Delaware legislators have proposed a new bill designed to help protect founder-led companies from legal action by shareholders. The bill, introduced on Monday, was drafted by a law firm that represents Tesla and Elon Musk, CNBC reports, citing an anonymous source. If approved, the legislation could potentially open the door for the reintroduction of Musk’s 2018 compensation package, which was blocked by a Delaware court following a lawsuit filed by a Tesla stockholder.
Nike is joining forces with Kim Kardashian's SKIMS shapewear to attract more women — and revive its stalling sales. They're collaborating on a new brand called NikeSKIMS to "disrupt the global fitness and activewear industry with best-in-class innovation" and reclaim market share from newer activewear rivals, including Lululemon and Alo. SKIMS, meanwhile, is exploding: It's valued at more than $4 billion, expanded into menswear, and has signed sponsorship pacts with the NBA, WNBA, and Team USA.
KFC is moving its corporate headquarters out of Kentucky as part of a consolidation plan in the U.S. by parent company Yum Brands. About 200 corporate workers will relocate to Yum's two main locations in Plano, Texas, and Irvine, California, according to a company statement. CEO David Gibbs says the changes will "better serve our customers, employees, franchisees and shareholders." Yum shares have risen roughly 17% over the past month, driven by better-than-expected sales, particularly at Taco Bell.
A federal judge refused Tuesday to immediately block billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing government data systems or participating in worker layoffs.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found that there are legitimate questions about Musk’s authority but said there isn’t enough evidence of grave legal harm to justify a temporary restraining order.
The decision came in a lawsuit filed by 14 Democratic states challenging DOGE’s authority to access sensitive government data. The attorneys general argued that Musk is wielding the kind of power that the Constitution says can be held only by those elected or confirmed by the Senate.
The Trump administration has maintained that layoffs are coming from agency heads and asserted that despite his public cheering of the effort, Musk isn’t running DOGE’s day-to-day operations himself.
DOGE has tapped into computer systems across multiple agencies with the blessing of President Donald Trump, digging into budgets and searching for what he calls waste, fraud, and abuse, even as a growing number of lawsuits allege DOGE is violating the law.
Chutkan recognized the concerns of the states, which include New Mexico and Arizona.
“DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion,” she wrote. Their questions about Musk’s apparent “unchecked authority” and lack of congressional oversight for DOGE are legitimate and they may be able to successfully argue them later, she found.
Still, at this point, it remains unclear exactly how DOGE’s work will affect the states, and judges can only issue orders to block specific, immediate harms, she found.
Chutkan, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, previously oversaw the now-dismissed criminal election interference case against Trump in Washington, D.C.
The state’s lawsuit seeks to bar DOGE from the federal Office of Personnel Management and the Departments of Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, and Commerce.
In other DOGE lawsuits, two other judges in Washington have similarly declined to immediately block DOGE from access to agency systems. A federal judge in New York has blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury Department data for now.
The Social Security Administration‘s acting commissioner has stepped down from her role at the agency over Department of Government Efficiency requests to access Social Security recipient information, according to two people familiar with the official’s departure who were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Acting Commissioner Michelle King’s departure from the agency over the weekend — after more than 30 years of service — was initiated after King refused to provide DOGE staffers at the SSA with access to sensitive information, the people said Monday.
The White House has replaced her as acting commissioner with Leland Dudek, who currently works at the SSA, the people said.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields released a statement Monday night saying: “President Trump has nominated the highly qualified and talented Frank Bisignano to lead the Social Security Administration, and we expect him to be swiftly confirmed in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the agency will be led by a career Social Security anti-fraud expert as the acting commissioner.”
Fields added, “President Trump is committed to appointing the best and most qualified individuals who are dedicated to working on behalf of the American people, not to appease the bureaucracy that has failed them for far too long.”
King’s exit from the administration is one of several departures of high-ranking officials concerned about DOGE staffers’ potential unlawful access to private taxpayer information.
DOGE has accessed Treasury payment systems and is attempting to access Internal Revenue Service databases.
Since Republican President Donald Trump has retaken the White House, his billionaire adviser Elon Musk has rapidly burrowed deep into federal agencies while avoiding public scrutiny of his work through the DOGE group.
Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an advocacy group for the preservation of Social Security benefits, said of DOGE’s efforts that “there is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is. And my understanding is that it has already occurred.”
“The information collected and securely held by the Social Security Administration is highly sensitive,” she said. “SSA has data on everyone who has a Social Security number, which is virtually all Americans, everyone who has Medicare, and every low-income American who has applied for Social Security’s means-tested companion program, Supplemental Security Income.”
“If there is an evil intent to punish perceived enemies, someone could erase your earnings record, making it impossible to collect the Social Security and Medicare benefits you have earned.”
The future of Social Security has become a top political issue and was a major point of contention in the 2024 election. About 72.5 million people, including retirees, disabled people, and children, receive Social Security benefits.
COURT BATTLES
There’s the executive in a U.S. supply-chain company whose voice breaks while facing the next round of calls telling employees they no longer have jobs.
And a farmer in Missouri who grew up knowing that a world with more hungry people is a more dangerous world.
And a Maryland-based philanthropy, founded by Jews who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe, is shutting down much of its more than 120-year-old mission.
Beyond the impact of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, some 14,000 agency employees and foreign contractors as well as hundreds of thousands of people receiving aid abroad — many American businesses, farms, and nonprofits— say the cutoff of U.S. money they are owed has left them struggling to pay workers and cover bills. Some face financial collapse.
U.S. organizations do billions of dollars of business with USAID and the State Department, which oversee more than $60 billion in foreign assistance. More than 80% of companies that have contracts with USAID are American, according to aid data company DevelopmentAid.
President Donald Trump stopped payment nearly overnight in a Jan. 20 executive order freezing foreign assistance. The Trump administration accused USAID’s programs of being wasteful and promoting a liberal agenda.
USAID Stop-Work, a group tracking the impact, says USAID contractors have reported that they laid off nearly 13,000 American workers. The group estimates that the actual total is more than four times that.
Here are stories of some Americans whose livelihoods have been upended:
Crop innovation work facing closures
At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a lab that works with processors, food manufacturers, and seed and fertilizer companies to expand soybean usage in 31 countries, is set to close in April unless it gets a last-minute reprieve.
Peter Goldsmith, director and principal investigator at the Soybean Innovation Lab, said the group has helped open international markets to U.S. farmers and made the crop more prevalent in Africa.
For Goldsmith, that kind of steady partnership built on trade and U.S. foreign aid offers the best way to wield U.S. influence, he said.
Goldsmith said innovation labs at other land grant universities also are closing. Without them, Goldsmith worries about what will happen in the countries where they worked — what other actors may step in, or whether conflict will result.
“It’s a vacuum,” he said. “And what will fill that vacuum? It will be filled. There’s no doubt about it.”
A refugee mission is imperiled
For nonprofits working to stabilize populations and economies abroad, the United States was not only the biggest humanitarian donor but an inextricable part of the whole machinery of development and humanitarian work.
Among them, HIAS, a Jewish group aiding refugees and potential refugees, is having to shut down “almost all” of its more than 120-year-old mission.
The Maryland-based philanthropy was founded by Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. Its mission in recent decades has broadened to include keeping vulnerable people safe in their home country so they don’t have to flee, said HIAS President Mark Hetfield.
Hetfield said the first Trump administration saw the wisdom of that effort. Has experienced some of its biggest growth during Trump’s first term as a result.
But now, Trump’s shutdown of foreign assistance severed 60% of HIAS’s funding, overnight. The group immediately started furloughs among its 2,000 direct employees, operating in 17 states and 20 countries.
The administration calls it a “suspension,” rather than a termination, Hetfield said. “But we have to stop paying our leases, stop paying our employees.”
“It’s not a suspension,” Hetfield said. “That’s a lie.”
Tracking USAID’s effectiveness may fall by the wayside
Keith Ives, a Marine veteran who fell in love with data, has a small Denver-area nonprofit that brought a numbers-crunching relentlessness to his USAID-funded mission of testing the effectiveness of the agency’s programs.
For Ives’ teams, that’s included weighing and measuring children in Ethiopia who are getting USAID support, testing whether they’re chunkier and taller than kids who aren’t. (On average they are.)
Last week, Ives was planning to tell half his full-time staff of 28 that they would be out of a job at the end of the month. Ives’ Causal Design nonprofit gets 70% of its work from USAID.
At first, “it was an obsession over how can I fix this,” said Ives, who described his anxiety in the first days of the cutoff as almost paralyzing. “There must be a magic formula. ... I’m just not thinking hard enough, right?’'
Now, Ives goes through all-staff call after call, breaking bad news on the impact of USAID’s shutdown. Being transparent with them, it turned out, was the best he could do.
He looks at the U.S. breaking partnerships and contracts in what had been USAID’s six-decade aim of boosting national security by building alliances and crowding out adversaries.
For the U.S. now, “I think for years to come, when we try to flex, I think people are going to go, ‘Yeah, but like, remember 2025?’” Ives said. “‘You could just be gone tomorrow.’”
A supplier faces ruin
It takes expertise, cash flow, and hundreds of staff to get USAID-funded food and goods to remote and often ill-regulated places around the globe.
For U.S. companies doing that, the administration’s only follow-up to the stop-work orders it sent out after the money freeze have been termination notices — telling them some contracts are not only paused but ended.
Almost all of those companies have been kept silent publicly, for fear of drawing the wrath of the Trump administration or endangering any court challenges.
Speaking anonymously for those reasons, an executive of one supply-chain business that delivers everything from hulking equipment to food describes the financial ruin facing those companies.
While describing the next round of layoff calls to be made, the executive, who is letting hundreds of workers go in total, sobs.
Farmers may lose market share
Tom Waters, a seventh-generation farmer who grows corn, soybean, and wheat near Orrick, Missouri, thinks about his grandfather when he reads about what is happening with USAID.
“I’ve heard him say a hundred times, ’People get hungry, they’ll fight,’” Waters said.
Feeding people abroad is how the American farmer stabilizes things across the world, he says. “Because we’re helping them keep people’s bellies full.”
USAID-run food programs have been a dependable customer for U.S. farmers since the Kennedy administration. Legislation mandates U.S. shippers get a share of the business as well.
Even so, American farm sales for USAID humanitarian programs are a fraction of overall U.S. farm exports. And politically, U.S. farmers know that Trump has always taken care to buffer the impact when his tariffs or other moves threaten demand for U.S. farm goods.
U.S. commodity farmers generally sell their harvests to grain silos and co-ops, at a per bushel rate. While the impact on Waters’ farm is not yet clear, farmers worry any time something could hit demand and prices for their crops or give a foreign competitor an opening to snatch away a share of their market permanently.
Still, Waters doesn’t think the uncertainty is eroding support for Trump.
“I really think people, the Trump supporters are really going to have patience with him and feel like this is what he’s got to do,” he said.
PHARMA, CHIPS DUTIES
SHELVED CAR TARIFFS
What’s new:
🔹 Performance - xAI claims Grok 3 outperforms GPT-4o and DeepSeek AI R1 on reasoning and coding tasks. It has a “Big Brain” mode, helping with complex step-by-step reasoning, and DeepSearch, which makes AI better at research. Say what you will about Musk, but the man knows how to name things for impact.
🔹 Distribution - Unlike OpenAI and Google, which are focused on enterprise adoption and broad accessibility, Musk is taking a direct-to-consumer approach. Grok 3 is locked behind X Premium+ ($50/month or $350/year). The big question: Can xAI break out of the X/Twitter sandbox, or is this an AI built for a captive audience? Over time, expect Grok to integrate with Tesla, SpaceX, and robotics, further tying AI into Musk’s empire.
🔹 Compute - Grok 3 was trained on 200,000 NVIDIA GPUs using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer, a 10x increase from Grok 2. The Colossus supercomputer is a clear indication that xAI is serious about long-term AI independence—Instead of relying on hyperscalers, Musk is building his own compute stack.
Musk wants AI to be vertically integrated—own the compute (Colossus), own the model (Grok), own the distribution (X/Twitter), and own the monetization (subscriptions). His strategy is control.
Following the release, Twitter/X was flooded with the usual AI tribalism—some celebrating Grok’s performance, others pointing out that xAI conveniently left out OpenAI’s o3 model, which actually scored higher. One of the more measured takes came from Andrej Karpathy, who summarized:
“Grok 3 + Thinking feels somewhere around the state-of-the-art territory of OpenAI's strongest models and slightly better than DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch ~1 year ago—this timescale to state-of-the-art is unprecedented.”
Grok 3 isn’t just another model launch - it’s a reminder of how fast AI is moving. The time from zero to state-of-the-art is compressing at an unprecedented rate, and that’s a win for customers, a challenge for incumbents, and a race against scale for new entrants.