Trump Financials and Political Corruption

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Oh Welcome to Profty Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is july second. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals Theao was roughly flat to start the third quarter. M meananwhile, Chip stocks dragged the NSDAQ and the S andP five hundred into the red. Rrent crude dropped as the U. S. signaled talks with Iran were productive And the yield on tenenure treasuries rose after Fed Chair Wash said inflation was, quote too high What else is happen there The Cloud computing industry has just gained an unexpected new arrival. Meta is reportedly planning a cloud business to sell its excess AI capacity The company has poured billions into its AI infrastructure. and until now, Meta has maintained that all of those investments and the resulting compute capacity would be used for internal purposes. But clearly now has changed. Metastock closed up neearly nine percent on the news, but other neoc cloud computer providers such as Corewave dropped on this news. So more on why Meta is getting into the compute game and what it means for the rest of the AI industry, we are joined again by Ed Zitrin, author of the Where's your Ed at newsletter and host of the better offline podcast Ed Good to see you. I'll just start with The good news on my end because for those of the listeners who Follow me on social media, I actually bought meta last week and it's up ten percent since then. So technically I'm happy because my view was that the price was Pretty cheap relative to the rest of tech and relative to the SMP Um, So That's the good news. bad news potentially is we thought that Meta was going to build their own AI products. Now they're saying no We're going to sell the compute to someone else, for someone else to build their AI products. And that's why I wanted to talk to you because it doesn't seem like a great signal for the AI industry and you've been all over this. So Your reactions to this Meta newews? I think it's a sign that Meta is walking away from its AI plan. It's Berenbervsky over at the Wall Street Journal at this point earlier. Meta was meant to have an API for its Muse spark AI model weeks ago just hasn't happened. and now we've got these rumors of Meta allegedly selling off its compute capacity. There's no other way to read this other than Meta has home they've built too much compute capacity and now they're selling it I think what we're going to see now is kind of the H bumber guy think of sell the compute to who? Aquaman at some point because who are the people that are buying this compute? Meta is the, I think the second or third largest buyer of AI compute. They have a seventeen billion dollars contract with Nebius, a twenty two point four billion dollars contract with or weave I'm not sure how this works and the bulls are already trying to frame this as, o, this is bettera intelligently. They're monetizing their AI stack. when what it actually is is Meta is flat out of reasons to have this capacity. They said on that annual shareholders meeting, they thought they had a reason. They used the word think. They thought they had a reason to have all this compute capacity, but they might sell it if they don't I guess they don't and I'm not I'm not sure how else to read this. This is very bad for the AI bubble. This is exactly what I feared, which is that these companies put way more capacity than they could ever ever need. Well just to go back to the quote from Mark Zuckerberg, this is from May. he said quote when asked sorry about whether he would what he's doing now, which is sell the compute. He said, quote, We haven't done that yet because we think we have a use for the compute. But obviously, if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have. and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out. So this seems to be the answer to that point which We did overbuild, thinking that we were going to use all of the compute to build our own stuff Now we're kind of admitting defeat and saying, no, we're just going to sell the compute to someone else for someone else to build the stuff. To be fair to the bulls and know explaining why the stock is up right now, I think Wall Street was concerned that they were building this stuff and they had no plan to monetize whatsoever Why are you building all these data centers? Wh you building up all this compute. They've come out with an answer now It's just not a great answer. It's probably the laziest answer you could come up with. And so this brings us to the question of Who is going to monetize this stuff Because if Meta had all those engineers and they had all of this all of the resources and they are deciding, no, we're not going to monetize AI ourselves with a front end product Who's going to do it Will it be open a? Will it be anthropic I mean, what do you think Well said on Twitter a few weeks ago, you know that we're at the end when Anthropic buys compute from meta I think that if we see a deal some with open AI or and meta or anthropic and meta, we're at the end they're out of ideas. because right now There are no large buiers of compute other than open AI and anthropic Meta was the other one. This whole time I've been saying, Wow, Ma has no AI story. Meta doesn't really have a use for this compute. Turns out that Ma has no use for this compute because they don't have an AI story. So this will be actually an interesting demonstration of how much actual compute demand there is. becausecause Meta, I don't imagine uses as much of and they have a large amount, they have almost as much capacity as I think Microsoft. They were one of the largest buyers of H one hundreds and H two hundreds at the beginning They're building that vast Hyberian data center, which Pimco owns most of the bonds of, which is interesting It's great to hear where our retirement funds are going that It's weird though. I thought the they needed all this computeer. I thought it was very important they had this compute and it just makes me wonder whether they ever had a strategy People want to say, o, their strategy failed. I don't think they had one. I think that they just bought all the computute because that's all Mark Zuckerberg can do. He sees someone else do something and he goes, I'm going to do that. And now he's becoming what a really big boring cloud infrastructure provider I mean, There's also the question of how much money they'll make of this because I've seen some fanciful projections, some truly ludicrous ones with people saying they'll get twenty billion dollars a gigawat It has no precedent A's Oracle, which is building Stargate Abele, the one point two gigawatt, I think's eight hundred and eighty megawatts of critical IT for open AI. They're only expecting to make about ten billion dollars a year from that once it's fully built So okay, let's say that Ma gets lucky and makes fifteen billion dollars a year. from their capacity. All right? I mean, for how long, who can afford that? Because really the answer is I Anthropic. No one else is buying that much. I think Jane Street is getting one hundred, two hundred megawatts, maybe, but who are the other large buyers? Because there certainly isn't an aggregate of gigawatts of capacity demand. And this is the larger point I'd be making about the buildout, which is that the demand does not exist at scale and the largest consumers are too bulbous fail sons that only lose billions of dollars. And I don't know I'm seeing people try and rationalize this I must I must warn them that this is a very, very bearish sign I think that's exactly right. And I mean, going back to the parallels to the dot com bubble I mean, The trouble that we keep running into is we keep hearing that there's all of this demand for compute and there's all of this demand for chips, which there is, which is why the prices of this stuff is going up When you go to the demand for the AI products on the front end from the consumer perspective or from know a B to B perspective, Yes, they they're technically spending money on this thing, but not nearly enough compared to the losses we have seen that you've reported on from anthropic and from openp AI. And so it does certainly seem that this is An admission of that point. I mean, I really you'd really think that if someone was going to figure out how to make AI an extremely profitable consumer product or business to business product, Ma would be that company But they have decided with this move, it seems they can't figure it out. and we'll see what happens. We'll see if they maybe go back on this. This is kind of initial reporting. Just go into that phrase though, excess compute That's a crazy phrase to hear and that was exactly what was written in the article that there is excess compute, and that's why they're making this move What do we know about compute supply, I thought that was there was no access I thought that we were completely constrained. So based on my analysis across all of these companies I would say eighty percent of all AI computers owned or used by open AI or anthropic. withith the rest of it being Ma. Meta is they have those multibillion dollar deals. they' being sorry, I actually thought they are also doing one point two gigawatts with Cruso. just sliip my mind there. So what's happening is it's a mirage of demand. What it is is two large companies are taking up an absolute crap time. They're buying anything they can get, leaving scraps for the rest of us. Well, well not me, but you know what I mean. So these companies taking up all this space. So of course the success. comp, Meta isn't using it. I don't even think Microsoft is using all of their compute. I don't think anything that's being like Google recently also said, it was reported that Google couldn't give Meta all of the access they needed for Gemini because they capacity constraints and people were saying, Well, that's a bullish signence it shows the demand. No, it's anthropic It's all anthropic. Anthropic is just rapacious and their demands for compute. The excess compute is whatever is left over, the drgs that are left over from anthropic and open AI So I think at the moment, there are large bumps of compute that ent intoer the market, such as meta leasing. It really comes down to how much they if it's ten percent or thirty percent, maybe, if they do more than fifty percent, this is just going to flood the market Because aggregate customers, I've really looked. I've done a lot of analysis on this, I've looked and looked. I can't find companies providing inference or people paying for AI compute in anything more than tens or maybe a hundred million dollars a year in spend And demand is not there. And that was before we got to this weird thing where everyone's cutting back. There's a UBS study that said sixty percent of organizations are. are token minimizing, they're limiting their token spend We're not in a supply constraint. situation. It's that just two companies are taking it all up. and if Ma dumps this onto the market, o boy, we'll finally get to see whether we're truly in a supply chain crisis really just having two o's taking it all up Just thinking about how this might end if it is true that the ROI or that the business model doesn't work, this has been your contention, that's what you've been saying for a long time I mean, I just think about how it would play out and who would get hurt Clearly, if you're spending Hundreds of billions of dollars on CapEx to build out the data centers. And it turns out that the ROI isn't as large as we thought back down the chain. then that's gonna to hurt for you, but you might figure out a way to monetize those data centers eventually That's sort of a question. The people the companies for whom this s really hurt Clearly in my view It's the companies that are offering the AI product whose job is to do the difficult task of figuring out how to make more money than they spend on the AI. and who have not proven their business models yet and that would be open eye andanthropic. And if those are the only two companies that are essentially buying up all of that compute when you've done your analyses and tryed to figure out who's buying this stuff, and it's just those two. It seems that Those are the ones who get hurt at the end of the day in a very significant way. Would that be your view I mean, it's everyone gets it. I think it's all of the construction firms, I think the construction firms underlying the data center. I think There are going to be just a bunch of dataents that get built and never get used, which will be hellish for the private credit funds which are backed by people's pensions and insurance annuities. I think it could open AI and anthropic will be able to find the compute they need But then they will run out of mudoney and then that will leave all of this compute sitting fallow I think that this still hurts Ma Because look, if Meta drops all this compute onto the market and they can't sell it, that's also bad. means that meta has got a bunch of computer to can't use and will, depending on how bad things are, actually have to take an impairment if they don't think they're going to be able to use on that compute. they're not going to be able to monetize it. Meta is actually in a position to mothball much more of this because they can just claim, oh yeah, we're working on ad models,'s just ads, doing some ads on the backend. No one's ever going to find out. It will get bad from the Microsofts and Googles of the world And I think the the apocalyptic conditions that there will be, if I'm right will be quite severe. I think we're going to see a lot of incomplete data centers. I think we're going to see data centers that just cannot pay they'll be assumed by lenders And if that happens at scale, it's going to be It's going to it's going to affect anyone who's invested in this. It's going to affect the Japanese stock market because of SNBC, a Sumitomo bank, two the largest banks in Japan who are heavily levered in the data centers. think The spread of this will be hellish, but it's gonna kill the neo cllouds I'm so tired of people on Twitter being like, Oh, Nebius and Iron. they're so good. No. they're all invested in byy NvidDia. They're all backstop by Nvidia and their customers are Microsoft for OpenAI, openpen AI, Anthropic and Meta So it's just I don't think people realize bad it is if I'm right. I'm not even saying that this is not a bit. this is just But the demand is not there, there is allegedly over a one hundred gigawatts of compute capacity under construction if we can only sell Six gigawatts, if there's only demand for six and that demand is mostly coming from two unprofitable companies that pretty much only make money because of a hype cycle and also subsidizing a lot of their products What does that look like in the future? It looks like a disaster and unlike the dot com bubble There is no useful infrastructure here AIGPUs do not have other monetizable use cases anywhere near even a fraction of what's being promised of AI. Final question for you before I let you go news has occurred since I last had you, specifically open AI reportedly delaying their IPO. I have a tinfoil hat theory that the reason they did that is because of you, specifically the financials that you leaked on open AI and kind of the shit storm that that caused I reactions to openp AI apparently not going to go public in twenty twenty six anymore. Ratat That's what happens when people see your stinky numbers. I'm serious. My infoil hat theory is that open AIs numbers in their S one differed from mine. I don't mean fraudulently just to be clear. they just presented them in a different gap variant or they just didn't show all of them. I also think that just There was a veryy large loud discussion of the numbers. And I don't know, I imagine because the whole reason that they delayed per the Times that they say was their investor their advisers wanted to get a trillion dollar valuation Couldn't that's Very bad because their lastost valuation pre money was seven hundred fifty something billion, I think. Somet around there. Yeah, they were right up there. You'd think you just one little step Like a thirty percent premium. That shouldn't a huge ask unless of course bankers looked at this and said, mate, that's not worth seven hundred do or even five hundred billion, which kind of lines up with something From a few weeks ago, Soft Bank tried to get a margin loan in which they used all of their open AI shares, which on paper are worth over one hundred billion dollars as collateral, a six billion dollars loan and the banks would not give it to them probably suggests that banks might have some issues with them. And people will say, well anthropic will be fine. Anthropic is exactly the same kind of business. They run in the same way. Oh they use the enterprise more? Everyone's on the entnerprise now even open AI. So my reaction here is I don't think the future is going to be better for these companies to list out. And I think that this is I don't know if open AI ever goes public now. Maybe they will. Maybe they slop this thing out there. Maybe they find a weird way in, but I don't know. if they want a trillion dollars, it's very clear that valuation isn't realistic at least at this point in time. Well it's a shame because I was looking forward to seeing those financials. That was going to be my big That was going to be my suuper Bowl. I want that S one. Yeah, that S one. When it happens, you and I will have to do some live stream or something and react in real time, but we'll have to wait if it ever happens. we'll see Ed Zitrin is the author of The Where's yourour Edd newewsletter and host of the better offline podcast Ed. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me After the break takeakeaways from the Supreme Court's first term And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, simply put at simply putut. proftymedia. com Support for the show comes from rippling. 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But LinkedIn Hiring Pro can take the hiring load off your plate by automating the hiring busywork from the initial job post to scheduling interviews Hireite the first time with LinkedIn Hiring Pro. post a free job today at LinkedIn. com flash quality We're back with Profty Markets The Supreme Court has wrapped up its term and left the presidency more powerful than it found it. While the court dealt the administration some blows, preserving birthright citizenship and blocking the president from firing Federal Reserve booard member Lisa Cook, it also handed the White House some significant wins The justices ruled that Trump can fire members of independent federal agencies without cause and did a separate decision court struck down limits on how much political parties can spend on candidates taken together. The rulings reshape the balance of power in Washington, strengthening both the presidency and the role of money in American politics. Here to discuss court' recent rulings, we are joined by Melissa Murray. professor at NYU laaw, co host of the strict scrutiny podcast and author of the US. Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide for the modern Reader. Melissa, thank you so much for joining us, helping us to make sense of what's going on with the Supreme Court right now I'd love to just start with the Lisa Cook decision because this is a markets podcast. This is something we've been keeping our eye on What is the independence of the Federal Reserve really? And it seemed as though they protected the independence of the Fed and said, no, you can't fire her. But then there's the other ruling which says that the president can fire officials and other agencies. It sounds kind of like a contradiction. How do we make sense of it? It's a terfect question, Ed, and it's one that a member of the court asked. Amy Coney Barrett, who dissented in the Cke decision, basically posed the same question. In her view, the two decisions are irreconcilable. It can't be the case that the president is free to remove The heads of independent agencies whatever he wants to, but somehow the Fed is off limits. And the court in the Cook case really didn't provide a very principled account of why the Fed is different. They talked a lot about history and the Fed's roots in the first bank of the United States and the second bank of the United States. But the structure of the Fed is congressionally ordained and to the extent that there are limits on the president's power to remove a governor of the Fed, because Congress has imposed them, one would think that the same sorts of limits would exist in circumstances where Congress created agencies and created limits on the president's authority to remove the members of those agencies. So it does seem to be a little incongruous. Some have argued that one thing that may explain it is the economy. and Brett Kavanaugh in his separate opinion, basically said as much, you know like nobody wants to see turmoil in the markets and people have a vested interest in the stability of fiscal policy. and that is what the Fed does. And you know, we've said on our podcast This is a court where every single person has a four hundred one K. and maybe that's the explanation. I do think there is a through line that unites both slaughter the case about independent agencies and cook about the Fed and the tariffs decision, which was decided earlier by the court. And you know one thing I think that unites them all There are decisions that interests can really get behind. So the Fad is something that corporate interests are actually very interested in. we all are because we want stable markets, we want stable economies, and it's good for business if those are stable and not in turmoil In the same vein though Regulated industries, corporate industries are not as interested in the kind of heavy handed regulation that at times independent agencies can dish out. So for example, I thought it was really interesting that Rebecca Slaughter, who was the person who was removed from the Federal Trade C commommission sparking this entire litigation, she noted that when President Trump was inaugurated for the second time The array of moguls behind him at the inauguration were the heads of corporations that the FTC was either investigating or were in act of litigation against. So it makes sense that If there is a president who is perhaps less friendly to regulation, if you're in an industry that is regulated, heavily regulated, you might want the president to have more authority to be able to align that agency with his priorities because they're your priorities as well. In the same vein, the tariffs case might be understood as one that really aligns with corporate interests Everyone talked about how bad the tariffs were for raising prices. Corporations also felt it too because it narrowed profit margins and it made it a lot harder to do business because everything was unstable in the global economy because of the tariffs. So if you think about those three decisions in tandem, I think a sort of through line that unites all of them, despite the seemingly irreconcilable aspects of them is that they really are decisions that would be favored by corporations and corporate interests. This idea that it's the corporate interests that are kind of driving the or that it seems to align with those interests. I have a quote here that was quite interesting that came out of Op AI. This was the General Councsel of open AI who was upset about the ruling, which I'll return to in a moment. but onn this point It seems as though and I'm not a legal scholar, so I don't know But it seems as though if that is the case, what you're describing, it doesn't seem to be grounded in the law as much as one would hope, I guess it would be my point. If there's a contradiction that is mostly driven by their personal opinions about politics or about Uh, markets Um I just wonder, I mean, are we setting a slightly unstable legal precedent if the law surrounding it isn't that strong? That's kind of my understanding hearing you. I want to be really clear about this. I'm sort of speculating as what could be part of it. I mean, I truly believe that these justices think that they're reading the Constitution, doing this right and to be very fair to them, Article two of the Constitution, which lays out the powers of the executive is pretty spare about the power to remove executive officials. And so the slaughter case is in reality, the kind of apotheosis of the sort of coming of age of a theory called the unitary executive theory that argues that The entire power of the executive branch is lodged in the office of the president. So he, because it's all him, he should have the authority to both appoint and to remove executive officers. And the slaughter case is basically the unitary executive theory codified in a Supreme Court opinion It may be the case that some industries welcome regulation. I mean like regulation may create barriers to entry for new entrants and that may be a boon for established players in a particular field. But my point about Rebecca Slaughter and her observation is that for a lot of the people who are aligning themselves with this president, a lot of the corporations that are aligned with this president They didn't want a lot of regulation, and this sort of gives it to them a sort of a less regulated environment for them because the FDC is not going to be doing the kind of work that it did before. It's also important to recognize that Conservatives have always been very wary of the prospect of these agencies because they argue there is no constitutional grounding for them That's something that I think people on both sides of the aisle can debate. It's something that constitutional scholars can debate. No, there's no specific authorization in the Constitution for administrative agencies, but in the same way that there's no specific authorization for immunity for the president, you might imply it from certain other protections or provisions that do exist. And again, the administrative state in these agencies is basically how we have come to do modern government. So you know part of this is a longstanding debate within the legal community about the fate of agencies, the propriety of agencies in a constitutional democracy where agency officials are really only accountable to president, maybe to some degree to Congress, but mostly to the president and whether or not allowing the president full authority to remove them at will is consistent with that kind of accountability. That's an ongoing debate that we have been having for some time. Your point about the instability and whether the justices are doing law or simply prosecuting their own preferences, I think that's a bigger question. You One of the things that is important to recognize about the slaughter decision is that it overrules an existing precedent. So this is not the time This question has ever come up. It came up in nineteen thirty five again over a president's efforts to remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And there, the court said that Congress, which delegates authority to the executive branch to create this agency, also has the authority to impose limits on the president's power to remove the heads of those agencies. And now we have a court that says We're overruling that. That's of no consequence. And I think That is the thing that's making people think that maybe what's going on here is more about personal preference as opposed to law. What essentially has happened is that the president now has more power. If you believe that the president likes you, then that's probably a good thing. If you believe the president doesn't like you, that's probably a bad thing. hundred Which is why I found this quote from the Associate General couounsel at Open AI quite interesting. They said, quote Trump Vister will have major implications for the future of AI regulation. If you want a federal body that can independently assess frontier models and then impose binding consequences free from political or partisan influence, that just got a lot harder, if not impossible. seemeeming to imply that Op AI or AI companies might not be on the right side. of Trump and perhaps he'll decide that he's going to do whatever he can to influence these agencies to make it harder for those AI companies. I'd just love to get your reactions to that quote and what that says about the future of private industry given this ruling. I don't think you can divorce this ruling from the current landscape that we occupy, right? So this is an administration that has very clear ideas about what it wants to do. There is, I think some people argue, a kind of pay or play ethos to this administration and that doesn't always redound to the advantage of those who are unwilling to who want to play by the rules as opposed to the rules that a single administration imposes. And one of the comforts I think that people had in these independent agencies is that they were staffed by experts who had particular expertise in a particular field and were not necessarily beholden by politics sort of looking at things straight down the line and making decisions based on their expertise. Now there may be all kinds of considerations that come into play when these agencies issue decisions. I mean the personnel of the agencies are clearly going to change and they're likely going to whipsaw as different administrations come in and out. So the kind of continuity that we've had in these agencies, I think that is no longer going to be the case. And that may be a real problem given the kinds of institutional memory that builds up in these agencies over time because they are bound by these individuals that are focused on expertise as opposed to politics just shifting to this other decision from the court to strike down the law that would have limited, that did limit the amount that parties can spend in elections. That's gone now. My takeaway is more money in politics following Citizens United, which we cover a lot on this show and which has clearly influenced our politics in a variety of different ways is that the right take away. So as Biggie Smalls', son of Brooklyn once said, no money, no problems. think We already lived in a very distorted electoral landscape. It's been distorted by gerrymandering, both partisan gerrymandering, racial gerrymandering, distorted by the influence of suppressive voter laws, and the influence of money flooding our political landscape It think this helps, right? So what was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment here was a set of rules that prevented or limited the ability of individuals to funnel their donations into the parties and then have the parties coordinate the donation to particular candidates. And the reason why that was so important Individual donors had a limit, it was about seven thousand dollars on what they could contribute in a campaign cycle, but the parties had a much larger limit. So if individuals can funnel their money into the party, they're able to give more money to the party than the seven thousand dollars they could give individually, and then the party could then funnel that into a particular candidate It's obviously an opportunity to circumvent the individual contribution limit to coordinate with the parties in this way. it will make it harder, I think for partarty that relies more on small donors, like in the aggregate, that would be the Democratic Party. It does redound, I think, to the benefit of the Republican partarty, which is, I think, in a better position, Vis v the larger donors who have the wherewithal and can now funnel their money into parties which have a much bigger capacity to make these coordinated and much larger donations to particular candidates. It also means that If a candidate doesn't have the favor of the party that's coordinating it, like they're not likely to be successful. So I think this is going to put more pressure on the primary system, which already, I think, has outsized importance in a world where we are increasingly polarized, perhaps making general elections just less weighty in some circumstances. certainly at the local level. This is going to further distort the playing field and just introduce new interests, new moneyed interests and make it just a lot harder for individual donors to compete. I mean, this just makes me furious to be honest and me if I should feel a different way, but learning what we've learned about Trump and his crypto returns last year, if you can call them returns, one point two billion dollars last year that he earned on his crypto and his meme coins. And we know that he was hosting these dinners where people basically pay to show up. and we know that he takes a lot of money from people. We know Increasingly that as you said, this is a pay to play administration And we're seeing that increasingly in politics where billionares spending is literally skyrocketing every single cycle. and this seems to add on to it. I mean, this seems like exactly the direction that our country should not be going It seems like the perfect moment to try to reel that in to suppress the amount that the richest in our society are influencing not just private industry, but the public sector too I'm very I'm very angry about this. Do you think that that is justified, I guess would be my question. I think you are justified. This wasn't, I think how the framers imagined electoral cycles would work. one They really did not anticipate the rise of political parties. I also don't think they anticipated The ability of political parties to be able to garner and funnel so much wealth into the political process. And removing this coordination limit only exacerbates that kind of capacity that the individual parties have to do so This is going to have an impact. I don't know if it will be as an impact as say, for example, Citizens United, which really did change the landscape. The landscape has been pretty changed and it's been pretty bad. I do think it will be very consequential for the Democratic Party, which has, I think, historically been more reliant on small donors like small amount donors as opposed to very large mega donors who are now then able to funnel their contributions outside of those limits. I can ask you questions for hours, but I know that you've got a flight to catch. I'm going to let you go. Melessa Murray is professor at NYU Law, host of the strict scrutiny podcast, which I highly recommend and author of the US Constitution a comprehensive and annated guide for the mododern Reader. Melissa, thank you so much. We really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me Trump's personal financial report was just released and the numbers are crazy The nine hundred and twenty seven page document reveals that in his first year back in office President Trump personally made more than two billion dollars. That is up. two hundred and thirty three percent. from the year before. Where did most of the money come from You guessed it Crypto. Trump made one point two billion dollars on his crypto ventures last year. That includes roughly five hundred million dollars from his crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, and more than six hundred million dollars from his meme token Trump coin, which has since lost ninety eight percent of its value. You might be wondering, how do you make six hundred million dollars on a coin that's down ninety eight percent Well, the answer is simple, you sell at the top More than eight hundred thousand people lost a collective two billion dollars trading Trump coins And as I've explained before Mme coins are a zero sum game, meaning anything you lose has to be lost to someone. Well, now we know for certain who that someone is It's the president. But it's not just crypto Trump traded way more stocks than we previously thought. and the trades he made didn't just look like insider trading. they were insider trading. For example bought a large position in Intel on august eighteenth. that was less than a week before he announced that the government would purchase a ten percent stake in the company. So the level of corruption here is unlike anything we've ever seen and it's happening in broad daylight. Why isn't anything being done about it Well, I'll end this episode with a stat that I believe explains most of it. This is from report from the House Judiciary Committee Nearly half of Trump voters say Trump hasn't profited from the presidency. at all So if you're ever wondering people don't seem to care about this stuff or why it doesn't seem to bother certain people. justust remember that many of them live in a completely different universe from you. You might think we're all looking at the same data and the same evidence and the same stories But we're not living in the same country, we are quite literally worlds apart. So the corruption train chugs along And now with even more power to influence the SEC and the CFEC and the FDC and all the agencies whose job is to prevent things like this. courtesy of the Supreme Court. onene thing is very clear, this train isn't stopping Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Allison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer Our video editor is Brad Williams, Our research team is Dan Salon, Isabella Kinsel, Kristin O'Donagghue, and Mia Solverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson