| Hey all, it’s Kurt Wagner in Denver. Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter deal suddenly seems cheap, but first... Three things you need to know today: • TSMC and GlobalFoundries have wrapped up talks over billions of dollars in Chips Act grants and loans from the US government
• Saudi Arabia is planning to spend as much as $100 billion on a new AI project
• Qualcomm gave an outlook suggesting the smartphone market is picking up The day before Donald Trump’s decisive election victory, Joe Rogan published a podcast interview during which he suggested that anyone who thought Twitter was once worth $44 billion was, in fact, a “f---ing moron.” Rogan’s guest, Elon Musk, who actually paid $44 billion for Twitter back in late 2022, agreed. “It wasn’t worth that in the first place,” Musk admitted. There was a reason, after all, that Musk tried to renege on his own deal shortly after signing it. But the general belief that Musk was fleeced when he bought Twitter, now X, was flipped on its head this week thanks to Trump’s win. The US election highlighted a stark reality that has existed for X since well before Musk ever arrived on the scene: The social network’s value is almost impossible to measure because the product’s impact on culture and politics is significantly more meaningful than the size of its business. Musk may be losing money, driving away advertisers and eroding the company’s paper value, but it turns out X still holds a significant place in the world of American politics. It appears as though Musk is finally cashing in on what the Wall Street Journal reported was “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.” There’s no way to quantify the impact X had in this week’s US presidential election — I just know that it felt significant. X’s vocal Trump-supporting owner did everything he could to get @realDonaldTrump re-elected. For months, Musk turned his feed into a Trump-inspired billboard for his more than 200 million followers. He posted support for Trump and his policies, and became a major source of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories; he re-shared posts from the former president’s supporters, not all of them accurate; and he even spent hours of his time doing live audio interviews to talk about the election. Under Musk, X became a much more powerful version of Truth Social. Was Musk’s full-throated support the difference? Did X actually drive the national narrative – and voters – in Trump’s favor? We’ll never know, though Musk certainly thinks that it did. “The reality of this election was plain to see on X, while most legacy media lied relentlessly to the public,” Musk tweeted Wednesday morning. The world’s richest man also spent more than $130 million on the campaigns for Trump and other Republicans, becoming among the top donors of the election cycle. Now comes the payoff. There is a long list of ways that Trump’s presidency could eventually benefit Musk’s constellation of companies. From friendly regulatory moves to government contracts, there is no doubt that Musk will benefit greatly from Trump’s new-old job. That boon should extend to X, too. Again, those benefits will be hard to quantify, but the last time Trump was in the White House, Twitter was more relevant and consequential than at any other point in the company’s history. If Trump returns to his policy-by-tweeting tendencies, X will be at the center of the global political universe for years. And unlike last time, Trump won’t need to worry about how the company will police his account. He’s free to say whatever he wants and will most likely hear an echo from Musk in the process. Trump has even said he’ll give Musk a job in his administration focused on cost efficiencies, which means we may see the same slash-and-burn approach Musk took to Twitter, but on a national scale. To say that Musk planned all of this from the beginning of his pursuit of Twitter feels like some serious revisionist history. But to say that Musk found a way to turn a bag of sour lemons into something much sweeter doesn’t feel hyperbolic, either. At the very least, the narrative around Musk’s Twitter deal has changed forever. “Elon is such a dumbass,” tweeted @wholemarscatalog, a popular Musk fan account. “He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.”—Kurt Wagner Donald Trump’s election will upend the US government’s relationship with the tech industry. That may be good for AI startups if the incoming president lifts restrictions, but not matter much for Big Tech companies if he continues the Justice Department’s antitrust crackdown. Amazon’s shares hit a record as momentum continued from strong quarterly results. Canada told ByteDance Ltd. to close a TikTok subsidiary because of national security concerns. Brain-device startup Precision Neuroscience is valued at $500 million in a funding round. | 
