Elon Musk Spent $366M On The Midterms — Will It Work?

Ed Elson is joined by Bradley Tusk to break down how Elon Musk is funding the midterms, whether that investment will pay off, and how he sees the elections playing out. Then, Gil Luria joins to unpack the sell-off in chip stocks and what he makes of valuations in the sector. Finally, Ed shares his take on Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation. Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, and writer. Gil Luria is the Head of Technology Research at D. A. Davidson. Vote for Prof G Markets at the Signal Awards here Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 1:34Speaker 03

  Money markets matter. If money is evil, then that building is hell.

• 1:44Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is October 14th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

• 1:52Ed Elson?

  The S and P 500 was flat after New York's Fed president eased fears of an aggressive rate hiking cycle. Meanwhile, the Dow and the Nasdaq declined. The yield on 10-year Treasury slipped from last week's highs. Brent crude held above $106 per barrel. And finally, earnings season kicked off with the banks. JP Morgan Chase stock fell after posting a rare profit miss due to reduced deal making and bond trading. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs stock rose as a strong quarter of equities trading led them to an earnings beat. And by the way, we have been nominated for three Signal Awards. So if you like our show, please head to vote dot signal award dot com. Cast your ballots for us in each of these three categories. Best video podcast, best daily podcast, and best money and finance podcast.

• 2:37Ed Elson?

  We'll also leave a link in the description to make it easier for you. Thank you so much. Okay. What else is happening? The world's richest man is quietly reshaping America's political map again. Elon Musk has now spent $276 million on his super PAC and other Republican groups over the past three months alone. That brings his total spending for the 2025 2026 election cycle to roughly $366 million, which is well beyond the $290 million that he spent in 2024 to help return Trump and the Republicans to power. But Musk isn't alone. According to the New York Times, 20 big donors have spent a combined $1.2 billion

• 3:20Ed Elson?

  on this year's elections, all but two backed Republicans. Meanwhile, AI and crypto groups spent $127 million across 100 primaries this year, and they have won roughly 90% of them. So joining us to discuss the money that is shaping the midterms, we're speaking with Bradley Tusk, venture capitalist, political strategist, and writer. Bradley, welcome back to the show. I would like to start with that $366 million number.

• 3:48Ed Elson?

  Your reactions.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  It's obviously a big number, right? You can't say that it's not. And I'm not going to sit here and say that it won't have an impact because it will. With that said, let me give a somewhat hot take on all of this, which is, I think that the role, the perception of the import of money in campaigns is overrated. I think that most money in a political campaign goes to broadcast television commercials. So the reason why broadcast TV is so expensive is by definition, there's a limited amount of spectrum. So there's a limited amount of time in the day. So therefore there is a market value for a 30 second ad, a 60 second ad, whatever it might be. And that's, that can be really high.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  So in a place like New York City, it could easily be a million dollars for, you know, a couple of days worth of 60 second ads. However, not that many people watch broadcast TV anymore, right? I see it when I watch sports, some people who watch news, but by and large, people are watching their TV on streaming. And there are some ads on streaming, but most of the time people don't see it or they're able to filter it out. Tremendous amounts of money get spent on direct mail. So that's like when you open your mailbox and there's annoying kind of big oversized postcards that are saying that someone's a pedophile or whatever it might be. Those go in the garbage. And I think they go in the garbage without people even glancing at them most of the time. And if you look at a lot of the more recent political phenomenons, whether it's Donald

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Trump on the right or Zara Mondani on the left, they didn't win because they had the most money. They won because they had the most energy and because they fit the zeitgeist of the moment. So Mondami won because affordability was an issue that for the people who do vote in a primary in New York City elections, that mattered the most. And he was a charismatic candidate who played incredibly well on social media. And through social media and grassroots, he was able to win. And in the general election, he ran against Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo spent 70 million, Mondami spent 17. Mondami destroyed him. And the reason why is Cuomo's ads were just the most conventional, you know, 6 PM on NBC News. And I don't think they were reaching anybody.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  And Trump was outspent by both Harris and Hillary Clinton, and he beat both of them. And so I think that while money is certainly a problem in politics, it's less of one than people think.

• 6:14Ed Elson?

  He said in May 20, revive this Elon Musk. He said that, he said, quote, "In terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future." And then suddenly, suddenly he's come out and he's spent more money on this election than ever before, which tells me that he probably feels desperate in some way. I guess, number one, what is the ROI? How does he believe that the ROI is going to come to fruition for him by investing so much in these midterms? And two, is it going to be for waste? Because it looks as though the Republicans are not polling so well.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  I think it largely will be for waste. But I think the ROI for him comes in two things. One is the reality, which is that for the people that he helps elect, they owe him. And whether his needs are for SpaceX or for Tesla or the boring company or something else, he can call it upon them for help. He is probably also trying to stop the House from flipping because when the House Oversight Committee starts grilling people left and right, private citizens especially, don't have the same ability to not, to fight subpoenas that government officials do. And so Musk, Jared Kushner, they're going to be very frequent attendees in Congress in the coming year or two. However, with that said, his money's not going to change the fact that the House is going to flip. The other thing is that for him, there's value in the perception, right?

• 7:33Speaker 05

  So for as long as politicians think that fundraising is really, really important, if he is seen as the biggest spender, that creates a certain amount of fear and deterrence that's useful for him anyway. And for normal people, that kind of money obviously is unimaginable. But if you're literally worth a trillion dollars and it's a rounding error of a rounding error, it might be worth it purely for perception stakes.

• 7:56Ed Elson?

  Just looking at the amount of billionaire spending now, 300 billionaires accounted for a fifth of all federal campaign contributions in the 2024 election. These numbers continue to rise with every election cycle. You're saying that they probably have less of an impact than we think, but is there a point at which they do start to influence our democracy?

• 8:19Speaker 05

  It's the other way, actually. I think that it has an impact until a certain point, and then the returns become diminishing very fast. There's only so many ads you can see before you tune them out completely. And when everyone is saying the same thing all the time and just lobbying themselves back and forth, you just stop paying attention. And so I think that the first money in might actually be impactful, but then it becomes less impactful. But keep in mind, if you're a billionaire, one, you probably became a billionaire because you believe that money is the only thing that really matters. So therefore you're going to over index on it. And two, that's the thing you have, right? You know, your endorsement isn't Elon Musk's endorsement would hurt most candidates, right?

• 9:02Speaker 05

  So you can't really impact things in other ways because simply it's, this is your only real resource. And I think there's still a distinction of how you use money. So for example, my consulting firm runs a super PAC called Invest in Tomorrow, which is a clean energy super PAC. And they've taken out some of the Freedom Caucus members who have been really anti-clean energy. But the way they've done that is to just try to be really clever. So for example, Chip Roy, who's a congressman from Dallas, ran for Texas Attorney General. He was way ahead when we got in the race. And we started running ads not on broadcast news and not even about clean energy. Our first ad was called Not MAGA Enough. And the whole point was Chip Roy is not nice enough to Donald Trump and isn't conservative

• 9:47Speaker 05

  enough. And we only ran the ads on Rumble and Truth Social. And so we were reaching people who were super high propensity voters in a Republican primary. And Roy ended up losing that race by 11 points. And we've done that multiple times with other people. So money can be helpful, but that whole effort so far has spent $6 million. I mean, we're not talking about a lot of money. And three incumbent members of Congress have already gone down. Several other primaries have already been won. So it's not that money can't be helpful, but it has diminishing returns quickly. And the very nature of technology has changed the way that you reach voters, which makes things that are free or very cheap like social media really impactful and makes things that

• 10:29Speaker 05

  are highly expensive and outdated like broadcast television much less impactful.

• 10:34Ed Elson?

  Do you have any thoughts on how these midterms will play out? You said the House will flip. Any thoughts on the Senate?

• 10:40Speaker 05

  I mean, the Senate, look, I mean, you know, you can look on Kalshi or anything like that, you would get the sense that roughly 52. Democrats will end up with about 52 seats. But the question then becomes, to what end? I mean, ultimately, I dislike Trump so much that I'm for anything that rebukes him, even though I'm an independent. But, you know, whether that Democrats have the House and the Senate or just the House, no legislation is moving. So, yeah, confirmation of judges, there's some things at the margins. But in the Senate, you still need 60 votes to invoke cloture to stop a filibuster. Democrats are not going to have anywhere near 60. And I would argue that there's actually not going to be much impact on tech in the midterms, simply because Trump is so anti-regulation, he's going to veto things, they're not going

• 11:25Speaker 05

  to override him. And in states, there will be lots of legislation that does move, but on a bipartisan basis. You have Republican governors go after AI and Democratic governors go after AI. They're going to go after data centers. So fundamentally, I actually think that despite all of the attention and all of the money, at least when it comes to my industry of tech, you're going to see relatively uniform results that would have been exactly the same kind of regardless of who wins or loses in a few weeks.

• 11:51Ed Elson?

  Is there a world in which receiving money from these billionaires who are becoming increasingly unpopular in popular culture? Is there a world in which it actually hurts you that if it comes out that, you know, you receive money from Elon Musk, that's a bad thing?

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Sam Altman is a good example of that. So there was a primary for Congress in New York City. It was the main Manhattan seat, so probably some ways the most high-profile congressional district in the country. And Alex Boris was one of the two leading candidates over a bunch. But OpenAI came out very aggressively against him because he passed frontier model regulation in Albany, and that propelled his campaign. Because when voters heard that Sam Altman hated Alex Boris, that made them like Alex Boris. Now Boris lost, but Sam Altman inadvertently in trying to kill Boris, ended up helping them. So, yes, I do think these companies have to be very careful because at least in certain things like social media, data centers, forms of AI, like frontier models and hyperscalers,

• 12:50Speaker 05

  antithropy is so great that it could actually have a collateral damage effect.

• 12:55Ed Elson?

  What do you think the future of money in politics will look like?

• 12:59Speaker 05

  The amount might continue to increase. I think the efficacy will continue to decrease. And I think that it's going to be a while till this is fully understood and realized because there's a massive industrial complex of people who make money through the money of politics. So they're doing nothing to disillusion billionaires of their belief. And billionaires fundamentally believe that the only thing in life that matters is money, especially their money. And so they're not going to be too fast to say, oh, no, I don't think there's actually an ROI here. And so while I don't think that money most of the time is going to be all that well spent, I think it will continue to be spent.

• 13:34Ed Elson?

  All right. Bradley Tusk is venture capitalist, political strategist and writer. Bradley, always love having you. Thank you.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

• 13:44Ed Elson?

  After the break, chip stocks keep sliding. And a reminder to please vote for us at the Signal Awards. Go to vote.signalaward.com. We really appreciate it.

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• 17:25Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. AI bubble fears are spooking investors yet again, and the chipmakers are tumbling. The worst of it hit South Korea yesterday, where semiconductor stocks make up most of their market. Korea's Kospi fell 5.5%. SK Hynix dropped more than 3% and Samsung fell more than 7%. The worries also hit the US chipmakers as well. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell for a fifth straight day and Micron dropped roughly 5%. Meanwhile, the AI bubble warnings from banks around the world keep on rolling in. The IMF warned yesterday that a sharp drop in AI investment could cut global GDP by

• 18:09Ed Elson?

  1.1% by 2028. Last week, Bank of America's analysts said that a bubble is building in tech stocks. An analyst at Jefferies wrote that the AI boom will likely end in, quote, "massive capital destruction." So is Wall Street changing its mind about AI? Here to break it down, we're speaking with Gil Luria, Head of Technology Research at DA Davidson. Gil, great to see you. Thank you for joining us. So chip stocks are having a rough week. The Kospi is down, which of course is largely comprised of these chip companies and these memory companies. What is triggering this sell-off right now? What are investors so worried about?

• 18:50Gil Luria?

  Well, there's plenty of headlines to worry about between misunderstandings about OpenAI's gross and net revenue, Chinese competition, pushback on data centers, the politicization of AI. There's plenty of those kinds of headlines that keep coming and the market's very jittery. But, you know, we're financial analysts and we deal in earnings reports and cash flows and income statements. And all we've heard over the last several weeks, I want to just be clear about that, from all the companies throughout the AI value chain is not only are they reporting very good results, they're saying the results and the market is better than it was three months ago.

• 19:34Gil Luria?

  They're saying that their outlook is better and raising guidance. And they're saying that their visibility is better than it's ever been. That's everybody from the companies that make chip equipment, the companies that make chips, to the hyperscalers and the model companies. So I think where investors get jittery is they just don't believe it can last. And that's very understandable. And on one hand, time will tell. On the other hand, the companies have to do a better job of explaining why it is that they say they have such good visibility.

• 20:02Ed Elson?

  Some of the recent comments we've seen from bank research that I've just collected here, Barclays sounded, Barclays desk sounded quite concerned. They said, quote, "Total AI revenues running at around $250 billion is not going to cut it when the ecosystem needs well in excess of a trillion. I've yet to be presented with a credible framework as to where this money is going to come." Jeffrey said, "It can no longer be assumed that large language models will ever be profitable. There is a 2008 real estate credit angle to this AI boom." Clearly, in terms of the supply chain of the chip manufacturers, as you say, the earnings are

• 20:42Ed Elson?

  great and the money's coming in and it appears that it will continue to over the next 12 months. It seems like a lot of the concerns are kind of around as you go down the value chain or you go down the supply chain, where a lot of the large language model companies, the AI labs, they haven't demonstrated profitability. It's not clear how sustainable this ecosystem actually is and for how long these extraordinary profits for the chip manufacturers will last. What is your view on those concerns at this point?

• 21:17Gil Luria?

  Yeah, I'm going to take the other side of a lot of those arguments. Let's just start with the fact that in the next few hours, Anthropic's going to give us for the first time in a little bit more of an official manner, what its revenue is. And as they tell us what their revenue run rate is, it's likely that combining their revenue run rate with OpenAI's revenue run rate, we're going to be well in excess of $100 billion. That number a year ago was maybe $10 billion and a year before that it was zero. That is actual companies and consumers spending on using AI models. By the way, those numbers are probably coming at anywhere between 60 and 80% gross

• 21:57Gil Luria?

  margins, depending on net or gross revenue, which is a very healthy level of margins. Now, OpenAI is probably not cash flow positive. Anthropic may actually be cash flow positive because their growth has been so fast, they couldn't spend fast enough. But on an incremental basis, their revenue is actually quite profitable and is still growing very fast. Now, the nature of long-term investments in an economy are that in year one, you invest the cash, in year two, you get a little bit of profit and that grows in years three, four, five and six. We're really in year one. Of course, we're not generating enough to justify the returns. We need years two, three, four and five to be much more profitable than year

• 22:42Gil Luria?

  one in order to justify the investment we just made. But again, the indications are that companies and consumers are willing to spend AI models 10 times more than last year, twice as much as they were three months ago. And as that growth continues, we are looking at the possibility of having positive returns. I think over the next 12 months, that's the likely trend. Obviously, the bigger question is what happens after that? Do the models get better? Is the diffusion through enterprise technology organizations going to improve? Are we going to use the AI models? Are they going to create real value? Those are bigger questions. But as we look in the next 12 months, the answer is probably yes. It's what's beyond that that is spooking investors.

• 23:25Ed Elson?

  On the question of the profitability of OpenAI and Anthropic, and we will just go with Anthropic for now, and those gross margins, it seems like one of the open questions is how they are calculating those, specifically whether they are stripping out their training costs, which is obviously one of the largest costs that they incur versus their inference costs, which is the cost of actually, you know, running the model versus building the model. So there's an open question that I've yet to understand what the true answer is, is are they factoring that in or are they stripping it out? Plus, there is the question of are they

• 24:06Ed Elson?

  stripping out their revenue sharing agreements with some of these other companies like Amazon? If the answer is that they are stripping them out, does that change your view on the question of sustainability here?

• 24:21Gil Luria?

  Yeah, so we are talking about accounting. So let's just walk through OpenAI numbers because there was so much discussion last week. Let's say that it's $70 billion, including the hyperscaler cut, which is 20 billion. And so $50 billion goes to OpenAI. They're probably making $30 billion of gross margin on that. So that is, the 30 billion is after only the compute expenses, the revenue from inference after compute expenses and after the markup to the hyperscalers. Now, their training cost is likely, which is the next piece, their training cost is likely more than $30 billion right now, absolutely. But that's like saying startup

• 25:02Gil Luria?

  companies that have 80% gross margins but are spending a lot on R and D and sales may not be profitable either. That's where OpenAI is in the cycle. The good news is that the training costs are actually not ramping up faster than revenue. And part of it is that we're starting to train models that are so big that you can only spend so much, you can only have a cluster big enough. So OpenAI may not be profitable, is probably not profitable right now on an overall basis, but it is profitable on a cost, on a gross margin basis, meaning how much revenue are they getting, considering how much they have to spend on compute? And again, I'd say

• 25:42Gil Luria?

  on, we're guessing that on a net basis, that's more like 80% on a gross basis, more like 60%. Those are still pretty healthy margins for a company that didn't exist a few years ago and is still growing very fast.

• 25:57Ed Elson?

  Given the size of their training costs, though, don't you think that in a way, the only thing we should care about is the overall profitability picture? Because, I mean, it just seems like this is a different kind of company where the expenditures of the training are just so enormous. And yes, it's long term. And yes, you know, for any other startup, you might not include that in the gross margin calculation. But I guess the overall profitability picture seems to be quite important here because it's not clear that those training costs will significantly go down in the near future or if they'll ever go away.

• 26:38Gil Luria?

  That's right. Because for Anthropic and OpenAI to continue to have this level of growth and this level of profitability, their models are going to have to get better and therefore they are going to have to spend a lot on training. So it is completely speculative whether they will ever become completely profitable on an overall basis, meaning including the payout to the hyperscalers, the cost of compute and the training. That's why, as Anthropic goes public, it's going to be highly speculative. Because let's not also forget that AI right now, a lot of this spend by consumers and companies is on these two companies. That's not going to be the case forever. There's going to be a whole application layer that gets applied

• 27:20Gil Luria?

  on top of these companies that's going to go to other companies, mostly the hyperscalers. And then there's going to be a really big part of the market that goes to less expensive models, open weight models, open source models. So their market is not necessarily going to continue to grow at the same rate their addressable market. Their ability to grow is very much in question. I'm completely on board with that. But what I would argue is that that revenue to the application layer, that revenue to other models, that revenue based on open source will continue to come into the system and fund the investments, even if it's not Anthropic and OpenAI that are the winner take all that they look like right now.

• 27:59Ed Elson?

  I seem to hear, you know, in the conversation a lot, especially online, that OpenAI and Anthropic are fine. I think where I land on this is they still seem very speculative. They are unique and that they are one and a half trillion dollar, two trillion dollar startups. Startups have a very high failure rate. We're okay with startups losing money because we know that they are extremely risky investments and therefore they might fail. They might go out of business. That is the way I view those two companies. It sounds like we agree that that probability is significantly higher than any other company that we usually talk about in public markets. But your view is that the ecosystem itself will be sustainable with

• 28:42Ed Elson?

  or without them. And therefore, we shouldn't be too worried about some of the companies higher up the chain, the supply chain companies, i.e. the chip companies.

• 28:50Gil Luria?

  That's right. Because when we use an open weight model, open source model, we're still using GPUs, CPUs and memory. It doesn't matter if, whether we're hosting it in a data center, whether they're hosting it on premise, whether it's on the device, we still need GPU or CPU and memory. It really doesn't matter which model it is. But I do think it is important that you're underlining that these two investments are highly speculative. I do think that they have, there's reasons to believe why they can be successful like any other startup. It's really about the team that they have. They have some of the most talented people in the world that are building these AI tools and they continue to find new impressive breakthroughs. And I do think that even in a longer term outlook, it's likely that they will have the

• 29:32Gil Luria?

  high end of the market, the most potent tokens, the ones used for the most mission critical systems are still likely to come from the frontier, which these two companies dominate and Google is kind of an also ran. But the overall spend on AI is likely to be far broader than these two companies and it may end up being far bigger than these two companies.

• 29:55Ed Elson?

  Just looking at the valuations of some of these chip companies, I was taking a look and I was This happens a lot when I look at the chip stocks. I'm surprised that they're actually quite cheap, at least on a forward earnings basis. Just looking at SK Hynix, which has gotten battered, trading at three and a half times forward earnings, Samsung at 3.7, Micron at five. There are some other companies that seem frankly just overvalued. I was just looking at AMD at 51 times. What is your, what is your sense of valuations in the chip sector? And to what extent do you think investors are really pricing in the possibility of some sort of significant correction or crash?

• 30:39Gil Luria?

  Yeah, there's a huge dislocation here. The market is of two minds. There's three or four companies that it's treating as if the cycle's already over. You mentioned them, SK Hynix, Micron, Nvidia, Broadcom. Those are trading at 18 times and four to five times respectively, where much of the semi-complex is still trading at 30, 40, 50 times. So the market is saying, yeah, for every other chip company, we believe the cycle's going through 2030. For those four, no, the cycle's already over. It makes no sense because if the cycle continues through 2030, those four companies will grab most of the profit. Not just will continue to grow, they'll get most of the profit.

• 31:23Gil Luria?

  So it's a big dislocation. Part of it has to do with trading, part of it has to do with law of large numbers. But realistically speaking, that's where the opportunities are, are with those four companies as opposed to the other chip companies that have smaller roles in the AI ecosystem. And yet the market is valuing them as if the AI cycle will definitely continue through 2030.

• 31:45Ed Elson?

  One company that you have flagged as sort of unsustainable, at least that from a financial standpoint, I thought of you when I saw this is CoreWeave because their debt is undergoing a huge sell-off right now. Their unsecured notes are now yielding 15%. What is going on with CoreWeave right now? What does this tell us about the company? And what does this tell us about the larger AI build-out?

• 32:13Gil Luria?

  There's a lot that goes into CoreWeave and why it's a poster child for the risks here, right? I would say that if the AI cycle sputters, or certainly if it doesn't, or if it turns over, CoreWeave is going to be the worst, the first to go. The equity value is going to be zero. And the reason is that it's a poster child for bad behavior, for borrowing at very high rates to build a speculative asset. Again, we're continuing, this is a speculative investment, a speculative asset, and they're borrowing at 9% to fund that. And the returns they're getting are around 1% right now. And at best, they're guiding, they're going to get to 4% or 5%.

• 32:54Gil Luria?

  So I like to, since you have some individual investor viewers, this is like an individual investor taking a margin loan at 9% to buy treasuries that yield 5%. That's destruction of value. That's the essence of CoreWeave. If things don't go well, they will not be able to make their interest payments. They're going to get wiped out.

• 33:15Ed Elson?

  Before we end, can I just get a list of the names you like and the names you don't like in this sector right now? Because I think this has been very informative and helpful.

• 33:24Gil Luria?

  Yeah, in semi land, we talked about the ones we like. So it's primarily Micron, Nvidia, to some extent Broadcom and SK Hynix. In software, there's a group of companies that are doing phenomenally well and they're going to keep doing well. You've got Palantir, Snowflake, Datadog, Shopify, CrowdStrike, extraordinarily good companies that are all benefiting from AI tools getting better. They're adding more and more value. They have accelerating growth. They performed well recently, but there are going to be much bigger companies down the road.

• 33:57Ed Elson?

  And the names you don't like? CoreWeave?

• 33:59Gil Luria?

  That's, that's a good one, yeah. C3 AI, Cerebrus, the, the fakers.

• 34:06Ed Elson?

  Okay. We appreciate that. Gil Luria is Head of Technology Research at DA Davidson. Gil, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

• 34:14Gil Luria?

  Thank you.

• 34:20Ed Elson?

  The White House has asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as the US Ambassador to Greece. This comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that she had solicited $100,000 from a wealthy Trump donor in exchange for access to the president. Messages reveal that Guilfoyle had promised to be his, quote, "Trump ride or die forever and ever," and that she even pledged to lobby the IRS and the Justice Department on his behalf. In exchange, he helped to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included private jet trips to luxury resorts. After announcing that she had been asked to resign, the new White House Press Secretary Katie Zachariah wished the ambassador well, calling her a, quote, "wonderful asset to the team."

• 35:04Ed Elson?

  Yes, aside from the lies, the corruption and the bribery, I am sure she was wonderful. The good news is that at the very least, the White House appears to be doing something about this corruption. I wouldn't have been that surprised if they had just denied the report, called it fake news, or simply ignored it. Instead, they did acknowledge it and they politely asked her to leave. It's a low bar, I know, but it is a bar nonetheless. The question now, though, is if they will do anything about all of the other corruption scandals that have gone unaccounted for. Will they do anything, for example, about Tom Homan, who accepted $50,000 in exchange for his promise to help win government contracts?

• 35:48Ed Elson?

  Meanwhile, he is still running the government's deportation program. Will they do anything about Howard Lutnick, who negotiated a $1.6 billion federal financing deal for a Kazakhstani mining project, which his sons ended up collecting fees on through his investment firm, Cantor Fitzgerald? Will they do anything about Jared Kushner, who actively steered America's Middle East foreign policy, including the decision to go to war with Iran, while also soliciting money for his private fund from Middle Eastern governments and sovereign wealth funds? Or Eric and Don Jr., who invested in 15 private companies right before they inked more than $3 billion worth of federal contracts? Or of course, Trump himself, who traded $220 million in stocks in the first three months

• 36:32Ed Elson?

  of the year while also selling Wall Street early access to his social media posts? Will any of these people be held accountable at all? Or will it just be Kimberly Guilfoyle? Because the truth is that the corruption that Guilfoyle engaged in as ambassador actually pales in comparison to the corruption that we're seeing across the rest of the government. And perhaps that is why they asked her to resign. Perhaps this is their way of saying, see, we dealt with it. We don't like the corruption either. Meanwhile, nothing has been done about all of the other corruption we've seen. And even though Ms. Guilfoyle should probably go to jail, you can also bet that she will be just fine.

• 37:13Ed Elson?

  The White House expects us to just nod along and ignore the corruption that we keep on witnessing every day, every week. But we are keeping the receipts. And until someone ends up accountable, until someone ends up behind bars, I'm sorry, but we will not move on.

• 37:36Ed Elson?

  Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalan, Kristin O'Donoghue and Mia Salvario. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

• 38:04Speaker 07

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• 38:34Speaker 08

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• 39:20Speaker 09

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai slash spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai slash spotify.