On January 3, 2026, Tim Stern, a German investor, was sleeping peacefully at his Venezuela residence when the phone on his small bedside table suddenly went wild. As he explained to Timothy Allen of the “Free Cities Podcast,” calls streamed in immediately after news broke that the United States had bombed Caracas in the early hours of the morning. Within hours, it was clear that Venezuelan…
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In April 2025, Peter Thiel’s Palantir made headlines after documents were released detailing its partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to create ImmigrationOS, a massive database of information gathered from a variety of sources including the IRS, in order to surveil, detain, and deport immigrants. Thiel is not new to spearheading endeavors that aim to dehumanize and attack…
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The Washington Post has laid off more than 300 journalists, dismantling its sports, local news and international coverage. “Everybody is grieving, and it’s a loss for our readers,” says Nilo Tabrizy, one of the paper’s recently laid-off staff, who describes a “robotic” meeting announcing the cuts. “They didn’t have the dignity to look us in the eye.” The shocking staff culling has been widely…
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French police have raided X’s offices in Paris and summoned its chairman, Elon Musk, to testify, in an escalation of a multifaceted investigation into the social media platform’s data use, deepfake porn generation, and other allegations of wrongdoing. Cybercrime investigators in France have been probing the company for over a year, with authorities looking into the company for allegations of…
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The Washington Post, one of the largest newspapers in the U.S., announced on Wednesday that it is laying off a third of all staff — a move that owner Jeff Bezos could prevent personally without his net worth changing in any meaningful way. As of Wednesday, Bezos’s net worth was listed as just under $249 billion by Forbes. Just last year, he spent an estimated $50 million on his wedding.
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After years of bipartisan attacks on TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, which for a time included an effort to potentially ban the social media app in the U.S., a new U.S. TikTok spinoff has been announced, set to be owned and overseen by a tight-knit consortium of tech and financial megabillionaires, many of whom have had direct business relationships with Trump and members of his…
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