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Submission + - Elon Musk Goes Nuclear (theatlantic.com) 4

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

The world's richest man and the president of the United States are now openly fighting.

Trump threatened to cancel Space X government contracts and Musk accused Trump to be a frequent flyer to the Pedophile Island. This would be highly entertaining if not for the potential to wreck companies, ruin the economy, and sabotage legislative agenda.

Submission + - DOGE Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data (wired.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: DOGE operatives have repeatedly referred to the software company Palantir as a possible partner in creating a “mega API” at the IRS, sources tell WIRED. Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir, a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.

Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger, are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: "We've so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base," Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March.

Submission + - Email shows that Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax filing prog (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: An Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.

The 18F office within the General Services Administration (GSA) created the IRS Direct File program that allows for free online tax filings. It has been a frequent target of Musk, and one of the billionaire businessman’s close associates who holds a key position in the GSA informed staffers that the agency would close 18F in an email to staffers that arrived around 1am on Saturday morning.

Submission + - Musk to "fix" Community Notes for contradicting Trump (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: The man who espouses "free speech" has announced he will be "fixing" Community Notes on Twitter because they repeatedly contradict what Trump says. He claims a cabal of governments and media are using Notes to game the system.

Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."

Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."

Submission + - Elon Musk's doge.gov website hacked (fortune.com) 1

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: Hackers wasted no time in infiltrating the Department of Government Efficiency’s website.

After a hasty launch this week, at least two pages of the site have been defaced by critics who seemingly have accessed a database the page draws from. Two messages appeared on two separate pages of the site, reading “this is a joke of a .gov site” and “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN -roro.”

The hacked pages, though still accessible as of 10:00 a.m. ET on Friday morning, no longer appear to people who navigate to the DOGE website in traditional methods.

404 Media, which first discovered the hacked pages, quoted anonymous experts who said the DOGE page does not appear to be hosted on government servers and was pulling data from a database that can be accessed by third parties. That opened the doors for the embarrassing criticism.

Submission + - H-1B DATA MEGA-THREAD (threadreaderapp.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: I downloaded five years of H-1B data from the US DOL website (4M+ records) and spent the day crunching data.

I went into this with an open mind, but, to be honest, I'm now *extremely* skeptical of how this program works.

Here's what I found

Lots to dig through, most of it damning.

Exit quote: “You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.”

Submission + - Grok names Musk 'one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X' (fortune.com) 2

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Fortune reports that X user Gary Koepnick asked [Grok], "Who personally spreads the most disinformation on X?" and the service did not hesitate in pointing a finger at its creator.

"Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform," it wrote, later adding "Musk has made numerous posts that have been criticized for promoting or endorsing misinformation, especially related to political events, elections, health issues like COVID-19, and conspiracy theories. His endorsements or interactions with content from controversial figures or accounts with a history of spreading misinformation have also contributed to this perception."

The AI also pointed out that because of Musk's large number of followers and high visibility, any misinformation he posts is immediately amplified and gains legitimacy among his followers.

This, it said, "can have real-world consequences, especially during significant events like elections."

Grok did note that the definition of misinformation is somewhat subjective and often depends on the ideological stance of the reader. And it added, late in its answer, that there are many actors, bots and more that spread misinformation.

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