Why are Democrats going after Elon Musk with everything they have? It's not because he's a billionaire in politics. They've been perfectly comfortable with billionaires in politics for decades. They're going after him because he's the first one playing against them. Look at the numbers. Soros's Democracy PAC had put over $100 million into this midterm cycle before the summer was even over. Only a tiny fraction of it shows up under his own name. Then add the advocacy arm of his foundations, which doesn't have to disclose all of its political spending. And that's just the visible part. Over 40 years, tens of billions have gone into NGOs, universities, legal networks and media projects that shape what counts as an "acceptable" opinion. That's the real game. Billionaires have been buying politicians for decades, on every side. But the smartest ones figured something out: you don't buy a candidate, you buy the ecosystem. Universities, foundations, newsrooms, NGOs, regulators, courts. Once you control who writes the reports, who trains the lawyers and who decides what counts as "misinformation", elections become a detail. For 30 years that ecosystem leaned one way. Nobody called it oligarchy. They called it "civil society." Then Musk showed up. He bought the main public square, took the filters off, and started spending in the open, under his own name. Yes, he's the biggest donor of these midterms. Everyone can see exactly how much he gave and to whom. That's the difference. One plays in daylight, the other plays through a maze of structures. And suddenly, billionaire money in politics became a threat to democracy. This isn't really about left versus right. It's about an ideology that captured these institutions and leads straight into a wall. More regulation, less building. More process, less progress. Countries shutting down working nuclear plants. A decade to approve a power line. A system whose default answer to any ambition is "no." Musk is the opposite. Reusable rockets. Mass-market EVs. Satellite internet for the whole planet. Brain-computer interfaces. A serious plan to make humanity multiplanetary. You can hate his tweets. You can't deny that no one in the last 20 years has pushed the frontier of what humanity can build further than he has. That's why they need to break him. Not because of his money. Because he proves the system can be bypassed. If we leave the system as it is, we don't get a catastrophe. We get something worse: slow, comfortable stagnation. A civilization that manages its own decline instead of building its future.

Power is one of the AI buildout's biggest bottlenecks, and US capacity to make electrical equipment is shrinking US factory capacity since 2019: - Comms equipment: +110% - Semis: +77% - Computers: +16% - Electrical equipment: -9% Electrical equipment prices are up 69%, the biggest jump of the four categories Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

Average UK house prices increased by 0.9%, to £273,000, in the 12 months to August 2026, down from 1.2% in the 12 months to July 2026. Average UK private rents up by 3.8%, to £1,406, in the 12 months to September 2026, unchanged from the 12 months to August 2026.

Anthropic plans to commit 5% of shares to a new “public benefit fund” with the flexibility to make charitable donations or direct money to “specific populations” on.wsj.com/3VT0WvR

Update from CENTCOM Commander:

Living with violent crime is a choice. We know how to stop it, what too many of us lack is the will to get it done.

The @EUCouncil has still not released the working documents where each Member State’s position on EU Inc would be visible. Against the law. Against EU Court rulings. Enough with this opacity that benefits the red tape lobby. They know they have to hide this. That’s why they hide it. We want European leaders who make Europe win. Not on the wrong side of Europe’s history. The most obvious thing is to make EU Inc as fast and as easy, or faster and easier, than US Delaware. Not to keep notaries feudal privileges and imposing a numerus clausus, a de facto ban on English, exhorbitant fees and sham digitalization in EU Inc. Europeans have spoken. Don’t go against Europeans’ will. Repost

1/ muse spark open is the most capable US open-weight model to date. 816B total params, 42B active. 1M-token context. natively multimodal. built for coding and agentic work like long-horizon tasks, hard software engineering, multi-step reasoning. america! 🇺🇲

When I set my business up 10 years ago today Employers NI was 13.8%, Corporation Tax was 20% falling to 19% in Apr 2017. The tax free dividend allowance was £5,000, the top rate of tax on dividends was 38.1%. You could sell your business and make the first £10 million of gains at a rate of 10%. By every single metric setting up a business in this country has become less attractive. Before you get to the mechanism actually trying to do anything as bold as opening a bank account working a 5 day week etc...

The WSJ starting to admit the obvious: Western democracy when combined with fiscally negative immigration and a generous welfare state, inexorably creates a solvency crisis. (they didn't mention the immigration part but it's an essential ingredient in the toxic mix) their words are unusually stark: > It’s also a litmus test of a pressing question facing the West: Is it possible for political leaders to rein in spending on ever expanding welfare states? So far, the answer seems to be no, increasing the chances that countries like Britain are inching toward a financial reckoning. the welfare state + open borders model is a clear democracy failure mode and there's no obvious way out. no western European nation will reform pensions or entitlements. they are actually fundamentally incapable of doing what must be done. (the immigration aspect is virtual corollary to democracy because it creates incentives for the left to import reliable voters, so at least part of the time immigration is virtually unfettered.) the UK, with maximum, unending immigration, an aging and shrinking workforce, a tiny and overexploited base of taxpayer paypigs, highly financialized service / financial industry, a legacy of welfare as political payoffs to disenfranchised groups, an inability to cut pensions, and a stagnant, is the poster child for this disease and the worst affected but by no means the only nation in this predicament. the UK's grim fiscal state is the future of every western nation, unless something changes dramatically. aging population + increasingly discouraged working-age adults + highly mobile capital & elites that simply leave under onerous tax regimes + mass and unending fiscally negative immigration + expensive decarbonization and deindustralization + a left wing that is totally committed to immigration, over all else + a total inability to cut entitlements = fiscal crisis and eventual default in the end, the wealthy and the entrepreneur class that actually power growth will simply leave to escape the tightening tax noose. the government will become increasingly reliant on the middle/upper middle professional classes who lack the ability to leave, completely eliminating any motive to be entrepreneurial or take risks. the economy will become increasingly torpid as dynamism vanishes. the left will continue to gain power due to slow electoral build of immigration and will continue to honor their side of the deal, which is neverending handouts to fiscally useless electoral client groups. case studies like south africa, venezuela and lebanon show us that life can get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse and worse. things getting extremely bad are not a guarantee that they won't continue to get worse. don't be fooled by anticipating a sudden realization among political elites that they have employed the wrong formula. things can just get steadily worse for decades and decades with no escaping the slide. if I had to guess, I would venture that if no MAJOR (and I'm talking _major_) political reform occurs in western Europe, the continent will enter a sovereign debt crisis in the coming decade, standards of living will collapse, life expectancy will collapse, entitlements will be ravaged. I anticipate something akin to the effect that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on the local population, or worse. politics will be polarized between the ultraright and far left, each with their own radical solution to the problem (extirpating immigrants, versus actual socialism). I don't know which of the two will prevail. neither the right nor the left is willing to reform entitlements, which is the biggest problem, and so the market will do it for them. the US may escape their fate, but I am not particularly optimistic it will. our demographics and willingness to do hard things (on immigration, eg) are marginally better, but our spending and fraud-based entitlement economy is almost just as bad. no major party will even contemplate uttering that boomer luxury communism must end eventually. it's not even a topic in the midterms nor will it be in '28. the productivity boost from AI might grant European nations a slight reprieve in the medium term, but it wont salvage their bleak fiscal situation in the end. this is because almost no European nation controls the industrial inputs to AI (beyond ASML), so their gain is limited to the productivity uplift from deployment of the technology, while they remain vassals to the nations which actually control the deeper stack. moreover, a GDP and tax revenue boost from AI can easily be outspent. these nations have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. they can always dream up utterly farcical new handout schemes, like the UK's "motability". additionally, while AI creates a legion of highly productive entrepreneurs, they will all tax optimize and the benefits of new firms will largely not be captured by their respective governments. capital and startups are more portable than they have ever been. AI simply accelerates the pareto-ization of the economy whereby a shrinking minority of founders produces more value whilst more and more are idle and depend on handouts from the productive few. however, capital and human capital mobility destroys this fragile arrangement and strips the idle many of their benefactors. AI buys Western Europe at most a few years of delay to the inevitable crisis.