The Trump campaign employed VanAkin between June and October. He received $14,000 in payments labelled “advance consulting & per diem” — for planning logistics ahead of campaign rallies — and $16,000 in travel reimbursements, according to FEC filings.

Musk's Tesla stake rose by $111 billion — 65% — last year. All but $2 billion of Musk’s Tesla gain and about 98% of what other Tesla shareholders gained came after Election Day, when Musk began hanging out extensively with Donald Trump and started calling himself Trump’s “first buddy.

Fresh from pouring his money and energies into helping Donald Trump win reelection, Elon Musk has trained his sights on Europe, setting off alarm bells among politicians across the continent. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany,

In a conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X, Musk concurred with her assertion that Adolf Hitler was a communist and pushed disinformation about migrants coming into the US.

The publicity was a potential boon for AfD, which has been frozen out of mainstream politics in part because its leaders have downplayed Nazi atrocities.

Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data — data generated by AI models themselves — is the path forward. “The only way to supplement [real-world data] is with synthetic data, where the AI creates [training data],” he said. “With synthetic data … [AI] will sort of grade itself and go through this process of self-learning.”

Elon Musk walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, saying Wednesday that half that amount would be “an epic outcome.”

In a Wednesday interview on X, Elon Musk said cuts of $2 trillion to the federal budget might not be possible and was a "best-case outcome."

Elon Musk, who U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to oversee a government cost-cutting effort, acknowledged that his declared goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending from the $6.8 trillion federal budget would be a long shot.