Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and the first Schrödinger’s trillionaire, flickering in and out of existence with each major fluctuation in SpaceX’s stock price, is playing an outsize role in media, tech, and politics, just as one would expect.
Let’s start with media.
Musk Puts $1B in Skydance
Hours after I went to press with last week’s post on Paramount/Skydance, news broke that Elon Musk was investing $1 billion in the Ellison family hasbara media empire. Semafor broke the news:
Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.
The deal came together at roughly the same time as equity investments from Skydance’s other investors, including board member Laurene Powell Jobs, the people said. Semafor reported in September that Paramount was considering seeking an equity injection from Musk.
Musk has publicly praised the Ellisons and Skydance, prompting speculation of a more expansive partnership between Musk’s lower-earth-orbit satellite network, Starlink, and Skydance.
By Monday, Simply Wall Street was adding some analysis:
Why does Elon Musk’s US$1b stake in Skydance matter for investors?
The check size is large enough to signal that a high profile entrepreneur is comfortable tying capital to Skydance’s media footprint and balance sheet at this point in its merger story. It also links Skydance, via Musk, to a wider tech and communications ecosystem that includes platforms and infrastructure, which many investors track closely for sentiment cues.Does this change the Skydance Narrative investors have been working with?
The existing Narrative leans on big content bets, higher theatrical output and heavy programming spend to support growth, while debt and integration risk cap the upside. Musk’s funding lines up with that playbook because it supplies fresh equity into a highly leveraged structure that is targeting efficiency gains and larger slates rather than a downsized media group.What is the clearest marker that will show whether this news really matters for Skydance?
The key checkpoint is whether Skydance can hit its planned increase in theatrical releases from roughly 8 titles to at least 15 films per year from 2026 without stretching its finances. If that expanded slate arrives alongside progress toward the US$3b cost efficiency goal, the read across from Musk’s backing will look very different than if those targets slip.
Puck had more interesting insights in their piece “What Elon’s Money Could Cost Skydance”
“People are freaking out,” an exec told me. “It’s bad enough that we have [David] Ellison. Did we need this, too? To discourage everyone in this town from doing business with us?”
…Still, with deep cuts looming, not everyone at Warners has been focusing on the Musk of it all. Another longtime insider said he’s mostly hearing about people’s fear for their jobs, and the more existential question of whether Skydance, with that debt and its cobbled-together financing, can stay afloat. The debt “feels insurmountable,” this insider lamented. Another exec predicted that “this will go down as the single most destructive deal in this industry’s history.”
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Longtime HBO talent Alex Gibney also has reason to be concerned about Musk’s incursion into Skydance. His documentary Musk, we are told, will still debut on HBO Max in early 2027—as Matt reported last Thursday, and as an HBO source reiterated to me.
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After Meta, YouTube, and TikTok U.S. initially blocked ads for Gibney’s film, the three platforms changed course, all citing error. But Gibney said TikTok was the most resistant to changing course. (Oracle—the company that Larry Ellison, Friend-of-Elon and Dad-of-David, co-founded and chairs—owns a 15 percent stake in the platform’s U.S. operations.)
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Democrats on Capitol Hill have already expressed concern about the Paramount–WBD merger, and the potential that Musk would have access to its data, content, and CNN would definitely enliven them. In an email response to my query, ranking Senate Finance Committee member Ron Wyden said, “Elon Musk bailing out Ellison’s Skydance is the definition of an unholy alliance. Information and entertainment are increasingly controlled by a small handful of right-wing billionaires who are intent on helping Donald Trump, breaking government services, cutting their own taxes, and sticking everyone else with the bill.”
Musk has also been investing in politics.
He’s Texas Big Rich Now
Elon might be new to Texas, but he’s making his presence felt. Politico has the scoop:
With days left until the midterm elections, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott reported raking in millions of dollars from the tech and data center industries — including $5 million from Elon Musk.
Abbott raised $26 million in the 30-day reporting period that ended Oct. 24, according to campaign finance records. At least $6 million of that haul came from Musk and others associated with tech and data center businesses…
Abbott pledged last year to make Texas the “epicenter” of artificial intelligence development. His staff also held a meeting last December with tech companies, power line builders and electricity officials two days before the state’s main grid operator rolled out a new framework to review data centers, POLITICO reported Tuesday.
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The fight over data centers, particularly their water use and impact on electric rates, has become a defining issue of the midterm elections. Half of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of their home, according to recent results from The POLITICO Poll.
Musk, the world’s richest man, is one of the GOP’s biggest donors. He previously gave Abbott’s campaign $500,000 in this election cycle. His companies rely on data centers and have a notable footprint in Texas: SpaceX runs a rocket facility on the Gulf Coast, Tesla has a giant auto plant in the Austin area and the firms are planning a microchip factory outside Houston. The companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
In addition to the donation from Musk, Abbott received $200,000 from the AI company Anthropic’s employee PAC, and $300,000 from Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown in the recent period.
We’ll come back to Musk’s complicated relationship with Anthropic, but first there’s more to the Musk-Abbott relationship than a simple pay-to-play deal; in fact, it’s gotten “embarrassing and intimate.”
Musk-Abbott
Per the Texas Tribune from June:
Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t want to reveal months of communications with Elon Musk or representatives from the tech mogul’s companies, arguing in part that they are of a private nature, not of public interest and potentially embarrassing.
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Matthew Taylor, Abbott’s public information coordinator, gave several reasons the records should not be released. He argued they include private exchanges with lawyers, details about policy-making decisions and information that would reveal how the state entices companies to invest here. Releasing them to the public, he wrote, “would have a chilling effect on the frank and open discussion necessary for the decision-making process.”
Taylor also argued that the communications are confidential under an exception to public records laws known as “common-law privacy” because they consist of “information that is intimate and embarrassing and not of legitimate concern to the public, including financial decisions that do not relate to transactions between an individual and a governmental body.”
Naturally, that only increased interest in the correspondence, particularly on the part of Abbott’s Democratic opponent, Texas State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, who filed suit citing more than $54 million in state grants to SpaceX, $1.7 billion in school tax breaks for Musk’s Terafab project, and Musk asking whether Abbott would “have his back,” with Abbott replying “I said 100%,” the day before Musk filed to reincorporate SpaceX in Texas.
Currently, Abbott has frozen Hinojosa out of accessing the emails with a well-timed appeal.
Now let’s get to Musk and Anthropic.
Elon’s Complicated Relationships with Anthropic
Elon Musk spent the first months of 2026 attacking Anthropic. In January, Anthropic cut off xAI’s access to Claude through Cursor, and Musk said the cutoff was “not good for their karma.”
On February 12th, he answered Anthropic’s $30 billion raise with “Your AI hates Whites & Asians … This is misanthropic and evil.” Later in February, xAI accepted the Pentagon’s “all lawful use” terms that Anthropic had refused over mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
On February 27th, the day Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic, Musk posted “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.” On March 6th, he asked Grok for “an extremely vulgar roast of Dario’s groveling.”
Then he started doing business with the company.
In May, SpaceX leased Colossus 1 to Anthropic, and Musk wrote that “No one set off my evil detector.” In July, he posted, “I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI.”
Action in the last two months on the Musk-Anthropic front has been so fast-paced I’ve got to resort to bullet points to catch up:
- September 12th: Musk quote-posted Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” which calls for the AI industry to slow down, with “Dario is right.”
- September 24th: Musk wrote that his “AI efforts are only 3 years old, vs 6 and 10 years old for Anthropic and OpenAI,” and that SpaceX would “reach pole position in about 6 months.”
- September 26th: In a China Media Group interview, Musk called Grok 4.7 “a solid workhorse of a model. It’s not as good as, say, Opus 5.5.”
- September 29th: Reuters, citing Anthropic’s confidential IPO prospectus, reported compute contracts with SpaceX worth up to $84.5 billion.
- October 7th: Musk said SpaceX’s Grok Bot agent “will use the best back end model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5,” along with Midjourney and Suno.
- October 15th: After Anthropic said it had given outside safety evaluators at METR employee-like access, Musk replied “SpaceX will probably do the same.”
- October 18th: Anthropic put 5% of its shares into a new Public Benefit Fund, rising to roughly 20% of its equity committed to the public good. Musk replied, “I recommend giving the shares directly to the public,” then “This is what I will be doing.”
- October 19th: Musk announced, “Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America,” and Donald Trump thanked him for giving the stock “through TRUMP ACCOUNTS.” SiliconANGLE put the pledge at about 72 million shares worth $10.5 billion.
- October 22nd: SpaceX’s third-quarter 10-Q showed an unnamed AI customer accounting for 34.5% of quarterly revenue. CNBC identified the customer as Anthropic, paying just over $5 billion of SpaceX’s $14.58 billion.
- October 25th: Musk answered “Pretty much” to a Chamath Palihapitiya post that cited a rumor, attributed to Anthropic’s S-1, that hyperscalers had told Anthropic they had no compute for it. In the same reply, Musk predicted “guppy-level death” for the neoclouds. The S-1 doesn’t say that. Its closest line is that Anthropic sought quantities of compute “in excess of what those partners were willing to provide.”
- October 26th: Anthropic’s S-1 disclosed agreements to spend up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX.AI through 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once all capacity is delivered. After early 2027, either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice. The filing never names Musk or xAI.
Figuring out who’s muscling whom in this relationship is over my pay grade; maybe some of the NC community can chime in here. All I know is that neither company is the type to play well with others, so who’s zooming who?
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