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Ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that corporations had the right to free speech and therefore could make political donations, American billionaires are constantly finding new ways to dump money into politics. Sure, there are technically legal limits to how much they can directly donate to candidates, parties, and causes. But that’s old-fashioned, analog, and 20th-century thinking. Baby stuff. The clever modern billionaire could theoretically bend the law enough to spend unlimited money on winning elections, and, in my humble opinion, the tech billionaires have been truly innovative — possibly too innovative — in this space.
You have your regular tech megadonors who will donate heavily to candidate super PACs, think tanks, and advocacy groups. But for the past several years, a galaxy-brained second tier has emerged — one whose inhabitants try to impress their individual and unique political views. Peter Thiel cultivated political candidates from the ground up and leveraged his money to get the Republican Party to accept them (and now one of them is vice president). Mark Zuckerberg donated $350 million to voter access initiatives in 2020. And most recently, Elon Musk pivoted heavily into the “free speech politics” of the culture war, bought Twitter, and then donated $300 million to Donald Trump’s super PAC and other Republican campaigns — which eventually bought him the power to fire a massive portion of the United States federal government.
But there appears to be a limit to how much political power a single tech billionaire can wield: Thiel dropped out of politics, citing the exhaustion of dealing with the entire Republican Party asking for money; Zuckerberg’s donation blew up in his face four years later, when a vindictive Trump accused him of using that money to rig the 2020 election against him. And even though Musk was once emboldened enough to announce the launch of a third party, furious that Trump’s spending bill had increased the federal budget, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Musk had quietly dropped his plans, choosing instead to cultivate his relationship with J.D. Vance and set him up for a 2028 presidential run. That’s a far cry from that one time Musk tweeted that Trump should be impeached so Vance could replace him.
Does Trump count as a tech billionaire? As of 2024, I would say yes, if only by definition: his stake in the Trump Media and Technology group, the publicly traded parent company of Truth Social, was worth at least $4 billion when he transferred it into a trust before returning to office. But beyond his net worth, the Trump family has attached their name brand to a growing number of products and companies in the tech space: beyond TMTG, which once promised a streaming service with a library of original content, the Trumps have launched memecoins, stablecoins, and NFTs; created a crypto holdings company; and as of this year, launched Trump Mobile, a phone brand whose purpose in the Trump empire still makes no sense to me. (Below, I talk to The Verge’s intrepid phone reviewer Allison Johnson to make sense of it all.)
Crucially, none of these businesses are actual investment-worthy, money-making entities. The values of the various Trump tokens depend on whatever Trump says that day, and TMTG has never been profitable, recently posting a net loss of $20 million in Q2 of this year. But if you think of them as meme businesses, whose values rise and fall depending on how much their investors are hyped about Trump, then you can see an odd correlation between the financial health of his otherwise worthless tech companies and the political support of his base. As someone in the Trump sphere once told me, the Trump brand makes money so long as the Trump name has power. And the Trump family, among other things, would very much like to keep making money.
But that’s not to say the old ways have died — rather, as the tech people say, they’ve been iterated upon.
The latest political money innovation — or at least one that I haven’t personally seen in this scale — is Leading The Future (LTF), a $100 million political operation meant to identify and promote pro-AI candidates and causes in elections. The “structured ecosystem,” as they described it in a press release announcing LTF’s launch on Monday, is an eye-popping amalgamation of campaign finance vehicles: it’s mashed a super PAC (which can spend infinite money on political messaging) with a 501(c)(4) (a tax-exempt social welfare organization which can spend less than half of their infinite money on political lobbying), with a super PAC that’s only for state elections, and a game plan to get AI-friendly candidates elected to state legislatures and Congress by the 2026 midterm elections.
I’m still trying to untangle this campaign finance structure (watch this space) but the relevant thing to pull out today is who’s funding it. So far, the following people and companies have committed $100 million to the campaign: billionaire megadonors Greg and Anna Brockman, Ron Conway, and Joe Lonsdale; the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; and the AI company Perplexity. More players (and, likely, more money) are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
It’s no surprise that these occasional rivals have come together: the explosion of proposed AI regulation in all 50 states, to say nothing of how Congress has been awful at writing AI laws, threatens the growth and stability of the industry. But no matter how much one wraps it in language about the future and innovation and whatnot, Leading The Future is, at its core, that most classic of Washington lobbying vehicles: a pro-business, Chamber of Commerce-esque political interest group.
Allison and I pivot to phones below, but before that, here’s the best of what we’ve written at The Verge this week…
“When the blade breaks” Last summer, a 114,000-pound wind turbine blade fell into the ocean off the coast of Nantucket, leaving a trail of fiberglass shards and styrofoam 12 nautical miles long. Gabriella Burnham reports on the environmental, economic, and political fallout of an event that could jeopardize the future of wind power.
“Trump’s immigration crackdown could be slowing the hunt for child predators online” As Trump shifts the government’s priorities into targeting migrants, Homeland Security agents are being forced to backburner cases investigating child exploitation and sexual assault. One agent said to Lauren Feiner: “You can only stretch your ability so far, and if you’re trying to do more with less, at a certain point, you’re just going to do less.”
“Will Trump help 4chan escape the UK’s internet police?” The US State Department has been quietly threatening to increase tariffs on countries that penalize right-wing American social media companies. 4chan’s lawyers tell me that, hopefully, Trump can do the same for them in the UK.
“I thought I wasn’t going to have to cover this administration on the phone beat.”
Out of all the breaking news meltdowns that I’ve ever witnessed in my career, nothing will ever be quite like the morning of June 16th: I opened Slack, popped into The Verge’s news channel, and saw a high-priority message about the announcement of Trump Mobile with more than 300 replies. Several stories had been assigned; editors were messaging back and forth about acronyms I knew nothing about — and I was completely lost.
I’ve covered Trumpworld long enough to know that there’s always some dubious, fast-money element to the family businesses. But I had to confess, I could not understand what the catch was with Trump Mobile or how something that involved expensive pieces of technology and vast telecommunications networks could be a money grab. But clearly, the rest of my colleagues did. The Verge has been reviewing the next generation of smartphones since its launch in 2011 — a time when Washingtonians still considered the BlackBerry a status symbol.
Unable to get this out of my head, I messaged our smartphone reviewer, Allison, with an embarrassing request: could she walk me through how this was supposed to make the Trump family richer? And, bless her, she was patient enough to do so. “You know, I thought I wasn’t going to have to cover this administration on the phone beat, and then that changed in a day,” she told me. “I was like, ah, no one’s safe.”
This interview has been condensed for clarity.
Tina: I keep seeing comparisons between Trump Mobile and what Ryan Reynolds did with Mint Mobile. Exactly how does that work?
Allison: Ryan Reynolds was part owner of Mint Mobile and has since sold his stake in the company, but he’s still in commercials and whatever. I don’t know how much of the marketing was up to Ryan Reynolds, but he was part of this branding of Mint Mobile that made it cute and attractive and friendly to people who were maybe not aware of MVNOs — mobile virtual network operators — which is what Mint Mobile and Trump Mobile are. It had a ton of success with it, so much so that it was sold back to T-Mobile [the original carrier].
So are there other celebrity-branded phone companies that are in this category?
The guys who do the SmartLess podcast — they have a wireless service now.
Which just makes no sense to me.
Yeah. I think Mint Mobile’s association with Ryan Reynolds encouraged companies to rethink the branding on MVNOs, even if they don’t have a celebrity face to them. Verizon actually owns Visible, which sort of operates in similar ways to an MVNO: there are no physical stores, it’s very price-focused, and pares away all stuff that comes along with a proper Verizon account. It has that kind of branding where it doesn’t feel stodgy, like a legacy mobile brand, or an MVNO that’s budget focused and price focused for a lower-income customer.
So it’s more of an individual lifestyle phone brand.
“Lifestyle” is the right way to think of it. And I think that’s what the SmartLess guys are tapping into: you like our podcast, you like our brand and our whole deal. Maybe try this wireless service that we sell you. They don’t go out and build cell phone towers, but it’s in the realm of celebrities all having their own cosmetic lines and makeup lines. It’s another way to try and reach their audience.
Do they also promise their own specific phone hardware? That’s the one thing I keep seeing in coverage of Trump Mobile — that it’s a reskinned phone.
As far as I know, I’m not aware of any Trump Mobile phone or SmartLess phone. I don’t think any of those companies see it as a good business model. Because making a phone from scratch is difficult: you’ve got to negotiate with the suppliers to get that up and running, and I don’t think that margins are super great, and it’s kind of impossible to break into the phone market in the US. Even established brands like Google have a relatively small market share in the US compared to Apple and Samsung.
It’s not a quick, easy way to make some money, even if you’re going the route of re-skinning one of these phones that are made by these ODMs — original device manufacturers. Their whole business model is that they make some of Samsung’s really budget phones, and Samsung focuses on the flagships. That’s sort of the only actual option if you wanted to spin up a phone brand out of nowhere. But even that seems kind of nuts.
In your opinion, is this a good phone to buy or a good phone plan to invest in switching over to?
The phone has yet to materialize, so I doubt we will see it. If it comes about, it’ll probably be your average mid-range, upper-budget-range Android phone. They have their pros and cons: you don’t usually get the latest, greatest processor, and maybe the cameras are fine. It will probably function as a phone just fine.
The wireless service is similarly piggybacking on Liberty Mobile — it looks like the existing MVNO. They can set up contracts with T-Mobile and provide T-Mobile service. They’re not inventing a new thing here that I would be like, oh God! I think I’d give any standard disclaimer about handing over potentially sensitive information and your billing information — big wireless companies don’t have amazing track records as far as breaches and whatnot. I don’t know if there’s any special concern I would have. It just definitely has all of the trademarks of, we’re playing for this demographic and this audience, we know what they’re into and we think we can appeal to that.
Liberty Mobile is one of those MAGA networks, right?
Probably. I didn’t investigate Liberty Mobile too much, but they’re based in Florida, and from what I can tell, it’s a very, like, freedom-focused kind of deal.
Okay, I just found this from The Financial Times: Liberty Mobile Wireless was launched in 2018, and its address is a luxury apartment in Trump Tower in Miami.
[laughs] Yeah, that tells us what we suspected. I can think of other companies I’d rather give my credit card information to.
Are MVNOs… often launched out of apartments?
I would not say that they typically are. I mean, they can be really small businesses. I was talking to consumer tech analyst Avi Greengart, and he was saying that an MVNO can target an audience or a segment of an audience that speaks a particular language or could be part of a relatively small community. There’s a benefit for them in buying a service from someone who literally speaks their language and a benefit for the business, because they can turn a profit that way. But launching a business out of an apartment seems sketchy.
There is apparently this trend where these companies that now have deals with the Trump brothers — they got real estate in Trump properties, so they had a higher chance of running into Don Jr. and Eric.
Oh, that’s so weird and icky.
Okay, most important question: how long would this take to be profitable?
I am not a great business head, but my very, very basic instincts are that it is not terribly hard. It’s kind of a basic equation of: you pay the wireless provider X amount, you sign up a certain number of people to pay for the service, you have your marketing costs. But it’s not more complicated than that, because they’re not paying to maintain cell towers. They’re not staffing brick and mortar stores. They don’t have leases. So as far as a lightweight kind of branding opportunity, it seems, in the grand scheme of things, pretty simple, at least from an outsider.
For more of Allison’s coverage on Trump Mobile, MVNOs, wireless carriers and all things smartphones, follow her here.
One of the reasons I love working at The Verge is that it allows me to be my truest self: someone who is really, really excited that there’s a new Katamari Damacy game coming out on the Nintendo Switch. I know I’m like three weeks late to the news — like I’ve said, DC lags behind the rest of the world — but as someone who played Katamari Damacy on the original PS2, I love the concept, I love the soundtrack preview, and I… especially love this screenshot from the trailer.
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