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A utopia for property owners, a loss of sovereignty for the dispossessed

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In the Financial Times dated December 7, 2025, an article describing how tech elites have begun building their own “for-profit cities” opened as follows:

“Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of the crypto exchange Coinbase, addresses hundreds of tech workers and investors filling a dim hall in Singapore; they are all here to learn how to build an empire.

‘I think it’s fair to say,’ he says from the stage, opening his hands, ‘we have a movement in 2025.’

This was early October, and Srinivasan was organizing an event called the Network State Conference, targeting those ‘interested in founding, funding, and finding new communities.’”

We will return to the Financial Times article, but first, I must provide a refresher on Balaji Srinivasan and the Network State. While trying to recall where I remembered Srinivasan’s name from, I first turned to a long profile of Curtis Yarvin, known as “America’s only monarchist.” Indeed, this tech tycoon, along with Peter Thiel, belonged to Yarvin’s “Dark Enlightenment” circle.

Later, I recalled Quinn Slobodian’s book Crack-Up Capitalism, which I made extensive use of last summer in a series of articles examining how Silicon Valley’s wealthy are exploring escape routes from the anticipated apocalypse. A significant portion of the book’s 11th Chapter (“A Cloud Country in the Metaverse”) was dedicated to Srinivasan and his Network State project.

In summary, this was the story—embodied in the person of this Indian-American tycoon—of how the rich might not necessarily have to establish their own states in physical spaces. Through The Sovereign Individual, a bedside book for tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, they had acquired a survival guide for the wealthy amidst the impending collapse of the welfare state: they were dazzled by the invention of disruptive microchips and their potential to “subvert the nation-state”(1). Faced with the internet, ideas of government/state that pointed to territorial sovereignty were melting away. Ultimately, a super-class composed of hyper-mobile and high-IQ individuals would emerge; they would remotely control the low-IQ, docile workforce and bury their wealth far away from states with peace of mind.

The nation-state form was “dysgenic,” meaning it caused the biologically weak to survive; it worked against the dictates of evolutionary development and the survival instinct. In the age of hypermobility, microchips and the Internet would allow evolutionary interests to break free from national constraints. The elites would no longer view national identities as meaningful—or rather, they wouldn’t need to; the “delusion” that they owed anything to their so-called fellow citizens would henceforth be something to laugh at: They would realize that their own countrymen were actually “essentially parasitic and predatory.” For sovereign individuals, there was no one they were responsible for other than themselves.

The well-known logical conclusion of this reasoning is a nostalgia for the Middle Ages; and so it was for the authors. In the new millennium, they imagined a world where sovereignties were fractured, just as they were before nation-states. Dissolution and fragmentation suited a chosen group; to them, every time a nation-state fell apart, the autonomy of sovereign individuals was encouraged.

Instead of the terrifying nature of real life, which restricts and occasionally destroys property rights, the spacious atmosphere of cyberspace was taking shape as a utopia that would protect the wealth of the rich. New lands meant new property, and the virtual world opened new doors for conquest fantasies.

This is where Srinivasan emerged as one of the most resolute representatives of this idea. He positioned his own city, which he called a “cloud country,” against Washington’s stifling laws, bureaucracy, media, and the diplomas of Harvard and Yale. Like Thiel, he was investing in Tlon, the company through which Yarvin sought to build a “new internet.”

Acknowledging that migration to physical lands would not be sustainable, Srinivasan set his mind on establishing digital communities. According to him, online relationships knew no differences of language, religion, or race, and were more inclined to foster intimacy than physical relationships. First, a virtual network would be established, then that virtual network would turn into a new city, and finally, a new country would come into existence. It’s like Minecraft: You get online, and through “crowdfunding,” you establish a new settlement anywhere in the world.

Rather than “Island” themed escapes that emphasize seclusion and self-sufficiency, Srinivasan was calling for a more “collective” establishment. Singapore and its eternal chief Lee Kuan Yew appealed to him more for this reason. Additionally, New Songdo City in South Korea, where “citizen-customers” own shares in a venture run by a private company, was also a favorite of our tech tycoon.(2)

In a famous speech at Y Combinator’s Startup School in 2013, Srinivasan conveyed his ideas to a broader audience regarding what he considered a fundamental contradiction between certain modern nation-states and innovation. In his speech, he advocated for Silicon Valley’s “ultimate exit” from the US, claiming the US was “obsolete and hostile to innovators.” In essence, he was saying: If the society you live in is broken, why not “exit” and create a new one?

Slobodian writes that Srinivasan’s “collective” vision differs only semantically from the sovereign individual of William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, authors of The Sovereign Individual:

“All three saw the same things: the possibility of exit created by a new technology; the creation of a new global caste of meritocratic specialists; and the abandonment of taxation and the regulatory state in favor of new relationships organized along the lines of a private company, and even new territories.”

Fredric Jameson’s observation in an essay on the end of history debates (“‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?”), noting that we are moving toward the limits of capital’s expansion possibilities in the “third stage of capitalism,” and that the “end of history” thesis rises upon an “inability to think beyond” this state, seems to be falling flat. While the cycle of capital expansion has been stumbling for a long time, it now appears to be countered by tech elites through re-territorialization—this time beyond the human and beyond space—by commodifying these realms as well.

***

In his opening speech at the Bitcoin Asia conference held in Hong Kong last August, Srinivasan said, “Just as you choose your university at 18, you will choose your country at 18, and this has already started with startup communities.”

According to a Bloomberg report, Srinivasan opened a school (The Network School) in Forest City, Malaysia, for this purpose. It is not entirely clear why he chose Forest City for the school, but advantages such as low rents and easy access to Singapore and an international airport are listed.

The report notes that officials, wanting to prevent the political repercussions of this project—which is widely mocked as a “waste of time” (or folly)—have taken a series of measures to increase its appeal, including declaring it a duty-free zone. Malaysia is reportedly promising a 0% tax rate to entice family offices, the investment vehicles of the super-rich, to move there.

The report continues:

“About 400 students, mostly entrepreneurs, came to Forest City to learn everything from coding to unconventional theories on state structure. They are building crypto projects, improving their physical fitness, and testing whether a shared ideology, not just a shared territory, can hold a community together. for those opting for a shared room, the price starts at $1,500 a month, including accommodation and meals.”

We also learn about the school’s curriculum: Product sprints and coding sessions in the mornings; in the afternoons, seminars covering topics ranging from the Meiji Restoration to Singapore’s statecraft and the mechanics of decentralized governance.

According to students speaking to Bloomberg, guest speakers provide both “deep dives into technology and ideological sermons.”

***

Let us return to the Financial Times article. Reporter Hannah Murphy reports that this idea of a “country for the rich” or startup city, considered marginal just a few years ago, is now capturing the interest of “bold entrepreneurs and aggrieved billionaires” who are increasingly drawn to the “allure of tech-friendly paradises” unbounded by old rules and regulations.

According to an open-source database shared by Srinivasan, approximately 120 “startup societies” are currently in the founding stage. A few of these have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from funds backed by names like investors Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

The article notes that Srinivasan has established a “Network School” on an artificial island near Singapore, where “techno-optimists” can live together in a hotel, perform their day jobs remotely, and learn how to build a new society. The membership and accommodation fee for what he calls “society-as-a-service” starts at $1,500 per month.

Murphy continues:

“Backers of these initiatives offer the opportunity to address all the problems they believe are causing the decline of American dynamism, from monetary policy to taxation. San Francisco, in particular, has been affected by high levels of homelessness and crime for years, causing tech workers to migrate away during Covid.”

We learn that Amjad Masad, CEO of the AI coding company Replit, says, “Young people are unhappy with stagnation, corruption, and isolation.” Masad moved Replit to Foster City last year to escape the “misery” on the streets of San Francisco. Foster City is a “master-planned” city built on marshland near Silicon Valley in the 1960s. Masad adds, “Young people clearly desire to discover new ways of living and building through technology.”

Let us pause to say a few words about the “frontier mentality” that enchants Srinivasan and tech billionaires. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous 1893 paper (“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”), explained American history and development primarily through the colonization of the American West. The uniqueness of American institutions lay in the settlers making the wild productive—in short, transforming the primitive political and economic conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Behind American crudeness and roughness, as well as its dynamism and resourcefulness, lay this very nature of being a “frontier nation,” constantly shifting the boundary Westward, reaching new frontiers with every shift, and transforming those frontiers. Contrasting the borders of Europe, which he described as “a fortified boundary line running through dense populations,” Turner argued that the US was full of “free land,” and stated that all classes of American society participated in this drive in great numbers. “The rise of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions,” Turner said, “were dependent on the advance of the frontier.”

Turner points out that the American frontier mentality and the role this mentality played in the New Continent opened the door to what we call “innovation” today:

“For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is no tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier.”

In his book The Network State, Srinivasan argued that the “frontier has reopened” and that thanks to advances in technology, the number of new sovereign entities will increase exponentially.

Masad says young people (but the wealthy ones) are eager to explore new ways of living through technology and the internet. This is actually a call to “frontiers” against the boredom, bureaucracy, and institutions of settled life.

In the same FT article, Patri Friedman, grandson of neoliberalism guru Milton Friedman, defines the movement’s goal as “reshaping governance for the 21st century, inspired by startups and the internet.” Friedman is the founder of Pronomos Capital, a venture firm investing in experimental cities.

He wants to run his country not as a democracy, but like a for-profit corporation. “A private venture-backed company becomes the city operator, and they [the executives] design the laws and earn revenue through a combination of rent, taxes, and service fees,” he says regarding his proposed model. He is reportedly in talks with eight countries in Africa for his “model.”

Srinivasan is even more outspoken. Based on developments in cryptocurrency technology, he writes that states should be backed by the crypto economy:

“You can found a tribe just like you found a startup. Joseph Smith of the Mormons did it. Abraham did it. Jesus did it. What I really want is something like techno-Zionism.”

In his book, Srinivasan also mentioned that Israel is a model for them. With the founding of Israel, Jews exhibited a successful example of the “God/State/Network” sequence.(3) Citing the works of Theodor Herzl as inspiration for his book, Srinivasan believes that a third pole, outside the US-China poles, will be a technologically advanced Indo-Israeli pole.

***

The proliferation of sovereignties means the disappearance of the crumbs of sovereignty held by ordinary people. The Próspera “startup city” in Honduras, which I mentioned in my article series last summer, is an example of this.

In this gated community run by a Delaware-based company, around 1,000 people live, and according to the FT, these residents “can enjoy co-working spaces, a beach resort, and a golf course.”

Reporter Murphy continues:

“In Próspera, a for-profit semi-autonomous zone, taxes are low, it has its own labor regulations, and an arbitration system hearing cases online by retired Arizona judges. Bitcoin is one of the preferred currencies.”

The rich have fled taxation, rules that rein in the labor market, and a judiciary that, albeit on paper, sometimes stands by the oppressed. There is more: Próspera’s wiping away of medical regulations, combined with themes popular in Silicon Valley circles like longevity or eternal life, has made this place a paradise for people seeking “experimental treatments.” For example, former tech entrepreneur and “bio-hacker-influencer” Bryan Johnson went there for follistatin gene therapy treatment, which is not approved in other countries.

In another Financial Times report, we learn that a wealthy bitcoin investor wants to establish his own court system within a “libertarian” community on the Caribbean island of Nevis as part of the “tech-enabled network state” movement.

Olivier Janssens’ company, South Nevis, is reportedly buying land for the “Destiny” project on Nevis. This project is the first of its kind on the island, made possible by a new “Nevisian” law. We read the rest from the news report:

“Described by the island government as a multi-billion dollar project, Destiny involves a major reshaping of the island’s southern coast, including villas and medical clinics. Speaking via video conference to a panel of residents in late November, Janssens criticized Nevis’s court system for ‘inefficiency.’ ‘If we copy this exactly, people won’t want to come here.’ Instead, he said Destiny would ‘propose our own efficient court systems for certain matters’ but ultimately ‘still comply’ with the national legal system.”

According to the report, in the summer of 2025, the St Kitts and Nevis government passed the “Special Sustainability Zones Jurisdiction Act,” allowing the government to make agreements for projects like Destiny.

Janssens is reportedly in talks with the government and announced that if the project proceeds, $50 million will be invested in Nevis’s infrastructure.

The law also includes a provision for developers to establish their own “dispute resolution services and mechanisms.” This situation has worried islanders, and many fear Destiny could become a “state within a state.”

Kelvin Daly, a member of the opposition Nevis Reform Party (NRP), said the law enabling special sustainability zones was passed “without any consultation with the public.”

Daly added, “They were very careful in using the word sustainable, because it implies something good and honest. It is a hyperbolic expression used to mean an economic zone with added benefits.”

Janssens, however, rejected the definition of a state within a state, stating that Destiny would be open to all island residents and ultimately subject to the government’s jurisdiction. Our investor, naturally, did not mention the price of the luxury homes to be built on the island. Janssens said, “I don’t trust politicians… We just say ‘Leave us alone and let us do our business,'” expressing his desire for a libertarian community and characterizing Nevis as the “host country.”

Of course, not everyone is in pursuit of new frontiers. Some are seeking to disrupt and reconstruct the internal coherence of sovereignties within existing borders. Inspired by the “charter cities” model—places with legal autonomy and fewer regulations like Singapore, Hong Kong, and Dubai—they focus on improving governance in existing cities without chasing a distinct sovereignty.

For instance, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to develop 10 regions called “charter cities” in the US to boost American innovation in light of the US-China tech race.

There is another dimension to hijacking sovereignty. In response to accusations of “techno-fascism,” Patri Friedman openly and proudly replies, “We are funding companies that will run undemocratic cities, and if you don’t like that, you shouldn’t move there.” In Africa, where he plans to build these “undemocratic cities,” what will happen to those already there? Friedman says they are looking for lands in charter cities in Africa large enough for people to live on. After fencing off these lands, they will reportedly give a “relocation bonus” to those who “don’t want to live” there to move out of the area.(4)

***

They believe that the limit of capitalist expansion coincides with the limit of the human. Here, the limit of the human is the historically determined limit of the human. Here, mechanisms of sovereignty are equated with the human, or rather, with the rabble, the low-intelligence, bureaucrats, and those trapped within national borders. Taxation, “democratic representation,” elections, unions, state subsidies, public education, and health… all go hand in hand with these and are equivalent to “welfare state socialism.”

Crossing the boundaries of the human proceeds in parallel with the opening of new spheres of commodification. The frontier mentality is an absolute loss of sovereignty for the border inhabitants who are confronted with the frontier mentality of others; or it is the “law of the jungle,” the “wild west.” In Turner’s words, the person grappling with the primitive world at the frontier is essentially a “ranger”; we could tolerate his coarseness by his transformation of primitiveness into the sophistication of complexity.

Despite the claim of the end of history, according to Jameson, a part of our mind has always tended toward the “systemic” and the prediction of the future. Anxiety about the future of their own mode of production directs the ultra-rich toward a fragmentation that will perpetuate and guarantee the loss of sovereignty for the oppressed.

***

(1) I assume the authors mean “national state” when they say “nation-state.” National states have stamped their mark on almost the entire world for several centuries as a form of territorial sovereignty containing peoples who are culturally very different and dissimilar in national characteristics; they also harbor centralized, federal, or autonomous structures. The nation-state, on the other hand, with an assumption of specific homogeneity, can only be a subset of the national state form; that is, while every nation-state is a national state, not every national state is a nation-state. For example, let alone the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even the Russian Federation does not come anywhere near being a nation-state. This oddity is also among the spices of the concept soup in the discussions held in the context of the recent “resolution process” in Turkey.

(2) Slobodian also draws attention to the cunning here: In the cloud city of the future, individuals would not own the land, they would only own a share/stake in the whole city. The owner of the land would be the one who developed that land (the developer). Slobodian summarizes: “The cloud city was terms and conditions rather than rights and obligations.”

(3) Srinivasan fabricates a group called “International Intermediate.” This group consists of those opposed to both “American anarchy” and “Chinese control.” Groups such as American centrists, Chinese liberals, and global technology experts are included in this group alongside India and Israel.

(4) One cannot help but think of the “transfer” idea in Zionist literature: Even before the State of Israel was established, Zionist settlers planned to deport (“transfer”) Palestinians to Jordan, Syria, or even Iraq in exchange for a certain amount of money.

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The system that needed Lindsey Graham

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23 hours ago

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13/07/2026

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Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

The senator died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, at seventy-one, in the middle of a campaign for a fifth term. His communications director cited the medical examiner’s preliminary finding: a rupture in the body’s largest artery, the consequence of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The tributes arrived within hours. Trump called him a true American patriot. Volodymyr Zelensky, who had met him twice in the preceding week, called him a friend who was there when it was needed most. Mark Rutte and Benjamin Netanyahu sent their own. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said there were no words to describe Graham’s impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

There are words. The obituaries have chosen the wrong ones, and in doing so they have skipped the only question worth asking about a man like this. Not whether he was sincere in his convictions — he was, exhaustingly so — but how a senator whose reflexive answer to every foreign crisis was force spent twenty-three years being handed the committee seats, the airtime, and the ear of four presidents that let him act on it. Graham was not an aberration the system tolerated. He was a product the system manufactured, promoted, and kept in stock because he was useful.

Consider the shape of the career. In March 2003, as the bombs fell on Baghdad, Graham told the country that past disagreements should give way to a shared commitment to see the effort through. The war he blessed that day killed more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians by the most conservative direct-death counts, birthed the insurgency that became ISIS, and left the country a wreck. He drew no lesson from it. When Libya was broken open in 2011 and left to its warlords, he had backed the intervention. When Syria was pulled apart, he had wanted deeper involvement. Across two decades, the country would be devastated, and Graham’s response to each devastation was to locate the next one.

By February of this year the next one was Iran. On the twenty-sixth, under his own Senate letterhead, Graham published an essay that reads now like a confession left in plain sight. Iran, he wrote, was facing a Berlin Wall moment. The regime was at its weakest point since 1979, and his ultimate hope was that regime change would be achieved. He described the October 7 attacks, in his own phrasing — as a silver lining, because the Israeli campaign that followed had degraded Iran’s military. He praised Trump for pursuing, in his words, peace, not war, in the same paragraphs that celebrated a bombing campaign already under way. The strikes had a name: Operation Midnight Hammer. Graham called it the largest opportunity for peace and prosperity in the Middle East in over a thousand years.

He said the quiet part in Tel Aviv, to reporters, on February 16, less than two weeks before the strikes began. The United States was on the verge of eliminating the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. On Fox News, days into the war, he offered the ledger in its rawest form: when the regime goes down, he said, there would be a new Middle East, and the United States would make a tremendous amount of money. Venezuela and Iran held nearly a third of the world’s known oil reserves, he noted, and the point of the exercise was a partnership with those reserves. Regime change as a real-estate transaction. He had made the trip to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia the week before to reaffirm, he wrote, that all of it was attainable and would be extremely beneficial to the United States. Weeks earlier he had met with Mossad, telling reporters they would tell him things his own government would not.

None of this cost him anything. That is the part the eulogies cannot hold in view, because to hold it in view is to indict the institutions doing the eulogizing. A senator who spent a career being wrong about the consequences of American force — wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about what would follow the fall of every regime he wanted to fall — was never demoted for it. He was promoted. The record of his committee assignments tells the story in the driest possible language. For years he sat on the Armed Services Committee, from which he lectured the Senate that its love for the troops bought nothing, that only appropriations did, that a colleague worried about the budget was out of touch with the world. By the time of his death he chaired the Budget Committee and sat on Appropriations — the panels that write the numbers and bless the spending. The man who wanted every war was placed, again and again, on the committees that pay for them.

Follow the money and the shape sharpens further. Graham’s donors, across a career documented in Federal Election Commission filings, clustered where his positions pointed. The defense contractors — the makers of the aircraft, the missiles, the systems — routed money to his committees and his leadership PACs. The specific career totals sit behind a paywall that blocks automated verification, and so no single figure belongs in this account. But the pattern needs no exact number to be legible. A senator who votes for every weapons system, who calls insufficient defense spending an emergency, who treats the reduction of the military budget as a moral failure, is a senator worth funding for the people who build the weapons. The contributions were not a bribe. They did not need to be. They were an investment in a man who already believed, and who sat where belief could be converted into contracts.

The media completed the machine. Graham was a fixture of the Sunday shows and the cable green rooms for a reason that had nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with format. He was quotable, available, and reliably hawkish, which made him the perfect guest for programs that reward certainty over accuracy and confrontation over reflection. The pipeline ran in both directions. The airtime made him a national figure, and being a national figure got him more airtime, and the whole apparatus rewarded the escalation it claimed only to be covering. When he called for bombing Iran regardless of Iran’s involvement in a given attack, and told Israel to finish the job, the remarks drew condemnation abroad and bookings at home. The market for a war hawk was deep, and he supplied it.

What made Graham durable was that his convictions never had to survive an election of ideas, only the tolerance of the institutions that housed them. He denounced Trump in 2015 as a race-baiting xenophobic bigot and a jackass, and by his second term was among the president’s most consistent defenders, having discovered that proximity to power mattered more than the content of the man wielding it. The pitch that helped start this year’s war was delivered, according to reporting on the strikes, over rounds of golf. Iran was a spoiler for everything Trump wanted, Graham told him; collapse the regime and it would be Berlin Wall stuff. The president was persuaded. The bombs fell. And when a reporter asked Graham what the plan was for the day after — the question that Iraq should have burned into every hawk in Washington — he answered that it was not his job to know. The future of Iran, he said, was for the Iranian people to determine. He had wanted the war. The consequences belonged to someone else.

That was always the arrangement. The wars were his to advocate and never his to own. He would appear on the morning shows to demand them, sit on the committees to fund them, take the money from the firms that profited from them, and when they curdled into the next disaster he would be on television again, demanding the next one, his authority somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the wreckage behind him. This is not the biography of an outlier. It is the biography of an incentive structure, wearing a man’s face.

He died with the seat already in motion. Within hours, before any burial, the reporting had turned to the scramble to replace him, to the governor who will name a temporary successor, to what his absence means for a Republican majority counting every vote. Trump told NBC he already had someone in mind. The machine that made Lindsey Graham did not pause to mourn him. It began, immediately, to fill the vacancy — because the position he occupied was never really about the man. It was about keeping the seat filled by someone who would say what he said. There is no shortage of applicants. That is the dread the eulogies are built to keep you from feeling. He is gone, and nothing that produced him has changed.

***

Thomas Karat has spent a career in multinational technology corporations and is a behavior analyst holding a Master’s in Science and Communication from Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on the psychology of language in power dynamics, and his graduate thesis examined linguistic deception markers in high-stakes business negotiations. He hosts a YT podcast, SaltCubeAnalytics, and publishes at karat.substack.com

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Trump financial disclosures show millions invested in major defense contractors, analysis reveals

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10/07/2026

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US President Donald Trump’s financial disclosures released last week reveal that he has invested millions of dollars in approximately a dozen companies, including weapons manufacturers and defense contractors, according to a news analysis by Responsible Statecraft. The analysis shows that Trump, through investment firms representing him, acquired shares in defense sector companies valued at a total of between $9.7 million and $24.3 million.

The companies receiving investment included Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics.

According to the financial disclosures, the investment firms managing Trump’s assets invested between $1.6 million and $3.9 million in the data analytics and artificial intelligence company Palantir.

The analysis noted that Palantir developed the AI-powered Maven Smart System, which is utilized in US military operations in the war with Iran. The same analysis also claimed that the company contributed to the development of software named “Big Daddy,” which is used in Israeli military operations in Gaza.

Trump’s portfolio also includes shares in Boeing. The analysis stated that Boeing sold F-15 fighter jets valued at $8.6 billion to Israel less than three months before Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated their joint war against Iran.

According to the financial disclosures, Trump also invested in GE Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and RTX, the manufacturer of Tomahawk missiles.

The analysis wrote that weapons produced by these companies were heavily used in the war with Iran, including Tomahawk missiles used in a US Air Force strike on a primary school in the Iranian city of Minab. The report stated that at least 168 children lost their lives in this attack.

According to Responsible Statecraft, the majority of these companies received new contracts from the Pentagon aimed at replenishing US missile stockpiles depleted during the war with Iran.

RTX signed a $373 million contract for 23 Standard Missile-3 IB interceptor missiles, while Lockheed Martin was reported to have secured a $35 billion contract intended to quadruple its production of the THAAD missile defense system.

The financial disclosures showed that Trump’s investment firms also invested in shares of Kratos Defense, Honeywell, Howmet Aerospace, L3Harris, and TransDigm.

Responsible Statecraft noted that the shares of these companies gained significant value within a year of Trump returning to office. According to the analysis, in 2025, Palantir shares rose by 135%, Kratos shares by 188%, GE Aerospace shares by 84%, and RTX shares by 61%.

In April, Trump posted on Truth Social, stating: “Palantir Technologies has proven to have very powerful capabilities and equipment on the battlefield. Ask our enemies!” Following the post, the company’s shares reportedly rose by approximately 3% within a few minutes.

Financial records showed that Trump generated more than $2 billion in income in 2025. Responsible Statecraft wrote that this amount is “unprecedented” for a sitting US president.

According to the report, the majority of this income was derived from investments linked to cryptocurrency companies such as World Liberty Financial and Binance. Trump reportedly earned hundreds of millions of dollars from “memecoins” launched through these companies, though these crypto assets later suffered sharp declines in value, resulting in losses for numerous investors.

The analysis stated that Tahnoun bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE National Security Advisor and brother of the UAE President and Foreign Minister, invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial and $2 billion in Binance. Trump subsequently approved the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE, a decision that the analysis indicated created the impression of being linked to the crypto investments.

According to the analysis, Donald Trump Jr. is also connected to companies operating in the unmanned aerial vehicle and defense technology sectors. Trump Jr. is a major shareholder and advisory board member at Unusual Machines, which manufactures drone components, while his investment firm also holds stakes in Powerus and Vulcan Elements, both of which hold Pentagon contracts.

Trump Jr. serves on the board of Powerus, which markets drone systems used to intercept Iranian missiles to Gulf countries, and Eric Trump is reported to hold a financial interest in the same company.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, evaluated the situation, saying: “These countries are under great pressure to buy from the president’s sons. In this way, the president will do what they want.”

When asked last year about potential conflicts of interest arising from Trump’s business activities, White House Spokesperson Anna Kelly responded: “There are no conflicts of interest.” Trump also acknowledged the existence of conflicts of interest in an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, but argued they were not important, saying: “I realized that nobody cares.”

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US Democrats split over proposed data center moratoriums amid rising energy and climate concerns

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4 days ago

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10/07/2026

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Democrats in the United States increasingly view the rapid expansion of data centers as a critical challenge, yet the party remains deeply divided over how to address the issue.

For many Democrats, the immense energy consumption of these facilities—which drives up household electricity bills and exacerbates climate change—makes some form of restriction an inevitable policy option. The growing public unpopularity of these centers raises the political stakes for Democrats, who are seeking solutions to protect their prospects in this year’s midterm elections on promises of lowering the cost of living.

Last month, Representative Frank Pallone Jr., the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called for a moratorium on data center construction. However, senior party leadership has shown little enthusiasm for the proposal.

These internal divisions are also playing out at the state level, where at least two Democratic-controlled legislatures have passed data center moratoriums. One of those measures was vetoed, while the other is currently awaiting the governor’s signature.

Support for restricting data centers does not align strictly along traditional ideological lines. A faction of anti-establishment Republicans has backed such efforts, while other members of the Republican Party continue to debate how, or even if, to regulate the massive server farms powering the artificial intelligence boom.

In Congress, Democratic leaders have repeatedly argued that data centers must pay their fair share of rising energy costs.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stated that Democrats would push for “strong, enforceable consumer protections.”

Similarly, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries expressed support for technological innovation while emphasizing, “We must ensure we are protecting the American consumer.”

However, neither leader has endorsed a specific legislative proposal to achieve these objectives. Requests for comment sent to the offices of Schumer and Jeffries went unanswered.

Jeffries also told Politico that halting data center development is “certainly not a position I am articulating at this time.”

In contrast, influential progressive figures, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argue that a total moratorium on data center construction is necessary.

In March, these lawmakers introduced legislation that would ban the construction of new data centers until Congress enacts a suite of AI safety measures, ranging from government audits of AI models to protections against mass layoffs.

Pallone voiced strong support for the concept last month during a subcommittee hearing on a separate data center bill, stating he favored “a national AI data center moratorium until we can figure out a way that this is not going to harm our nation’s air, water, and utility bills.”

Following his remarks, Pallone added: “The reality is that everything with these data centers is moving so quickly, and I am concerned about the impact on electricity consumers and the environment.”

The Data Center Coalition, an industry group backed by several major technology companies, argued that a national moratorium would deter investment in the US, damage the economy, and “send the wrong message to other industries.”

“A federal mandate to halt data center construction risks restricting access to cloud and digital services, undermines our global competitiveness, and would have significant consequences for Americans’ daily lives,” the group said in a statement in late June.

Maxwell Shulman, a policy research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors, suggested that the primary force driving the recent push for moratoriums is a “general hostility toward AI and Big Tech.”

“People see many of these changes. They are worried about AI. They are worried about the economy and their jobs, and they feel there is very little they can do about it,” Shulman said. “They view data centers not only as the physical embodiment of AI, but also as one of the rare areas where they can actually have a say or fight back.”

Shulman added: “I think moratoriums are a blunt but effective tool to demonstrate this opposition or concern toward AI in general, not just data centers.”

Meanwhile, a narrower, bipartisan bill has been gaining momentum in Congress.

The Electricity Consumers Protection Act, led by Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat, and Representative Gabe Evans, a Republican, would require state utility regulators to establish rules ensuring that ordinary Americans do not foot the bill for new power generation and transmission lines built to support high-load consumers like data centers.

The bill passed the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee in late June and is scheduled for consideration by the full committee.

Castor said Congress should begin by establishing regulatory safeguards, though she did not rule out supporting a construction halt in the future.

“People want guardrails. They do not want their electricity bills to go up, and they are worried about water,” Castor said last month.

When asked about her stance on a moratorium, Castor added: “If we reach a point where these guardrails are not put in place and companies simply ignore them, we will have to move to that stage.”

At the state level, Democratic governors have blocked or slowed legislative efforts to limit data center expansion. In Maine, the legislature passed a bill to ban new data center construction for 18 months, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed the measure because it did not exempt an ongoing $550 million project.

New York lawmakers passed a one-year data center moratorium in June, which is currently awaiting action from Governor Kathy Hochul. According to a report by Politico, Hochul is instead considering an executive order for a shorter, six-month halt.

Other Democratic governors have actively opposed data center moratoriums.

“Walking away from a technology that will continue to propagate is leaving the table,” Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, told Politico this week.

In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required planned data centers to estimate their water usage.

As broad moratoriums encounter resistance, state-level Democratic leaders are turning to more targeted solutions, such as reassessing data center tax credits. In Illinois, Democratic Governor JB Pritzker announced in June that the state would suspend its tax incentives for data centers due to energy and water concerns.

Some Republicans have adopted a similar approach. In May, Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine instructed state officials to temporarily halt the evaluation of new tax exemption requests while lawmakers review data center growth in the state.

In Virginia, lawmakers kept data center tax incentives intact after prolonged budget debates that forced a special legislative session. Spanberger instead supported the introduction of a new tax on electricity consumption.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Governor Mikie Sherrill signed legislation this week that places data centers into a separate category of electricity consumers. The governor’s office stated that the measure will ensure data centers pay for their own energy use and the associated infrastructure.

Commenting on the dynamics facing state leaders, Shulman said: “There is a massive amount of investment potential and a lot of potential jobs at stake. And I really think these Democratic governors do not want to shoot their own states in the foot in the race to capture these jobs.”

Shulman added: “The goal for a Democratic governor is to send a policy signal strong enough to make voters feel they are taking a tough stance on AI, or addressing its potential negative consequences, while still trying to attract as much investment and as many jobs as possible.”

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