Jeffrey Epstein was a vile individual, the kind any decent person would instinctively avoid. But Tony Blair isn’t like most people. He opened the door, put the kettle on, and asked about investment returns. Where others saw a predator, Blair saw potential: another billionaire to court, another rung on the golden ladder. For a man fluent in charm and comfortable with compromise, conscience has always been optional.
In 2002, while serving as prime minister, Blair hosted Epstein at Downing Street. It was not a chance encounter. Peter Mandelson arranged it.A civil service memo shows senior official Matthew Rycroft briefing Blair on the “super-rich financier” before their five o’clock meeting. The visit was deliberate, coordinated, and approved at the highest level. Epstein, a sadistic sex trafficker, entered the heart of British power because those who occupied it wanted him there.
That image — Epstein walking through the black door of Number 10 — captures the essence of Blair’s career. Power and privilege have always moved easily in his orbit. His gift has never been moral clarity but moral camouflage, the ability to dress ambition in the language of virtue. Many might argue that that afternoon in Downing Street was an aberration. They would be wrong. It was a preview of the career to come, where access trumped honesty and appearance outweighed truth.
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His defining chapter remains Iraq. Blair sold that war as an act of conscience; the noble defeat of tyranny. What followed was an unmitigated disaster. Hundreds of thousands were killed, entire cities were destroyed, and a generation of young men and women returned home broken. The infamous “dodgy dossier” was assembled under the direction of Alastair Campbell, his loyal spin doctor and now, astonishingly, one-half of the most self-satisfied podcast in Britain (more on this in a minute). The intelligence that justified the invasion was not discovered but constructed. The facts were bent until they fit the policy, and Britain was led into disaster on the back of manufactured certainty.
When the war turned sour, Blair rebranded. Out went the messianic reformer. In came the global elder diplomat. He spoke with the solemnity of a saint and the slickness of a salesman; a halo on hire. Now he fancies himself a guardian of order, warning of climate doom, disinformation, and populist decay. He preaches as though none of these ills were sharpened, seeded, or sustained by his own hand. His foundation now trains leaders and advises governments on “good governance”, a phrase that in his mouth sounds like a private joke. These days, Blair’s favourite subject is digital identity. He sells it as the next step in modern efficiency, a world where every citizen is catalogued for convenience.The tone is gentle, the promise soothing, but the purpose is unmistakably authoritarian.
The irony of his entourage completes the farce. The aforementioned Alastair Campbell, architect of deception turned podcast bro, now lectures the public on honesty with a straight face. His co-host, Rory Stewart, plays the pseudo-philosopher. A sort of Tesco Value Tocqueville, he dispenses fortune-cookie wisdom to anyone soft enough to nod along. Together they host a weekly séance of self-regard, a kind of moral karaoke for the comfortably smug. Tuning in feels like watching arsonists host a fire-safety seminar while the curtains behind them burn. Their chemistry has all the warmth of a tax audit and the honesty of a campaign promise. It’s not dialogue but duet, a harmony of hypocrisy so grating it makes you envy the deaf. Stewart may be insufferable, but Campbell is even worse — still scheming, still sermonizing, and still allergic to accountability. Standing just behind them, calm as ever, is the man who taught him every trick in the trade.
Many would argue — and rightly — that Blair belongs in a courtroom, not on the conference circuit. War crimes should have ended his career, yet he drifts from summit to stage, speaking with unshaken confidence. Polite, persuasive, and impeccably rehearsed, he talks of peace as if he never sold war.
For all the talk of redemption, nothing has truly changed beneath the measured tone and careful smile. The appetites endure: the taste for control, the hunger for influence, and the unshakable belief that he is right. Tony Blair’s gift has always been to make self-interest sound selfless, and to turn catastrophe into consultancy. He speaks as though history has absolved him, but history has merely moved on. The war he started remains a wound without closure. The meeting he took with Epstein remains a symbol of how power protects itself. Blair today stands as a monument to audacity — the man who helped break the world and then crowned himself its conscience.
The system of federally funded research gave the U.S. wealth, power, and prestige. Its future is now uncertain.
By: Jonathan D. Moreno
The American scientific community is experiencing a moment of collective trauma.The assumptions about the relationship between the federal government and the science establishment, especially as mediated by the great research universities, are no longer reliable, if they ever were.
What is puzzling is how so many smart people failed to appreciate the unique vulnerability to political fortune of the system of funding science in America that has prevailed since the 1940s.
Science leaders often voice their shock and grief by pointing to what feels like a broken bargain. Since World War II, the system of federally funded research has been credited with powering American prosperity and global influence. These advantages have not only been measurable in flourishing economic growth and an unrivaled military. They have also stimulated the creation of novel and world-leading technologies from atomic power to the internet and biotechnologies. American science has helped produce the “soft power” of innovation engines like the entertainment industry that has served as inspiration to anyone in the world with access to a screen or a radio, the most effective and sustained projection of a national idea in history.
This success rested on an implicit and largely merited confidence in government’s role as a steward of knowledge. That role runs deep in U.S. history. Thomas Jefferson’s patent law signaled the young republic’s commitment to invention, while the Articles of Confederation stressed the importance of reliable weights and measures for a stable economy, today embodied in the critically important National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 1807, the Coast and Geodetic Survey became the first federal science agency, ensuring safe navigation along America’s shores and, with it, the foundations of trade and national sovereignty.
The federal role was not always welcomed by the states. Bridges and tunnels and technologies like the railroad and the telegraph bound the country closer together but also challenged the power of individual states. Through much of the first half of the 19th century congress debated the implications of “internal improvements,” a question that the Civil War largely put to rest.
So extreme is this embarrassment within the political class that it has eclipsed even the personal fears of disability and death among legislators who control the dollars.
During the war, President Lincoln established a National Academy of Sciences to advise him on the most promising military armaments. Later, amid deep resistance by gilded age interests, a professional civil service was put in place along with intensified regulation of financial markets. Often the apparent stability provided by these arrangements proved illusory, as in the case of the Great Depression, but they created an opening for the most radical expansion of federal power in U.S. history:Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Suspicions that the new physics could lead to the engineering of the most powerful weapon in history reached the leadership of the most powerful countries at about the same time. But it was the United States that most effectively seized the opportunity. Great Britain had the intellectual capability but lacked the material resources and scale required to put the atomic bomb plan into action. At first, many academic leaders hesitated to allow government funding to shape their research agendas. But the urgency of war and the sheer availability of cash to finance their research endeavors and grow their faculty proved irresistible.
The undeniable success of this massive engineering effort formed the principle case study for presidential advisor Vannevar Bush’s argument that science could provide an “endless frontier” for American dominance in the post-War era, one with no end in sight and no immediate competitor, especially considering the devastation of the other great powers after 1945. The key ingredient, one that seemed blindingly obvious, was the organized and relatively predictable governmental support of research institutions. For more than a century the frontier image was also a political powerful one among the narrators of American manifest destiny, including President Kennedy’s New Frontier and the heralding of space as the last frontier. It was also resonant with the somewhat fuzzy notion of an American dream founded on opportunity amid greater affluence.
At mid-century, direct federal investment in transportation and education was accompanied by indirect investment in science and technology, especially in the expanded National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. In turn, those organizations dispersed funds to the most promising ideas as determined by scientists and engineers themselves. In a sense, it all seemed to unfold with an air of inevitability.
But here is where some of the peril lay dormant in a society that has always displayed a conservative streak, one suspicious of elites and central government. When disaster struck, whether in financial markets or public health, those doubts came alive.
What American science leaders and the community of science advocates failed to perceive, this writer included, was the fragility of the alliance between government and science, and more particularly between politicians and scientists. As unfair as the perception might be — and it is wildly unfair — the alleged failure of the scientific establishment during the pandemic did the one thing that much of the political system could not endure: embarrassment about the confidence it had entrusted in these elites.
So extreme is this embarrassment within the political class that it has eclipsed even the personal fears of disability and death among legislators who control the dollars that could (and unarguably have) lead to new treatments for the diseases that will ultimately threaten them and their families, not to mention their constituents. Convenient and vague promises of efficiencies and discoveries afforded by AI provide the excuse of the moment. That may be an attractive play for the short-termism of venture capital, but cancer, stroke, heart disease, dementia and the next pandemic virus aren’t waiting for the next killer algorithm.
Thus American science finds itself in a kind of interregnum. The old world will not return; the new world must now be built. But no one can yet say how or when.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The United States’ anti-immigration regime already boasts an impressive arsenal of surveillance towers, cloud data bases, and automated visa systems.
Adding to that panopticon is the personal phone of every Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent currently prowling the streets of US for migrants to round up.
404 Media was the first to report the troubling rise of federal immigration officers busting out their phones to scan people’s faces to confirm their immigration status.
“I’m an American citizen so just leave me alone,” a Chicago-area man tells a swarm of masked immigration officials in a video circulating on social media. The man had refused to give his ID, and was declining to give officers information about his job. “Just get out of here, I have to go to work bro,” he pleads.
That’s when one of the officers points his phone camera at the driver’s face. He proceeds to fumble with his phone for a few seconds, while other masked feds crowd around and a small group of protestors gather.
“Hey, so listen, if you can — if you can take your hat off, it’ll go a lot quicker,” the officer stammers.
Other clips are also making the rounds showing ICE and CBP agents making prejudicial stops, haranguing brown-skinned people and scanning their faces when they exercise their right to refuse to cooperate.
Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that customs officials could not target people based on the color of their skin.That decision was at least temporarily suspended thanks to an emergency ruling by 2025’s Supreme Court, allowing feds to stop people based on factors like race, ethnicity, or the language they’re speaking.
Now imbued with the power to racially profile whoever they want, federal agents are increasingly using facial recognition as the go-to tool to sort the citizens from the migrants. The dystopian practice is in keeping with comments made by ICE’s acting director Todd Lyons earlier this year, when he said he imagines deportations running like “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
While the Department of Homeland Security declined to answer any questions about ICE’s use of facial recognition, CBP confirmed its agents were using Mobile Fortify, a surveillance app connected to a database of over 200 million images. Mobile Fortify’s existence was first uncovered by a prior 404 investigation earlier in June.
“The growing use of face recognition by ICE shows us two things,” Electronic Frontier Foundation senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia told 404 of the scans. “That we should have banned government use of face recognition when we had the chance because it is dangerous, invasive, and an inherent threat to civil liberties, and that any remaining pretense that ICE is harassing and surveilling people in any kind of ‘precise’ way should be left in the dust.”
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Kate Cantrell Senior Lecturer, Writing, Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland
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Kate Cantrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.
Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.
The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.
Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”
“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.
King Charles has initiated a formal process to strip his brother Andrew of his remaining royal titles, including prince. Joanna Chan/AAP
British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.
As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.
“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”
Review: Nobody’s Girl: A memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice – Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Doubleday)
Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.
Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.
‘We were girls who no one cared about,’ writes Virginia Roberts Giuffre in her memoir. Bebeto Matthews/AAP
Allegations of parental abuse
Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.
Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”
After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:
My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.
Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.
Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”
‘Apex predator’ Ghislaine Maxwell. Chris Ison/AAP
Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.
Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.
Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.
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‘The younger, the better’
Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.
Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.
The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.
Prince Andrew and Donald Trump were two of the many powerful men known to have associated with Epstein. Matt Dunham AAP
‘Please don’t stop reading’
Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)
Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages,Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.
Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.
Young Viriginia Giuffre in the foreground, with Ghislaine Maxwell (light blue top) at Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party in St Tropez, in 2001. Pool Lafargue/Lenhof/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”
Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”
One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.
According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.
Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.
Girls no one cared about
“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”
In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”
In 2019, Langissued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”
In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.
“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”
Sex as birthright
In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”
Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.
In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.
In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.
In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre describes Prince Andrew as ‘friendly enough but still entitled’. Andy Rain/AAP
The last word
Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.
However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:
It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.
As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.
“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”
Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.
While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.
Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.
By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.
In this way, she got the last word.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
The Rundown: Sam Altman just tappedCaltech biomolecular engineer Mikhail Shapiro to join the founding team of Merge Labs and help lead investor talks for the soon‑to‑launch brain‑computer interface startup alongside co‑founder Alex Blania.
The details: Merge is actively fundraising, aiming to pull in hundreds of millions, with backing expected from OpenAI and other heavy hitters.The hire points to a non‑invasive, ultrasound‑first BCI approach that could use gene‑encoded acoustic reporters to make neurons readable by sound waves.
Set to rivalNeuralink, Merge emphasizes “sensing over surgery.” Product specifics remain secret, but an official announcement is expected soon. Altman says he favors a “read-only” interface: think querying your brain and getting a ChatGPT-style response, without implanted electrodes.
Why it matters: Neuralink is already helping paralyzed patients control computers with implanted chips. But Merge may be betting on a different endgame: why go invasive when you can read brains via sound waves? If it works — a big if — we get brain interfaces without the surgery.
SAMSUNG/NVIDIASamsung’s ‘AI megafactory’ with Nvidia GPUsImage source: Wikimedia CommonsThe Rundown: Samsung is acquiring a 50K-GPU Nvidia cluster to supercharge its chip manufacturing capabilities for mobile devices and robotics, in a massive infrastructure play that signals AI’s expanding role in semiconductor production.The details:The GPU array will power what Samsung calls an “AI Megafactory,” though the company hasn’t disclosed when it goes live.Samsung will co-develop its fourth-gen high-bandwidth memory (HBM4) with Nvidia, tuning it specifically for AI accelerators.The partnership follows Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s announcement of deals with Palantir, Eli Lilly, CrowdStrike, and Uber on Thursday.The move cements Nvidia’s dominance in AI compute as chipmakers scramble to embed machine learning into every layer of the stack.Why it matters: Samsung essentially plans to use a giant Nvidia‑powered AI system to catch defects and tune its chip-making process in real time, enabling better and faster production. The deal also tightens Nvidia’s grip on the stack as it just crossed a $5T market cap, the first company ever to hit that threshold.
In this episode of the Fidias Podcast, Member of the European Parliament Fidias Panayiotou sits down with world-renowned economist and professor Jeffrey Sachs for a deep and eye-opening conversation about global politics, economics, and the future of humanity. Sachs breaks down how power, education, and economic development have shaped today’s world — from the rise of China and India to the challenges facing Europe and the United States. He also shares candid insights on U.S. foreign policy, the Ukraine war, global inequality, and the urgent need for diplomacy in an age of nuclear danger. This is a powerful and thought-provoking discussion you don’t want to miss!
The Truth About Who REALLY Controls the World – Jeffrey Sachs
In this episode of the Fidias Podcast, Member of the European Parliament Fidias Panayiotou sits down with world-renowned economist and professor Jeffrey Sachs for a deep and eye-opening conversation about global… pic.twitter.com/wgBcmANt3m
In fact, the CEO announced during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Meta will be spending between $70 billion and $72 billion on AI this year — up from its previous estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion, as CNBC reports.
Unsurprisingly, that cash bonfireisn’t going over well with investors. Meta’s shares slid by more than 11 percent on Thursday, indicating widespread skepticism about the company’s ability to stop bleeding billions of dollars as it races to keep up with the AI industry’s ever-escalating expenditure commitments.
That’s particularly striking because the drop comes in spite of Meta’s revenues exceeding Wall Street’s estimates. In other words, out of control AI spending is starting to rattle investors.
“The total dollar spend is just kind of what hangs us up a little bit,” Zacks Investment Management portfolio manager Brian Mulberry told the Wall Street Journal. “They have to start doing a better job of showing us when that comes back to the balance sheet.”
Mulberry questioned Meta’s ability to turn its ballooning expenditures into a return on investment.
“The return on invested capital is definitely a huge metric for us and the fact that they are being a little bit cagey and not quite upfront with what exactly is going on doesn’t help soothe those fears,” he told the WSJ.
In fact, a similar story to Meta’s is playing out at Microsoft as well. The company reported better-than-expected results this week — only for its stock to slide almost three percent as investors balked at the company’s forecast to increase its spending.
For Zuckerberg, it’s a matter of acting now, before it’s too late, highlighting a persistent fear of missing out among tech leaders.
“It’s pretty early, but I think we’re seeing the returns in the core business,” he told investors. “That’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not underinvesting.”
As such, Meta has been on an AI hiring spree this year, investing over $14 billion in AI startup Scale AI, and poaching its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its so-called Superintelligence Labs. It’s been given out pay packages ranging from tens of millions to more than $1 billion in a desperate bid to attract talent.
Then, as Axios reported earlier this month, the company cut hundreds of roles from its AI unit — suggesting that the cracks could be starting to show.
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
Image source: Wikimedia CommonsThe Rundown: Samsung is 
canisgallicus 