As markets opened Friday morning, Elon Musk-owned SpaceX was poised to become the biggest new addition to the stock market — ever. The company, which also owns X — the social media cesspool formerly known as Twitter — and xAI, set an initial share price of $135. That placed the corporation’s overall valuation at $1.77 trillion. But shares surged once trading officially opened, pushing SpaceX’s value over the $2 trillion mark and officially making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. If the Securities and Exchange Commission approves confidential filings made earlier this year, SpaceX’s massive initial public offering could be followed by IPOs from two other tech giants: OpenAI, valued at more than $850 billion, and Anthropic, valued at more than $960 billion.

All three tech firms are taking steps to go public amid a high-stakes race to control the burgeoning artificial intelligence market. At the same time, questions abound about the hype surrounding AI, its safety issues and pacpotential profitability. This means those dreaming of getting rich with SpaceX’s IPO or any other tech titans should keep in mind: For all the resources Silicon Valley is pouring into these emerging technologies, it’s still possible that predictions of endless growth could turn out to be another LLM-generated hallucination.

For all the resources Silicon Valley is pouring into these emerging technologies, it’s still possible that predictions of endless growth could turn out to be another LLM-generated hallucination.

And should the AI bubble pop, the results for the global economy could be disastrous. In effect, these AI giants are strapping a time bomb to the stock market. If they go down, they might take most of those who went along for the ride down with them.

For months, economists have debated just how much of an effect massive investments in AI infrastructure have had on the U.S. economy. Regardless of its actual effect on GDP, investors have bet big on Big Tech, helping propel the major stock market indexes to record heights. Notably, that stock market boom hasn’t included the companies behind the large language models most widely used: Grok (SpaceX), ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic). So far, those firms have relied on investment rounds from venture capital, major institutions such as banks and other private deals to raise funds.

At the same time, many of the companies fueling the AI explosion are also investing in one another. Established multinational corporations such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google are pouring money into purchases from chip manufacturer Nvidia. Nvidia, in turn, has joined those giants in pumping cash into OpenAI and Anthropic, which also purchase Nvidia chips. Musk, meanwhile, used SpaceX to “acquire” xAI from himself, adding a whole new layer to the fiscal ouroboros he’s already fashioned.

But the vast sums being invested and spent have yet to generate sustainable profits. Meanwhile, advanced AI models consume a lot of energy in their computations. Between the cost to keep them running and investments in new research, even the billions in revenue being brought in aren’t enough to generate profits. And some companies that have been pushing their employees to use generative AI are feeling sticker shock as the fees associated with their licenses cut into their own bottom lines. It’s possible that cuts to that spending could depress revenue for AI companies, fueling their quest to tap new funding sources — which look likely to soon include ordinary investors or index funds that house retirement plans.

The timing couldn’t be better for the Center for Economic and Policy Research to have launched its “AI Bubble Monitor” earlier this week to track potential signs that we’re experiencing what would be the third major economic bubble of the past three decades. Economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the center, points out that “the value of the stock market relative to the economy is nearly twice as large as it was at the peak of the tech bubble.” And the stock prices of many tech companies driving the stock market far outshine their earnings.

Already, there are signs that some major financial institutions are getting worried about how much credit to offer based on stakes in AI companies. We have reached a point, then, where new money needs to be injected into this previously closed system. Whereas most firms doing IPOs reserve 5% to 10% of shares for retail customers, SpaceX held back as much as 30%, by some reports.

As things stand, the AI system is like a dazzling array of dominos — eye-catching and poised to topple with the slightest jostling.

While some might be thinking about the potential for people who believe Musk is going to terraform Mars will snap up shares, a better question could be the point made by this New York Times op-ed: “Mr. Musk could well believe his own projections. What’s harder to understand is why so many investors do, given his recent track record of missed deadlines, abandoned products and failed business predictions.”

As things stand, the AI system is like a dazzling array of dominos — eye-catching and poised to topple with the slightest jostling. Should one of these firms prove unable to meet the obligations it has to the other major players, the cascading effect could launch another recession. Rather than inoculating the financial system against this potential contagion, regulators appear poised to greenlight injection directly into the U.S. economy. Amid the talk of trillionaires, it should not be missed that a few people stand to get much, much richer in the short term — and these giant IPOs have the potential to leave everyone else holding the bag if AI proponents’ visions do not become reality.

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The $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill Republicans have been working to pass for months finally got President Donald Trump’s signature Wednesday afternoon. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was on hand at the White House for the signing, along with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and a smattering of other GOP senators and representatives.

Missing from the celebration despite having spearheaded the effort to get it passed: Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

It may be a simple matter of scheduling that allowed Johnson to attend and not Thune. But the South Dakotan’s absence was notable given how often he’s lately been forced to play the uncomfortable role of the person who has to tell Trump “no.” And when it comes to Trump, even big wins like a bill funding one of his top priorities can easily be forgotten as his focus slips back toward more esoteric demands.

Trump’s relationship with Thune is best examined in contrast with the president’s interactions with Johnson. Punchbowl News framed the dynamic succinctly Wednesday morning: “Thune derives much of his power from his conference, not Trump. Johnson derives a good deal of his power from being close to the president.”

The two-vote majority Johnson controls in the House means both ends of the GOP’s contracted ideological spectrum can make demands that grind legislation to a halt. The Louisiana lawmaker’s at times tenuous grasp on the House and reliance on Trump to get his ducks in a row have been constant themes of this phase of his speakership. NOTUS recently reported that Trump has at least once declared in front of Johnson and other lawmakers: “I have two jobs: being president and being speaker.”

Johnson’s caucus first put him into the speakership in 2023 because there was nobody else who could win enough votes for the job, as several weeks of internal jostling proved. Almost three years later, there’s little appetite among House Republicans to go through the sort of internal fight to replace him without a clear alternative. But even without wanting to take Johnson out entirely, House Republicans have historically had few problems with pulling out the knives against their own leadership.

Ironically, the House speaker has much more direct control over his chamber’s workflow than the Senate majority leader does. A single senator can ruin the majority’s best-laid plans by denying the unanimous consent that keeps things flowing smoothly. In practice, Thune needs to persuade enough GOP senators to stick with him and contend with the filibuster’s limitations on what can make it through a tough vote.

Despite that, for the better part of Trump’s second term it’s been the Senate that’s been the more reliable chamber in terms of delivering on the White House’s legislative priorities. The final version of last year’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill first cleared the Senate, and it’s been the Senate that’s broken logjams over funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the federal government more broadly. It’s also been the Senate steadily confirming Trump’s nominees, giving him a more or less free hand to continue his war against Iran and supporting his crackdown on immigrants.

Thune has been most willing to push back on issues he knows he can’t get his members to support. He doesn’t have the votes to kill the filibuster and doesn’t seem like he would be inclined to do so even if he did. He has refused to fire the Senate parliamentarian for blocking security funding for Trump’s White House ballroom. And Thune has allowed his members to vent freely about the corruption on display from the slush fund Trump attempted to establish.

Unfortunately, those issues also tend to be the ones on which Trump has placed an outsize focus. The president doesn’t seem to understand any system that doesn’t allow its head to act as a despot. His decision to help remove members of the GOP caucus by backing primary challengers hasn’t made it any more likely that he’ll win over holdouts. And while he has succeeded in helping to bully House members into following Johnson’s lead, those tactics have been less effective against the more imperious senators in his crosshairs.

The resulting dynamic has forced Thune to plan around Trump’s shifting demands and take the heat when his members balk at the president’s whims. It’s an arrangement that so far has managed to work out despite itself. Trump has never called for Thune’s removal from atop the Senate GOP — and to be honest, Trump may not like the response he might receive if he ever does.

For now at least, the president may control the House, but the Senate still belongs to John Thune.

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President Donald Trump and his family have cashed in big since he won the 2024 election. Of the billions of dollars they have accrued over the past 18 months, the lion’s share has reportedly come from cryptocurrency assets that bear the president’s name or his family’s endorsement. The technology may be novel, but crypto lets the Trump family play the age-old game of separating fools from their money, all while leveraging Trump’s position in the White House to boost the sales pitch.

According to an in-depth investigation from Reuters, whose reporters reviewed thousands of documents, disclosures and blockchain records, the price of the crypto offerings Trump is marketing have plummeted — but not the profits that the Trumps have pocketed. Investors who trusted Trump’s business acumen have been left unable to achieve the profits they assumed were coming or even offload the assets as their worth collapsed. In effect, a predatory market that should be subject to stricter regulation from the government instead has been a massive cash cow for the president and his family.

Crypto lets the Trump family play the age-old game of separating fools from their money

(Reuters helpfully published a full methodology for how it calculated the gains and losses on the notoriously opaque crypto market. The White House did not comment directly on Reuters’ reporting but said in a statement: “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”)

Trump has long preferred projects in which he features his name prominently but takes on little, if any, financial risk. The Trump Organization’s longtime M.O. has been licensing his name to real estate projects and reaping the benefits, even if the projects failed. Trump has also stamped his name on mattresses, wall sconces and slabs of meat. He even added his name to Bibles during the 2024 campaign.

At least all those were physical products. But in 2022, when he was out of the White House, Trump got involved in the burgeoning digital marketplace. The nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, sold for $99 each featuring his name and image as part of another licensing scheme. The cash flowed into Trump’s bank account before a “digital trading card” was sold. As a result, the latecomer entry into the NFT market, after months of decline in the NFT market’s value more broadly, mattered little to him when he had already extracted whatever value he could from the deal.

Trump and his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. fully entered the world of cryptocurrency in late 2024. Leading up to his inauguration, the three hawked the $TRUMP meme coin and “governance tokens” for their crypto business, World Liberty Financial. The resulting surge in interest in those offerings and two crypto companies with the sons’ backing have generated a massive flood of new revenue for the Trumps. The report Reuters published Tuesday highlighted how the influx of funding for the Trumps left behind those hoping to join in the windfall:

While they vary in size and structure, each of these ventures has followed the same playbook. The Trumps risked little up front. Trump family members — notably, the president’s oldest sons, Eric and Donald Jr. — hyped the venture. The Trumps raked in money as investors piled in. And those buyers lost big when, for various reasons, the prices of their Trump-related crypto assets later tanked.

A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis. Those investors include retail buyers of crypto and crypto-linked equities, as well as those who invested indirectly through funds such as exchange-traded funds with exposure to Trump crypto. The loss total includes paper losses on unsold investments.

We shouldn’t ignore that, per Reuters’ calculations, the Trumps have profited at least as much money as outside investors have lost. World Liberty has sent 75% of the net revenue from token sales to the Trumps. Those tokens were meant to provide those who own them a say in the “new financial system” the company promises to eventually develop — though there’s been little progress on that front.

The price for those tokens, along with the $TRUMP meme coin, another straight-up licensing venture, have crashed. Investors have been barred from selling most of the coins they have accumulated, meaning even those who bought in early are unable to make money from their purchase or even cut their losses. Reuters interviewed an investor whose $2,000 investment in $TRUMP is now worth less than $120. (A spokesperson for World Liberty disputed the methods Reuters used to calculate the losses retail investors have seen.)

After hyping a product with almost no real value, the president and his sons have in effect siphoned billions of dollars away from investors who hoped to profit themselves

Buyers of this meme coin had even more reason to beware than investors in general given the volatile nature of the crypto market and Trump’s history of flimflam. As with most crypto tokens available to purchase, the World Liberty “governance token” and the $TRUMP meme coin also included fine-print disclaimers that their tokens are not an investment and that purchasers shouldn’t expect a profit. But that’s hard to square with the president’s marketing and him offering perks to investors including dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate and the White House.

After hyping a product with almost no real value, the president and his sons have in effect siphoned billions of dollars away from investors who hoped to profit themselves. Anyone else who did this would be accused of running a classic pump and dump scheme. But when it’s the president of the United States behind it all, the people who bought in have nowhere to turn. Instead, they’re left holding the bag.

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Senate Republicans demurred last week at the chance to rein in President Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, despite indications that the slush fund is not as dead as the Justice Department has claimed. Even more troubling, the GOP opted not to touch the less blatantly corrupt part of Trump’s settlement with himself. Under the terms of an addendum from acting attorney general Todd Blanche, the Internal Revenue Service is “forever barred and precluded” from auditing the president, his companies, or the sons that joined him in attempting to shakedown the agency for $10 billion in a lawsuit against the government he leads.

Importantly, the one-page ban includes any ongoing audits that may have already begun. It also specifically applies to all tax returns filed before the settlement was put in place last month. This would cover those filed in April, which cover Trump’s first year back in office. And as even a cursory review of the Trump family’s alleged ongoing profiteering shows, any number of fraudulent claims could potentially slip through the cracks if the IRS is forbidden from reviewing any of those filings.

Any number of fraudulent claims could potentially slip through the cracks if the IRS is forbidden from reviewing any of those filings.

The slush fund itself is widely seen as a vessel for Trump to pass out cash to supporters who claimed they’d been unfairly targeted by federal investigations. Some tax experts recently told Politico that while Trump wouldn’t be getting money from the fund himself, he would potentially have still been responsible for a tax bill costing hundreds of millions of dollars. But the language of the broader settlement argued that the fund is “not taxable income as to Plaintiffs, who receive no economic benefit from this Settlement Agreement.”

In truth, there’s a potentially massive economic benefit from the settlement via the follow-up provision Blanche later added. As The New York Times has noted, an IRS audit launched in 2020 could have resulted in Trump owing $100 million or more for double-dipping on certain tax breaks. Simply causing that to go away would be a massive boon to the president and his businesses, let alone any other audits that may or may not have been underway behind closed doors. After all, the IRS has had a policy since the post-Watergate era began to automatically audit the president and vice president’s tax returns.

We already know some of what was likely in the most recent filings, thanks to a mix of mandatory disclosures and excellent journalism. Trump revealed in a federal disclosure form last month that he’s engaged in massive stock trades since January, including millions of dollars’ worth of shares in businesses that have benefited from his decisions as president. (White House spokesperson Kimberly Benza said last month in a statement to The Associated Press that “neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments” and that they “receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management.”)

Meanwhile, Trump’s sons who were co-plaintiffs in the suit, Don Jr. and Eric, have also been very busy in the last year and a half making business deals that appear to have benefitted from their father’s position in multiple ways. All told, according to The New York Times’ Editorial Board, Trump, and in turn his businesses and family, “used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion.”

Tellingly, the audit addendum has nothing to do with the direct subject of Trump’s original case against the IRS. He and his sons claimed that the IRS had gravely injured them in allowing a contractor to leak the president’s returns, along with those of other public figures. But the leak happened during Trump’s first term, and the culprit was already prosecuted for stealing the documents. To ban the IRS from undertaking any current or future audits based on a theft that’s already been punished simply makes no sense.

None of this should excuse lawmakers from turning a blind eye to the apparent corruption on display

There are a few silver linings. The Justice Department said in a statement last month that the breathtaking scope of this quasi-legal tax shield “is only with respect to existing audits, not future.” Likewise, as MS NOW analyst Lisa Rubin has noted, Blanche may not have had the authority to tell the IRS what to do in this case. Unlike the main settlement, the addendum wasn’t signed by any Treasury Department officials, and the Justice Department can only settle matters that have been referred to it for prosecution or defense.

Most hopeful is the decision from a federal judge to re-open Trump’s IRS lawsuit after first agreeing to dismiss it. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said that she intended to determine whether the settlement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.” She was already concerned that Trump appeared to be both the plaintiff and defendant in the case and now means to examine whether the settlement was “premised on deception.”

None of this should excuse lawmakers from turning a blind eye to the apparent corruption on display. The president has already shown that he believes himself to be beyond the reach of the law. In trying to shield his family’s businesses from any scrutiny, Trump has now attempted to place himself above one of the only two constants in this world: death and taxes.

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