Neuralink Raises $650 Million in Late-Stage Funding Round
Neuralink Corp., Elon Musk's brain chip company, raised $650 million in a Series E funding round.
At least 11 investment firms, including ARK Investment Management, Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital, participated in the round, according to a statement released Monday. Since the previous funding round in August 2023, the company said it has enrolled five patients with severe paralysis and announced a clinical trial in Abu Dhabi on May 14.
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Buzz Feed
20 minutes ago
- Buzz Feed
How Donald Trump Reacted To Elon Musk's Angry "Big Beautiful Bill" Tweet
Yesterday was the start of something people say was a long time coming. In case you missed it, Elon Musk spoke out against Donald Trump's *big beautiful bill* that would reportedly raise the national deficit by $5 trillion. "I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore. This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it." People were saying this could be the end of their relationship: "I think this officially signals the end of the trump-elon bromance." Sooo, now we have an update. "I talk to President Trump all of the time, multiple times a day. Obviously, we talked about this. As you know, he's not delighted that Elon did a 180 on that. Look, I don't know what happened in 24 hours, everybody can draw their own conclusions on that." "Not delighted," eh? "Well, I'll tell you. I called Elon last night and he didn't answer. But I hope to talk to him today, it's not, you know, it's very friendly. You know, we've laughed about our differences on policies before." Interesting! "Not delighted" and an ignored phone call... let's see what happens next!
Atlantic
20 minutes ago
- Atlantic
‘No One Can Offer Any Hope'
Every month or so I get a desperate message from a 25-year-old Afghan refugee in Pakistan. Another came just last week. I've written about Saman in the past. Because my intent today is to write about her place in the moral universe of Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, I'll compress her story to its basic details: During the Afghan War, Saman and her husband, Farhad (they requested pseudonyms for their own safety), served in the Afghan special forces alongside American troops. When Kabul fell in 2021, they were left behind and had to go into hiding from the Taliban before fleeing to Pakistan. There the couple and their two small children have languished for three years, burning through their limited cash, avoiding the Pakistani police and Taliban agents, seldom leaving their rented rooms—doomed if they're forced to return to Afghanistan—and all the while waiting for their applications to be processed by the United States' refugee program. No other country will provide a harbor to these loyal allies of America, who risked everything for the war effort. Our country has a unique obligation to do so. They had reached the last stage of a very long road and were on the verge of receiving U.S. visas when Donald Trump came back into office and made ending the refugee program one of his first orders of business. Now Saman and her family have no prospect of escaping the trap they're in. 'The stress and anxiety have become overwhelming,' Saman wrote to me last week. 'Every day I worry about the future of my children—what will become of them? Recently, I've developed a new health issue as well. At times, my fingers suddenly become tight and stiff—almost paralyzed—and I can't move them at all. My husband massages them with great effort until they gradually return to normal. This is a frightening and painful experience … Please, in this difficult time, I humbly ask for your help and guidance. What can I do to find a way out of these hardships?' I've brought the plight of Saman and her family to members of Congress, American activist groups, foreign diplomats, and readers of this magazine. No one can offer any hope. The family's fate is in the hands of Trump and his administration. George Packer: 'What about six years of friendship and fighting together?' And, after all, their story is just one small part of the suffering caused by this regime. A full accounting would be impossible to compile, but it already includes an estimated several hundred thousand people dead or dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria because of the elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as the starvation of refugee children in Sudan, migrants deported to a Salvadoran Gulag, and victims of domestic violence who have lost their shelter in Maine. In the wide world of the regime's staggering and gratuitous cruelty, the pain in Saman's fingers might seem too trivial to mention. But hers is the suffering that keeps arriving in my phone, the ongoing story that seems to be my unavoidable job to hear and tell. And sometimes one small drama can illuminate a large evil. Since reading Saman's latest text, I can't stop thinking about the people who are doing this to her and her family—especially about Musk and Vance. As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He's a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don't hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do. Musk and Vance function at a higher evolutionary level than Trump. They have ideas to justify the human suffering they cause. They even have moral ideas. Musk's moral idea goes by the name longtermism, which he has called 'a close match to my philosophy.' This reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number of human beings who will ever live. By this reasoning, the fate of the hundreds of billions of as-yet-unborn people who will inhabit the planet before the sun burns it up several billion years from now is more urgent than whether a few million people die of preventable diseases this year. If killing the American aid programs that helped keep those people alive allows the U.S. government to become lean and efficient enough to fund Musk's grand project of interplanetary travel, thereby enabling human beings to live on Mars when Earth becomes uninhabitable in some distant era, then the good of humanity requires feeding those aid programs, including ones that support refugee resettlement, into the woodchipper. Refugees—except for white South Africans —aren't important enough to matter to longtermism. Its view of humanity is far too large to notice Saman, Farhad, and their children, or to understand why America might have a moral obligation to give this family a safe home. Longtermism is a philosophy with a special appeal for smart and extremely rich sociopaths. It can justify almost any amount of hubris, spending, and suffering. Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency mogul who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, was a longtermist. It isn't clear that Musk, during his manic and possibly drug-addled months of power in the Trump administration, applied moral reasoning when hacking at the federal government. His erratic behavior and that of his troops in the Department of Government Efficiency seemed driven more by destructive euphoria than by philosophy. But in February, on Joe Rogan's show, Musk used the loftiest terms to explain why the cries of pain caused by his cuts should be ignored: 'We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it's like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide. The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.' Here is another category of the long view, with an entire civilization in place of the planet's future inhabitants. Musk's sphere of empathy is galactic. In its cold immensity, the ordinary human impulse to want to relieve the pain of a living person with a name and a face disappears. Vance once called himself 'a proud member of both tribes' of the MAGA coalition—techno-futurists like Musk and right-wing populists like Steve Bannon. But when Vance invokes a moral code, it's the opposite of Musk's. The scope of its commitment is as narrow and specific as an Appalachian graveyard—the cemetery in eastern Kentucky where five generations of Vances are buried and where, he told the Republican National Convention last summer, he hopes that he, his wife, and their children will eventually lie. Such a place is 'the source of America's greatness,' Vance said, because 'people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.' Politically, this is called blood-and-soil nationalism. Religiously, Vance traces his moral code to the Catholic doctrine of ordo amoris, the proper order of love: first your family, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News, then your neighbor, your community, your nation, and finally—a distant last—the rest of humanity. But Vance's theology is as bad as his political theory. Generations of Americans fought and died for the idea of freedom in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, and other conflicts. And Christian doctrine does not say to keep out refugees because they're not your kin. Jesus said the opposite: To refuse the stranger was to refuse him. Vance likes to cite Augustine and Aquinas, but the latter was clear about what ordo amoris does not mean: 'In certain cases, one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.' From the March 2022 issue: The betrayal It's a monstrous perversion of both patriotism and faith to justify hurting a young family who, after all they've suffered, still show courage and loyalty to Vance's country. Starting from opposite moral positions, Musk and Vance are equally indifferent to the ordeal of Saman and her family. When empathy is stretched to the cosmic vanishing point or else compressed to the width of a grave, it ceases to be empathy. Perhaps these two elites even take pleasure in the squeals of bleeding-heart humanitarians on behalf of refugees, starving children, international students, poor Americans in ill health, and other unfortunates. And that may be a core value of these philosophies: They require so much inventing of perverse principles to reach a cruel end that the pain of others begins to seem like the first priority rather than the inadvertent result. Think of the range of people who have been drawn to MAGA. It's hard to see what political ideology Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, Glenn Greenwald, Glenn Loury, Nick Fuentes, Bari Weiss, Lil Wayne, Joe Rogan, Bill Ackman, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kanye West have in common. The magnetic pull is essentially negative. They all fear and loathe something more than Trump—whether it's wokeness, Palestinians, Jews, Harvard, trans people, The New York Times, or the Democratic Party—and manage to overlook everything else, including the fate of American democracy, and Saman and her family. But overlooking everything else is nihilism. Even if most Americans haven't abandoned their private sense of empathy, many don't seem terribly bothered by the rancidness of their leaders. I confess that this indifference astonishes me. It might be the ugliest effect of Trump's return—the rapid normalization of spectacular corruption, the desensitization to lawless power, the acceptance of moral collapse. Eventually it will coarsen us all.
Fox News
23 minutes ago
- Fox News
There's a way to aid Gaza. I know, my foundation just helped deliver 7 million meals... without incident
It's time to be honest about humanitarian assistance in Gaza. The incumbent system is morally bankrupt. Grift is not a bug—it is a feature. The decades-long cycle of empty statements, inflated budgets, and institutionalized failure has created a self-sustaining machine that feeds off misery, undermines peace, and instinctively demonizes America and Israel. The current system fuels fate. Here's an example. Just days ago, the world should have celebrated the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's week of success. Over 7 million meals were delivered free to Gazans -- no trucks seized, no aid diverted, no violence at distribution sites. The system worked despite Gaza's volatility. Gazans spontaneously thanked America and President Donald Trump. Instead of celebrating GHF, the international press swallowed a Hamas disinformation campaign wholesale. Hamas falsely claimed 31 Gazans died at our distribution site. Global media printed headlines treating Hamas' claims as fact. When GHF's denials were questioned but Hamas' statements were believed, GHF released CCTV proving the truth. Yet fabricated headlines still deceive online, even fooling U.N. Secretary General Guterres, who spread them the next morning (and has yet to correct his mistake). Guterres' statement came just hours after someone incited by this fake news set Jewish Americans on fire at a Colorado hostage vigil. What the media should be doing is joining us in telling the truth about the systemic failure for years in Gaza and the United Nations should be working with us to fix the system. The current systems, built to serve the Palestinian people, have not just been ineffective—they have been actively complicit in perpetuating suffering. These organizations speak of "human rights," yet remain silent when terrorists steal international aid, embed rockets in schools, and use hospitals as human shields. What the media should be doing is joining us in telling the truth about the systemic failure for years in Gaza and the U.N. should be working with us to fix the system. The current systems, built to serve the Palestinian people, have not just been ineffective—they have been actively complicit in perpetuating suffering. From UNRWA to the Human Rights Council, bigotry has been wrapped in bureaucracy, funded by American and European tax dollars, and aimed squarely at helping terrorists wage a never-ending war with Israel. Activists disguised as humanitarians clutch their pearls and rush out press releases in support of these failed systems, exactly as terrorists hijack aid trucks or beat dissenting Palestinians in the street trying to get to humanitarian aid. The silence is deafening, but actually, it's worse. They keep spreading with no scrutiny the profane lies of Hamas. The fact is that there were Palestinians harmed last week, but not by GHF. They were harmed by Hamas when they tried to break into warehouses where Hamas had been hoarding piles and piles of humanitarian aid meant for Gazans. We're told by beneficiaries that Hamas was selling aid or using it for coercive purposes. One beneficiary asked our aid workers five times if our aid was truly free, and we observed the decline in the price of sugar in the rudimentary markets of Gaza. Yet, this behavior is excused, explained away, or flat-out ignored while organizations like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are attacked constantly for trying to feed Gazans with no strings attached. What GHF is guilty of is exposing the whole charade for what it is. Unfortunately, instead of just focusing on feeding Gazans, GHF humanitarians must fight a profane information war naively parroted by those who should know better. We will press on. Our vision is that failure will no longer be rewarded. Instead, we demand results with Silicon Valley precision. The good-hearted taxpayers of rich countries should no longer be content to line the pockets of institutional elites with cushy jobs propping up failing systems. It's time to do it differently. We understand this is a threat to the system. Because if even a sliver of hope is delivered through a model based on transparency, accountability, and realism, the entire cottage industry of perpetual process collapses. The lavish conferences, the donor summits, the panel discussions where nothing gets done—gone. But, no longer can we let the weaponization of humanitarian aid, or its mismanagement, prolong this and other conflicts. There can be no peace process without peace, and there is no humanitarian aid without human dignity. There's also no time for nostalgia over broken systems. It is time to stop rewarding failure and start building the future. Not in Geneva or New York, but in Ashkelon, Khan Younis, and Ramallah—where outcomes matter more than press Gaza Humanitarian Foundation isn't perfect. But it is honest. And for those who have grown rich, powerful, and respected by keeping Palestinians poor, hopeless, and angry—that's the real threat. We say: good. Let them be afraid. To those in the humanitarian community who truly care and have witnessed press and U.N. attacks on our relief efforts: we choose the high road. You're good people who, like Gazans, recognize authentic work. It's time to deliver food—not for politics, not for process, but for people. Join us or get out of our way. But, for God's sake, tell the truth.
