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BILLIONAIRE AMBASSADOR TO ITALY SHOWS OFF HIS YACHT

As Trump Scraps With Meloni, His Envoy to Italy Is at Sea

Tilman J. Fertitta, the U.S. ambassador to Rome, is summering on his superyacht as President Trump squabbles with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy.

In recent weeks, while President Trump was locked in an unusually testy standoff with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, the United States ambassador to Rome was on a monthslong tour of Italy’s coastline aboard his $450 million superyacht.

As the leaders’ spat escalated over the Independence Day weekend, the ambassador, Tilman J. Fertitta, moored the 384-foot, seven-deck yacht off Palermo in Sicily to host a phalanx of Sicilian dignitaries.

The visitors could gawk at the boat’s pools, hot tubs, spa that offers facials and pedicures, movie screening room, putting green, multiple bars and two helicopters. They sipped wine, nibbled antipasti and posed for the ambassador’s Instagram feed — shoeless, as footwear is forbidden on the yacht — in rooms decorated with fluorescent artwork, varnished wood, crystal sculptures and chandeliers.

Mr. Trump was about to roast Ms. Meloni, posting on social media that he needed to take out a “restraining order” against her, two weeks after he claimed she had “begged” him for a photo at a gathering of world leaders. Mr. Fertitta, 69, seemed unconcerned by the political fracas, telling me that weekend on the yacht that he had talked to Mr. Trump and Ms. Meloni “in the last couple of weeks.”

“I listened to ’em both,” he said, speaking in his heavy Texas twang. “And they both make sense to me.”

A crowded sandy beach with colorful umbrellas on the sand and people in the blue water. A large white yacht is visible in the distant ocean. — Mr. Fertitta’s yacht off the coast of Cefalù, Sicily.

Mr. Fertitta and Daniele Tumminello, the mayor of Cefalù, both wearing light-colored suits as they shake hands and smile. They stand by water, with a town and mountains behind them. — Mr. Fertitta meeting Daniele Tumminello, the mayor of Cefalù, where some of his ancestors lived.

The president is “upset with Giorgia Meloni,” Mr. Fertitta conceded in the 90-minute interview as he spread his arms across the back of a large couch and rested his white-socked feet on a coffee table. “And so he lets the world know it.”

“It doesn’t affect my relationship or the American-Italian relationship,” he added.

There are those who feel Mr. Fertitta is not practicing much diplomacy during the worst public feud between American and Italian leaders in living memory. Mr. Trump is furious at Italy’s decision not to support the war in Iran, and Ms. Meloni has lashed out at Mr. Trump, saying he picked a fight with the pope.

“It sounds like something that comes from a movie, from an Italian comedy, like the guy who wants to cruise around the coast,” said Michele Masneri, a novelist and columnist at Il Foglio, an independent newspaper. “The job of an American ambassador, I’d say, is like 60 percent being a high-scale tourist,” Mr. Masneri added.

His sailing has also attracted criticism for its cost to the Italian state. An opposition lawmaker has called for a government inquiry into how much Italy is spending on providing a police escort to secure the yacht. The Italian government declined to comment.

Mr. Fertitta, the owner of a restaurant and casino empire as well as the Houston Rockets basketball team, says it is all worth it.

“How many people ever get to come on a boat like this?” Mr. Fertitta said of Boardwalk, the sixth yacht that he has given that name. “People love successful people. Everybody wants to be successful. And anybody who says they don’t is just lying to you.”

The way Mr. Fertitta sees it, giving Italians a glimpse of how the 0.1 percent live helps to make the kind of people-to-people connections that ambassadors are supposed to foster. Even if — or perhaps especially if — relations between the leaders of his home country and his host nation have deteriorated.

By and large, though, the guests he hosts aboard the yacht come from a narrow band of Italian society. The mayor of Naples, Gaetano Manfredi, attended a reception on the yacht last month. “The people I met on the ship,” he said, “were the people who represent the city’s ruling class.”

A group of people stand behind a metal barrier, some of them in hats and sunglasses. Some hold camera phones aloft. A police officer stands to the left. — Onlookers watching the visit.

People in suits walk down steps to a sandy beach. Many people in swimwear relax on the sand, some holding up phones. — Mr. Fertitta on a tour of Cefalù.

Mariangela Zappia, Italy’s former ambassador to the United States, said she saw value in Mr. Fertitta’s approach because the yacht tour relegated the personal agita between the two leaders to “the background.” Mr. Fertitta, she said, can “demonstrate village by village, port by port, that this relationship is in fact very lively and thriving.”

Mr. Fertitta was not specific about how often he spoke to Italian officials, but Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said in a statement that the ambassador had helped “when we need to understand something.”

A Bipartisan Political Donor

Even among politically appointed ambassadors, who are often selected in part as a reward for campaign donations, Mr. Fertitta stands out.

Based on Forbes’s billionaire rankings, which estimate his worth at $11.1 billion, he is by far the richest envoy appointed by the Trump administration. When he first arrived in Rome last summer, Mr. Fertitta said, he spent about $3 million of his own money renovating the private living spaces at Villa Taverna, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador.

Although he identifies as conservative, he is a political chameleon who has donated to both major parties, sometimes during the same electoral cycle. Recently, he has generally given more to Republicans, but he hosted fund-raisers at his Houston home in the 1990s for President Bill Clinton and calls the Democratic senator Mark Kelly a friend.

In the run-up to the 2024 race, he donated $13,200 to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s re-election campaign and gave roughly $500,000 to Mr. Trump’s political action committees, according to public filings.

He explained that rather than hewing to strict partisan affiliations, he is “a loyal American.”

Mr. Fertitta and with Lauren Fertitta, his wife, on a curved gray sofa. A small dog stands next to Mr. Fertitta, whose arms are stretched across the back of the sofa. — Mr. Fertitta and his wife, Lauren Fertitta, aboard the yacht. Ms. Fertitta spotted the village of Acciaroli, prompting the family to land there on short notice.

A small swimming pool on the deck of a boat. — A swimming pool and a hot tub on the $450 million superyacht.

A narrow coffee table between two curved banks of cushioned seats covered in throw pillows, underneath a low ceiling with decorative lighting. — A seating area on the 384-foot, six-deck yacht.

In a nod to the flexibility of his politics, Mr. Fertitta said that Italian officials were “smart enough to know” that they would not necessarily have to deal with Mr. Trump forever. “Just because one president and one administration wants to do things one way, that doesn’t mean that two and a half years from now another president isn’t going to do things different,” he said.

Indeed, Mr. Fertitta first started to muse about the ambassadorship to Italy while raising money for Mr. Clinton, he said.

At the time, though, Mr. Fertitta was too busy trying to expand his business, he said. Several of his associates in Houston said that even this time around, they did not expect him to actually want the job.

John Whitmire, the Democratic mayor of Houston, called Mr. Fertitta “as big a name as we’ve got in Houston in terms of networking” and said he was surprised Mr. Fertitta wanted to leave his business empire for the job in Rome. Now, though, “I think he’s enjoying the importance of the job of the ambassador,” Mr. Whitmire said.

Mr. Fertitta’s great-grandparents emigrated from Sicily more than 130 years ago, and he has for years tried to maintain a relationship with the country. In 2021, he tried to buy A.C. Milan, an Italian soccer team once owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister who died in 2023. Mr. Fertitta’s bid was roughly $200 million short of the winning offer. “Because I was stupid,” he said.

Italy was the only country he would consider for a diplomatic posting, he said, although he does not speak the language. At an Independence Day party at the ambassador’s residence in Rome this summer, he had trouble pronouncing the names of some of the cabinet ministers whom he introduced as friends when they joined him onstage.

The Sailor-Ambassador

Mr. Fertitta’s maritime itinerary is sometimes determined as much by whim as by diplomacy, scrambling the Italian police escorts that accompany him.

While sailing toward Sicily, he and his wife, Lauren Fertitta, spotted the village of Acciaroli in Campania. “I said, Look at this cute little town,” Mr. Fertitta recalled. “Let’s stop there.”

Several people on a small white boat, wearing sunglasses. A large white yacht is in the distance. — Mr. Fertitta and members of his family and crew rode a speedboat to his yacht.

A police officer in a dark uniform and white cap stands next to a black police car. White buildings, a beach and green hills are in the background. — A police officer in Cefalù waited for Mr. Fertitta’s arrival. An Italian lawmaker has called for a government inquiry into how much Italy is spending to secure the ambassador’s trip.

The mayor of Acciaroli, Stefano Pisani, said the consulate in Naples gave him about 15 minutes to prepare for the ambassador’s impromptu visit. Despite the short notice, the mayor was delighted to help, taking the ambassador on a three-hour tour and hosting him for a meal.

Such visits can feel like the arrival of a small expeditionary force.

On July 4, with more notice, Boardwalk anchored outside the storied port of Cefalù, Sicily. Mr. Fertitta’s entourage motored in on two skiffs, including his wife, his youngest daughter, two of his adult sons and a group of friends, Italian security agents and yacht staff members.

Curious bystanders, standing knee-deep in the water to snap photos, did not seem to know who Mr. Fertitta was, although one man raised his fist in the air and said, “Viva Trump!”

Dressed in a linen shirt and formal sneakers, Mr. Fertitta joined the Cefalù mayor for a walk through the city, where his great-grandfather lived before setting sail in 1887 for the United States.

At City Hall, Mr. Fertitta presented Italian editions of his book, “Shut Up and Listen!,” to the mayor, met with more than 15 distant relatives, posed for photos and hailed “truly one of the most special days I’ve ever had.” Giuseppe Marciante, the bishop of Cefalù, showed Mr. Fertitta marriage registries that traced his family ties to the city to the 16th century.

Later, the ambassador presented the bishop with an engraved silver dish. “This has my name on it,” he said. “I don’t want you to forget me.”

Mr. Fertitta holding a framed document as a man in a green, white and red sash points to it. A red banner, a crucifix and other people are in the background. — At Cefalù’s City Hall, Mr. Fertitta hailed “truly one of the most special days I’ve ever had.”

The ambassador presenting Giuseppe Marciante, the bishop of Cefalù, with an engraved silver dish.

Back on the yacht, I asked him if he was having fun in his job.

He looked puzzled. “I don’t really look at anything as fun,” he said. Still, he added, “It’s a very enjoyable job.”

In fact, he said, he would consider returning to Italy as ambassador for a second term, even under a different administration.

“It wouldn’t matter to me who the president was,” he said.

Still, he said, he had “no desire” to run for elected office himself. “Because there’s no job that I could hold and I could be on this boat,” he said.

Green trees and houses with orange roofs along the sea. A large white yacht is on the water. — Mr. Fertitta’s yacht off the coast of Sicily.

TINY NATIONS OFFER CITIZENSHIP!

E.U. tells Caribbean nations: Stop selling citizenship or we’ll require visas

The bloc is giving five nations two years to phase out citizenship by investment or lose visa-free travel to the 29-country Schengen area.

July 18, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDTToday at 5:00 a.m. EDT

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Basseterre Bay in Saint Kitts and Nevis. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group/

The European Union is giving five nations in the Eastern Caribbean two years to end their lucrative citizenship-by-investment programs or lose visa-free travel to the bloc, their leaders say.

The nations — Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Saint Lucia — generate significant revenue through their programs. Foreigners who invest in their economies, buy real estate or pay their governments directly gain passports that allow visa-free travel to more than 140 countries and territories, including much of Europe. Costs begin at $200,000.

Each of the five received a letter from Brussels last month advising that new E.U. rules make the existence of such programs grounds for suspending visa-free access, according to the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. The bloc gave them until June 1, 2028, to phase out their programs.

Their prime ministers are coordinating a “collective response,” they said in a statement. After meeting last week in Dominica, they are planning “a high-level mission to Brussels” at the “earliest appropriate opportunity” to meet with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President António Costa and other senior E.U. officials.

E.U. officials did not respond to requests for comment. The bloc has long been wary of citizenship-by-investment programs. Critics say insufficient vetting of applicants can enable money laundering and terrorist financing and increase the risks of identity fraud and illegal immigration.

Several E.U. member states offer residence-by-investment programs that can lead to citizenship. President Donald Trump last year introduced a $1 million “Trump gold card” promising a direct path to U.S. citizenship within weeks “for all qualified and vetted people.” (As of May, one person had been approved, the Department of Homeland Security said in a legal filing.)

“Investment migration is a well-established global practice, not a Caribbean peculiarity,” Didacus Jules, director general of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, told The Washington Post. “More than half of the world’s states offer some form of access to residence or citizenship through investment.”

The European Commission acknowledged in December that the five nations had taken steps “to strengthen due diligence and information-sharing,” but said the programs “continue to raise concerns due to high volumes, short processing times and low rejection rates.”

Together, the five have issued more than 100,000 passports, according to the commission. Prospective citizens generally are not required to be present in the country to apply; only Antigua and Barbuda requires them to ever visit. Passports are typically issued within a year, and rejection rates are typically in the single digits.

Such programs have long suffered a “bad image,” said Jean‑François Harvey, an attorney whose multinational firm specializes in business immigration.

Harvey Law Group serves more than 100 clients seeking Caribbean citizenship each year. Some want to live there, Harvey said, “but the vast majority … want a second citizenship for estate and tax planning, and for safety.”

Hugh Jorgensen, program lead for corrupt money flows at Transparency International, said such programs can also be exploited by criminals. The main risk, he said, is that “what is being sold is not the actual citizenship in the country itself, it’s what the citizenship offers in getting access to other countries.”

Citizens of the five nations enjoy visa-free travel to the Schengen area, which includes 25 of the 27 E.U. member states. The majority of applicants to at least four of the five in 2024 came from countries for whom the bloc requires visas (Grenada released only partial data), the commission reported. They included China, Syria, Iraq and Nigeria.

Criminals can use citizenship by investment to “launder their proceeds in these countries, or simply escape their own jurisdiction where they are facing criminal charges or at risk being arrested,” Jorgensen said.

“Many countries have tried these in the past and brought them to a conclusion because it’s not worth the risk,” he said. “This is not a long-term economic solution.”

Harvey said his firm turns away applicants who have undisclosed criminal convictions or are unable to explain the source of their funds. “At least a dozen times a year, we refuse clients because we’re not comfortable representing them,” he said. “Sometimes, clients have a bad profile.”

Jules of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States defended the integrity of the five nations’ programs.

“Investment migration, in its various forms, is a widespread and legitimate instrument of economic policy,” he said in written responses to The Post’s questions. The region’s programs “are distinguished less by what they offer than by their fiscal significance for small island developing states — and, increasingly, by the depth of the regulatory architecture that governs them.”

He noted that citizenship by investment in the Eastern Caribbean predates the visa deal with the Schengen area. The programs were established, he said, “as sovereign economic development tools to attract investment, diversify economies, and generate non-tax revenue. Visa-free access has enhanced their attractiveness, but it is not the foundation upon which they were built.”

Revenue from the programs made up an average of about 6.5 percent to the nations’ gross domestic product between 2019 and 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund. Dominica’s program generated more than 30 percent of its GDP in 2022.

ANOTHER GOVERNMENT PROJECT WASTING MILLIONS AND NOBODY IS IN JAIL!

Unfinished mortars seen lined up before being painted© Aimee Dilger/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A Pentagon watchdog report found that in the roughly two years since it was built, an ammunition plant in Mesquite, Texas, has not produced any parts for 155mm artillery rounds, hindering the Army’s goal to help backfill stocks of ammunition provided to Ukraine after Russia invaded in 2022.

In a report released Monday, the Defense Department inspector general found that as of March 2026, the plant had not produced any metal projectile parts that met the specifications laid out in the contract and the “the Army’s expenditure of $469 million to establish the Mesquite facility could have been used to address other Army or [Department of Defense] priorities.”

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Over the past four years, the Pentagon depleted its inventory of 155mm artillery by 3.6 million rounds, according to the report. The report does not note how many rounds are in the stockpile.

More than 3 million rounds were given to Ukraine through weapons packages committed by the Biden administration. Roughly 112,000 rounds were used for training and testing, and another 218,000 were sold to other countries.

Based on the consumption in Ukraine and anticipated foreign military sales, the Army in 2024 set a goal to ramp up production of 155mm artillery from 14,000 rounds per month to 100,000 by Oct. 2025 and invested in the Mesquite plant in Texas to help produce specific parts.

That plant, which is operated by General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, opened in May 2024.

As of March 2026, the Army was producing about 36,000 rounds per month, still far short of the 100,000 goal, in part because the facility in Mesquite failed to produce any of the 30,000 projectile metal parts it was expected to make each month, according to the report.

An Army spokesperson confirmed to CBS News this is still accurate as of this month.

In a statement, a spokesperson for General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems said “GDOTS and our U.S. Army customers have reached an agreement on a path forward for the Mesquite facility, which includes additional GDOTS investment to complete the project.”

According to the report, officials involved with the Army’s ammunition program said that with only three facilities producing the required projectile metal parts, the Pentagon will “reach only 71,000 rounds per month, or 71 percent of its monthly production capacity goal” by September 2026.

The gap, the report concluded, occurred because Army officials “accepted the risk” with the contractor’s plan to procure equipment which had not been tested. According to a timeline in the report, the Army contracting office requested the plant stop work in Aug. 2025 while the government evaluated if it could meet its obligations and work to resolve the production issues.

The demand for artillery has diminished somewhat, since the war in Ukraine has altered its approach and is now more reliant on drone warfare, rather than the trench fighting of a few years ago. Still, the initial expenditure rate highlighted issues with the defense industrial base’s ability to produce weapons quickly.

Recently, there have been concerns about the more expensive and technologically advanced weapons, like interceptors for Patriot air defense systems and Tomahawk missiles, that have been used in the war with Iran. The Pentagon this year asked for more than $70 billion in its budget to help procure missiles and related equipment, a nearly three-fold increase compared to last year.

SOCIALISM ALWAYS BECOMES COMMUNISM, AND IT NEVER WORKED; INVENTED BY AN UNEMPLOYED GERMAN LOSER NAMED KARL MARX

Socialism is Always a Move Towards Communism — with the Same Results

Communism and socialism have terrible records.

Tragically, we face today burgeoning support for socialism, largely because the U.S. socialist-inspired public schools have intentionally avoided teaching the system’s evil ways and disastrous results everywhere on earth it’s ever been attempted. As red flags go, they don’t come much bigger. Or redder.

I have a long-time family friend, who should know better. He’s a lifelong business journalist who even for a while wrote for the conservative Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, my buddy insists “socialism” is quite different from communism, and that in fact many socialist countries, such as in Scandinavia, are quite happy with the “benefits” of socialism.

He may be right that many people are happy in Sweden, whose major political party is the Swedish Social Democratic Party. But the happy faces in Sweden and its Scandinavian neighbors can be explained by the fact that many people find pleasure in receiving benefits paid for by other people. As U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher so coyly noted in 1976 before she became prime minister, “The problem with socialism is that eventually they run out of other people’s money.”

The difference between those happy-faced socialists and actual communists is just a matter of degree. As those benefiting from seizing other people’s wealth and income taste the fruits of their government-enabled theft, their appetite only grows for more. When was the last time you heard a socialist demanding less of other people’s money?

As Karl Marx, the unemployed German who came up with the idea of communism, spelled out in detail in his Das Kapital, Communist Manifesto, and other writings, socialism is not a goal. It is an essential step toward the goal.

That means even those enjoying short-term benefits by living off the sweat of others, in fact are nudging their nations closer and closer to the communist goal, whether they realize it or not. Today’s socialist is tomorrow’s communist; that’s the plan. Don’t think otherwise.

Vladimir I. Lenin, who in 1917 established the planet’s first socialist state in Russia, said the international movement to bring communism to all nations is aided and abetted by what even his followers apocryphally called “useful idiots.” That describes people who don’t see beyond their immediate conditions and don’t realize the path they trod is intended to take them to communist Utopia.

Advocates for socialism excuse the failure of Russia’s 70-year experiment with socialism by claiming it failed only because it wasn’t done right. Or done enough.

The lesson they claim to have learned is that if we just do it right, the more of it we do, the better will be the outcome.

Again, this excuse plays well among people who enjoy living off wages earned by other people. The late American economist Walter E. Williams wrote that legalizing theft doesn’t make it right. It just makes it legal.

Thatcher no doubt agreed with Williams when he wrote, “I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you disagree? Well then tell me how much of what I earn belongs to you — and why?”

Whatever their motive, today’s advocates for socialism, wittingly or unwittingly, lead directly to what Lenin and Marx said is necessary to achieve communist utopia.

Find me a socialist who wants less socialism. Find an advocate for socializing anything for the government to pay for and you will find an advocate for more. It’s habit-forming. Maybe someone else can find an exception, but in the history of governments that have adopted socialist tactics, I’ve found that they always grow. Never shrink. At least until they go broke.

Only when governments teeter on the brink of bankruptcy do they entertain suggestions that perhaps they should scale back their socialism. Many are reluctant to trim the socialist sails even when it’s apparent that they have become fiscally untenable. Examples include communist China, Great Britain, and any number of impoverished third world states.

If economic reality isn’t enough to dissuade our current gaggle of socialist wannabes, perhaps they should turn their attention to the brute force, often brutal force, that socialist governments inevitably resort to.

It’s not likely that most of today’s useful idiots even consider Nazi Germany to have been socialist. They seem to have missed the Second World War. How they did that is probably no mystery, even though it was in all the newspapers. But honest portrayals are increasingly rare in America’s socialist-endorsing public school system.

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) was as socialistic as Joseph Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Same economic scheme of taking money that belongs to someone else to give to people it doesn’t belong to – after the state takes its entirely arbitrary cut. Same authoritarian thuggery. Germany’s flavor of socialism was national. Russia’s had worldwide ambitions.

It should be obvious from the outside that socialist nations must resort to force or the threat of force to raise the money they want, which may include giving the masses some degree of economic improvement. But tragically, many in socialist nations don’t realize what that force looks like until the government begins to apply it in earnest to take their wealth and ensure their compliance with the glut of myriad rules and regulations inherent in controlling large populations’ every economic move.

But even Stalin couldn’t steal enough from the Russian breadbasket of Ukraine to feed Moscow’s favored residents and other preferred populations. As he stole ever more, he killed or sent to Siberia anyone who resisted. The Holodomor, a catastrophic famine, resulted in from 3 million to 11 million deaths from 1932-1933. Most knowledgeable claims estimate about 4 million Ukrainians starved to death, including families cannibalizing their dead kin. The USSR’s secret police, the NKVD, recorded cases of cannibalization, which was a crime. But Western researchers found that the government had covered up the actual numbers. Again, that’s standard operating procedure for authoritarian governments who don’t share the ugliest sides of their socialist enforcements.

If socialism has one unifying trait it is that governments practicing it must resort to such authoritarian diktats to enforce what most people recognize as the unjust redistribution of private wealth.

It’s also instructive that in every socialist society, the people in charge always live much higher on the hog than do the masses. As British author George Orwell, who was a disillusioned wanna-be socialist, noted in his book Animal Farm, “All animals are equal,” in the eyes of the government, “but some animals are more equal than others.”

Our nation’s current most popular socialist, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, garnered headlines by calling for outlawing millionaires and billionaires. Since becoming a millionaire, however, Sanders has modified his demand and now insists that only billionaires be eliminated. On his $174,000 annual Senate salary, Sanders’ net worth is $3 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. He owns two houses with a combined value of about $1 million, according to Yahoo! Finance, and a third home he sold in 2021 for $422,000, $40,000 less than he paid for it 14 years earlier.

If all this doesn’t discourage chasing socialist utopia (which happens to be communism), consider this: In the 20th century, communist countries which claimed to practice communism-lite, a.k.a., socialism, killed more than 100 million of their own people.

Those weren’t people killed fighting foreign wars. Those were citizens of their own countries who opposed the socialism imposed on them. You could look it up in the Black Book on Communism, which documents the horrific history of socialist and communist China, Germany, Russia and all the rest.

PRESIDENT TRUMP RELEASES HIS 2025 INCOME!!!

Trump’s annual financial disclosure shows more than $580M in crypto-related income

Key Points

President Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure report was released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.
Trump’s crypto-related income included about $515 million from the sale of tokens released by World Liberty Financial, and $65 million from sales of equity in WLF’s holding company.
Trump disclosed he received $635 million in royalties from “Celebration Coins.”
The president reported more than $290 million in income from golf and club properties.
The ethics office also released Vice President JD Vance’s annual disclosure, which totaled 17 pages, compared to 927 pages for Trump.

President Trump raked in at least $2 billion in 2025

President Donald Trump’s annual financial disclosure report was released on Tuesday by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, revealing income of hundreds of millions of dollars from proceeds of crypto tokens and holdings of hundreds of individual company stocks.

Trump’s disclosure report for 2025, which was the first year of his second non-consecutive term in the White House, totals 927 pages.

The report reveals that Trump’s crypto-related income included about $515 million from the sale of tokens released by the firm World Liberty Financial, and $65 million from sales of equity in WLF’s holding company.

WLF is the Trump-linked crypto company co-founded by members of his family that issues the WLFI governance token and USD1 stablecoin.

Trump, who first made his name in business with real estate developments in New York, also disclosed that he received $635 million in royalties from what were described as “Celebration Coins.” It was not immediately clear what those coins are. The Bloomberg news service reported that the royalties were related to CIC Digital LLC, Trump’s memecoin business.

Trump’s golf and club properties continued to generate major revenue, according to the disclosure.

The president reported more than $290 million in income related to revenue from his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, his Trump National Doral golf property, his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, his Jupiter Golf Club and Trump National Washington, D.C.

One of the largest bursts of stock buying by Trump detailed in the disclosure occurred on Aug. 18, 2025.

The document shows three successive purchases of some of the biggest names in technology — Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia — with each trade valued at between $5 million and $25 million. The values of Trump’s holdings are given in dollar ranges, not in absolute amounts, as is normal for U.S. government ethics filings.

The trades were among the largest individual stock transactions in the disclosure.

The Nvidia purchase came exactly one week after Trump announced that Nvidia and AMD had agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of their H20 chip sales to China in exchange for export approval. That deal reopened a key China revenue stream for Nvidia.

Apple also announced an additional $100 billion in U.S. investment on Aug. 6, bringing its total planned U.S. commitment to $600 billion.

The filing also shows that Trump purchased Amazon stock worth between $500,000 and $1 million on Sept. 23. That was the same day a trial began in Seattle federal court for a lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged Amazon duped customers into paying for Prime memberships.

The trial ended two days later after Amazon agreed to settle the suit by paying a $1 billion civil penalty to the FTC and refunds totaling $1.5 billion to an estimated 35 million customers.

Trump also reported receiving a total of more than $86 million in settlements of legal disputes from media companies including ABC, CBS, Meta, YouTube and X.

The massive filing is peppered with eye-opening assets, some of which are highly valued.

One line, on page 157, discloses an investment in gold bars valued at between $500,000 and $1 million.

Trump also disclosed receiving gifts totaling more than $370,000, primarily tickets to sports events.

They included 10 tickets to the FIFA men’s World Cup worth $15,000 from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, 10 Super Bowl LIX tickets from New Orleans Saints owner Gayle Benson, 15 tickets each to two UFC events from UFC CEO Dana White as well as tickets to other NFL, MLB, NCAA and golf events.

He disclosed that a statue from Sticker Mule CEO Anthony Constantino depicting Trump with his fist raised after an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, was worth $250,000.

The disclosure also reveals a bevy of royalty deals that paint a picture of just how exhaustively Trump has been able to capitalize on his name and political brand since entering political life.

The royalty income includes: $4.7 million received through a licensing agreement for “Trump Watches” with The Best Watches on Earth LLC; a deal related to the publication of “The Greenwood Bible,” a collaboration with “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood, netting $208,486; a licensing deal for “Trump Sneakers & Fragrances” for $67,634; an endorsement of a ”’45′ Guitar” for $35,920; and publishing agreements for “Letters to Trump,” “Save America” and “A MAGA Journey,” for $590,730, $1,893,965 and $552,685, respectively.

Another line item shows Trump received a $200,000 speaking fee for a fundraising event in Naples, Florida, in December 2022.

The disclosure says the income from the watches and the sneakers-and-fragrances deal was “inadvertently omitted from” Trump’s prior financial disclosure, as was the balance he was owed from the 2022 speaking event.

The president’s disclosed liabilities included civil trial verdict judgments in favor of the writer E. Jean Carroll, who had accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s, and of defaming her after she went public with those allegations in 2019. The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear Trump’s appeal of a jury verdict awarding Carroll $5 million for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Trump is still appealing another jury’s verdict, which awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case for defamation. Trump denies sexually assaulting Carroll.

The disclosure also includes asset and income information for first lady Melania Trump — including $10.7 million in net proceeds through a license agreement related to her self-titled documentary film, “Melania.”

A separate license agreement with the film’s publisher, Skyhorse, netted her an additional $521,161 in income.

Melania Trump also reported $6,011,259 in income from a separate license agreement “for the sale of NFTs and other collectibles,” the form shows.

Trump’s annual disclosure was filed after he received a 45-day extension and does not appear to have triggered a late fee for the annual report itself.

But the filing says he paid late filing fees for transactions that had not previously been reported on required periodic transaction reports. The disclosure does not specify the total amount paid. The Office of Government Ethics’ standard late filing fee is $200.

The ethics office also released the annual financial disclosure report of Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday.

Vance’s report is a mere 17 pages.

The vice president’s report details earnings from his book, the firm Narya Capital, which he founded, the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, where he had served as managing partner, and bitcoin holdings valued at between $250,000 and $500,000.

HUMANOID ROBOTS PERFORM FIRST EVER SURGERY!

Teleoperated humanoid robots complete first-ever live surgery

Surgeons controlled the movements of the robots remotely to perform the procedures

UC San Diego

Surgeons at UC San Diego just handed the scalpel to two humanoid robots, who went on to complete live surgical procedures for the first time in history. This milestone moves beyond the fixed robotic arms found in operating rooms today and hints at an operating room of the future where humans and humanoids work side by side.

Humanoid robots are already showing up in factories, warehouses, and even on battlefields, precisely because their human-like shape lets them operate in spaces built for people without any redesign. A Morgan Stanley report from late June projects that China, the current leader in the field, will produce 446,000 humanoid units annually by 2030, with full-size humanoids growing from 30% market share in 2026 to 70% by 2028.

UC San Diego’s team wants to bring that same flexibility into the operating room. In one procedure, a humanoid robot and a human surgeon acting as an assistant completed a cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal). In a second, two humanoid robots worked together and finished the operation solo.

In one surgery, a humanoid robot and a human surgeon acting as an assistant successfully performed a gallbladder removal

The trials, described in a paper published in Nature, were carried out on large non-primate mammals, but the achievement matters because it moves the technology from concept to something that has demonstrably handled real surgical tasks.

The researchers say their real target is the growing shortage of surgeons and the surgical backlogs it creates, especially in rural areas or regions far from major hospitals. Traditional surgical robots address none of that: they’re bulky, expensive, and typically require rebuilding the operating room around them.

A conventional robotic system weighs around 800 kg (1,764 lb) and needs significant space. The humanoid system used here, nicknamed Surgie, looks to have started life as a Unitree G1, and stands just 1.5 m (about 5 ft) tall and weighs only 27 kg (60 lb) – compact enough to wheel into a small clinic or a field hospital.

“It’s a fraction of the cost, and it takes a fraction of the space in an operating room,” says Dr. Shanglei Liu, assistant professor of surgery at UC San Diego School of Medicine and one of the study’s lead authors, who personally operated one of the robots during the trials. “So it’s easy to deploy, anywhere from rural areas to the battlefield and even to space.”

Dr. Ryan Broderick controls a robot during a gallbladder removal procedure

The surgeons control the robots remotely, using standard surgical tools fitted with adapters so the robotic hands can grip and maneuver them properly. Testing moved through stages: lab simulations, animal trials, and finally live surgery. The results are promising but not flawless – the robots needed recalibration mid-procedure, operations took longer than usual, and latency (the lag between a surgeon’s hand movement and the robot’s response) remains a challenge for any remote-controlled surgery.

That said, today’s routine surgical robots also started out slow and clumsy. “This achievement reflects the power of bringing engineers and surgeon innovators together to solve meaningful clinical problems at our world-class training and research lab,” says Dr. Ryan Broderick, interim director of UC San Diego’s Center for the Future of Surgery.

The team envisions humanoids eventually doing more than assisting in surgery: fetching instruments, tidying the room, or working alongside human staff as full team members.

“Many communities struggle with adequate staffing on the surgical team, which means patients are not being treated,” says Dr. Michael Yip, a UC San Diego engineering professor and co-author. “Our goal is an operating theater of the future, where humanoid robots and humans work side by side as an integrated team to deliver procedures to those in need, both in traditional hospital settings as well as in non-traditional, field medicine scenarios.”

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM, TRUMP’S BIGGEST SUPPORTER, DIES OF A HEART ATTACK AT AGE 71

Lindsey Graham answer media questions near a damaged Russian vehicles exhibition in central Kyiv© AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

The haunting final photos of Lindsey Graham appeared to show no sign of the “brief and sudden illness” which claimed his life.

The South Carolina Senator passed away on the evening of Saturday, July 11, his office confirmed in a statement, without sharing further details about his cause of death. There have been unconfirmed reports that Graham suffered chest pain at his home in Washington, D.C. after returning from Ukraine.

It has been reported he suffered chest pains and a cardiac arrest before his death at the age of 71. The last public photos of Graham were taken during his diplomatic visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, July 10.

• Lindsey Graham the latest politician to fall ill without explanation

Zelensky shared a series of photographs documenting their meeting on his official social media account on X. During the visit, the pair discussed foreign policy, with Graham visiting the president’s office and looking at damaged Russian vehicles in central Kyiv.

Graham spoke to the press in the Ukrainian capital, announcing a new agreement with the Trump administration regarding a Russia sanctions package, which he noted was designed to give “tools to President Trump to end this war.” Graham, who was also photographed holding the P1SUN Ukrainian interceptor drone developed by SkyFall, engineered specifically to track down and destroy Russian drones, said during his final press conference in Kyiv, “I’m pleased to announce, as of about 30 minutes ago, we’ve reached agreement with the White House on a version of the Russian sanctions bill that they will support.”

Lindsey Graham answer media questions near a damaged Russian vehicles exhibition in central Kyiv© AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

He added, “It means it’s gonna become law. So when I get back to Washington, I’m gonna go with Senator [Richard] Blumenthal to the Republican and Democratic leader to see if we can find time to move this Russian sanctions package that would give tools to President Trump to help end this war.”

On Friday, an announcement was also shared on his official website, with a joint statement from Senator Graham, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and Roger Wicker (R-MS). “We are proud to announce that we have reached an agreement with the Trump Administration to move our updated Russia sanctions legislation forward,” the statement read.

“We are very pleased with this significant progress and expect to roll out the legislation very soon. As Russia intensifies its slaughter of civilians, it is imperative that the legislative and executive branches work together to create tools to exact a heavy price on those who buy Russian oil and natural gas, fueling the Putin war machine.”

On Friday, Graham also continued banging the drum about modern infrastructure investment in his state, sharing the news that the US Coast Guard has awarded a $230 million contract for new operational support facilities at its base in Charleston, South Carolina.

Graham met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 10© Ukrainian Presidential Press Off

The senator’s last tweet, before his death was announced on Saturday, read, “Great news to see the continued investment in Coast Guard Base Charleston! As Chairman of the Senate @BudgetGOP Committee, I was glad to secure this historic funding for the Coast Guard as a part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Last week, Graham also shared his last Instagram post – a video marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. “One nation, under God,” he captioned the post. “Here’s to the next 250 years of freedom.”

Announcing his death, Graham’s office said in a statement, “On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.” The Washington Post has since reported the senator suffered chest pains before experiencing cardiac arrest.

The sparse statement from Graham’s office, which did not explain his death, comes during a stretch of concern about a lack of transparency about lawmakers’ health. Rep. Tom Kean Jr, a New Jersey Republican, was absent without explanation for months before returning to Congress and disclosing that he had been diagnosed with depression. Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was hospitalized weeks ago for undisclosed health reasons.

Graham was elected to the US Senate in 2002 and was running for a fifth term. He had been a close ally of President Donald Trump and a longtime hawk on Iran. As a member of the US House in the 1990s, he backed policies aimed at isolating the country and limiting its missile and nuclear programs.

He also cheered on Trump’s decision to strike nuclear sites last year and had been been a supporter of the latest conflict that started a few months ago. Graham, who was most known for his hawkish foreign policy positions, mounted a brief bid for the party’s presidential nomination during the 2016 campaign and later was a vocal critic of Trump, the eventual GOP nominee.

PUTIN HAS 800 SECURITY PERSONNEL …

Putin In Airplane Simulator Russian Government Photo

The July 1944 bombing that nearly took the life of Nazi Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, was the last of some 40 attempts to eliminate him.

What kept any of those plots from succeeding was a set of practices that made his movements unpredictable – last-minute changes in schedules and destinations – and an ever-increasing army of protective services that were always around him.

These lessons have not been lost on Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among other adjustments, he has recently increased the innermost circle of his security detail – the “last line of defense” of a hurricane-force architecture of multiple, interlocking layers of bodyguards and palace militia – to more than 800 persons.

One of the characteristics that all dictators have in common is that they all have some “alphabet agency” elite security formation that is supposed to take care of the ruler of the nation first, and everyone and everything come second or third – and to also kill anyone who threatens the “great leader.”

In one of the most repressive and murderous times in Russian history, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was protected by the NKVD.

Its current-day successor is the Russian FSB, which Putin served as director in the 1990s. Hitler had his Gestapo, and Eric Honecker – the long-time East German communist party chief – had the Stasi.

Putin on Direct Line Back in 2019. Image Credit: Creative Commons.© Putin on Direct Line Back in 2019. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

States Within a State

Today, some of the most pervasive analogs of these entities are the Supreme Guard Command, which protects North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and the Central Security Bureau, which guards the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping. Every supreme leader has to have one.

As a profile of Putin’s increasingly paranoid demeanor in The Daily Telegraph published this week points out, as these dictators fall under pressure or become convinced of threats to their position, these security services encourage and benefit from their leaders’ paranoia.

They “become a state within a state, putting millions under surveillance, giving credence to the sniping and jealousies of each informant, and listing the originators as anti-state activists.”

The dictator becomes trapped in a vicious cycle of his own making, and “perpetual personal security becomes an obsession,” reads the profile.

The Stasi, which Putin became so close to during the Cold War period when he was posted to the East German city of Dresden is an extreme example.

Including all its part-time informers, “the East German secret police is reckoned to have employed one secret policeman for every 6.5 East Germans. By comparison, Hitler’s Gestapo deployed one per 2,000 people.”

Since Putin is as fearful or not more “than Hitler was of any threat to his regime, he hopes that technology and his many overlapping security organisations will neutralise any opposition,” reads The Telegraph article.

Wary of Plots

In March 2026, the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) flagged what it had identified as a high-level alert in the Kremlin that had assessed “the risk of a plot or coup attempt against the Russian president. In particular, the fear of drones for a possible assassination attempt by members of the Russian political elite”.

The formation created by Putin, at the top of the security pyramid that serves and protects him and his inner circle, is the 50,000-strong Federal Protective Service (FSO).

The innermost unit is a handpicked, politically reliable force that was recently announced to have increased from 785 operatives to 812. The reason for the increase is suspected to have been the addition of a new detachment of 27 first-rate drone pilots.

With the issuance of this high-level alert, there were immediate orders that staff working near Putin be banned from traveling on public transport or using mobile phones.

Mobile network signals are now jammed when he is anywhere in the vicinity, and his key staff are issued with Kevlar umbrellas.

Putin also employs up to a dozen body doubles and has several identically furnished offices in Moscow, St Petersburg, his various dachas, and aboard his train.

These identical and multiple “film sets” are used by him regularly so that no one ever knows his true location.

The parallels are striking. As a consequence of the elaborate deceptions as to his true whereabouts and the endless security measures, “the Führer became a raving, deluded old man who hid in bunkers and, nine months later, died in one.” Putin, concludes the profile, “appears to be heading in the same direction.”

BROWN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, ARE DUMBER THAT YOU IMAGINE…SO MUCH FOR PRESTIGE LABEL

Brown’s ‘elite’ students scored 96 on a test with AI and 48 without it…

Brown used to represent the pinnacle of American education. Just saying that name, “Brown,” meant serious scholarship, fierce competition, and students who had fought with their smarts to earn their place among the brightest minds in the country.

Families pay a jaw-dropping amount of money for that reputation because a Brown degree is supposed to prove something to the world.

But lately, that prestigious reputation has been taking a brutal beating, especially after this latest cheating scandal… more on that later.

So, why has Brown gone from glistening, well-respected ivy to dusty, second-class weeds? Well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but the main one has to be these three letters: DEI.

Brown has spent years making diversity and inclusion a central part of its academic mission. Excellence has taken a backseat to their new purpose: charity.

Brown’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion describes itself as a “critical leader.” The university says DEI is essential to advancing knowledge and understanding. Of course, they can’t explain how accepting people based on skin color or sexual preference over excellence and IQ is advancing knowledge.

But Brown made a choice. They placed all of their eggs in the DEI basket, and now, they’re paying the price.

As a matter of fact, when President Trump signed an executive order targeting these unfair, dangerous programs, Brown administrators were reportedly prepared to fight any action they believed compromised the school’s very important mission.

Brown has made it very clear what it considers worth defending.

What isn’t clear is whether academics, integrity, and actual learning have been protected with the same level of passion or if any of that is even part of the mission these days.

And that brings us to the cheating scandal now blowing up at Brown. It started in one of the university’s toughest economics classes, where the difference between what students could do at home and what they could do sitting in a classroom (without AI) was quite a shocker.

The take-home midterm average was 96 percent, and forty students got perfect scores.

That’s pretty impressive, right?

Well, when Professor Roberto Serrano decided to move the final back into the classroom, eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, nine students didn’t show up, and the class average crashed from 96 percent to a horrific 48 percent.

As it stands now, Brown is looking like a wildly expensive “credential factory” that just got caught selling the appearance of Ivy League excellence.

Did the universities’ DEI culture and DEI students and staff cause students to cheat? Probably, but honestly, that’s not the argument here.

The story here is less about the students cheating and why and more about these once well-respected institutions revealing their true priorities through the things they fight hardest to protect. Brown has feverishly defended DEI as part of its actual “academic mission.” Meanwhile, the professor at the center of this scandal says the administration’s response to very obvious mass cheating has been pretty weak.

So, how did all of this go down?

It started after a deadly shooting on Brown’s campus. Professor Serrano decided to make the spring midterm and final take-home exams.

Serrano noticed that many of the answers were technically correct but strangely written. When he and his grad students dug deeper, it was clear that ChatGPT was likely the culprit.

Professor Serrano didn’t throw out the midterm right away. He gave the students a chance to prove the scores were legit. He moved the final back into the classroom and told them it would only count if their results were somewhere in the same ballpark.

That’s when the whole thing blew up.

The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.

This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”

Beyond the numbers, many of the answers, even when correct, felt slightly off. They had a “very convoluted style,” Serrano said. When he and his grad students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT, they received similar results.

A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.

Maybe these students aren’t a bunch of dummies. Some of them might be really clever. But being smart and actually learning something aren’t the same thing. This scandal makes it look like plenty of students figured out how to work the system without ever really learning the material.

Brown didn’t suddenly develop this crisis because ChatGPT popped on the scene. AI exposed how much of the university’s “celebrated excellence” is based on grades, credentials, and appearances rather than academic excellence.

The professor who exposed all of this understands something about genuine academic work that his students don’t.

Serrano went blind from retinal dystrophy when he was seventeen. He could’ve decided that was the end of his academic future, but he didn’t. He learned Braille, kept going, and made it to Harvard… on his smarts and merits, not DEI.

That probably explains why he couldn’t shrug off what happened in his classroom.

TBDH:

After a short-lived crisis, he decided [blindness] would not stop him. He learned Braille, and his excellent academic record opened up the doors of Harvard. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he says.

DEI is a major part of this collapse in excellence. It helped create a university culture that fixates on how students feel inside the institution, but does Brown care nearly as much about what those students can actually do?

Brown’s own research shows that students know AI is weakening them, yet they keep using it anyway.

More than half of the undergraduate students surveyed said they intentionally use generative AI either daily or weekly. Graduate and medical students reported even higher usage.

Great, so medical students are skating by on AI. That’s good to know.

The students know the shortcuts are making them less capable, but the pressure to compete, save time, and protect their grades keeps pulling them back to it.

So we have to ask: Are these exceptionally smart students who are under a lot of pressure, maybe a little lazy, and looking for a shortcut? Or are these DEI students, admitted under lowered standards, who are now in way over their heads and using AI as a life preserver just to stay afloat?

TBDH:

As a university, Brown is grappling with hard questions about AI use at the moment. It recently released a provost-led report (PDF) on “Generative AI in Teaching and Learning,” which found that it’s not just professors who have concerns.

Even though “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” the report notes that large majorities of students also have “concerns about the impact of GenAI use on their learning” and a “fear of negative consequences for their cognitive capacity.”

Serrano shares those concerns, and he wants universities as a whole to stand up for human thought. That’s why he’s not letting this story go, despite what he contends is a fairly tepid reaction from Brown administrators.

“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.

“We cannot choose to become idiots.”

One could argue the university’s DEI mission is creating a whole bunch of idiots.

Brown has fought hard to make DEI part of the school’s front-and-center identity. It’s spent years talking about making students feel welcomed, valued, represented, and empowered. That all sounds great in a brochure.

But an Ivy League school is supposed to expect something from the students lucky enough to be there. It should care about honesty, effort, excellence, and big consequences when students cheat.

Sure, Brown still has the Ivy League name, the prestige, and the massive price tag.

But excellence and high-achieving greatness have been diluted by DEI, AI, and cheating scandals.

SPACEX HAS FUTURE VALUATIONS OUT OF THIS WORLD!!!!

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk speaks via video at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square on June 12, 2026.© Spencer Platt/Getty Images

This has been valuation week for SpaceX, with more than a dozen analysts writing initial research following the company’s record-setting June IPO.

Investors have had a lot of estimates, price targets, bull cases, and bear cases to digest. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also has a thought about SpaceX’s potential: It will be worth more than Earth.

“You don’t seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” wrote Musk in a post on X on Thursday afternoon. He was responding to a comment about AI costs.

That might be his most optimistic projection ever, and he’s had a few. In 2022, he said that Tesla could be worth more than Apple and Saudi Aramco combined. That pair was worth about $4.4 trillion at the time. (Tesla is worth about $1.8 trillion today, based on fully diluted shares outstanding.)

To be sure, SpaceX operates in space, giving it an edge in growing its AI and communications businesses. Musk is fond of talking about the Kardashev Scale, a framework for evaluating civilizations proposed in the 1960s by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev.

The scale is about energy use. A level I civilization harnesses the energy on its planet. A level II civilization harnesses the power of its sun. And a Level III civilization harnesses the power of its galaxy. Musk’s ambition is to harness the power of the sun, which, of course, is much larger than the Earth.

As for the non-planetary valuations, Raymond James has the highest price target for SpaceX at $800 per share. Citi’s bull case for the stock is $900 per share, valuing SpaceX at about $12 trillion.

Those estimates, obviously, assume everything goes well for SpaceX, including the development of Starship, SpaceX’s huge, fully reusable rocket that will drive down costs to reach orbit. Morgan Stanley has a $300 price target for SpaceX and a $600 bull case. Its bear case is $75 and assumes Starship isn’t operational until 2029.