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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, a roundup of the past week’s top stories at the intersection of technology and politics.
Musk’s Tesla troubles grow
In April, Tesla’s year-on-year sales plummeted 49% in Europe as the brand suffers from a deep-seated angst on the continent due to Elon Musk’s efforts to interfere in European politics and the influence the Tesla CEO has wielded over the Trump administration.
Read more at CNBC.
DOGE on the hunt
Antonio Gracias, a billionaire investor who’s worked in the Trump administration’s dubiously titled Department of Government Efficiency, recently revealed how the techies in the group are sifting through federal Social Security data in an attempt to find evidence for Donald Trump’s conspiratorial claims about immigrants’ voting in federal elections.
Read more at NPR.
MAGA-fueled brain drain
Foreign science organizations are looking to poach U.S. scientists who have been fired from federal jobs or had their research stopped as a result of the administration’s withholding of grant funding. Scientists in the United States have ushered in cutting-edge developments for all sorts of tech, including the internet and cellphones. But Trump’s authoritarian crackdown on programs he deems “wasteful” or “woke” risks sending some of the smartest minds in America abroad.
Read more in the Los Angeles Times.
Fool’s gold
The cryptocurrency event hosted at one of Trump’s private golf clubs last week was an ethical minefield, and few people appear to have made out better than celebrity-linked crypto bro Justin Sun, who’s allegedly the top investor in Trump’s meme coin while dealing with federal scrutiny of his business ventures.
Here’s Sun celebrating a gold watch he claimed he received as a gift.
The White House hasn’t answered MSNBC’s request for comment about who gave Sun the watch. But you can read my article on the crypto dinner here.
Media Matters under a microscope
My colleague Steve Benen published a piece on the Trump administration’s targeting of Media Matters, a liberal watchdog whose monitoring of far-right conservatives and extremism has angered MAGA figures like Musk.
Read Benen’s post here.
Trump goes Apple-picking
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s years of glad-handing Trump have reached a pivotal moment now that Trump has threatened to place a 25% tariff on Apple products unless the company moves more of its production to the United States.
The Hill published a breakdown explaining how the man Trump once mistakenly referred to as “Tim Apple” has tried to tread lightly around the president across his two terms in office — and how this delicate relationship appears to be unraveling.
Read more here.
Money talks
Following tech billionaire Bill Gates’ vow to donate nearly all of his wealth by the year 2045 to make sure “no mom, child or baby dies of a preventable cause,” health professionals Mona Hanna and Miriam Laker-Oketta recently argued in The Washington Post that “such a bold goal will require a powerful but overlooked tool: giving mothers cash. Not advice. Not training. Just money — with no strings attached.”
Together, they make a compelling argument — one that NGOs and government institutions alike should heed — about what true philanthropy looks like.
Read more in The Washington Post.
Shaheen seeks assurances
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., is pushing the Trump administration to get Musk and other DOGE employees to certify that they won’t use federal data for personal gain. On this particular point, Shaheen and Trump adviser Steve Bannon are in agreement.
Read my blog on Shaheen’s letter here.