Musk Says He'll Scale Back Political Spending in Blow to GOP
Elon Musk said he would significantly pull back from political spending, a likely blow to US President Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
'I'm going to do a lot less in the future,' Musk said during a discussion at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday.
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Washington Post
21 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Top US universities raced to become global campuses. Under Trump, it's becoming a liability
WASHINGTON — Three decades ago, foreign students at Harvard University accounted for just 11% of the total student body. Today, they account for 26%. Like other prestigious U.S. universities, Harvard for years has been cashing in on its global cache to recruit the world's best students. Now, the booming international enrollment has left colleges vulnerable to a new line of attack from President Donald Trump. The president has begun to use his control over the nation's borders as leverage in his fight to reshape American higher education. Trump's latest salvo against Harvard uses a broad federal law to bar foreign students from entering the country to attend the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His order applies only to Harvard, but it poses a threat to other universities his administration has targeted as hotbeds of liberalism in need of reform. It's rattling campuses under federal scrutiny, including Columbia University , where foreign students make up 40% of the campus. As the Trump administration stepped up reviews of new student visas last week, a group of Columbia faculty and alumni raised concerns over Trump's gatekeeping powers. 'Columbia's exposure to this 'stroke of pen' risk is uniquely high,' the Stand Columbia Society wrote in a newsletter. People from other countries made up about 6% of all college students in the U.S. in 2023, but they accounted for 27% of the eight schools in the Ivy League, according to an Associated Press analysis of Education Department data. Columbia's 40% was the largest concentration, followed by Harvard and Cornell at about 25%. Brown University had the smallest share at 20%. Other highly selective private universities have seen similar trends, including at Northeastern University and New York University, which each saw foreign enrollment double between 2013 and 2023. Growth at public universities has been more muted. Even at the 50 most selective public schools, foreign students account for about 11% of the student body. America's universities have been widening their doors to foreign students for decades, but the numbers shot upward starting around 2008, as Chinese students came to U.S. universities in rising numbers. It was part of a 'gold rush' in higher education, said William Brustein, who orchestrated the international expansion of several universities. 'Whether you were private or you were public, you had to be out in front in terms of being able to claim you were the most global university,' said Brustein, who led efforts at Ohio State University and West Virginia University. The race was driven in part by economics, he said. Foreign students typically aren't eligible for financial aid, and at some schools they pay two or three times the tuition rate charged to U.S. students. Colleges also were eyeing global rankings that gave schools a boost if they recruited larger numbers of foreign students and scholars, he said. But the expansion wasn't equal across all types of colleges — public universities often face pressure from state lawmakers to limit foreign enrollment and keep more seats open for state residents. Private universities don't face that pressure, and many aggressively recruited foreign students as their numbers of U.S. students stayed flat. The college-going rate among American students has changed little for decades, and some have been turned off on college by the rising costs and student debt loads. Proponents of international exchange say foreign students pour billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, and many go on to support the nation's tech industry and other fields in need of skilled workers. Most international students study the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. In the Ivy League, most international growth has been at the graduate level, while undergraduate numbers have seen more modest increases. Foreign graduate students make up more than half the students at Harvard's government and design schools, along with five of Columbia's schools. The Ivy League has been able to outpace other schools in large part because of its reputation, Brustein said. He recalls trips to China and India, where he spoke with families that could recite where each Ivy League school sat in world rankings. 'That was the golden calf for these families. They really thought, 'If we could just get into these schools, the rest of our lives would be on easy street,'' he said. Last week, Trump said he thought Harvard should cap its foreign students to about 15%. 'We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can't get in because we have foreign students there,' Trump said at a news conference. The university called Trump's latest action banning entry into the country to attend Harvard 'yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard's First Amendment rights.' In a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's previous attempt to block international students at Harvard, the university said its foreign student population was the result of 'a painstaking, decades-long project' to attract the most qualified international students. Losing access to student visas would immediately harm the school's mission and reputation, it said. 'In our interconnected global economy,' the school said, 'a university that cannot welcome students from all corners of the world is at a competitive disadvantage.' ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Bloomberg
21 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Bankruptcy Was Good for 23andMe
Sometimes a public company has a controlling shareholder who wants to take it private by buying out all of the other shareholders, and that's always messy. 1 The controlling shareholder will to some extent be negotiating with herself: She will want to buy the company for a low price, but the company's shareholders will want to get a high price, but she's the controlling shareholder and can vote for the low price. There are standard solutions to the problem, but they are only partial solutions: In the past few months, I have written a few times about 23andMe Holding Co. as an illustration of these problems. 23andMe is a publicly traded genetic testing company that was once worth about $6 billion, but it has now fallen on hard times. Its founder, Anne Wojcicki, owns about 49% of the voting power of the stock, making her effectively a controlling shareholder. She offered to buy all the stock she didn't own, to take the company private and fix its problems 'outside of the short term pressures of the public markets.' But the board of directors, whose job was to find an 'actionable proposal that is in the best interests of the non-affiliated shareholders,' didn't think her offer was good enough.
New York Times
22 minutes ago
- New York Times
Live Updates: Trump-Musk Alliance Dissolves as They Hurl Personal Attacks
Pinned President Trump and Elon Musk's alliance dissolved into open acrimony on Thursday, as the two men hurled personal attacks at each other after the billionaire had unleashed broadsides against the president's signature domestic policy bill. While meeting with Friedrich Merz, Germany's new chancellor, in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump broke days of uncharacteristic silence and unloaded on Mr. Musk, who until last week was a top presidential adviser. 'I'm very disappointed in Elon,' Mr. Trump said. 'I've helped Elon a lot.' As the president criticized Mr. Musk, the billionaire responded in real time on X, the social media platform he owns. 'Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate,' Mr. Musk wrote. 'Such ingratitude,' he added, taking credit for Mr. Trump's election in a way that he never has before. Mr. Musk had been careful in recent days to train his ire on Republicans in Congress, not Mr. Trump himself. But he discarded that caution on Thursday, ridiculing the president in a pattern familiar to the many previous Trump advisers who have fallen by the wayside. What started as simply a fight over the domestic policy bill sharply escalated in just a few hours. Within minutes of one another, Mr. Trump was making fun of Mr. Musk's unwillingness to wear makeup to cover a recent black eye, and Mr. Musk was raising questions about Mr. Trump's competency as president. The public break comes after a remarkable partnership between the two men. Mr. Musk deployed hundreds of millions of dollars to support Mr. Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. After Mr. Trump won, he gave Mr. Musk free rein to slash the federal work force. And just last week, Mr. Trump gave Mr. Musk a personal send-off in the Oval Office. The president praised Mr. Musk as 'one of the greatest business leaders and innovators the world has ever produced' and gave him a golden key emblazoned with the White House insignia. Mr. Musk promised to remain a 'friend and adviser to the president.' But now Mr. Musk, who has left his temporary role, has turned into the most prominent critic of a top presidential priority. Mr. Musk has lashed out against the far-reaching policy bill in numerous posts on X. He has called it a 'disgusting abomination,' argued that the bill would undo all the work he did to cut government spending and hinted that he would target Republican members of Congress who backed the legislation in next year's midterm elections. Mr. Trump on Thursday said Mr. Musk's criticism of the bill was entirely self-interested, saying he only opposed the legislation after Republicans took out the electric vehicle mandate, which would benefit Tesla, Mr. Musk's electric vehicle company. (Mr. Musk has previously called for an end to those subsidies.) The president also downplayed Mr. Musk's financial support for him during the campaign, arguing he would have won Pennsylvania without Mr. Musk, who poured much of his money and time into the critical battleground state. Mr. Musk also on Thursday rebutted Mr. Trump's statement that Mr. Musk 'knew the inner workings of the bill better than anybody sitting here.' 'False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!' Mr. Musk wrote, sharing a video of Mr. Trump saying he was disappointed in Mr. Musk.
