With their first presidential debate next week, the Oval Office hopefuls are holding megaphones to their promises to deliver the same rosy economic outcomes through opposing methods. And one plan intimately involves Elon Musk.

Addressing corporate leaders in New York yesterday, former President Trump pledged to create a government efficiency commission—suggested and helmed by Musk—that would audit federal spending and recommend “drastic reforms.”

Trump also said he will:

• Cut the corporate tax rate to 15% from 21% for companies that keep their production in America. The current rate expires after next year and has been in place since Trump slashed it from 35% as part of his 2017 tax plan.
• Impose tariffs on all $3 trillion worth of goods imported to the US each year—60% on products from China and 10% for every other country—which Trump suggested could create a sovereign wealth fund.
• Declare a national emergency on energy to fast-track more oil and gas projects and lower fuel costs.

Across the aisle…Vice President Kamala Harris wants to rival Trump’s business-friendly image without annoying her Democratic base. She made her first policy break from President Biden this week when she said she’d raise the capital gains tax from 20% to 28% for Americans who make $1+ million—a far cry from Biden’s proposed 39.6% rate.

Harris has also pitched:

• Raising the corporate tax rate to 28%.
• Offering small businesses and startups a $50,000 tax break (10x the current deduction) and giving first-time homebuyers up to $25,000 in down-payment support.
• Capping out-of-pocket medication costs at $2,000/year and insulin prices at $35/month.

What economists think: Goldman Sachs projected that the economy would shrink under Trump and grow under Harris. Harris’s plans could also cost ~$2 trillion less than Trump’s, according to the latest analysis from the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Model, which came before Harris’s policy announcements this week.—ML

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Snap sued for allegedly being a “breeding ground” for predators. The attorney general of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Snap yesterday, alleging that the social media giant facilitates sexual abuse and fails to protect minors from predation. The suit claims that Snap’s signature features—disappearing photos and messages—make it uniquely vulnerable to bad actors. New Mexico said it created an AI decoy profile posing as a 14-year-old girl that was flooded with prompts to connect with accounts wanting to trade sexual content. The state filed a similar lawsuit against Meta last year.

🚙 Tesla plans to launch self-driving cars in Europe and China next year. More drivers are going to know what it feels like to be in the passenger seat with Jeff Gordon at the wheel. Tesla announced it wants to launch its Full Self-Driving (FSD) product in Europe and Asia early next year, pending regulatory approval. But Tesla is like Stanley in That’s So Raven—it says a lot of things. The company and its gregarious founder, Elon Musk, have promised fully autonomous self-driving technology for eight years and have so far failed to deliver, even as competitors like Waymo and Pony.ai successfully operate robotaxis. Investors seem optimistic: Tesla stock was up almost 5% yesterday on the news.

China ended its international adoption program. People from other countries will no longer be allowed to adopt Chinese children unless they’re relatives, the country announced yesterday. The program, hatched at the height of China’s overpopulation, was the source of tens of thousands of adoptions around the world since the 1990s: US families alone adopted 82,000 children from China between 1999 and 2023, according to the State Department. But China is now dealing with declining birth rates, while much of the rest of the world also tightens restrictions on international adoptions.

When X went dark in Brazil this week, the world discovered that South America’s largest country was the epicenter of online stan culture.

Brazil, the home base for dozens of English-language fan pages, banned X after owner Elon Musk refused to suspend right-wing accounts that the government said spread misinformation. The collateral damage was the disappearance of the country’s popular “stan” accounts with millions of followers, including ones for stars like Taylor Swift and author Virginia Woolf.

It’s a disruption of a delicate ecosystem. The entertainment industry is losing the efforts of passionate fans who helped promote albums, propel artists up the charts, and chronicle the lives of the glitterati. Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz credited the accounts with resurrecting American TV shows and movies.

Bluesky’s smiling at you. Much like how you settle for Pepsi when there’s no Coke, Bluesky is benefiting from X being off the menu in Brazil. According to CEO Jay Graber, Bluesky added 2 million users after the shutdown, with ~90% coming from Brazil. One complaint from stan account proprietors is that Bluesky doesn’t support video posts, although Graber says that’s coming soon.—DL

A unique AI investment: By 2027, robotic knee surgeries will be 4x as common. Monogram (Nasdaq: MGRM), known for their autonomous robotic surgical systems, just filed for FDA approval to commercialize their patented tech. Now they’re offering the opportunity to buy preferred stock with an 8% dividend (in cash or kind) at $2.25/share. Their common stock closed as high as $3.44 in the past two weeks. Monogram currently plans to close the Series D Preferred offering on September 12, 2024.

There couldn’t have been a worse group to tell its members that it was cozying up to artificial intelligence. The organization that runs National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) said in a statement last week that it wouldn’t condemn the use of AI because doing so ignores “classist” and ”ableist” issues. Backlash ensued.

Four board members resigned in protest, including fantasy writer Daniel José Older, who pointed to generative AI’s habit of stealing work, among other issues. Ellipsus, an anti-AI alternative to Google Docs, stopped sponsoring the organization.

Last year, the group welcomed hundreds of thousands of participants to use the technology to assist it in completing the annual challenge of writing a 50,000-word manuscript. But it also specified that “using ChatGPT to write your entire novel would defeat the purpose of the challenge.”

This year, however, the org softened its stance on AI, saying the total dismissal of the technology ignores the privilege of time, education, cognitive ability, and the financial means it takes to participate in NaNoWriMo. Many writers disagreed, arguing that the group’s new position was a poorly veiled attempt to court sponsors.

In the end...NaNoWriMo amended its statement to acknowledge that some AI can be bad—and it’s too big of a technology to fully endorse or reject.—MM

How many identical black beanies can you buy with $100,000 a week? You’ll have to ask right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool, since that’s allegedly how much he received in payments from Russian state media employees as part of a covert disinformation scheme.

In a federal indictment, US prosecutors allege that a media company with ties to Pool and other influencers, including Benny Johnson, collected nearly $10 million from Russia’s state-controlled broadcaster RT in exchange for posting political content that the Kremlin wanted amplified in the US. One influencer, whom reporters identified as Johnson, was allegedly given a whopping $400,000/week and a $100k signing bonus to make videos for the company in question. Pool, Johnson, and the other right-wing personalities caught in the skulduggery say that they were unwitting victims who had no idea where the funds came from.

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