The Thesis Holds
REPORTED. Reich's central point rests on a Politico poll by PF Global. In it, 47 percent of voters called Republicans the party of tech tax breaks, against 21 percent for Democrats. About one in five said ending tax breaks for data centers would be among their most important tax issues in November, and about one in ten wanted new breaks. A majority said tech chief executives have been secretive about the risks of AI. A plurality said the risks outweigh the benefits, and a plurality wanted strict regulation. The Old Goat could not open Politico directly and relies on its syndicated text, which gives no sample size or field dates. Politico →
DOCUMENTED, and it supports him. CBO's monthly budget review for August 2026 found corporate income tax receipts down $96 billion, or 25 percent, over the first eleven months of fiscal 2026. CBO credits the 2025 reconciliation law, which "allows corporations to take larger deductions for certain investments." Total federal receipts rose 3 percent, carried by individual and payroll taxes. In other words, the corporate share of the tax bill shrank while everyone else's grew.
The Ledger, Line by Line
| Reich's claim | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Three billionaires have given more than $600 million to Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms, a record | REPORTED. Musk says he has spent $366 million this cycle, a figure his team gave the NYT; the Brennan Center calls it the biggest giving by any donor in modern history. Americans for Tax Fairness, through Aug. 28, has the Andreessen and Horowitz families at $149 million and the Yass family at $92 million. Together that comes to about $607 million, but it counts four people, mixes dates and methods, and part of the Andreessen-Horowitz money went to Leading the Future, an AI-industry super PAC that backs candidates of both parties. Musk plus Yass plus Adelson ($68 million) comes to about $526 million. | RUNS HIGH |
| Musk put more than a quarter billion dollars into electing Trump in 2024 | REPORTED. About $290 million in the 2024 cycle (Brennan Center, NYT). | HOLDS |
| Musk was given the power to disable Ukraine's communications | REPORTED. On Oct. 14, Starshield terminals in Ukraine were capped at about 100 mph. The WSJ and CBS report that Musk ordered it. Our file: The Speed Limit. | HOLDS |
| DOGE gathered information on every American from federal databases | REPORTED. Social Security's chief data officer, Charles Borges, said in an August 2025 whistleblower complaint that DOGE-linked officials put a live copy of NUMIDENT, the agency's file on more than 300 million people, in a cloud environment without agency security oversight (NBC News). The House Ways and Means Committee has since called for an investigation. "Every American" is Reich's shorthand for that file. | HOLDS, WITH CONTEXT |
| The Ellisons defanged CBS News and "60 Minutes" | REPORTED. Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, made Bari Weiss editor in chief of CBS News. On Dec. 21, 2025 she pulled a finished "60 Minutes" report on El Salvador's CECOT prison three hours before it was due to air. The correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, called the decision political. The piece aired later. | HOLDS |
| The Ellisons kicked Stephen Colbert off the air | REPORTED. On July 14, 2025, Colbert called Paramount's $16 million settlement with Trump a "big fat bribe." Three days later, on July 17, CBS announced the end of "The Late Show," calling it "purely a financial decision." At that moment Paramount's sale to the Ellisons' Skydance was waiting on the Trump FCC. Seven days after the cancellation, on July 24, the FCC approved the sale, and it closed Aug. 7. Trump posted: "I hope I played a major part in it!" Skydance told senators it played no part in the decision. The Ellisons did not sign the cancellation. Their deal was the reason it happened (opinion, below). | HOLDS IN SUBSTANCE |
| Trump greenlit the Ellisons' media empire: Paramount, CNN, CBS, TBS, TNT, HBO, Discovery and more | REPORTED. The Justice Department cleared the roughly $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery purchase in June 2026 without requiring any divestitures, and said the deal was likely to increase competition. The FCC approved up to 49.5 percent foreign ownership, and the states settled their challenge. The Old Goat found no closing notice yet. | HOLDS; CLOSE PENDING |
| …and TikTok | REPORTED. TikTok's U.S. joint venture closed Jan. 22, 2026, and Oracle holds 15 percent. Oracle is Larry Ellison's company; it is not part of David Ellison's Paramount. "Ellison family" is fair. Including it in the Paramount empire is not. | HOLDS, WITH CONTEXT |
| Bezos's Amazon paid Melania Trump a $40 million licensing fee, about $28 million of it to her, plus $35 million in marketing | REPORTED. Amazon paid $40 million for the film and a docuseries, about $26 million more than Disney bid. The WSJ puts her share at $27 million to $28 million, and the NYT reports the $35 million marketing campaign. Amazon says it bought the film "because we think customers are going to love it." | HOLDS |
| Bezos barred the Post from endorsing Harris, and from writing against capitalism | REPORTED. He blocked the drafted endorsement in October 2024, and more than 200,000 readers canceled. On Feb. 26, 2025 he told staff the opinion section would defend "personal liberties and free markets," and that "viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others." | HOLDS |
| Amazon got federal cloud contracts for ICE and the NSA | DOCUMENTED, and the record is stronger than the column. On June 11, 2026, DHS awarded Amazon Web Services a department-wide cloud contract, 70RTAC26D00000004 ("Cumulus"), with a ceiling of $2,564,699,767, coded "not competed." On Sept. 8, ICE placed an $18.3 million order directly with AWS under it. AWS hosted ICE systems through resellers before that. The $10 billion NSA contract, however, was awarded in 2021 and confirmed in 2022, before this term, so it cannot be a reward from this administration. | HOLDS FOR ICE; NSA PREDATES |
| Trump gave Amazon carte blanche to monopolize online retail | Opinion. The FTC's 2023 monopoly suit against Amazon was set for trial in October 2026. The Old Goat did not confirm the case's current status. | NOT GRADED |
| Tim Cook gave $1 million to the inauguration | REPORTED. | HOLDS |
| Cook gave $25 million to the ballroom | REPORTED. A donor spreadsheet obtained by the Washington Post lists Apple pledging $25 million, tied with Nvidia for the largest. The pledge is Apple's, not Cook's personally. Cook handed the CEO job to John Ternus on Sept. 1, 2026 and is now executive chairman. | HOLDS |
| Cook gave Trump an engraved glass plaque on a 24-karat gold base, and Apple got tariff exemptions | REPORTED. The gift was made Aug. 6, 2025, at the same event where Apple announced $100 billion in new U.S. investment and Trump said companies building in the U.S. would be exempt from his new chip tariff. Smartphones and computers had been excluded from the reciprocal tariffs in April 2025. | HOLDS |
| Zuckerberg helped finance the inauguration and the ballroom | REPORTED. Meta gave $1 million to the inaugural fund and pledged $5 million to the ballroom, per the Post spreadsheet. Amazon also pledged $5 million. | HOLDS |
| Meta paid Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit, rolled back fact-checking and brought Trump loyalists into its leadership | REPORTED. The January 2025 settlement totaled $25 million: $22 million toward Trump's library and $3 million in legal fees, with no admission of wrongdoing. Meta ended third-party fact-checking in the U.S. the same month and added Trump ally Dana White to its board. | HOLDS |
| In return: no federal AI regulator, and pressure on foreign digital taxes | REPORTED. The Dec. 11, 2025 executive order directs the Justice Department to sue states over AI laws. Trump has threatened 100 percent tariffs on countries that tax U.S. digital services, after Zuckerberg reportedly pressed him on the issue. | HOLDS |
| More than $1 trillion of other people's money and debt is going into AI | REPORTED. Estimates for 2026 capital spending alone run from about $650 billion to $785 billion (Moody's), and Moody's projects nearly $1 trillion in 2027. Counting 2025 and 2026 together, or counting the bond issuance, the total is well past $1 trillion. | HOLDS |
| Tech emissions: Meta up over 60 percent, Google nearly 50, Amazon 33, Microsoft over 23 | REPORTED. These match the companies' older reports, measured against 2019 or 2020 baselines: Amazon's 33 percent comes from its 2024 report. The newer numbers are worse. Amazon's 2025 emissions were about 81 million metric tons, up 16 percent in one year and about 58 percent since 2019. | HOLDS; NOW UNDERSTATED |
| Palantir's Maven Smart System powers U.S. targeting in the Iran war, and Anduril's billionaire founders supply counter-drone systems against Shaheds | REPORTED. Senior U.S. officials said Maven was used to pick top-priority targets, and Palantir said the Pentagon doubled its use of Maven in four months. Anduril's president calls the company a "heavy" participant against Shaheds in the region. Forbes counts Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf as billionaires. | HOLDS |
| Google, OpenAI, and "Eric Schmidt and Dario Amodei's Anthropic" provide AI for military planning and counter-drone work | REPORTED. Correct as written. Bloomberg reports that Eric Schmidt, Google's former chief executive, has owned about 1 percent of Anthropic since its 2021 Series A round, about half the stake of its chief executive, Dario Amodei. From 2019 to 2021 Schmidt chaired the federal National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The WSJ, Axios and the Washington Post reported that the military used Anthropic's Claude in the opening strikes on Iran. The administration had designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company refused to drop its limits on mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. OpenAI signed its own Pentagon deal the same week. The Old Goat did not check the counter-drone part for these three companies. | HOLDS, WITH CONTEXT |
Not graded: the poll's sample and dates, which were unavailable, and Reich's forecasts about reform.
Colbert, and Where the Column Runs High
The Old Goat's first pass called two of Reich's lines wrong. On a closer look, neither is.
- Colbert. This is opinion, and the Old Goat holds it firmly. Technically, Paramount's old management canceled the show, not the Ellisons. Look at what it was waiting for. The company had an $8 billion sale stuck at an FCC run by a Trump appointee. It paid the president $16 million to settle a lawsuit its own lawyers had called meritless. Its biggest late-night star called the payment a bribe on national television, and three days later his show was gone. One week after that, the sale was approved, conditioned on written promises of "viewpoint diversity" and an ombudsman for bias complaints. The president said he hoped he had "played a major part in it," and claimed the new owners would add "$20 Million Dollars" more in ads and PSAs. Skydance denied any side deal, and Paramount said the settlement included no PSAs. The Writers Guild asked New York's attorney general to investigate. Whoever signed the paper, the show was cleared out of the way of the deal. Reich says the Ellisons kicked Colbert off the air. The Old Goat would put it this way: Colbert was taken off the air to clear the way for the Ellisons. The difference is a signature, not a motive.
- Anthropic. The Old Goat's first version said Eric Schmidt had no stake in Anthropic. Bloomberg reports he owns about 1 percent, and Reich had it right; see the correction at the top. The record on Anthropic is still more complicated than a list of war suppliers suggests. The administration penalized the company for its limits, and the military reportedly used its model anyway.
- The $600 million. It takes four people, or three families, and mixed dates to reach the total, and part of the money went to a super PAC that backs candidates in both parties. Musk's own total breaks every record without help.
The Receipt the Column Left Out
DOCUMENTED. Reich wrote that Amazon got cloud contracts for ICE. The federal record has a bigger one. Four months after the Melania film opened, on June 11, 2026, Homeland Security made AWS its department-wide cloud provider under a contract with a ceiling of $2,564,699,767, coded "not competed." By September, ICE was buying AWS capacity directly under that contract. USAspending →
REPORTED. The Post's spreadsheet lists Palantir pledging $10 million to the ballroom, Microsoft $10 million and Google $22 million, the last paid out of its settlement of Trump's YouTube suit. On Feb. 12, 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion purchase agreement with Palantir that drew a single offer. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreement had been $2.7 billion before Corey Lewandowski held it up while seeking a private meeting with Palantir's chief executive. See The Volunteer's Signature.
What the Old Goat Thinks
This part is opinion. Reich wrote a polemic, and polemics round up. The Old Goat checked the rounding: of 21 graded claims, one runs high, and the rest hold, need context, or understate the case. Twice, the Old Goat's own first pass was the one that needed fixing. The emissions figures are out of date, and the newer numbers are worse. The Amazon line undersells the contract. The list of what was given lines up with the list of what was received, in public, on the record, mostly within months of each other.
INFERENCE. The pattern Reich describes doesn't need a secret deal to work. A sale waits on a regulator, and the network cancels its loudest critic. A company licenses a film for nearly three times the next bid, and its cloud wins a no-bid department contract. A chief executive hands over a gold plaque, and the chip tariff comes with an exemption for firms that invest at home. None of it is illegal on its face, and that is the column's real complaint.
Counter-evidence, plainly. Each company has an ordinary business reason for each decision. AWS is the largest cloud provider and already hosted DHS systems. The FCC approved Skydance, and DOJ cleared Warner Bros., under standards that predate this administration. Apple's tariff relief applies to any company that builds in the U.S. Correlation in time is not proof of exchange, and the Old Goat alleges no crime.
Related: the money behind the midterms is in Donors; the Musk, Thiel and Karp connections are in Influence Orbit; the press side is in Who Holds the Megaphone.