Sweet potato gone wild

Our fearless colleagues were outside the @forbes.com Power Women’s Summit in the rain ☔ this morning with an important gut check.

Elon Musk's mammoth $17 billion purchase of spectrum from EchoStar will only pay off if SpaceX can launch a new generation of satellites on its mega-rocket Starship. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

No president in U.S. history has used his position of power to profit as immensely as Trump, whose net worth is up $3 billion in the last year. That vaults Trump 118 spots higher on The Forbes 400, out this morning. www.forbes.com/sites/danale...

ICE is using a controversial spy tool to locate smartphones, court records show.

A new spy drone can stick itself to walls with glue and carry out covert surveillance, then detach itself and fly away, leaving no sign that the targets were being bugged. www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

NEW - Here's my magazine profile on Flock Safety, the $7.5bn surveillance juggernaut that local and federal cops have been using to monitor Americans. I got a look at its car surveillance tech in action, as well as its new drones, and Nova, its police intelligence platform that's caused a stir.

A bevy of startups are dreaming of mining the moon and asteroids for valuable minerals. Interlune may be among those that have the best shot of building a business soonest by targeting a rare form of helium. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

Really important new study on the tax rate of billionaires from @gabrielzucman.bsky.social et al Upshot: The top 400 ultrabillionaires: 23.8% Avg Americans: 30.2% Yes, the superrich pay far less in taxes than the rest of us. www.nber.org/papers/w34170

Commerce Secretary Lutnick said there's a "monstrous discussion" under way in the Trump administration about taking stakes in defense contractors. That might be particularly repellant for Elon Musk's SpaceX. He may have stronger leverage than anyone to prevent it. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

As the DoD preps for war with China, it’s grappling with a tough problem: how to get supplies across thousands of miles of water against an enemy with an arsenal of missiles designed to destroy U.S. cargo planes and ships. Startup Grid Aero believes it has a solution. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

At Apex’s HQ in L.A., meeting spaces are named after predators: eagle, caiman, orca. It’s an expression of the richly funded startup’s ambitions to claw its way to the top of the food chain in satellite manufacturing. Trump's Golden Dome could be its big opportunity. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

HAVE YOU SEEN HIM? We were out searching this past weekend for @randalllane.bsky.social, who we hear likes to watch the horses at Saratoga Racecourse. 🏇 .

Good news: FAA seeing fewer lithium battery incidents than last year. ✈️ Bad news: we are still averaging about six per month! 🚨 For @forbes.com www.forbes.com/sites/suzann...

New from me! An investigation into the "1.5bn+ company" known as The Agora, which sells misleading health and investing advice to seniors, and which was one of Meta's largest political advertisers this year (until many of their pages went down after this story). www.forbes.com/sites/emilyb...

BREAKING: Elon Musk fired one of his top lieutenants. Omead Afshar was tasked with improving the electric vehicle company’s business in North America and Europe late last year, but sales continue to drop in both #Tesla www.forbes.com/sites/alanoh...

“An air traffic controller shouldn’t have to worry, are these tiles over my head going to fall down and is it going to pour water on me while I'm around all this electrical equipment?” Here’s how Canada's overhaul of its ATC system offers a blueprint for the U.S. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

Satellite images of Fordow suggest U.S. bunker buster bombs hit their aim points on the surface. But among the unknowns as to the strike's effectiveness are whether they continued true as they plowed deep into the complex, and whether they blew up in the right places. www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

That bird is probably getting every cable channel for free

Elon Musk probably doesn't have much to fear from President Trump's threat to cancel SpaceX contracts. The company has made itself indispensable to the government. But there are still ways the administration could hurt it. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

A bird’s nest incorporating fiber-optic cable is a striking sign of how much debris from fiber-guided FPVs now litters the landscape in Ukraine. www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

Why NASA might end up paying the biggest price for the Trump-Musk feud -- by my colleague @thealexknapp.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/alexkn...

The end of the billionaire bromance between President Trump and Elon Musk could have lucrative ramifications for many aerospace and defense companies. Not least of them, Boeing. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

🚨 NEW 🚨 Flock Safety, a $7.5 billion police contractor, has announced a significant expansion of its AI camera network. It'll allow police to turn their license plate readers into fully-fledged surveillance cameras, with live access and multiple camera angles. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

🚨 NEW: The Secret Service has paid Trump’s campaign entities $13M for travel. His campaign entities then paid his own jet company $18M. Nothing illegal here. Just taxpayer dollars and campaign contributions flowing to a company Trump completely owns. me, for @forbes.com

TBH, there’s a lot of blame to go around. For @forbes.com www.forbes.com/sites/suzann...

NEW: Ready or not–and despite a spotty safety record–Tesla is racing to launch a pilot ride service in Austin to show off its self-driving chops. It’s Elon Musk’s latest risky bet www.forbes.com/sites/alanoh...

Many have speculated that Qatar has offered Trump a luxuriously customized 747 to curry favor with the famously transactional president, but there may be a simpler rationale: they just don’t want it anymore. Fuel-guzzling palaces in the sky have gone out of fashion. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

New: Meta is recruiting former national security officials to bolster its military ambitions, months after allowing its Llama AI model to be used for military use. www.forbes.com/sites/davidj...

Scoop: Accel is leading a $275 million funding round into defense tech startup CHAOS Industries — just months after backing a previous round. The round values CHAOS, which makes radar and communications tecchnologies, at $2 billion. www.forbes.com/sites/davidj...

Scooters, Bikes, Cars and Golf Carts Now Account for 90% of Russian Losses

While Tesla stock has crashed amid public disenchantment with Elon Musk, SpaceX is still flying high with investors as the world’s most valuable private company. But economic realities and the physical limits of beaming internet signals from space could kill the buzz. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

NEW: GlobalX flight attendants were told they would fly rock bands, sports teams and sun-seekers. Then the company started expanding into deportation flights. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

Tesla's share price may be cratering as billionaire CEO Elon Musk pursues his side-hustle of chain-sawing the federal workforce, but investors still believe in his rocket company SpaceX. That’s made his longtime lieutenant Gwynne Shotwell a billionaire, Forbes reveals. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

The Irish drone delivery upstart Manna has raised $30 million to fund an ambitious expansion, taking on deep-pocketed competitors like Amazon, Alphabet's Wing and the unicorn Zipline. It's bidding to be the first to scale a mass drone delivery operation. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

Someone should probably tell USDOT's Sean Duffy that this is b-roll of Tokyo, not of New York City. What else could he be getting wrong in this video? 👀

New: Trump Media Executives Launch New SPAC Seeking $179 Million—And Target Crypto, Defense Sectors me, for @forbes.com

A startup founded by a trip of Harvard students promises to give the U.S. military a better command of the electronic battlefield, with tiny AI-powered sensors that can ID and locate enemy drones, jammers and soldiers' positions based on their radio transmissions. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

The drone warfare in Ukraine is really starting to look like WW2 aviation evolution - this Ukrainian interceptor drone with a 4-barrel shotgun in the nose looks like so many WW2 designs... t.me/texotdelBPLA...

There is no literally nothing differentiating Southwest from other airlines. Actually, I take that back. Everything that differentiates Southwest from other airlines is bad. They stopped away literally every benefit and now Southwest is just like United or American but without all the useful stuff.

So long, Solar System. arstechnica.com/space/2025/0...

🚨NEW🚨 - Trump supporters on Telegram and X are being targeted by scammers tricking folks into believing that just by having proof they own Trump memorabilia they're due millions. One woman sent $150k in "fees" to the fraudsters, believing it would unlock $13 million. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

The Trump administration may take a $2.4 billion contract to upgrade the FAA's communications system from Verizon and give it to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But his satellite internet service Starlink doesn’t have the capabilities to be the FAA’s communications backbone. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

New: Among those leading Elon Musk's DOGE effort at the Pentagon is Justin Fulcher, a telehealth startup founder with a degree in terrorism studies. Like other DOGE employees, he's got impressive tech chops. But other parts of his story don't add up. www.forbes.com/sites/davidj...

It's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Pentagon needs to speed up development of weapons, use more commercial technology and tap new suppliers. Now one of the most promising experiments at the DoD to do exactly that has been upended by a bureaucratic backlash. www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...

New: Clearview AI's CEO Hoan Ton-That has resigned. After he led the company through controversy and lawsuits, the company struggled to secure big federal contracts. Now, Clearview is focused on selling to the Trump border effort and the Pentagon. www.forbes.com/sites/davidj...

The good news: @forbes.com ramped up the number of bargaining sessions in 2025. The bad news: We've seen no change in tone at the bargaining table, just the same old, same old. Very disappointing.