Donald Trump hosted Apple CEO Tim Cook for a Friday evening dinner at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.
Cook is the latest in a string of big tech leaders — including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — who have sought to improve their standing with the incoming president after choppy relations with Trump during his first term.
Trump has said he has spoken with Cook about the company’s long-running tax battles with the European Union.
The meeting comes less than two months after Trump said he spoke to Cook by phone, and soon after Apple lost its last appeal in a dispute with the EU over 13 billion euros ($14.34 billion) in back taxes to Ireland.
“He said the European Union has just fined us $15 billion,” Trump recalled of his conversation with Cook, in an October interview with podcaster Patrick Bet-David. “Then on top of that they got fined by the European Union another $2 billion.”
The decision by the EU top court was the finale to a dispute that centered on sweetheart deals that Dublin was offering to attract multinational businesses with minimal taxes across the 27-nation bloc. The European Commission in 2016 ruled that Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid that Ireland was required to recover.
Trump’s transition team and Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his dinner with Cook.
OpenAI CEO Altman is planning to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, the company confirmed Friday. Amazon and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, confirmed this week they had each donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.
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During his first term, Trump criticized Amazon and railed against the political coverage at The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Meanwhile, Bezos had criticized some of Trump’s past rhetoric. In 2019, Amazon also argued in a court case that Trump’s bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract.
More recently, Bezos has struck a more conciliatory tone. Last week, he said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York that he was “optimistic” about Trump’s second term while also endorsing the president-elect’s plans to cut regulations.
The donation from Meta came just weeks after Meta CEO Zuckerberg met with Trump privately at Mar-a-Lago.
During the 2024 campaign, Zuckerberg did not endorse a candidate for president but voiced a more positive stance toward Trump. Earlier this year, he praised Trump’s response to his first assassination attempt.
Elon Musk says the Securities and Exchange Commission wants him to pay a penalty or face charges involving what he disclosed — or failed to disclose — about his purchases of Twitter stock before he bought the social media platform in 2022.
In a letter posted by Musk on the platform now called X, his lawyer Alex Spiro tells the outgoing SEC chairman, Gary Gensler, that the commission’s demand for a monetary payment is a “misguided scheme” that won’t intimidate Musk. The letter also alleges that the commission reopened an investigation this week into Neuralink, Musk’s computer-to-human brain interface company.
The SEC has not released the letter. Nor would it comment on it or confirm whether it has issued such a demand to Musk.
“It is the policy of the SEC to conduct investigations on a confidential basis to preserve the integrity of its investigative process,” an agency spokesperson said in an email Friday.
Messages also were left Friday by The Associated Press seeking comment from Spiro.
In the letter, Spiro says he is responding to demands from SEC staff members about a multi-year investigation of “certain purchases, sales and disclosures of Twitter shares.” In addition, Spiro is demanding to know who directed the actions.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion. However a lawsuit filed by a Twitter investor in April 2022 accused Musk of violating a regulatory deadline to reveal that he had accumulated a stake of at least 5%. Instead, according to the complaint, Musk failed to disclose his position on Twitter until he had nearly doubled his stake to more than 9%.
That strategy, the lawsuit alleges, hurt ordinary investors who sold shares in the San Francisco company in the nearly two weeks before Musk acknowledged that he held a major stake in Twitter.
Eventually, the disclosure of Musk’s stake in Twitter caused the value of its shares to soar 27% from its April 1 close to nearly $50 by the end of trading on April 4. That improper delay, according to the lawsuit, deprived investors who had sold shares before Musk’s stake in the company was publicly known of the opportunity to realize significant gains.
Musk has been engaged in a running battle with the SEC since 2018. That was when he and Tesla, his electric car company, each agreed to pay $20 million in fines over tweets Musk had made about having amassed the necessary funding to take Tesla private. Such a transition never happened; Tesla remains a public company.
Musk sought to overturn part of the settlement that required him to have his postings about Tesla reviewed by a Tesla attorney. That provision, he had contended, violated his free speech rights. The dispute made its way to the Supreme Court, which rejected Musk’s appeal without comment.
Gensler, who was nominated to lead the SEC by President Joe Biden, announced last month that he would step down from his post on Jan. 20, when Donald Trump will be inaugurated as president. Trump has announced that intends to nominate cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the SEC.
Trump has named Musk as co-chair of a “Department of Government Efficiency” to try to reform the federal government.
A federal appeals court on Friday left in place a mid-January deadline for a federal law requiring TikTok to be sold or face a ban in the United States, rejecting a request made by the company to halt enforcement until the Supreme Court reviews its challenge of the statute.
Attorneys for TikTok and its China-based parent company, ByteDance, are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court.
It’s unclear if the nation’s highest court will take up the case, though some legal experts have said they expect the justices to weigh in due to the types of novel questions it raises about social media, national security, and the First Amendment. TikTok is also looking for a potential lifeline from President-elect Donald Trump, who promised to “save” the short-form video platform during the presidential campaign.
Attorneys for TikTok and ByteDance had requested the injunction after a panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the U.S. government and rejected their challenge to the law.
The court rejected that request on Friday, calling it “unwarranted.”
“The petitioners have not identified any case in which a court, after rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Act of Congress, has enjoined the Act from going into effect while review is sought in the Supreme Court,” said the court’s unsigned order.
The statute, which was signed by President Joe Biden earlier this year, requires ByteDance to sell TikTok to an approved buyer due to national security concerns or face a ban in the U.S.
The U.S. has said it sees TikTok as a national security risk because ByteDance could be coerced by Chinese authorities to hand over U.S. user data or manipulate content on the platform for Beijing’s interests. TikTok has denied those claims and has argued that the government’s case rests on hypothetical future risks instead of proven facts.
In the request filed this week, attorneys for TikTok and ByteDance had asked for a “modest delay” in enforcement of the law so that the Supreme Court could review the case and the incoming Trump administration could “determine its position” on the matter.
If the law is not overturned, the two companies have said that the popular app will shut down by Jan. 19, just a day before Trump takes office again. More than 170 million American users would be affected, the companies have said.
The Justice Department had opposed TikTok’s request for a pause, saying in a court filing this week that the parties had already proposed a schedule that was “designed for the precise purpose” of allowing Supreme Court review of the law before it took effect.
The appeals court issued its Dec. 6 ruling on the matter in line with that schedule, the Justice Department filing said.
In the decade since SpaceX arrived on the Texas coast, billionaire Elon Musk’s company has created thousands of jobs near the Mexico border, launched rockets, and sprung up new homes — all around an area dubbed Starbase.
Now SpaceX wants to make Starbase a recognized city.
Nearby residents are asking for an election to incorporate the area, which sits on the southern tip of Texas at Boca Chica Beach. Musk posted on his social platform X on Thursday that “SpaceX HQ will now officially be in the city of Starbase, Texas!”
But turning Starbase into a new Texas city with its own government won’t happen overnight, and questions remain, including what SpaceX and residents would stand to gain. Already, the idea is drawing pushback from local activists who have raised concerns about SpaceX’s environmental impact.
Becoming a city
SpaceX’s operations are in Cameron County, which has roughly 426,000 residents. Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., the county’s top elected official, said SpaceX’s petition delivered this week formally starts the process for becoming a city.
“Our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all of the statutory requirements, and then we’ll go from there,” Treviño said.
He did not offer a timetable. But if the process moves forward, Treviño said the county elections department would next create the jurisdiction to decide who gets to vote and then plan a vote.
Neither SpaceX nor local officials have said how many people live in the area who would become Starbase residents. More than 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the Starbase site, according to a local impact study issued by Treviño earlier this year.
Possible changes
Robert Greer, an associate professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, has studied how cities incorporate. He said a city would need to create its own charter, provide services, create local ordinances, and levy taxes. It could also shift the tax burden on residences or businesses.
“If you create your own city, and it’s a relatively small area now, you have kind of control over that area,” Greer said.
SpaceX officials have said making Starbase a city is necessary to continue growing the area’s workforce and the company’s development.
“Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world-class place to live—for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space,” Kathryn Lueders, Starbase’s general manager, wrote in a letter to the county this week.
SpaceX has faced local opposition to its impact in the area. Most recently, they faced a lawsuit from Save RGV, a regional nonprofit group that alleged SpaceX was dumping polluted water into the nearby bay. SpaceX said in response that a state review found no environmental risks and called the lawsuit “frivolous.”
“Some of the questions that we have is what this will mean in terms of regulation and oversight by the county,” said Jim Chapman, a Save RGV board member.
A widening Texas footprint
Musk has long been planting business roots in Texas and has spread them far and wide across the Lone Star State. The billionaire moved to Texas in 2020 and relocated to or expanded a number of his companies in the state, citing the state’s business friendly climate.
Tesla’s massive, 10-million square foot (930,000 square meters) Gigafactory, where the company makes its Cybertrucks, opened near Austin in 2022 and will also serve as the company headquarters.
In 2021, Musk moved his Boring Co., a tunnel construction business, to Bastrop, another Central Texas community near Austin. Musk has said he has a vision to build out a “Texas utopia” where employees could live and work. The company has its own small community of mobile homes and a store called the Boring Bodega, which serves as a general store, lunch spot, barbershop, bar, and public playground.
In 2023, Musk and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott broke ground for the site of a Tesla lithium refinery near coastal Corpus Christi. Lithium is the key ingredient used to make batteries for electric vehicles.
And in September, Musk moved X headquarters from San Francisco to Bastrop, leaving the California spot that had been the company’s home since 2011.
Time magazine gave Donald Trump something it has never done for a Person of the Year designee: a lengthy fact-check of claims he made in an accompanying interview.
The fact-check accompanies a transcript of what the president-elect told the newsmagazine’s journalists. Described as a “12-minute read,” it calls into question 15 separate statements that Trump made.
It was the second time Trump earned the Time accolade; he also won in 2016, the first year he was elected president. Time editors said it wasn’t a particularly hard choice over other finalists Kamala Harris, Elon Musk, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Kate Middleton.
Time said Friday that no other Person of the Year has been fact-checked in the near century that the magazine has annually written about the figure that has had the greatest impact on the news. But it has done the same for past interviews with the likes of Joe Biden, Netanyahu, and Trump.
Such corrections have been a sticking point for Trump and his team in the past, most notably when ABC News did it during his only debate with Democrat Kamala Harris this fall. There was no immediate response to a request for comment on Friday.
In the piece, Time called into question statements Trump made about border security, autism, and the size of a crowd at one of his rallies. When the president-elect talked about the “massive” mandate he had received from voters, Time pointed out that former President Barack Obama won more electoral votes the two times he had run for president.
The magazine also questioned Trump’s claim that he would do interviews with anyone who asked during the campaign if he had the time. The candidate rejected a request to speak to CBS’ “60 Minutes,” the magazine said.
“In the final months of his campaign, Trump prioritized interviews with podcasts over mainstream media,” reporters Simmone Shah and Leslie Dickstein wrote.