — including a comparison to a “cartoon villain” — after she spoke at a public hearing last week at which she told Arizonans she was working “hand in glove” with the Trump administration to bring data centers to the valley, warning local residents to get onboard or face federal intervention.
Read more at Deseret News.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
