The Cylon (TOS) Design Fallacy

Just to be clear, I'm talking about these Cylons...

 

... not these Cylons.

In the pilot of the original Battlestar Galactica, Apollo and Starbuck steal a Cylon fighter. They're able to do this because those ships, like all of the others depicted in the show, appear to be designed for human use. They have manual controls, display screens, life support systems, and voice communications—all things that were either unnecessary or horribly inefficient for technology designed to be used by a race of robots.

It's best not to try to think too deeply about that 1978 show. For one thing, we know the reason that Cylons looked like they did. It was because the producer, Glen Larson, blatantly ripped off Star Wars and got sued for it (Larson was one of the few people in Hollywood who couldn't get along with the famously well-liked James Garner—to the extent that Garner once punched Larson in the mouth over plagiarized Rockford scripts) . Cylon centurions looked the way they did because they were supposed to remind people of Imperial stormtroopers.

The Cylon design fallacy is that robots should be designed to interface with systems that were designed to interact with humans and systems designed to work with robots should interface with them in the same ways they would interact with humans.

The standard argument for humanoid bipedal robots, put forward by people like Elon Musk, is that they can do anything that humans can do physically. That's a dubious claim, but even if they could back it up, it's really not that impressive a boast. Most of what we do requires tools, which raises an interesting question: since robots are tools, why pick a design that is far more expensive and less efficient just so it can use tools that only look the way they do because they were designed for humans to use?

Bipedal humanoid robots are inevitably top-heavy and unstable compared to other designs, badly suited for lifting, carrying, and stacking heavy objects—particularly those where the load can shift while moving (think of a half-full container of liquid or a box with loose objects that can slide around). It's true that a humanoid robot could operate equipment such as a forklift, but if you're going to go to that expense, you could get an autonomous forklift that would do the same things at far less than the combined price—with the added advantage of being more compact, since it would not need space for a driver.

As for the argument that the same robot could go from working in a factory to cleaning your house, why would we want it to? You’ll be paying for functionality you don’t need and compromising on functionality that you do. And even if you insist on a one-size-fits-all model, what reason—other than the naivest of naive biomimicry—is there to believe that the sci-fi movie robot is the design you’d want to go with?

I hate to reschedule "The Cylon (TOS) Design Fallacy" yet again, but we had a big news day on the Tesla front

I've got some real posts coming up on Elon's Optimus and the humanoid robot bubble, with any luck starting tomorrow, but the last three days of April were just too eventful to ignore.

Remember, as I'm writing this, Tesla's P/E ratio is 155.30. Toyota's is 7.10. Alphabet's (Google) is 18.23.

Tesla (TSLA) chair sells most of her stocks – her time is done?
Fred Lambert | Apr 29 2025

Tesla’s Chairwoman, Robyn Denholm, has filed to sell another $30 million in Tesla stock. She appears to be completely liquidating her stake in the company she chairs.

This morning, we noted that a Tesla insider made their first stock purchase in five years.

Other than the small purchase from Joe Gebbia disclosed last night, Tesla executives and board members have exclusively exercised stock options and sold them right away.

Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s Chairwoman, has been the top seller. She sold over $150 million worth of Tesla stocks over the last 6 months.

She has received over $600 million in stock compensation since joining the board just 10 years ago, and she has sold over $500 million worth.

While that looks bad, there was a potentially far bigger announcement, but first a bit of background. More from former Elon fan Lambert.

When explicitly asked about Waymo, which is already seen as the market leader by most experts, Musk again claimed that it won’t be competitive because of cost:

Well, okay. The issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs way more money, but that is the issue. The car is very expensive, made in low volume. Teslas are probably cost 25% or 20% of what a Waymo costs and made in very high volume. So, ironically, like, we’re the ones to make the bet that a pure AI solution with cameras and what do you have? The car actually will listen for sirens and that kind of thing. It’s the right move. And Waymo decided that an expensive sensor suite is the way to go, even though Google is very good at AI. So I’m wondering. And it is worth noting that Tesla has both an incredible AI software team and AI hardware chip design team.

While it’s true that Waymo’s vehicles are more expensive, this has little to do with an “expensive sensor suite”, as Musk claimed.

Tesla’s sensor suite, which consists only of cameras, is certainly less expensive than Waymo’s, which includes cameras, radar, and lidar sensors. Still, most of the cost difference is due to Tesla building vehicles in high volumes for consumers while Waymo buys existing vehicles and retrofits them with its sensor suite in much lower volumes.

Talking to Business Insider this week, John Krafcik, who helped launch Google’s self-driving vehicle program and was Waymo’s first CEO until 2021, doesn’t see it as a problem:

In the long run, the cost of sensors has a “trivial cost-per-mile impact over the useful life of a robotaxi,” he told BI,” while also providing massive quantifiable safety benefits.”

Krafcik has been skeptical of Tesla’s efforts for a while and even suggested that what Tesla plans to launch in Austin in June could amount to “faking” self-driving.

If Waymo were in a position to build in high volumes, the math might be very different.

On a completely unrelated note.

Waymo, Toyota strike partnership to bring self-driving tech to personal vehicles
Jennifer Elias, Lora Kolodny

Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.

“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.

The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales. 

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”

And there's this.

To be blunt, I don't see any way out for the company. Elon is—and will remain—the public face of Doge, regardless of how much time he spends in the White House. As long as he is with Tesla, the brand will remain toxic.

But that 155 P/E is wholly dependent on the false belief that he is an engineering genius who will make trillions of dollars through robotaxis and humanoid robots. If he leaves, investors will have to face the fact that this is a small car company with a horrible brand trading at something like 20 times any reasonable value.

Tesla may be the platonic ideal of "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent," but when sanity does hit, it's likely to hit hard.

Sometimes it's useful and I think healthy to imagine trying to explain the news of 2025 to the you of 2015.

Paul Krugman has a good take on the larger ramifications.

If Trump had merely made economic demands on our northern neighbor, Canada might have acquiesced, although it’s not clear what concessions it could have made. But by repeatedly insisting that Canada must become the 51^st state, he made any hint of Trumpiness toxic in Canadian politics. Hence the stunning defeat for Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader (who lost his own seat in Parliament.)

...

Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.

But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.

And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them. Bloomberg reports that

President Xi Jinping’s diplomats are fanning out across the world with a clear message for countries cutting deals with Donald Trump: The US is a bully that can’t be trusted.

Unfortunately, they’re right. And Trump’s repeated insistence that the Chinese are negotiating with him, when they say they aren’t, comes across as pathetic.

Will the robotaxi business really be worth $443 billion to Tesla?

As discussed previously, one of the ten largest corporations in the world by valuation is a failing car company with small and rapidly declining sales, which the CEO and largest shareholder himself has suggested may never release another new model.

Despite this and other damaging revelations, the price of the stock has recently shot up almost 20%. As I'm writing this, its price to earnings ratio is 155.82. (Toyota's is 7.25.) Other than the possibility of graft (and it would have to be truly unprecedented to justify this market cap), the bull case for holding—let alone buying—the stock rests entirely on two products still in the prototype stage and already facing intense competition from companies with a bigger foothold in the market and what are arguably superior technologies.

We've talked about Optimus, the humanoid robot, earlier, and we will come back to it. For now, let's look at Tesla's proposed robotaxi business.

For starters, there are the findings that the company's own analysts reached even when they included Musk's absurdly optimistic assumptions. [Joe Wilkins writing for Futurism.]

Tesla's robotaxi will also have to contend with Musk's ever-irrational ego trips. In new reporting, The Information found that when an internal Tesla analysis suggested that the Cybercab would was unlikely to sell well or become profitable, Musk buried the report instead of facing reality.

"We had lots of modeling that showed the payback around [Full Self Driving] and Robotaxi was going to be slow," Rohan Patel, Tesla's former head of business development and policy who left the company last year, told the outlet. "It was going to be choppy. It was going to be very, very hard outside of the US [Keep in mind, this was before Musk and Tesla saw their popularity plummet across Europe -- MP], given the regulatory environment or lack of regulatory environment."

Per The Information, the internal analysis was based on Musk's own hare-brained assumptions that "individuals would buy the cars, but a large portion of the sales would go to fleet operators, and the vehicles would mostly be used for ride-sharing." In addition, "many people would give up car ownership and use Robotaxis" and "Tesla would get a cut of each Robotaxi ride."

Along with some other executives, Patel used this analysis to highlight how much more reasonable it was to focus on the $25,000 vehicle, but Musk shrugged it off. Instead, he axed the $25,000 Tesla program altogether, and went all-in on the Cybercab.

Musk is promising a 90% plus share of the robotaxi market.  He  has also promised to have a million robotaxis on the road "next year" since 2019. In that time, Waymo has gotten a pretty good head start.

[For a good rebuttal of Musk's dismissive comments about Waymo, check out these comments from John Krafcik, Waymo founder and former CEO.]

Ironically, the one part of the earnings call that arguably got investors most excited—the June launch in Austin—was the most damaging to the robotaxi narrative when you dug into the details.

Supposedly, Tesla has self-driving solved and the Cybercab ready to roll into mass production next year. So what will the upcoming rollout of robotaxis look like (assuming it happens at all)? Ten to twenty Model Ys, geo-fenced and teleoperation-assisted—in other words, what Waymo has been doing for years, only without LIDAR.

There's no way to reconcile what Musk has been claiming with what he's proposing. The rollout doesn't prove anything. It can't add significantly to the data they already have on Full Self-Driving using their current array of sensors. All this does is reiterate the fact that they have absolutely no technological advantage over their well-established competitor.

We've been down this road before with Elon. Remember when he promised a futuristic underground system that would take your car at blinding speeds to any point under Los Angeles, thanks to his fantastic new tunneling machines? Instead, what we got was a car driven through a completely conventional tunnel, stabilized with wheels bolted to its sides. All these years later, The Boring Company has produced no technological innovations whatsoever. It is a Theranos-level failure to deliver on promised technology.

As of this writing, Tesla has a market cap of $892.88B. Almost all of that is based on the potential profits from robotaxis and robots. It's difficult to see how the first of those two justifies hundreds of millions in market cap. We'll talk more about robots next time.

#SummerOfScarcity

If you're selective with social media and limit yourself to following smart, savvy—in the good sense—people (which now pretty much means Bluesky), you will often start hearing about the next big story a week or more before everyone else.

Case in point: last week, when everyone was trying to decipher the latest vague and contradictory comment on tariffs out of the White House, those who followed people like Carl Quintanilla knew that the first wave of damage from the tariffs was already on its way (or, more precisely, not on its way), and it was too late to do anything about it.

This information was coming out before and during the huge market rally.

 

Toward the end of the week, this started getting serious coverage. Of the major news orgs, the LA Times seems to have beaten the competition by at least a day or two.

Imports at the Port of Los Angeles are expected to plunge in the next two weeks, even as negotiations over the final tariffs that China and other countries must pay are still being negotiated by President Trump.

That was the sobering message that port Executive Director Gene Seroka had Thursday for the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners during an update on port activity.

“It’s my prediction that in two weeks’ time, arrivals will drop by 35% as essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal,” Seroka told the board.

That whole thread from Marshall is worth checking out, particularly the conclusion.

Social media platforms such as Blue Sky have tools that let you decide who to let in and it turns out that these platforms can be pretty great if you only listen to people worth listening to.

Markets can remain high on LSD longer than you can remain solvent.

I'm not sure there has ever been an earnings call as disastrous as Tesla's three days ago. I'm absolutely certain there has never been one this disastrous that was followed by such an inexplicable reaction. As for the disaster: just over a 70% drop in profits, an enormous—perhaps unprecedented—level of brand damage, and a flagship product they couldn't sell before the CEO became one of the most hated men in the world.

Musk basically dropped the pretense of arguing that the car manufacturing business could ever justify the stock price of his company. Instead, he went all in on robots and robotaxis, despite a report leaked to the press a few days ago revealing that Tesla's own internal auditors had determined the self-driving taxi business would actually be a money loser.

But here's the truly amazing part: the markets responded to this train wreck of dumpster fires—this once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a company absolutely implode—by pushing the stock up 17 points over the next couple of days. The P/E ratio is now an eye-watering 142.83.

Tesla now has the worst of both worlds. Musk said he will continue his involvement with (and being the face of) the toxic DOGE movement, while also spending more time in the office tweeting, playing video games, and randomly rage-firing people.

Edward Niedermeyer, who wrote the definitive book on Tesla, probably does the best job capturing the profound insanity of  the call. Here are a few excepts of his very long thread.

"somehow the car business which generates the majority of the company's revenue doesn't matter" because Tesla will never make enough selling cars to justify its valuation, not even if it sold more than Toyota, VW, Ford, and GM combined. The fact that sales are cratering only highlights what has always been obvious.

Make a mental note of that last one.

As recently as October, his robots required human operators to perform tasks as simple as pouring drinks. 

When Noah Smith and Ezra Klein wax poetic about abundance, remember they're getting their ideas from people like Marc (crypto, WeWork 2.0) Andreessen and Elon Musk.

It looks like the proposal is for a modest geo-fenced version that at best matches what competitors have been offering for years. Not an option you'd go with if you had "a general solution to self-driving, present tense."

I also wouldn't be surprised if this was the last we saw of the Cybercab.

Musk has been promising a million robotaxis on the road next year since 2019.

Because Waymo has waymo advanced technology. 

About that...

God, what a loser.

This next part is fun.

As mentioned many times before, Musk learns most of his engineering lines phonetically. Currently there are a number of conversations on Blue Sky with actual experts trying to figure out the original line he mangled.

"Been down so long it looks like up to me" -- a tale told mostly in tweets*

Market Psychology in 2025

"I'm going to lob a half dozen grenades into that building!"

Everyone runs out, screaming and trampling each other.

[Consults with advisors]

"Maybe I'll just lob three grenades into the building."

Everybody runs back in, singing and dancing.

 

We’ve talked about this before. Despite what you’ve heard, the current stock market loves uncertainty—probably because it contains at least the possibility of good news, and traders really want to hear some of that. As far as I can tell (keeping in mind that I am no expert on the financial system in general, and bonds in particular), bond traders remain more traditionally hard-headed in this respect.

Huge surges are sparked by vague, noncommittal statements from a secretary who is currently in a power struggle with Musk and Loomer and who may not outlast those unsustainable tariffs.

While on the subject of uncertainty, you have to wonder how the markets would react under some other administration if the Secretary of the Treasury—who was seen as one of the primary sources of stability in the economy—were to get into a shouting match in broad daylight at the White House with the second (second?) most powerful man in the country.

Putting aside the fact that these new “moderate” tariffs are still sky-high, there is no reason to believe that Trump won’t return to his more extreme position. For starters, Trump and many of his advisors deeply believe in the wisdom of tariffs, though their rationales may differ and even contradict each other.

Trump’s ego—and his favorite negotiating strategy—both depend on maintaining a perception of dominance. It is difficult to imagine the general reaction to this new position not getting under his skin.

It is worth mentioning that even if Powell’s job is secure through the end of his term—something I’m not sure we should necessarily assume—Trump is continuing to interfere with and attempt to intimidate the Fed on a level that, in normal times, would cause an outcry and a substantial reaction from the markets.

"May defend"

Even if we take the tariffs and the firing of Powell off the table, there’s still plenty of bad news to go around.

* Technically not "tweets" but you know what I mean. 

We'll be okay as long as the Silicon Valley grown-up are in charge -- Greenland edition

I'll try to come back to this one with one or two more detailed posts, but for now, here are a few quick observations.

1. This goes a long way toward explaining why the conquest of Greenland remains such a high priority for the White House. I suspect that most people assumed this was just a personal, passing obsession with Trump, when in fact it appears to have considerable support among his backers.

2. The assumption that the sane and sober PayPal Mafia and their hand-picked vice president would be a moderating and stabilizing influence on the administration was always based on a profound misunderstanding of who these people are.

3. The discussion of Greenland's mineral resources was, for me, perhaps the most chilling part. Just coming out and saying we should take them over because they have nice stuff strips away any pretense of justification.

4. Thiel et al. have had this dream for a long time. From Wired (paywalled but discussed here):

THE SEASTEADING INSTITUTE was the toast of tech entrepreneurs when it received financial backing from venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2008. Its mission was to build a manmade island nation where inventors could work free of heavy-handed government interference. One early rendering shows an island raised on concrete stilts in eerily calm waters. [Spoiler alert: it turned out that the open ocean in the middle of international waters were seldom eerily calm. -- MP]] The buildings atop the platform resemble nothing so much as the swanky tech campus of an entrepreneur’s ultimate dream: No sign of land or civilization in sight. The island, despite appearing strapped for square footage, has room for a full-size swimming pool with deck lounges.

...

Thiel’s reassessment marks a clear departure from tech culture’s unflinching confidence in its ability to self-govern. In recent years a number of prominent entrepreneurs have urged Silicon Valley to create a less inhibited place for its work. Larry Page called on technologists to “set aside a small part of the world” to test new ideas. Elon Musk has aimed at colonizing Mars. And venture capitalist Tim Draper made a proposal to divide Silicon Valley into its own state. But aside from the continued growth of full-service tech campuses such as Google’s and Facebook’s, very little has been accomplished in the way of true societal independence.

One quick side note. While California Forever does have a clear libertarian influence and is modeled after the far-right, white-flight enclave that gave us Matt Gaetz, unlike the Greenland proposal, it is less of a political statement and more of a classic real estate scheme taken from the oldest page in the playbook: Quietly, or even secretly, scoop up land on the cheap, then manipulate the system to get it rezoned. It's a classic because it may be the simplest and easiest way to make a huge windfall profit without breaking any laws (at least most of the time).

Mack DeGeurin writing for Popular Science:

Who is behind the freedom city? 

The Reuters report cites claims Howery, Thiel, and prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen are amongst the most prominent names backing the Greenland effort. Howery, who still needs the US Senate to confirm his position as ambassador to Denmark, is reportedly a long-time friend of billionaire Elon Musk and formerly founded a venture capital firm with Thiel. Thiel, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the loudest supporters, both vocally and financially, of the “Seasteading” movement, which is trying to build floating, stateless utopia cities in the ocean. Andressen, notably, is also part of a tech-investor consortium California Forever looking to build the city in Solano County.  Each of these efforts—along with others like the already existing city Próspera in Honduras—are united by libertarian political ideals, a focus on technological development, and lots of money.  

Rumors around the proposed Greenland city date back at least to November 2024 when Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown fired off a series of tweets explaining how he had tried to purchase land in Greenland. Praxis is a self-described “internet-native nation” crypto startup with a stated goal of “restor[ing] Western civilization,” and has reportedly received over $525 million in funding to start building out new cities. Brown told Reuters he has since been approached by several companies to explore establishing a new city on Greenland.

 

Why the obsession with Greenland? 

The idea of the U.S. acquiring Greenland, once widely regarded as a joke during the first Trump administration, has evolved into a serious U.S. foreign policy objective. The president campaigned on the issue during the 2024 election and has since doubled down, despite repeated assertions from Danish officials that the island isn’t for sale. Nevertheless, Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, visited a U.S. military installation on the island in March 2024 and delivered a speech urging Greenlanders to voluntarily cut ties with Denmark. (Recent polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Greenland residents oppose the idea of possible annexation by the U.S.) President Trump, meanwhile, has not ruled out the possibility of taking the territory by force.

So why all the obsession with a mostly uninhabitable island with a population of around 57,000? Supporters of Greenland development laid out their arguments during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing earlier this year. During the hearing, Texas Mineral Resources Board Chairman Anthony Marchese claimed Greenland’s coastline holds what is “indisputably” one of the greatest collections of minerals found in a single jurisdiction. That includes rare earth minerals, which are crucial to powering a plethora of modern consumer electronics devices.

Of course, the chances of people relying on their 401(k)s breaking even are much slimmer

 

 

 

 Though it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever be anything but obscenely rich, most of Trump's billionaire supporters (of which there are alarmingly many) have found the administration’s economic policies—or lack thereof—incredibly costly, both in absolute and relative terms.

 

Trump keeps finding new ways to terrify Wall Street | CNN Business
Allison Morrow

After months of swearing up and down he wouldn’t fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump on Thursday reversed course and said Powell’s “termination” couldn’t come soon enough. Stocks fell sharply.

Then US stock traders had a nice three-day weekend — the first sunny and warm spring weather New York City has seen this year — to ponder whether Trump was serious. Perhaps Thursday’s threat was just a bit of bluster from a president prone to tantrums — a one-off social media post that his more stable advisers will surely try to rein in to avoid an all-out panic.

Or…not.

Shortly after the US stock market opened Monday morning, Trump once again attacked Powell for ostensibly not cutting interest rates fast enough. Stocks immediately tumbled and the US dollar fell to its lowest level in three years.

While Trump’s tariff plan has been disruptive, the uncertainty it created had, to an extent, become priced in. Markets famously hate uncertainty, but the 90-day pause on the administration’s most aggressive tariffs offered a measure of reassurance that Trump may relent if there’s enough of a negative reaction.

Attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve is a new level of recklessness that few thought possible. But now even Kevin Hassett, the White House adviser who literally wrote a book arguing against firing the Fed chair, is saying openly that the administration is discussing whether to do so before Powell’s term ends a year from now.

 

At the same time, those plutocrats who happen to be first in line find themselves on the verge of huge, perhaps unprecedented, windfalls from massive and blatantly corrupt government boondoggles.

Among the “My yacht has a yacht” wealthy, it's safe to say that there will be winners and losers, with the latter greatly outnumbering the former. The one name that seems safely in that first group is Peter Thiel. The outcome for Elon Musk, however, is much more uncertain. On one hand, he appears to be in the pole position for billions upon billions of dollars in sweetheart government contracts. On the other hand, he is likely to lose hundreds of billions through the damage that has been done to Tesla. It could well take a quarter of a trillion dollars in graft just to break even.

Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro reporting for ProPublica:

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters in the tech world and who spent millions aiding Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Thiel’s firm, Founders Fund, has invested in seven separate rounds of funding for Ramp, according to data from PitchBook. Last year Thiel said there was “no one better positioned” to build products at the intersection of AI and finance.

To date, the company has raised about $2 billion in venture capital, according to startup tracking website Crunchbase, much of it from firms with ties to Trump and Musk. Ramp’s other major financial backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk allies. [Specifically Joe Lonsdale -- MP]

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

...

Rabois, one of Ramp’s earliest investors, is part of an influential group of tech titans known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Leaders of the early payments company include several influential players surrounding the Trump administration, including Musk and Thiel. Rabois and his husband, Jacob Helberg, hosted a fundraiser that pulled in upwards of $1 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to media reports. Trump has nominated Helberg for a senior role at the State Department.

 

 And it gets worse.

 Mike Stone and Marisa Taylor reporting for Reuters

WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) - Elon Musk's SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of President Donald Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter said.

...

All three companies were founded by entrepreneurs who have been major political supporters of Trump. Musk has donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and now serves as a special adviser to the president working to cut government spending through his Department of Government Efficiency.

...

One of the sources familiar with the talks described them as "a departure from the usual acquisition process. There's an attitude that the national security and defense community has to be sensitive and deferential to Elon Musk because of his role in the government."

SpaceX and Musk have declined to comment on whether Musk is involved in any of the discussions or negotiations involving federal contracts with his businesses.

 But, as Josh Marshall points out, that's not the jaw-dropping part.