“FOUNDATION FUTURE INDUSTRIES LANDS $24 MILLION PENTAGON CONTRACT” screamed the Fox Business Network chyron Thursday morning. Host Maria Bartiromo teed up her segment, explaining that the defense tech startup was developing “autonomous humanoid robots” to help troops “breach enemy sites more safely.”
Bartiromo’s guest? Eric Trump, Foundation Future Industries’ chief strategy adviser who also happens to be the son of the man in charge of the government that doled out the eight-figure contract. The host congratulated Trump and Foundation Future’s founder Sankaet Pathat — also a guest — on landing such a lucrative payday. No mention was made of the clear ethics quandary involved in the president’s administration funneling millions in taxpayer funds toward his family through federal contracts. Then again, the amount given to Foundation Future is barely a drop in the swimming pool of wealth the Trump family has accumulated by leveraging their patriarch’s position over the last 18 months. They clearly feel no need to hide.
Trump — also referred to during the broadcast as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — told Bartiromo that he could see “unlimited uses” for the robots, and mentioned some of his family’s other ventures: hospitality, golf, and crypto, to name a few.
The president has reportedly upped his net worth by billions since returning to the White House, but nearly every member of his immediate family — and even some of his extended family — is also raking in cash. They seem to be completely unbothered if not oblivious to the potential ethical or legal restrictions they’re trampling as they do it. Here’s a brief overview:
Donald Trump Jr.
The eldest child of the president is, in conjunction with his younger brother Eric, overseeing the Trump Organization while his father is in office. Jimmy Carter famously placed his peanut farm in an independent trust, but Trump continues to own the Trump Organization and his sons are running it as their father conducts government business with nations where the business operates, or is looking to operate.
Trump Jr. plays a leading role in his father’s empire, including by serving as director of the Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (TMTG), the parent company of Truth Social. He is also a founding partner of World Liberty Financial (WLF), a financial and crypto company that is majority-owned by the Trump family. His co-founders include his brother Eric, alongside Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of real estate developer Steve Witkoff, whom Trump tapped to serve as his special envoy to the Middle East, and his de-facto conflict envoy.
The fund quickly established itself as a vehicle for shady foreign dealings, inking out a deal with Emirati royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who has sought to craft a deal with the U.S. for advanced AI chips and courted Trump’s support in shielding the U.A.E from sanctions by the International Court of Justice. Tahnoon has been wined and dined by the White House, and his deal with the Trump sons included a $500 million dollar investment as well as a $2 billion partnership deal between WLF and the international cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which is banned in the United States after being accused of violating anti money-laundering laws. TRON blockchain protocol creator Justin Sun (who coincidentally had an SEC investigation against him dropped) and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (who coincidentally received a pardon from the president) also became involved in WLF.
WLF isn’t the Trump kids’ only crypto venture. In 2025, Trump Jr. and Eric Trump founded American Bitcoin, which Forbes estimates is increasing Jr.’s net worth by as much as $80 million. The Trump administration has responded extremely favorably to the requests and lobbying of major cryptocurrency firms, with President Trump regularly declaring his intent to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.” The president has adopted an extremely light regulatory strategy for the controversial financial systems, launched his own meme coin, and killed attempts to conduct oversight by agencies like the United States Securities and Exchange Commission — all while his family builds a crypto empire.
As the director of TMTG, he is overseeing a partnership with Crypto.com to bring an in-platform prediction market to Truth Social. He is meanwhile on the advisory board of Polymarket, the largest global prediction market. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration has been hesitant to regulate prediction markets, and has undermined efforts by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to crack down on rampant insider trading on the platform.
Trump Jr., also serves as a board member to PSQ Holdings, an anti-woke financial tech company, and is an adviser to the publicly traded investment and acquisition firm New America Acquisition I Corp., which according to its website “seeks to merge with growth-stage U.S. businesses leading in areas such as automation, data infrastructure, and energy modernization.”
Forbes estimates that Donald Trump Jr.’s net worth has jumped from roughly $30 million to $300 million.
Eric Trump
He may be the second son, but he’s outpacing all of his siblings in terms of accumulated wealth, with Forbes estimating that his net worth increased tenfold to $400 million since his father’s reelection.
Eric Trump is partner to his brother on many a business venture, including his position as executive vice president of the Trump Organization, and a founder at both World Liberty Financial, and American Bitcoin.
His independent business ventures are some of the most blatant instances of grift of the second Trump term so far. Earlier this month he announced that Foundation Future Industries — a defense robotics company where he serves as a board member and advisor — had received a $24 million contract from the Department of Defense, raising questions about a direct conflict of interest between the federal government and the president’s family.
Eric Trump is largely responsible for the rapid growth of the Trump family’s hotel business — particularly in the Middle East and countries that have courted the president’s favor. The Trump Organization announced the construction of a luxury tower in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, less than a month after Trump won the 2024 election, a luxury golf course and residential complex is in development in Muscat, Oman. The “coming soon” webpage for the Trump Organization boasts commercial, residential, hotel and gold projects in India, the United Arab Emirates, Romania, Indonesia, the Maldives, and Georgia.
President Trump has had a close relationship with Saudi Arabia since his first term, dismissing the murder of Washington Post journalist and American resident Jamal Khashoggi on the alleged orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president views the kingdom as one of his most prominent geopolitical supporters, and hosted bin Salman in the Oval Office in November, touting the crown prince and the hundreds of billions of dollars Saudi Arabia is investing in the United States as the Trump family launches business ventures there..
Eric Trump is expected to accompany his father on a diplomatic trip to China next month, and concerns are already being raised that the first son will soon be announcing another lucrative deal made on the back of the presidency.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump
Ivanka Trump may have tried to make herself invisible after her father’s first term, but her husband is everywhere.
Jared Kushner, the son of disgraced New York real estate mogul Charles Kushner, and son-in-law to the president, is doing a lot of peace negotiations in the Middle East — and collecting a lot of checks from the involved parties.
Kushner’s Miami-based investment firm Affinity Partners has been a dumping ground for massive investments from global figures, even as Kushner serves as an unofficial leader for diplomatic negotiations concerning the Iran war. In 2024, his firm received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and manages over $4.8 billion in foreign funds.
He has reportedly collected over $100 million in management fees from the Saudis, who reportedly supported Trump’s entry into the war. Even as he spearheads Trump’s Gaza “redevelopment plan” and acts as one of the primary negotiators in Pakistani mediated talks attempting to bring an end to the war initiated by his father-in-law, Affinity Partners is courting over $5 billion additional in largely Middle Eastern investments.
The primary party in the deal is Saudi Arabia. In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles last month, House Oversight and Senate Finance Committee Ranking Members Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) raised concerns that Kushner could be “subject to conflicts of interest which could threaten the security of the American people.”
Ivanka Trump is a partner in her husband’s financial firm, Affinity Partners, but seems intent on staying out of her father’s spotlight.
Tiffany Trump and Michael Boulos
Tiffany Trump has long remained on the margins of her family’s business empire, but that doesn’t mean she and her husband Michael Boulos aren’t cashing in on Trump 2.0. Boulos, the son of Lebanese transportation millionaire and diplomat Massad Boulos, married Tiffany Trump in 2022 — and almost immediately became a lot more successful. Boulous took a cut from the sale of a superyacht to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, while working for his cousin, a yacht broker. Reporting later revealed that the yacht had not been completed amid claims that the brokerage firm had illicitly up-charged Kushner by several million dollars, and attempted to conceal the true value of the craft.
Boulous is currently under investigation by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee over allegations that he charged a Saudi businessman $100,000 for an introduction and photos with Trump at his own wedding to Tiffany.
Boulos’ father currently serves as a senior adviser to Trump on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs, raising concerns that business dealings conducted by the younger Boulos could be leveraged to gain access to diplomatic channels.
Melania Trump
Melania Trump made headlines last year when Amazon announced it was paying a whopping $40 million for the right to produce an authorized documentary about Trump, which many viewed as part of Jeff Bezos’ bid to curry favor with Trump upon his reelection. The Amazon billionaire dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago shortly after his 2024 election victory, donated to his inaugural fund, and announced that his newspaper The Washington Post — long a nemesis in the president’s vendetta against the free press — would transition its editorial style to focus on “free markets and personal liberties.”
Melania Trump promoted her documentary while hosting freed Israeli hostages at the White House in February.
Barron Trump
As of late 2025, Trump’s youngest child — just 20 — is worth an estimated $150 million. Most of that valuation comes from his investment stake in World Liberty Financial, the financial firm run by his two older half-brothers. Barron also holds a large stake in World Liberty Financials “stablecoin,” USD1, which has an overall market cap of $2.6 billion.
The Rise of the Digital Oligarchy
On Jan. 11, 1994, I drove to UCLA’s Royce Hall to hear Vice President Al Gore deliver the keynote address at the Information Superhighway Conference. I was in the early stages of building Intertainer, which would become one of the first video-on-demand companies. The 2,000 people crowded into that auditorium did not know it, but they were crossing a threshold. The roster of speakers read like a who’s who of industrial power: TCI’s John Malone, Rupert Murdoch, Sony’s Michael Schulhof, Barry Diller of QVC. These were among the richest and most commanding figures in American communications. Today, their combined force and fortunes are a rounding error beside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Andreessen. The world the Hollywood moguls walked back out into would not, in any meaningful sense, be the world they had left.
Gore’s UCLA speech now reads like a confident moment in the early‑Clinton fantasia of managed modernization: the assumption that a lightly guided market, properly “incentivized,” could be coaxed into building a new civic commons. He framed the whole project as a public utility constructed with private capital, insisting that “the nation needs private investment to complete the construction of the National Information Infrastructure. And competition is the single most critical means of encouraging that private investment.” What is striking, in retrospect, is not the technophilia but the blithe certainty that “competition” would safeguard pluralism and access, that state‑designed market rules would prevent the emergence of bottlenecks and private tollbooths. The actual trajectory of the internet — toward a stack dominated at each layer by a handful of firms from carriers to platforms to ad brokers — renders the scene almost allegorical: an administration hymning competition as the guarantor of openness while midwifing, in practice, the consolidated, quasi‑monopolistic order that would eventually narrow and privatize the very public sphere it imagined itself to be creating.
For 150 years since the Industrial Revolution, Americans had trusted that science and technology would bind the nation together, just as railroads and the telegraph had once compressed its continental distances. The historian John P. Diggins observed that “whereas the very nature of politics in America implied division and conflict, science was seen as bringing forth cohesion and consensus.” That faith was about to be tested to destruction.
Within two years, Gore and Newt Gingrich collaborated to pass the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and buried inside it was a provision — Section 230 — that would prove more consequential than anything else in the bill. It granted the new platforms a liability shield unavailable to any other business in America: immunity from responsibility for the content their users generated, moderated, or amplified. The effect was to hand the architects of the digital age a license to build without obligation. Welcome to the Wild West; the platforms own the sheriff.
What followed was an era of rapacious accumulation. In 1994, the largest company in America by market capitalization was Exxon, valued at $34 billion. Today, Google is worth $3.7 trillion. And when Donald Trump took the oath of office in January 2025, flanked by the very technocratic elite whose fortunes had grown beyond all precedent, the possibility loomed that the preceding 10 years was crystallizing into a name: techno-fascism — an authoritarian, corporatist order in which a narrow caste of technocratic elites deploys digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence to automate governance, intensify surveillance, and erode democratic accountability, all while presenting their dominion as the neutral application of expertise.
For the past decade I have written about the almost theological divide between two competing creeds. The gospel of nostalgia promises to “make America great again” — its default logic being that the America of the 1950s, when white men’s assumptions went unchallenged by people of color, women, immigrants, or queer individuals, was a more stable and legible world worth recovering. The gospel of progress, as Andreessen has written, holds that “there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology.” Its default logic is simpler: stop complaining. Flat wages, rising social media–induced mental illness, falling homeownership, a warming planet — perhaps, but at least we have iPhones. But the philosopher Antonio Gramsci had foreseen this dialectic in 1930: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.”
After the Republican midterm disappointments of 2022, Thiel called for a party that could unite “the priest, the general, and the millionaire”— a formula that reads, with hindsight, as a precise blueprint for Trump’s second administration: Christian nationalism, military force deployed at home and abroad, and a financial oligarchy powerful enough to steer the state. By the election of 2024, the gospel of nostalgia and the gospel of progress had concluded a short-term bargain to elect Trump. The result is the rise of an oligarchy of fewer than 20 American families.
The Copernican Moment
A deep unsettlement runs beneath our society today. Just as Nicolaus Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, we are now displacing the human from the center of consciousness. New discoveries about cognition in other animals and organisms — octopuses dreaming, bees counting, trees retaining memory of drought — suggest, as Michael Pollan has written, that thought and feeling are not human monopolies but properties of life itself. The first Copernican revolution humbled our astronomy; the second threatens to humble our very being.
Yet the revelation carries its twin anxiety. If mind is no longer our exclusive inheritance, what becomes of that inheritance when machines begin to mimic it? Artificial intelligence poses not merely a technical challenge but a metaphysical one. It asks whether consciousness can exist without vulnerability — without the pulse and jeopardy of a life that can be lost. The Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio reminds us that the brain evolved to serve the body, that consciousness begins in feeling. Machines, however elaborate, know no hunger, no pain, no desire. To be conscious in the human sense is to participate in necessity — to be held by one’s own fate.
The real danger is not that machines will become like us, but that we will become like them: efficient, unfeeling, exquisitely programmable. A people habituated to passivity and optimized for consumption may eventually forget the work of building a world together. What once belonged to politics — the imaginative labor of collective destiny — has been quietly surrendered to the corporate logic of the algorithm. The result is not enlightenment but enclosure: a society awake to everything except itself.
This interregnum, then, is not a pause but a rupture — a suspended time in which institutions still stand yet no longer persuade, in which the future arrives in forms no one quite intended. What began for my generation as the optimistic dream of a communications revolution has matured into a general condition of American life: a digital oligarchy adrift between orders, armed with enormous power but uncertain whom, or what, it serves. Some of us glimpsed the terrible risk when it was still only a risk — that the principles of kleptocracy would become America’s own. That grim vision is now arriving, in real time, in the person of Trump. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic, “The brazenness of the self-enrichment now underway resembles nothing from any earlier White House, but rather the corruption of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial state.” And the techno-fascist oligarchs are at the trough, waiting to be fed.
The Age of Surveillance and Simulation
The first clear sign that the promise of the digital commons had curdled came with Edward Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, when Americans learned that Google and Facebook had opened their back doors to the security state. What had been marketed as an architecture of connection revealed itself also as an infrastructure of monitoring.
By the mid-2020s, the fear had hardened into habit. A 2025 YouGov survey found that nearly a quarter of Americans admitted to censoring their own posts or messages for fear of being watched or doxxed. Surveillance no longer needed a knock at the door. The mere awareness of a watching eye did the work. What had been a public square had become, almost imperceptibly, a panopticon of self-restraint.
Into this apparatus stepped a new class of private overseers. Palantir, the data-mining firm Thiel co-founded, grew from a counterterrorism instrument into a generalized engine for correlating personal information — tax filings, social media traces, the bureaucratic exhaust of ordinary life. Insiders warned that data citizens had surrendered to the IRS or Social Security for basic governance could be recombined for far more intrusive purposes. The point was not simply that we were being watched, but that we were being rendered legible — sorted, scored, and classified in ways invisible to us. As Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told The New York Times, the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure is effectively nullified by AI:
It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It’s a public space — you don’t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn’t record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition — and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?
We are witnessing the first serious moral battle of the AI era, and its front lines run straight through the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Anthropic drew them first. The company refused to allow its systems to be turned on the American public in the name of security and declined to let the Pentagon wire its AI into autonomous weapons capable of identifying and killing without human authorization. To the Defense Department, accustomed to purchasing compliance along with contracts, the idea that a vendor might set moral limits on military use was borderline insubordinate. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. President Trump, on Truth Social, called the company “radical woke” and ordered federal agencies to stop using its technology. Anthropic had been, in effect, blacklisted for conscience.
What happened next revealed something important about the moral landscape of the AI industry. OpenAI, which had publicly positioned itself as sharing Anthropic’s red lines — Sam Altman insisted his company, too, opposed mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons — moved swiftly to fill the vacuum. While Anthropic was being frozen out of Washington, D.C., OpenAI quietly negotiated and signed a deal of its own with the Pentagon, granting the Defense Department access to its models for deployment in classified environments. OpenAI then published a blog post with a pointed aside: “We don’t know why Anthropic could not reach this deal, and we hope that they and more labs will consider it.” The company that had stood shoulder to shoulder with Anthropic in principle had, in practice, used Anthropic’s exclusion to capture the contract.
The backlash was swift — and came from inside the house. Caitlin Kalinowski, who had led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics teams since late 2024, publicly announced her resignation. Her statement, posted on X and LinkedIn, was brief and precise: “AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people.”
The formulation was careful, almost scrupulously fair to her former colleagues. But the substance was damning. A senior technical executive, one who had spent her career building the physical systems through which AI meets the real world, had concluded that OpenAI had crossed lines it had publicly promised not to cross — and had done so without the internal deliberation those lines deserved. Some users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, became the number-one free app in the Apple App Store, displacing ChatGPT. The market, in its way, had registered a verdict.
What the episode exposed is the hierarchy of pressures operating on every AI company at this moment. Altman’s public statements and OpenAI’s private negotiations inhabited different moral universes, and the gap between them is a measure of how quickly principle buckles under the combined weight of government contracts, competitive anxiety, and the intoxicating proximity to power. Hegseth and Trump have sent the clearest possible signal: Companies that draw lines will be punished; companies that erase them will be rewarded. The outcome of this first moral battle of the AI era will do much to determine the shape of every battle that follows.
But erasure, in this case, is not incidental — it is the business model. The questions that seem separate — who controls the weapons, who watches the citizens, who owns the culture, whose labor trains the machine — are in fact a single question, asked of us all at once: whether humanity will remain the author of its own story, or be quietly written out of it.
The Technocracy’s Bargain
Artificial intelligence functions in this landscape not only as a tool, but also as an ideology. The systems that now summarize our news, grade our tests, and generate our images are built entirely from accumulated human expression, yet are heralded as replacements for the slow, wayward work of thought. By design they remix rather than originate; they automate style while evacuating risk. The consequence is a flood of synthetic prose and imagery that feels like culture but carries none of the scars of experience. Anyone with a prompt can simulate the surface of artistry, further collapsing the distinction between the crafted and the merely produced.
We need to insist on the human self as something more than a flicker of circuitry or an echo of stimulus — to hold that our consciousness is not reducible to mechanism, that our art, our music, our capacity for beauty and sorrow carry a dignity no machine can counterfeit. We need to imagine a future in which humanity still governs its own creation — not as the object of its inventions, but as their author and their measure. A world that offers consumption in place of purpose courts a different and more corrosive kind of unrest.
The outlines of that unrest were already legible by the middle of the decade. In labor reports and think-tank bulletins one could trace the quiet unmaking of the white-collar world. Young graduates, credentialed and deeply indebted, were discovering that the jobs they had trained for no longer existed in familiar form; whole categories of administrative and creative work were being absorbed by AI or retooled around its efficiencies. Commentators spoke of an “AI job apocalypse” not as metaphor but as demographic fact — an educated stratum slipping downward, its ambitions collapsing into precarity. History offers a warning: When a surplus of the educated meets a scarcity of opportunity, turbulence and unrest follows. The clerks and interns of the knowledge economy can become the dissidents of a new era.
But many of the technocrats already sense what is coming and prefer to prepare their escape. They buy compounds in New Zealand, secure airstrips in remote valleys, fortify estates on distant islands stocked and wired for siege. The gesture betrays everything: They, too, expect the storm. They simply mean to watch it from a safe distance — beyond the reach of the graduates, the strivers, the displaced millions who will inhabit the world their machines made. In that distance — the gap between those who build exits and those who have nowhere to go — the interregnum takes on its most recognizable shape: a society waiting, with gathering impatience and anger, for a new settlement that has yet to arrive.
Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, said something recently about AI and labor that hangs in the air like a change in pressure: For once, those who have never known economic danger are about to feel what it means to be exposed — to live without insulation from the market’s weather. According to The New York Times, “The unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 soared to 5.6 percent at the end of last year.”
For 30 years, the country has drifted ever further from the world of things. The old economy of matter — of tools, factories, and physical production — was gradually exchanged for an economy of signs. We learned to believe that the future belonged to those who trafficked in abstractions: the managers of systems, the manipulators of symbols, the custodians of information. That belief became the moral core of the professional class. To think was noble; to make was obsolete.
For decades, the professional class watched the industrial world hollow out and mistook the spectacle for confirmation of its own permanence. It confused exemption with destiny. Now, the correction is arriving — not from the shop floor, but from the circuits.
This is one meaning of the interregnum: a pause in which the old class myths no longer align with material reality, and no new story has yet cohered. In the space between, people who once felt like authors of the future are discovering that they were also characters, written into a script whose logic they did not fully control.
Yet another path exists, if we can summon the imagination to take it. Rather than waging a doomed Luddite resistance, we might seek a grand bargain with the architects of the new order — entering into direct negotiation with Big Tech over the political terms of the transition. The question is not whether AI can be stopped; it cannot. The question is whether its spoils can be shared.
How much of the immense stream of revenue flowing through the platforms and hyperscalers could be redirected toward a sovereign fund, a common dividend for those whose labor has been displaced? Anthropic’s Amodei has suggested a tax of three percent of AI revenues to seed the sovereign fund. It is a moment that calls less for purity than for negotiation — an uneasy but deliberate partnership between humanists and technologists, aimed at keeping a frustrated graduate class from becoming the raw material of a larger revolutionary breakdown.
Marshall McLuhan believed that new media were creating “an overwhelming, destructive maelstrom” into which we were being drawn against our will. But he also believed in a way out. “The absolute indispensability of the artist,” McLuhan wrote, “is that he alone in the encounter with the maelstrom can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the awareness to tell us what the world is made of. The artist is able [to give] … a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity.”
Our great inquiry now must be: How do we quit the politics of national despair — a maelstrom that our own ingenuity has created? It will be hard, because a vast media industry depends on your engagement with its outrage. Three companies — X, Meta, Google — monopolize the advertising revenue that flows from that outrage. Seventy-eight percent of Americans say these social media companies hold too much power. To break the spell, we need to understand the roots of the phony culture war they have cultivated — and remember that America has had a real promise. Only when we recover that memory can we begin to imagine what the new promise of American life might look like.