MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

‘Colossally Wrong Decision’ as Facebook Parent Company Wins Instagram-WhatsApp Antitrust Case

“This court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side.”


A mobile phone screen displays Meta logo and a digital screen displays founder of Meta Mark Elliot Zuckerberg in the background in Ankara, Turkey on October 28, 2025.
(Photo by Arda Kucukkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Nov 19, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Anti-monopoly advocates are warning that a federal judge’s ruling in favor of Facebook parent company Meta in a major antitrust case will have negative repercussions for US consumers by allowing Facebook to continue wielding monopoly power in the social media marketplace.

Judge James Boasberg in the District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Tuesday that the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp did not violate US antitrust policy.

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Boasberg found that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had not proven Meta holds monopoly power in the personal social networking market, “largely because he folded TikTok and YouTube into the same market and concluded that their popularity reduces Meta’s share below illegal levels,” said the American Economic Liberties Project (ALEP).

John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, argued that Boasberg’s ruling demonstrates a basic misunderstanding about the economics of the social media market.

“The court’s opinion reflects a view of the market that is at odds with how digital-platform power operates today,” he said. “Meta systematically acquired emerging competitors precisely because direct, head-to-head competition threatened its dominance. Meta’s consolidation strategy deprived consumers of innovative services and prevented the development of a truly competitive social-networking ecosystem.”

Nidhi Hegde, executive director of ALEP, described the ruling as a “colossally wrong decision” that “turns a willful blind eye to Meta’s enormous power over social media and the harms that flow from it.”

“These deals let Meta fuse Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp into one machine that poisons our children and discourse, bullies publishers and advertisers, and destroys the possibility of healthy online connections with friends and family,” she said. “By pretending that TikTok’s rise wipes away over a decade of illegal conduct, this court has effectively told every aspiring monopolist that our current justice system is on their side.”

Hegde added that it should now fall upon US Congress to “step in and break up Big Tech, prohibit addictive surveillance algorithms, and create the conditions for building a better future.”

Open Markets Institute policy counsel Tara Pincock said Boasberg’s ruling was “profoundly misguided,” and accused the judge of blocking the FTC from reversing a mistake it made last decade when it signed off on Meta’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Judge Boasberg erred in concluding that Facebook competes with TikTok and YouTube,” said Pincock, a former state assistant attorney general in Utah. “I was part of the bipartisan coalition of states that brought this case alongside the FTC in December 2020, and the court’s framing misrepresents what is at stake. This case has never been about generic ‘time and attention.’ It is about how people connect, communicate, and build communities—and about how a powerful company abused its dominance to protect itself from competition.”

America, Incorporated: The Era Of The Portfolio State – Analysis

STATE CAPITALI$M BY ANY OTHER NAME

November 7, 2025 

 Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Mohammed Soliman


(FPRI) — For much of the last century, the American state has intervened directly in the economy only in times of extraordinary crisis. During World War II, Washington commandeered entire industries to serve the war effort. In 2008, it took ownership stakes in banks, automakers, and insurers to stabilize the financial system. These interventions were temporary, emergency-driven, and designed to unwind once the immediate danger had passed.

What is happening today is different. The state is no longer waiting for crisis. It is proactively buying into the commanding heights of the 21st-century economy. This shift is not simply about regulation or subsidy, but about ownership. America is beginning to look less like the free-market exemplar of the neoliberal era and more like a strategic shareholder, assembling a portfolio of national assets across semiconductors and minerals that will expand to energy and biotechnology, and other industries of interest.

A few months ago, something unprecedented happened: The US government quietly bought an equitystake in Intel. This was done using pre-allocated subsidies from the CHIPS and Science Act, and it occurred without any sort of emergency. A few weeks before the Intel deal, the then Department of Defense, now Department of War, also acquired a 15 percent stake in MP Materials, positioning the company as a rare earth national champion. These decisions are not isolated events. They reflect the birth of a new industrial paradigm: the Portfolio State.

The End of the Neoliberal Consensus

For 40 years, American industrial policy was guided by market fundamentalism. The private sector was the engine of innovation, while the state served as a light-handed regulator and an enabler of globalization, providing market access for geopolitical alignment. Silicon Valley flourished. Capital moved freely. Manufacturing was offshored in pursuit of financial returns with Washington effectively outsourcing its industrial base to the invisible hand of the market. But that model has begun to crack. Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the semiconductor shortage, and the rise of China as the techno-industrial superpower exposed America’s deep vulnerabilities. Chief among them is its lack of industrial scale in strategic sectors, areas where volume, speed, and competitiveness are required for national resilience and preserving a leading global position. This shortfall reflects a broader American tendency to assume that our perceived sense of technological superiority—which is already eroding vis-à-vis China—can compensate for material and industrial deficiencies, a belief at odds with industrial reality.

Industrial Policy in Historical Perspective

This is not the first time the United States has abandoned laissez-faire orthodoxy in favor of direct state intervention. During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson established the War Industries Board to coordinate the allocation of raw materials and standardize production to support the war efforts. The government nationalized railways and exerted control over telegraph networks to guarantee reliable transport and secure communication for the war efforts against Imperial Germany.

By World War II, Washington’s role was even more sweeping. President Theodore Roosevelt’s War Production Board converted entire sectors of the civilian economy to military use—automobile plants churned out tanks and aircraft, rubber and gasoline were rationed, and steel was funneled into shipbuilding. The government also imposed price controls and even nationalized industries such as coal mining when strikes threatened production. The United States became the “arsenal of democracy” by producing a massive amount of military goods. This extraordinary mobilization raised real GDP by 72 percent between 1940 and 1945, and at its peak, a large portion of US economic activity was managed or steered by federal authorities to sustain the war effort.

In the late 1980s, facing competition from Japan’s semiconductor industry, the US government and 14 tech companies formed a public-private consortium called SEMATECH. Funded by the Department of Defense and its members, SEMATECH’s goal was to improve US semiconductor manufacturing, a collaboration that helped the United States regain its leadership position by the mid-1990s. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government intervened at an unprecedented scale. Through Operation Warp Speed, it directly funded the development and manufacturing of vaccines, and it also guaranteed airline payrolls, injected liquidity into markets, and authorized the Federal Reserve to purchase corporate bonds.

The through line is clear: when national security or systemic stability is at risk, the United States has never hesitated to use the full weight of the state to direct markets, sustain industries, or even seize assets in the name of the national interest. The difference today is not whether Washington intervenes, but how. First came export controls on advanced chips to China in October 2022. Then came the CHIPS and Science Act, allocating over $52 billion to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing. Next came targeted loan programs, tax credits, and partnerships for critical minerals. These steps reflected a strategy of de-risking—not full decoupling, but reducing dependence on China while restoring industrial sovereignty.

And now, under the Trump administration, there is a shift from subsidies to equity—from carrots to ownership. The United States is no longer just underwriting industry—it is becoming a shareholder in it. This marks the clearest break yet with the neoliberal consensus and the strongest signal that a new model is emerging—a model this piece will later define as the Portfolio State.

Intel and MP Materials: From National Champion to National Stake

Intel once defined American semiconductor leadership. Under pioneers like Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove, the company invented the modern microchip, scaled it, and dominated global computing. By the 2000s, Intel’s dominance began to slip, largely due to a series of strategic miscalculations. The company missed the fundamental shift to mobile computing, as its chips weren’t designed to compete with the low-​power ARM architecture that powered the smartphone revolution. At the same time, it failed to recognize the emerging market for artificial intelligence (AI), allowing rivals like NVIDIA to become the leaders in specialized chips for AI data centers.

These setbacks were compounded by internal challenges. Intel fell behind in manufacturing, struggling with costly delays in developing its next-generation technology while competitors, such as Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, pulled ahead in advanced chip manufacturing. This shift was particularly dangerous as TSMC came to dominate an estimated 90 percent of the market for the most advanced AI chips. As the AI compute wave hits, the world’s dependency on these chips will only increase, making the need for a domestic alternative like Intel a top priority for national security. In a world where compute is foundational to technological supremacy, this was an unacceptable strategic liability. The Biden administration began with subsidies and procurement contracts, but the Trump administration went even further: it bought in.

This is why, in August, the US government acquired approximately a 10 percent equity stake in Intel—an $8.9 billion investment funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in CHIPS Act grants and $3.2 billion from the Secure Enclave program. This investment is in addition to the $2.2 billion in CHIPS grants Intel has already received, bringing total federal support to $11.1 billion. This stake in Intel signals more than confidence in one company. It is the scaffolding for a new model of techno-industrial policy where the state doesn’t just fund innovation—it holds shares in it.

On the other side of the technology stack lies the raw material: rare earths. MP Materials operates the Mountain Pass mine in California. Rare earth elements are critical to everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines to precision-guided missiles and smartphones. Yet for decades, the United States ceded this sector to China, which now has a monopoly over global processing capacity. In February, the Department of Defense announced a $35 million cost-sharing agreement with MP Materials to design and build a facility to process heavy rare earth elements at the company’s Mountain Pass site in California. This partnership expanded even further: the Department of Defense is now MP Materials’ largest shareholder, holding a 15 percent stake in the company as part of a multibillion-dollar package to accelerate domestic magnet production.

What’s different this time is the logic. This is not just a loan or subsidy. It is a deliberate move to reassert sovereign control over a key input in the technology, defense and energy transition supply chains. In its own way, MP is the mining equivalent of Intel: a national asset operating in a strategic bottleneck. It is not hard to imagine a future where the US government, or a coalition of industrial funds, acquires equity stakes in critical mineral producers.

The Portfolio State

What unites Intel and MP Materials is not sector or technology, but logic. The United States is no longer just subsidizing innovation but also building a portfolio of national assets—companies that sit at the apex of geoeconomic power. It is a Portfolio State: not a command economy in the Chinese mold, but a shareholder model in which public capital is deployed to achieve both commercial success and national interest. This new approach is finding a consensus between the populist left and the populist right. The Trump administration’s shift toward state intervention, most notably with the Intel deal, is being openly supportedby progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had previously advocated for a similar approach as an amendment to the CHIPS Act.

Of course, industrial policy is not new to America, but the modern Portfolio State is different. It is shaped not only by geopolitical competition and techno-industrial urgency, but also by the growing influence of venture capitalist culture on American politics and, by extension, technology policy. As David Sacks put it when discussing the Intel deal, “if you are going to hand out billions of dollars to these companies, you’re better off at least again getting something for it, having the taxpayers have some upside in it, allowing the government to recoup and creating the right incentive for these companies.” That logic—placing bets, managing risk, and demanding returns—is straight out of Sand Hill Road.

Sacks made the point even sharper: “We don’t really want our companies going to the federal government to try and get bailed out. And at least if they have to give up equity or warrants, things like that, there’s a cost to it. We would rather that these companies get financed privately. But that didn’t happen here.” In other words, Washington is beginning to act like a venture capital firm by providing capital, but also demanding equity, and seeking geopolitical and commercial upside.

This shift is reinforced by personnel. Vice President JD Vance is a venture capitalist. Sriram Krishnan, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, serves as an AI advisor in the Trump White House. The number of senior officials drawn directly from the venture capital ecosystem, or from its broader circle of influence, is unprecedented. Personnel is policy. And in this administration, the policy reflects the worldview of venture investors: scale fast, take equity, export your stack.

This logic is already visible in America’s AI Action Plan, which makes scaling and exporting the American AI stack the centerpiece of national strategy. Commercial success is now the core of America’s geopolitical position. Within this line of thinking, if American firms dominate the infrastructure and application layers of AI, then Washington can set the terms of global technological competition and its broader geopolitical position. In that sense, the United States is leveraging commerce itself as a geopolitical instrument.

The Case for an American Wealth Fund

That raises a larger question: If Washington acquires more and more equity stakes in companies, how should these stakes be managed? It makes little sense to allocate shares in Intel or future strategic firms on an ad hoc basis. Instead, to build a fully integrated model for this era of industrial policy, the United States should consider managing them through a sovereign wealth fund—one that aligns financial firepower with national priorities and blends commercial returns with strategic statecraft.

A US sovereign wealth fund could institutionalize the Portfolio State and link investment flows directly to government priorities: AI, biotechnology, materials science, space, and energy technologies. Rather than treating each crisis as a one-off bailout, Washington could operate with foresight and discipline—turning public capital into a long-term lever of national strategy.

Intel and MP Materials are just the bookends of this emerging model. The US government’s equity stake in these companies signals something deeper: America’s techno-industrial playbook, filtered through the grammar of venture capital and, potentially, the architecture of a sovereign wealth fund. This is the Portfolio State.

About the author Mohammed Soliman is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is also the director of the Strategic Technologies and Cyber Security Program at the Middle East Institute and a visiting fellow with the National Security Program at Third Way. He can be found on X at @Thisissoliman.

Source: This article was published by FPRI

Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute

Founded in 1955, FPRI (http://www.fpri.org/) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests and seeks to add perspective to events by fitting them into the larger historical and cultural context of international politics.

A Market Economy Coexisted With Totalitarianism Under Stalin, An Arrangement That Continues In Putin’s Russia – OpEd

STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Moscow, Russia. Photo Credit: step-svetlana, Pixabay

 October 6, 2025 

By Paul Goble

Most people see a market economy and totalitarianism as antithetical phenomena and believe that where one exists, the other cannot. But in fact, even in the darkest days of Stalin’s totalitarian system, a kind of market economy existed albeit not in its own name; and a similar arrangement now exists in Putin’s Russia, Dimitry Savvin says.

The editor of the Riga-based conservative Russian portal Harbin points to the case of Nikolay Pavlenko who created a private construction firm which operated in the USSR between 1948 and 1952, a case described by Russian historian Oleg Khlevnyuk in a 2023 Moscow book, The Corporation of Imposters (harbin.lv/algoritm-rynochnogo-pererozhdeniya).

What Pavlenko did was criminal “only” in the official Soviet understanding, Savvin says. In fact, what he did was to “establish a private construction enterprise masked as a military institution and over the course of several years successfully conduct commercial activity” in a totalitarian state.

As “phantasmagorical” as that may seem, he continues, “in essence, the mechanisms of coexistence with a totalitarian state and a private commercial enterprise which Pavlenko developed are in many respects typical” and were later employed “not only in the Soviet Union” but also in North Korea and since the 1990s by entrepreneurs in Russia.

Shortly after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Pavlenko, “suddenly discovered” that if one had the write papers and stamps, one could operate as a kind of covert free market player. He ran one such business during the war and established a second in 1948, when he was routinely sought out by officials because of his good and speedy work.

Eventually the party leadership caught up with him; and in 1952, hie operation was shut down and he was shot. But his operation, which was certainly far from unique, dis played four characteristics that help to explain why such things reemerged in some other communist countries, the post-Soviet USSR, and especially in Putin’s time.

First of all, Pavlenko’s organization was not political but commercial in the purest sense. Second, his organization mimicked state institutions; third, he did nothing criminal except for operating as a private firm in a system that denied that possibility; and fourth, if the leadership hadn’t been obsessed with defending socialism, what he did might have continued.

            “We see that little islands of market arrangements are natural for man and humanity” and emerge in communist and other totalitarian states, Savvin says, a pattern that requires us to recognize that with the proper masking, free market phenomena can and will exist under totalitarianism rather than being totally excluded by it.  

Savvin’s observation carries with it another implication that he doesn’t discuss but that is critical for those who want to overcome totalitarianism. In the 1990s, many Western leaders believed that if they got the economy right in the Russian Federation, totalitarianism would be precluded. But in fact that was not true.

Had such leaders focused more on democratic procedures and laws and worried somewhat less about the economy which they expected would do all the heavy lifting Russians and the world might have been spared the rise of the new totalitarianism under Vladimir Putin now.

Paul Goble

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. He has served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Goble maintains the Window on Eurasia blog and can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com .

Russia’s Most Powerful Weapon: Lies – OpEd

 

Spreading disinformation. Photo Credit: Phạm Nhật, Unsplash

 October 6, 2025 

By Mitzi Perdue

The Kremlin’s Disinformation War  

The recent discovery of a massive, foreign-linked telecom network in New York—packed with over 100,000 SIM cards and capable of crippling cell service across the city—is a stark reminder of how modern conflict is waged. This new frontier of warfare operates not with bombs, but with invisible threats that target the very infrastructure of society.

Yevhenii Dorohanov, from the National Police of Ukraine, has a good idea of what may be the reason.

“The disinformation you see online,” he says, “is well-planned, carefully targeted, and meant to sow division and anger. The goal is to destroy the fabric of society.”

Dorohnov’s job is to track how the Kremlin pushes propaganda and also to counter the disinformation that has almost certainly reached you, likely without your knowing it.   Read on for an unusually candid look at how Russia’s disinformation machine works.

Russia’s Strategy: Divide and Distract

Here’s an example of how Russian information warfare works in Ukraine. The Russians post a false report on Facebook or Telegram that a village has been captured by Russian troops. Since the people in the area are avid for information, the report will spread to all the surrounding towns and villages within minutes.

 “The result is panic,” Dorohanov explained. “Civilians from the neighboring towns now believe that the front line of the war is about to come to their village. They flee from their area, with the result that supply chains freeze, and commanders waste time correcting what never happened. The disruption ripples across every layer of society.”

The same tactics work in the West, only the narratives differ. “Before elections,” he says, “Russian propagandists focus on spreading false information on corruption or misuse of funds, or anything that undermines people’s faith in their leaders.”

Yevgeniy didn’t comment on the assassination of Charlie Kirk but he did say that the purveyors of Russian disinformation will move instantly in cases of a national tragedy.  They’ll swing into action, spreading conspiracies and amplifying distress and anger. “The point isn’t persuasion,” he said. “The point is to create discord, anger, and chaos.”

I pressed him on the mechanics. “How,” I asked, “do Russian operatives spread their messages?” 

The answer is fake accounts on social media. They use SIM cards to create fake identities.  A SIM card, by the way, is the small chip in your smartphone that stores a mobile phone’s subscriber identity and allows it to connect to a cellular network. With a SIM card, you can open an account on Facebook or TikTok, or other social media.

The Russians use SIM cards on an industrial scale to create fake identities on social media. In a recent operation, Ukrainian police confiscated over 150,000 fraudulent SIM cards that were used to create fake identities on social media.  

“One SIM card can register multiple accounts,” Yevgeniy explained. “And with e-SIMs, which are contraband, entire farms of fake accounts can be created automatically. In the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, there’s even a market where thousands of ordinary people are recruited to buy SIMs in bulk.”

“The fake accounts are trained to act like humans,” Yevgeniy continued. “The fake accounts will do things like click on memes, leaving harmless comments. Facebook’s algorithms see them as real people. Then, when those same bots choose to like or share disinformation, the system thinks the disinformation is popular and pushes it to the top of your feed.”

It doesn’t take thousands of bots. Sometimes a few dozen, deployed strategically, are enough to convince the algorithm that a topic is trending. “The goal is to make disinformation unavoidable and everywhere,” he said.

The Russians who do this work are called “trolls,” and the areas where they work are called “troll farms.” We in the West don’t know how many troll farms Russia has, but estimates are that there are thousands of them, and they’re there to spread disinformation.  

Online, some pose as patriots, others as critics. It’s a full-time job, and it’s guided by intelligence services that study exactly which communities are most vulnerable, whether it’s people angry about police violence, fearful about immigration, or suspicious of elites. It’s a good guess that Russian troll farms are doing everything they can right now to get Americans at each other’s throats over Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

The troll farms have a rapid response approach. As Dorohanov says, “When a major event breaks, they mobilize within minutes. Multiple narratives appear at once, each designed to inflame a different group.”

I asked how effective this kind of information campaign is compared to bombs. His answer surprised me. “In democracies, once citizens stop trusting their leaders-or each other-you don’t need to fire a shot.”

As our interview drew to a close, I asked what advice he would give to people in the West who want to protect themselves.

“Be skeptical,” he said. “Ask yourself: who benefits if I believe this? Check with reliable sources. And above all, don’t share unless you know it’s true.”

Yevgeniy’s final words lingered with me: “The danger isn’t that you’re lied to. The danger is that you stop believing in truth at all.”

Mitzi Perdue

Mitzi Perdue is a public policy advocate and co-founder of Mental Help Global.

STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

Heavy hand: Free-market US tested as Trump takes stakes in private companies

“Is Trump a State Capitalist?”

By AFP
September 25, 2025


As a condition of allowing the sales of US Steel to Nippon, President Donald Trump demanded a government 'golden share' in the enteprise 

- Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Drew Angerer

The Trump administration is in talks to take an equity stake in Lithium Americas, which would insert the government into another private enterprise in the latest challenge to American free-market traditions.

The move comes on the heels of Trump announcements establishing government holdings in struggling semiconductor giant Intel and the rare earth company MP Materials. Trump also secured a “golden share” for Washington in United States Steel as a condition of its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel.

Talks are still ongoing on the Lithium Americas stake, part of a renegotiation of a US Department of Energy loan held by the Canadian mining company and General Motors, said a Trump administration official.

The White House has characterized the stock holding arrangements as a boon for taxpayers that points to Trump’s prowess as a dealmaker, while asserting that day-to-day management will be left to companies.

But free-market advocates have reacted with various degrees of alarm to a trend they see as undermining the strength of the US system and stoking crony capitalism. In the US system, the government sets up the rules governing the private sector but generally stays out of it thereafter as firms respond to market signals.

“It undermines competition,” said Fred Ashton, director of competition policy at American Action Forum, who believes inserting the state into private enterprise leads to inefficiency and benefits politically favored firms over those less connected.

“We know the president likes to win so there’s no way the government lets these firms fail,” Ashton said.

Trump administration officials recently made use of the US Steel golden share. The company had planned to keep paying 800 workers while idling an Illinois factory, but decided to keep the plant running after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick invoked the golden share, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

“You need to let an executive of the company conclude the best use of the capital,” said governance expert Charles Elson of the University of Delaware, who criticized the White House intervention.

“The government is not in the business of picking winners and losers in the capital system,” he said. “That’s why we have a capital system.”


– Bipartisan consensus –

It is not unprecedented for the US government to hold equity stakes. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the US government amassed holdings in insurer AIG, General Motors and fellow automaker Chrysler as a condition of government support packages.

But the Treasury Department sold off the shares after the crisis ended, reflecting a bipartisan consensus, according to Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute think tank, who said presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama embraced the free market.

“Obama would have laughed out of the room the suggestion that the government take an equity stake in a manufacturing company,” Strain said in a recent column that also criticized the White House’s tying of Nvidia and AMD export licenses to payments to the government.

Obama “understood that in America’s system of democratic capitalism, the government does not own or shake down private companies,” Strain said in the piece headlined “Is Trump a State Capitalist?”

Strain, in an interview, predicted a “massive amount of crony capitalism” under Trump compared with the norm, but said the shifts will be too limited to significantly tilt the US macroeconomy given its size and tradition.

Ashton said he agrees that US status as a free market economy is not seriously in question. But he believes Trump’s conduct is distorting company behavior, noting reports that Apple may take a stake in Intel following Apple CEO Tim Cook’s August White House visit when he presented Trump with a 24-carat gold piece.

“It’s become so murky,” Ashton said. “We don’t know whether it’s a business decision because it’s a business decision or whether it’s a business decision because they have to please the White House in some way.

Trump wants piece of company in charge of America’s biggest lithium mine

Reuters | September 23, 2025 | 

The Trump administration is seeking an equity stake of as much as 10% in Lithium Americas as it renegotiates terms of the company’s $2.26 billion Energy Department loan for its Thacker Pass lithium project with General Motors, two people familiar with the discussions told Reuters.

The proposed stake is the latest example of the Trump administration intervening directly in the American economy as it has in taking stakes in Intel, MP Materials and other US tech and minerals firms to promote industries it sees as critical to national security.

Slated to become the Western Hemisphere’s largest source of lithium when it opens in 2028, the Thacker Pass mine has been under construction for nearly a year with more than 600 contractors at the site roughly 25 miles (40 km) south of Nevada’s border with Oregon.

Thacker Pass is seen as a linchpin in building a domestic supply chain part of Washington’s long-standing drive to boost US production of lithium, a metal used to make batteries for electric vehicles and other electronics.

“President Trump supports this project. He wants it to succeed and also be fair to taxpayers,” a White House official told Reuters. “But there’s no such thing as free money.”

Shares of Lithium Americas rose by roughly 80%, from around $3 a share to $5.54 a share, in aftermarket trading following the news.

The project has long been touted by both Republicans and Democrats as a key way to boost US critical minerals production and cut reliance on China, the world’s largest lithium processor.

The US produces less than 5,000 metric tons of lithium at a Nevada facility owned by Albemarle. Thacker Pass’s first phase is expected to produce 40,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate per year, enough for up to 800,000 EVs.

China plays a dominant role in the global lithium supply chain, producing more than 40,000 metric tons each year, making it the third-largest producer after Australia and Chile. China’s influence is far greater in refining, where it processes over 75% of the world’s lithium into battery-grade material.

The $2.93 billion Thacker Pass project was approved by Trump at the end of his first term. The loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) was closed last year by Biden administration officials.

The loan has a 24-year term, with interest rates based on the US Treasury rate as each tranche is drawn.

Lithium Americas was slated to make its first draw on the loan earlier this month but Trump officials sought to renegotiate terms amid concerns about the company’s ability to repay the loan given low lithium prices due to Chinese overproduction, according to the sources.

Discussions over the loan’s potential reevaluation were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. The administration’s request for an equity stake has not been previously reported.

GM, which invested $625 million in the mine last year for a 38% stake, has the right to buy all of the project’s lithium from its first phase and a portion from the second phase for 20 years, although Trump officials are now seeking a guarantee that GM will buy the metal, according to the sources.

The equity request came during discussions in recent months over the loan’s amortization schedule, with Lithium Americas proposing to shift when part of the loan’s principle would be repaid although not the repayment timeline itself or the total interest the Loan Programs Office would receive, according to one of the sources.

In response to that request and in order to close the loan and secure the funding, Lithium Americas earlier this week offered the government no-cost warrants that would equate to 5% to 10% of its common shares, as well as funds to cover any fees incurred by changing the amortization schedule, according to one of the sources.

Trump officials also are pushing to have GM relinquish its control over parts of the project and transfer them to Washington, according to one of the sources.

GM, which is relying on Thacker Pass to supply much of its lithium needs for its electrification push called the loan a “necessary part of the financing to commercialize this important national resource” and noted that Trump “strongly supported” the mine in his first term.

“We’re confident in the project, which supports the administration’s goals,” a GM spokesperson told Reuters.

Lithium Americas declined to comment on the ongoing negotiations, but said: “We respect the LPO’s decision to pursue a restructure and remain in active discussions with the (Department of Energy) and our partner, GM, and will provide an update at the appropriate time.”

Washington has safeguards in place to protect its investment as part of the original loan terms, including several clauses that give the government the option to take over the project if it is delayed or faces major cost overruns.

Lithium Americas, which has a market value of roughly $750 million, is one of several companies – including ioneer, Exxon Mobil, Standard Lithium and others – developing US lithium projects.

(By Ernest Scheyder and Jarrett Renshaw; Editing by Veronica Brown and Michael Learmonth)

A PIECE OF THE ACTION  STAR TREK

 

US rare earths champion says Pentagon deal not easily replicable

STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M BY ANY OTHER NAME

Bloomberg News | September 24, 2025 | 

MP Materials’ Mountain Pass rare earths mine in southern California is the only rare earths producer in the United States. Credit: MP Materials

MP Materials Corp., the US rare earths producer that’s received government investment to support construction of domestic capacity, is warning the unprecedented move won’t be easily repeated for other companies.

The Pentagon agreed to a $400 million preferred equity investment in MP in July, not long after the US faced the threat of industrial shutdowns triggered by China’s curbs on exports of rare earth magnets. The deal — also including a supply agreement with a guaranteed floor price — was seen as a transformative moment for an industry plagued by cycles of boom and bust even before this year’s crisis.

The move also triggered widespread discussion about how much support could be extended to other companies, both inside and outside the US. Chief executive officer James Litinsky, who co-founded MP in 2017 to resurrect a dormant Californian mine, said the company’s spectrum of assets — from mines to magnet plants — was one key to the deal.

“One unique thing that we offered is that we’re the only company in the world that’s fully vertically integrated, and if the government is going to support a solution, they need to make sure that the solution works,” Litinsky said in an interview on the sidelines of a rare earths event in Toronto. “You really have to have a full supply chain offering before you go to the US government” for support, he added.

The Pentagon deal was put together after Beijing’s grip on global supply of rare earth magnets proved pivotal in fighting a trade war with Washington. It also constituted a major government intervention to ensure future supply of a strategic product on national security grounds, and it meant the Trump administration has effectively created a national champion.

MP Materials’ shares have more than doubled since the Pentagon investment was unveiled, and rare earth stocks worldwide have soared as prices for the critical materials rally. The Australian government is also considering a floor price for rare earths, and there’s growing expectation for a bifurcated global market in which producers outside China have more protection against volatile prices.

Litinsky said America’s interventionist tack should ultimately create “normal” market pricing for ex-China producers. “The Chinese are going to come to a realization that it’s a fool’s errand to attack this industry,” he said on a conference panel earlier.

Another major talking point at the Toronto event was just how quickly the US is ramping up its own capacity, partly as a result of earlier investments and partly in response to the China shock this year. Adamas Intelligence, the consultancy and organizer of the Toronto event, sees domestic US magnets capacity briefly matched with demand in 2028 before demand from sectors like robotics, drones and electric vehicles takes off.