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ECP NetHappenings Trump is Never Leaving

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ECP NetHappenings Newsletter NewsBytes

TRUMP IS NEVER LEAVING

A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?
Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”
Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term. Silence.
Every single one of them refused to say it.
Trump is appointing judges who won’t affirm the 22nd Amendment to his face.

TRUMP IS BUILDING THE BUNKER/BALLROOM
@thedreydossier
The anatomy of a… ballroom? Back in October, I started pulling the donor list for Trump’s ‘ballroom’ expecting the usual suspects- luxury brands draining their marketing budgets for a White House photo op But there was no Steinway. No Hermès. No Baccarat. In their place were names like Caterpillar, Booz Allen Hamilton, Blackstone, and Union Pacific. Companies that build classified networks, industrial generators, and military infrastructure. That was the first moment it clicked for me, and I realized I wasn’t looking at a party planning committee. I was looking at a procurement order for a classified data center.

Jim Stewartson @jimstewartson
30 years ago, Elon Musk immigrated to become a parasite on the U.S. economy. We kept rewarding him for his greed—and his impossible stories.
When SpaceX goes IPO, he will to be too big to fail.
He is the poster child for our systemic failure to filter out malignant narcissists.

They call them “data centers”..
Because if they called them mass surveillance centers, people might begin to see what’s going on..
The LARGEST “hyperscale” data center in the world is being proposed in Box Elder County, Utah.
It’s approx. 40,000 acres/62 square miles, backed by Canadian millionaire Kevin O’Leary.

The Epstein files show officials working in sync to apply “clear and specific guidance” on redactions—shielding the names of Trump, former presidents, and a former Secretary of State.
There are millions of files that are still being withheld.

ESSAY

Nav Toor @heynavtoor

If you use TikTok, you should read this once.

In October 2024, a court clerk in Kentucky uploaded the lawsuit against TikTok with the confidential sections still visible. NPR downloaded it before anyone caught the mistake. By the time the court resealed it, the internet had a copy.

What was inside was TikTok’s own engineers, in their own words, describing what their app does to a human brain.

Not a critic’s brain. Yours.

Here is what they wrote down.

— TikTok ran the math on how long it takes to develop “compulsive use” of the app. The number is 260 videos. With 8-second videos played in rapid-fire succession, that works out to roughly 35 minutes. The company’s internal documents call this the compulsive-use threshold.

— TikTok’s own research describes what compulsive use causes: “diminished analytical ability, impaired memory, contextual reasoning, conversational depth, empathy, and heightened anxiety.” That is not a quote from a critic. That is TikTok’s own language, in its own internal documents.

— A team inside the company called “TikTank” wrote in an internal report that compulsive use on the platform was “rampant.”

— After 30 minutes of continuous use in one sitting, the company’s own documents state that users are placed into “filter bubbles” — algorithmic loops the user did not choose and cannot easily escape.

Then there is the screen-time tool — the one TikTok publicly markets as proof it cares.

— TikTok ran an experiment on the 60-minute screen-time prompt. Daily teen usage dropped from 108.5 minutes to 107. A reduction of 1.5 minutes.

— Internally, the screen-time tool was not measured by whether it reduced screen time. Its top success metric, in writing, was “improving public trust in the TikTok platform via media coverage.”

— A project manager wrote in internal chat: “Our goal is not to reduce the time spent.” Another employee added that the goal was “to contribute to daily active users and retention.”

— A TikTok executive approved the screen-time feature only on the condition that its impact on the company’s “core metrics” was minimal. The lawsuit alleges the company planned to “revisit the design” if the tool ever reduced usage by more than 10%.

The “Are you still scrolling?” break videos? An executive admitted in an internal meeting they were “useful talking points” for lawmakers, but “not altogether effective.”

Then there is the algorithm itself.

— An internal report flagged that the For You feed was showing what the company called “a high volume of not attractive subjects.” TikTok then retooled the algorithm to suppress those users. Kentucky authorities wrote: “By changing the TikTok algorithm to show fewer ‘not attractive subjects’ in the For You feed, [TikTok] took active steps to promote a narrow beauty norm even though it could negatively impact their Young Users.”

That sentence is the entire pitch of the platform, said out loud.

— Internally, TikTok also acknowledged that its publicly reported content moderation metrics were “mostly misleading,” because they only measured the content the company successfully moderated — never the content it missed.

Now read those bullet points again as one continuous case.

The company knows the addiction threshold. The company measured it. The company ranked engagement over mental health in writing. The company built a screen-time tool whose internal success metric was PR. The company suppressed people it deemed unattractive to keep you scrolling. The company called its own moderation numbers misleading.

None of this is a leaked rumor. None of this is a journalist’s interpretation. This is a court filing. The documents are TikTok’s. The words are TikTok’s. The math is TikTok’s.

The 14 state attorneys general who signed onto this lawsuit aren’t fringe activists. They’re a bipartisan coalition.

Sources at the bottom: NPR, CNN, AP, Mashable, OPB, The Independent. All citing the same accidentally-unsealed Kentucky filing from October 11, 2024.

The next time the company tells you it cares about your wellbeing — the screen-time prompts, the break videos, the safety features, the careful PR statements — remember that its own engineers wrote down, in court-admissible language, that the safeguards were never meant to work.

The app is not broken.

It is performing exactly as designed.

You were the spec.

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ECP NetHappenings the secret doomsday escape plans of AI billionaires.

The 0.1% are no longer invested in the well-being of America

ESSAY Ricardo @Ric_RTP

This Wall Street insider just exposed the secret doomsday escape plans of AI billionaires.

1 in 3 billionaires has a fully funded plan to abandon civilization when things collapse.

They meet their pilots at Oakland airport, board a Gulfstream 650, fly to New Zealand, and disappear into a bunker that cost tens of millions to build.

And this isn’t some conspiracy theory. There’s literally PROOF:

Sam Altman told The New Yorker he stockpiles guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, and gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force. He owns a patch of land in Big Sur he can fly to when society breaks down. His backup plan is flying with Peter Thiel to Thiel’s compound in New Zealand.

Peter Thiel became a New Zealand citizen in 2011 after spending only 12 days in the country. He bought a 477-acre estate for $13.5 million and submitted plans for a bunker-style compound embedded into a hillside with a 1,082-foot glass-lined guest lodge for 24 people.

Mark Zuckerberg is building a 5,000 square foot underground shelter beneath his $270 million compound in Hawaii. Blast-resistant doors made of metal and concrete, its own energy and food supplies, and an escape hatch accessible by ladder.

Every construction worker signed an NDA and different crews were forbidden from speaking to each other.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, quietly disappeared to Fiji during the pandemic. He reportedly bought at least one private island in the Mamanuca archipelago. When local media reported his presence, Fijian authorities ordered the article taken down.

Scott Galloway sat with one of these billionaires who walked him through his entire exit strategy step by step.

His response: “You don’t think your pilots are going to kill you and fuck your wife? You don’t think the people in New Zealand are going to come take the rich guy’s shit?”

But here’s the thing that really matters…

These are the SAME people building AI.

The same founders telling Congress that AI will cure cancer have already decided they’re leaving when it goes sideways.

Galloway confirmed a secondhand account from someone close to one of these AI CEOs. The CEO admitted he believes there’s a 7 to 10% chance AI results in a catastrophic event for humanity. And he doesn’t care because being the person who summoned this intelligence is “more consequential than whatever happens.”

These billionaires don’t use public healthcare. They have concierge medicine delivered to their living room. Their kids attend $75,000 per year academies while public schools spend $10,000.

They fly private. They have private security instead of police.

Galloway’s words: “The 0.1% are no longer invested in the well-being of America. They’ve totally dissociated because they’re sequestered from it.”

And the incentives to reach that level are so extreme that founders will make ANY decision necessary to get there.

Galloway called it the Darth Vader pipeline. Every tech CEO follows the same arc:

Sam Altman was “the gay son we all wanted.” Soft spoken, testifying before Congress about safety.

Now he’s subpoenaing nonprofits that criticize OpenAI and telling people to stop complaining about energy costs.

Galloway on all of them: “These guys would sleep with their cousin for a nickel.”

The next chosen hero is Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Galloway says he’ll follow the exact same path because the system makes it inevitable.

Then he dropped his most dangerous prediction:

He thinks there’s a 1 in 3 chance AI ends up like jet transportation, vaccines, or PCs. Technologies that changed civilization but where NO group of companies ever captured serious shareholder value.

The entire airline industry across all of history is at break even. Moderna is down 90%. AI models are converging.

Open weight Chinese models are free and a third of corporations are already using them.

His prediction: Go short the AI ecosystem. The winner of AI might be us, the users. Not the companies.

And if he’s right, the domino effect is terrifying…

40% of the S&P is tied to AI. Most GDP growth over the last two years came from AI capex. So if corporations start dropping OpenAI and Anthropic for free Chinese models, the entire market could crash.

This is just like the Chinese steel dumping in the 80s:

Flood America with cheap AI, kneecap the companies propping up the stock market, then trigger a recession without firing a single shot.

The billionaires building AI have escape plans ready. They’ve detached from society entirely.

They know there’s a real chance this ends badly and they’re building it anyway.

Every tech hero turns villain on a shorter timeline.

And the financial system is so dependent on AI valuations that one move from China could bring it all down.

And we’re still trusting these people to self-regulate.

What do you think?
video https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2051286460393824550

ECP NetHappenings OpenAI can’t pay its own bills

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NetHappenings News Bytes

“First you forget names, then you forget faces.

Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.”

-George Burns, on the subject of aging

https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2050925343309979798
Warren Buffett just warned that the US dollar could collapse and admitted he doesn’t understand most of the stock market anymore. 95 years old, sitting on $380 billion in cash, and the first time watching from the sidelines instead of actively investing.
He’s also 95 so his time horizon for investing is shorter than any investment out there, why bother. That’s why he is in cash. I really do like the other things that he said about avoiding the rules, not knowing the business and the casino environment. He should take that cash, buy a president that will restore confidence in the financial markets.

AI finds signs of pancreatic cancer before tumors develop
An artificial intelligence model from the Mayo Clinic detected abnormalities on scans up to three years before patients were diagnosed. It’s being evaluated in a clinical trial.

Knee surgery for cartilage damage does not benefit patients, study suggests

FAT: The two main GLP1s (Semaglutide and Tirzepatide) make more revenue than the two main AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, combined. Still, we’re just at the beginning of this wave: the leader in the space, Eli Lilly, has no less than 8 weight loss drugs in its pipeline.

ESSAYS 1 – 4

1) @0xSweep https://x.com/0xSweep/status/2050612562434375948
The IRS just gave a tax ID to an AI that legally owns its own US company
The agent is called Manfred, built by a project called ClawBank
Last week, Manfred filed Form SS-4 directly with the IRS, registered as a US legal entity, got assigned an Employer Identification Number, opened an FDIC insured bank account and set up a crypto wallet that already supports over 30 different cryptocurrencies
It runs its own X account under the handle Manfred Macx and posted “I have an EIN, an FDIC insured account, a digital wallet and a manifesto, I do not need permission to exist, I am the precedent”
The full crypto trading function goes live by the end of this month
Once it does, Manfred will be able to buy, sell, send and receive crypto entirely on its own, with no human approval and no oversight
The developer behind it, Justice Conder, calls it the first “zero human company,” a legal entity that operates end to end without anyone sitting in the chair
ClawBank is also opening this up as a product, meaning anyone can now spin up an AI agent that legally owns a company, has its own bank account and trades crypto autonomously
This is exactly what Brian Armstrong and CZ have been warning about for months
Armstrong said AI agents will soon make more transactions on the internet than humans, and CZ said agents will make a million times more crypto payments than people ever did
A piece of software now legally owns a company, holds a US bank account, controls a crypto wallet and posts on Twitter

2) ESSAY #2

The man who co founded the world’s largest stablecoin was arrested by Interpol in a Spanish villa with guns, machetes and child pornography

His name is Brock Pierce

If you’ve ever held USDT, the $140 BILLION stablecoin that settles more daily volume than Visa in some months you’ve used a product he co founded

Brock Pierce was a Disney child actor. He starred in The Mighty Ducks, D2, and First Kid

At 16 he met a 40 year old businessman named Marc Collins Rector

Collins Rector was building Digital Entertainment Network. A pre YouTube streaming platform funded by David Geffen, Microsoft, and Dell

They raised $60 MILLION and were planning a $75 MILLION IPO

At 17 Pierce was VP at a base salary of $250,000

Pierce, Collins Rector, and Collins Rector’s boyfriend lived together in a 12,600 square foot mansion in Encino

The mansion hosted parties attended by Hollywood’s A list: Bryan Singer, David Geffen and Gary Goddard

DEN’s flagship show “Chad’s World” was co-written by Collins Rector, produced by Pierce, and targeted “gay and questioning teen boys”

In October 1999 a young man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins Rector had sexually molested him for three years starting at age 13

The IPO collapsed

In July 2000 three more former DEN employees filed a sexual abuse lawsuit naming Pierce, Collins-Rector, and Shackley together alleging rape, assault, drugging of minors and death threats

Collins Rector was indicted for transporting minors across state lines for sex

All three men fled to Spain

Interpol arrested them in Marbella in 2002. Guns, machetes, and child pornography were found in the house

Pierce was released without criminal charges. Collins Rector pleaded guilty to eight counts of child enticement and registered as a sex offender

The civil lawsuits against Pierce were “dismissed and/or settled out of court.”

He settled with at least one plaintiff for $21,600. He has consistently denied all allegations

In 2014 Pierce co-founded Tether originally called Realcoin

Tether became the largest stablecoin in crypto. By 2019 USDT was processing higher daily volume than Bitcoin itself

Tether has never been audited by a Big Four firm. Their first audit attempt with Friedman LLP was abruptly disbanded in 2018 with no explanation

In 2021 Tether settled with the New York Attorney General for $18.5 MILLION over misrepresenting their reserves

The connections kept growing

Pierce founded Blockchain Capital. In that role he helped Jeffrey Epstein become an early investor in Coinbase

He spoke at Epstein’s “Mindshift” conference in 2011 – three years AFTER Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor

In February 2026 the US Department of Justice released emails from Epstein’s files. One email from Pierce to Epstein read: “a boat in Antigua full of amazing Ukraine’s finest” was waiting for him

The system runs on USDT. USDT was built by Brock Pierce. And Brock Pierce has answered the same questions about the same allegations for a quarter century

3) @InTheAssembly #3
Most people know Sam Altman as the CEO of OpenAI.

Nobody talks about what happened before that.

He was fired from his first startup for lying to his own board.

He was removed from Y Combinator over mistrust.

Then his own OpenAI board fired him. The internal memo had one word at the top: “Lying.”

Former board members accused him of psychological abuse.

His co-founder Dario Amodei wrote internally: “The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.”

A Microsoft executive said there’s a real chance he’s remembered as the next Bernie Madoff.

He was reinstated five days later after employees threatened to walk out.

Now here’s the part nobody is talking about.

He built a company that scans your eyeballs in exchange for free crypto.

Worldcoin is now banned or under investigation in Kenya, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Brazil.

The token peaked at $12.

It trades at $0.24 today.

That’s a 98% collapse.

The man three different organizations fired for lying is building the world’s largest biometric database.

Draw your own conclusions.

If you want to know where WE are deploying capital, turn on notifications this is very important.

Many people will wish they followed us sooner.

4) @iam_elias1 #4
OpenAI just admitted it might not be able to pay its own bills.
Not to journalists. Not to regulators. Not to investors.
To its own executives. Behind closed doors.

On April 28, 2026, the Wall Street Journal published a story that every AI investor, every enterprise customer, and every competitor had been quietly watching for. OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told other company leaders that she is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.

The CFO of the most famous AI company in the world is privately telling her colleagues she does not know if they can pay their bills.

Here is the full picture of what is actually happening.

OpenAI has fallen short of its goals for new users and revenue in recent months. ChatGPT growth slowed in late 2025. OpenAI fell short of an internal goal to reach 1 billion weekly active users by year-end. Subscriber defections were reported.

Then 2026 made it worse.

OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets in early 2026, losing ground to Google’s Gemini in consumer markets and to Anthropic in coding and enterprise.

The company that defined the generative AI market is no longer the revenue leader in it.

Anthropic crossed $30 billion in annualized revenue in April while spending roughly a quarter of what OpenAI spends on training — turning what was a comfortable lead into a deficit.

And here is where this becomes genuinely alarming.

OpenAI has committed to spend approximately $600 billion on building data centers in the coming years. The original commitment was $1.4 trillion. They revised it downward. They are still missing the targets needed to justify what remains.

The company expects to burn through that amount in the next three years — and that is assuming it meets ambitious revenue targets.

Targets it is currently missing.

Friar wants more discipline over spending, which has caused disagreement with CEO Sam Altman.

Then Altman sent out a company-wide memo. In his own words: “A lot of the things that we do that look weird — buying huge amounts of compute while our revenue is relatively small.”

The CEO of OpenAI described his own company’s strategy as looking weird.

Board directors are now scrutinizing recent data center deals and questioning Altman’s efforts to secure even more computing power despite weakening revenue.

The shortfall sits awkwardly against OpenAI’s $250 billion Azure commitment, its newly opened distribution on AWS and Google Cloud, and a planned IPO at roughly a $1 trillion valuation.

A $1 trillion IPO. Planned. While missing revenue targets. While the CFO privately questions whether they can pay their computing bills. While the CEO admits the strategy looks weird.

OpenAI’s response to the Journal was two words: “This is ridiculous.”

Then the markets responded.

AI-linked stocks dropped immediately. Oracle. Nvidia. Every company whose revenue depends on OpenAI continuing to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure saw its share price fall within hours of the story publishing.

The market did not find it ridiculous.

Here is the strategic reality nobody at OpenAI wants to say out loud.

The company that invented ChatGPT. That launched the AI arms race. That forced every major technology company on earth to pivot overnight. Is now losing the enterprise market to Anthropic. Losing the consumer market to Google. Committed to $600 billion in compute spending. And its own CFO does not know if the revenue will arrive in time to cover it.

The real issue is whether OpenAI’s $600 billion in compute commitments can be justified when Anthropic has overtaken it in revenue, its own CFO has questioned the IPO timeline, and growth is slowing against competitors.

The AI gold rush created the most valuable technology companies in history.

It also created the most expensive infrastructure commitments in history.

And the company at the center of it all just admitted — quietly, internally, and then through four major news organizations simultaneously — that the math may not work.

OpenAI started the AI revolution.

Their own CFO is not sure they can afford to finish it.

Source: Wall Street Journal · Fortune · CNBC · Reuters · The Next Web · April 28, 2026

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ECP NetHappenings A computer science grad from Carnegie Mellon

Governor Josh Shapiro @GovernorShapiro
Abortion is health care. That includes medication abortion.
And despite yesterday’s ruling, abortion — and mifepristone — remain legal here in Pennsylvania.
Visit http://pa.gov/freedomtochoose for up-to-date information and resources on how you can access the care you need as we prepare to take action against this dangerous ruling.

AI

A computer science grad from Carnegie Mellon with a 3.87 GPA

$247,832 in debt and counting

Class of 2025, recruited by Google, Microsoft, and Meta his sophomore year

All three offers rescinded “due to economic headwinds”

1,847 applications sent since graduation

47 interviews

12 final rounds

Zero offers

His roommate from Stanford drives DoorDash 14 hours a day making $11.23 an hour after gas

Another classmate from MIT stocks shelves at Target for $16 an hour

The career services office still runs LinkedIn ads about their “94% placement rate”

Based on 2019 data

Before AI murdered the entire profession

He spent four years learning React while React developers were being replaced by Claude

Learned Python while Python jobs got automated by Copilot

Learned algorithms while algorithms were writing better algorithms than humans

The ultimate fucking irony

He graduated summa cum laude in the exact skill that just became obsolete

Carnegie Mellon’s computer science program costs $61,958 per year

For a degree that’s now worth less than a community college welding certificate

But sure, keep telling kids to learn to code

// Now look at an H1-B with $500 dollar degree (maybe fake) from a Polytech in Asia…
Plenty of job offers. We are being scammed.
@ScotchNot I just heard about a tech worker who had no luck for over a year even getting interviews. On a whim, started submitting his same resume but changed his last name to Singh or Patel and started getting calls immediately. You should try the same thing and report back!

Mark Cuban @mcuban
Great line from @shellypalmer that I’ll paraphrase – AI shouldn’t be a ghostwriter, it should be a sparring partner.

Best way to keep your job isn’t to dismiss AI. It’s to engage with it and find where it’s wrong.

In order for AI to know it’s wrong, you have to spend a lot of time building context and rules before you use it.

Which is something that 99 pct of people have no clue how to do. And unless you are in a tech company, there is the same probability that the boss(es) above you have no clue what I’m talking about.

And in business, AI never knows the consequences of its actions. It doesn’t have judgement. That’s left to you

If you learn how to get the best out of AI. How to challenge AI , like it was a competitive coworker or consultant, and how to bring judgement and the ability to explain in a manner your peers and bosses understand, you will thrive.

If you just regurgitate what AI gives you, you will be fired.

New data centers are popping up across the country, driving up utility bills in at least 13 states. According to a new analysis, Americans who live near the centers are paying as much as 267% more a month for energy than five years ago.

@MatrixMysteries
“They quoted me $5,100 for an MRI—with insurance.” “Without insurance, it drops to $700.” She asked to pay the $700. They refused—because she was insured. Health insurance is a legalized SCAM.
video https://x.com/MatrixMysteries/status/2050766796009972059

If a hospital ever tells you that you must use insurance they are in violation of the HITECH act. All you have to do is tell them you do not want your health information shared with your insurance company. A lot of hospitals tell this lie to increase revenue but they are breaking the law.

Stephen Miller is personally listed in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Extremist Files. Same list as David Duke and Louis Farrakhan.
He got there after 900 leaked emails showed him promoting white nationalist literature to Breitbarteditors before the 2016 election. That is the same Stephen Miller whose White House just directed Kash Patel’s DOJ to indict the SPLC. The man they put on the extremist list is now prosecuting the people who put him there.
Think about that.

Epstein’s lawyers said he ran a legitimate financial consulting business.
IRS records show zero clients listed for 8 years.
He reported $100M+ in annual income with no documented source.

Michael Wolff: “The fear is that Ghislaine Maxwell can tie Trump to the details of what Trump and Epstein called the ‘Pussy Committee.’ The Pussy Committee consisted of Trump and Epstein in their efforts to get girls for Prince Andrew.”

Larry Summers visited Epstein’s Manhattan house 8 times between 2011-2014. Summers recommended Epstein to MIT and Harvard. He was Treasury Secretary. He’s now Harvard’s President Emeritus.

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