Money

Palantir let new ICE hires in before vetting, sent lawyers in after an MP's speech.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 22 October 2026

Louis Mosley, the UK chief executive of Palantir Technologies, sent letters this month to a handful of British MPs who had criticized the company from the floor of Parliament. Novara Media, which obtained the letters, reports they read as intimidating. The recipients included former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Labour and Cooperative MP Rachael Maskell. Both say the letters will not stop them from continuing to hold Palantir to account.

The federal government has not published the privacy assessment the law requires for a system like ELITE — a filing that was due, and is still sitting wherever filings sit when nobody above them asks where it went.

Line that up next to the letters, and the ledger reads the same company two ways in two months. One column: outside counsel, dispatched to a sitting MP over a floor speech. The other column: a hiring pipeline that let people see restricted immigration data before the background check cleared it. Both are Palantir's columns. Only one of them appears to have been audited by anyone with the standing to ask.

Nobody at Palantir has said what the September gap cost ICE, or what it cost to find out. Nobody has said what the October letters cost either. The company is not required to say, and as far as the public record shows, nobody with subpoena power has asked. That is not proof of a connection between the two line items. It is proof that neither one carries a public price tag, which is its own kind of finding, hon.

What the MPs say is simpler than any of that: the letters do not change what they plan to say next. Parliament has a floor, the floor has a record, and the record stays open to anyone who wants to stand up and name a contractor by name, intimidating letters or not. Whether that stays true depends on how many more letters go out, and how many members decide the floor isn't worth it. For now the count is two names, one company, and zero changes in what either of them plans to say.

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Midterms' largest donor, at $366 million, vows to find out who is really pulling the strings

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the morning edition, 22 October 2026

Three hundred and sixty-six million dollars, and the man who spent it would like to know who is really pulling the strings. You will take that for a threat. It is better than a threat — it is a lawful notice of intent, and do note that nothing in it will have to be withdrawn. Independent expenditure: money spent for a candidate and never with one, which is the condition that makes the sum unlimited and the spender untouchable by the coordination rules. Two hundred and seventy-six million of it since July. Since July. On Wednesday the terms were published — "live by the sword, die by the sword," and those who pick a fight should understand he will come for them, "not just their puppets." In September Democrats were rebuked for declining to name him. In Memphis a state representative runs against the data centers xAI built ... and the statute sets no hour at which the money stops. The price of a congressional inquiry is now a matter of public record. You have read it.

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Same legal backlash fines Meta $25 billion, lets Google keep the monopoly it proved.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 22 October 2026

Judge Francis Mathew's order against Meta — $25 billion, signed in Santa Fe on Wednesday, over data practices dating to 2016 — is this month's addition to a ledger that already has entries. The Federal Trade Commission fined Meta $5 billion in 2019 for the identical Cambridge Analytica breach. California collected $17 billion from Meta in 2018 for exploiting the same teen users the company kept monetizing afterward. The Department of Justice's own separate probe into Meta was halted this month, after the company gave Trump millions — an investigation closing, not a payment, and the one entry on this account that moved money toward Meta's side of the ledger instead of away from it.

The New York Times this week named what the Meta order belongs to: a legal backlash that has created a new de facto regulatory regime, with courts ordering Big Tech companies to change their practices and pay up. The Hill had the mood dated before the Times wrote it up. On September 7, six weeks and three days before the Times's account, it described a rarity — Americans across the usual divides finding common ground in frustration with the technology industry's footprint, from data centers to the verdicts now landing.

Five days before that Hill piece ran, on September 2, The Hill filed the entry that belongs on the same ledger and does not match the others. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google does not have to break up its advertising technology business — a year after her own court found that Google held an illegal monopoly over that industry. The backlash reached Google. It found the monopoly. The remedy it set was to leave the business whole.

New Mexico will collect its $25 billion from Meta. The ad-tech market Judge Brinkema's court found Google had monopolized stays in Google's hands, undivided, by that same court's own order. The gap is not between a company a court found broke the law and one it did not — the monopoly finding against Google stands. The gap is between what a jury can order paid in a privacy verdict and what a judge can decline to order divided in an antitrust one, even holding the same finding of illegality.

Whose column that gap tends to favor is the one that still has the ad-tech business sitting in it, hon.

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THE WORKAROUND

Zuckerberg preps to pay the tax Newsom just endorsed abolishing, its funder dining with Trump that week.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 22 October 2026

On August 25th, groups backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel opened an advertising campaign against a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, run under the names Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes. Brin alone has put more than $100 million into defeating it.

Four weeks later, on September 21st, six Nobel laureate economists, Joseph Stiglitz among them, signed a letter backing the same tax, calling it a possible first in the country and a start on redistributing wealth concentrated at the top. The column balances like this, hon: the people who study wealth favor the tax; the people who hold it are buying airtime against it.

On October 11th, Governor Gavin Newsom settled which side the state's own chief executive sits on. He endorsed a competing ballot measure that would cancel the wealth tax outright and bar California from ever passing another tax on financial assets. Debru Carthan, vice president of SEIU-UHW, the union running the tax campaign Newsom had just undercut, said of the governor: "He's showing California his true colors."

That weekend, Brin had dinner with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, seated to his left at a fundraising dinner hosted by the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc.

Three days after that report, on October 22nd, a federal filing disclosed the outcome of Meta's months-long negotiation with its own chief executive: Mark Zuckerberg agreed to stay in California for eight years, in exchange for a board-approved plan to issue new shares he can sell to pay the very tax Newsom's measure is built to cancel. Economist Gabriel Zucman called the filing "huge," writing that "we are witnessing a global turning point unfold before our eyes."

Run the two filings side by side and the gap is not a contradiction, it is a hedge. One instrument prepares a man worth $239 billion to pay a tax he has not yet lost. The other, backed by the governor who is supposed to be collecting it, is built to make sure he never has to. Both are dated this October. Only one of them made the papers as a victory for the tax.

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THE LEDGER

Trump orders Ramaswamy to keep attacking Acton's abuse; donations land in her column instead.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the afternoon edition, 22 October 2026

Arthur calls her daughter a liar about a childhood that included a stepfather charged with raping her between ages 10 and 12, a charge he never answered in court because he fled the state; he died in 2004 without a trial. Acton says she has not spoken to her mother since 1978, the year she was removed from the home. Her brother backs her account.

By Wednesday the ad has bipartisan Ohio company. Gov. Mike DeWine calls it "wrong" and asks Ramaswamy's campaign to take it down. Iowa Senate candidate Ashley Hinson agrees. Vice President Vance tells Republicans to "stop whining" and go win the race. Commentator Scott Jennings notes on CNN that Vance "could have just ignored it" and didn't. By Thursday, President Trump settles it from Truth Social: Ramaswamy should "keep it up," a position he restates as "hitting pay dirt" — his phrase for an ad built on a woman's account of childhood sexual abuse.

Here is where the ledger clerk clocks in. Before the ad aired, Acton was already ahead: three points in a Bowling Green/YouGov poll in September, eight points in an Oct. 11 CNN poll, and ahead again — no margin published — in a New York Times/Siena survey the same week. After the ad aired, the Hill reports Acton's fundraising surged: she lands at No. 2 on ActBlue's trending list, behind only Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. Whatever the ad buy cost the corporations and executives who funded it, ActBlue's own trending list puts the deposit in her column, not his.

It is the second time this fall the Acton campaign has had to treat an attack as a line item. On Sept. 6, an armed individual lunged at her at the Canfield Fair near Youngstown, injuring several bystanders. In September it was security. In October it is a corporate-funded spot about a woman's childhood abuse, kept on the air over her own party's objections, that her opponents cannot explain except to say she should stop complaining about it. Whoever bought that airtime bought the other side a fundraising week.

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Trump calls for Omar's ouster over a 'fake name' that federal investigators already built into her salary probe.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 23 October 2026

Call it the paper trail. On a Monday in October, federal immigration agents searched Ilhan Omar's Washington home over a document filled out in the 1990s — immigration paperwork, completed by her late father when she was a child — CBS News reported October 12. Two days later, Democracy Now! covered the same search under a different name for the agents, Homeland Security, and quoted Minnesota state senator Zaynab Mohamed calling it "bogus."

By October 20, the Guardian was measuring something past the paperwork itself: the president's obsession with the congresswoman, the paper wrote, had "reached a dangerous new level," citing his own description of Omar as "unpatriotic" and "disrespectful … to Israel."

On October 22, the New York Post put a dollar sign on the file. Investigators had folded the paperwork's name question into a financial-disclosure probe of the salary Omar draws in Congress: $174,000. The same day's Post described the original search as "the FBI raid" — a third name for the agents on one Monday search already filed, by two other outlets, under immigration agents and Homeland Security. Same door, three letterheads.

That edition of the Post also asked why Omar, after a week of public silence about the raid, had surfaced only to ask supporters for money. "Very suspicious," the headline called it, with no number raised and no form filed against it to check.

The next day, October 23, at a rally in Iowa, the president said out loud what the filings had been carrying quietly. "She used a fake name to be sworn in," he told the crowd. "I assume she must immediately have to resign from Congress." It was, he said, "not looking good" for her. He was not breaking news. The theory was already sitting inside a federal probe of her disclosure forms before he said a word of it onstage.

Senate Republicans read her promise, and the Democratic objections to the Omar probe, as one exhibit: proof, they said, that "lawfare" is coming for them next.

The paperwork says one name, hon. The rally gives another reason to use it. The salary stays $174,000, under review, until the file gets a case number or a close date — whichever the record shows first.

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Trump calls attack ad on rival's childhood abuse 'hitting pay dirt'; Iowa Senate candidate calls it wrong.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the evening edition, 23 October 2026

On Monday a sixty-second video surfaces online: Donna Arthur calling her daughter, Amy Acton, a liar, urging Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton says Arthur is the mother who stayed with the stepfather charged with raping her, a charge he never answered because he fled the state; he died in 2004 without a trial. Acton says she was sexually abused by him at 12, and that she has not spoken to Arthur since 1978, the year she and her brother were removed from the home for abuse and neglect. Her brother backs her account. Acton calls it part of a lifelong pattern of personal attacks from her opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, and says his campaign is behind it. A critic quoted in a Common Dreams dispatch calls Ramaswamy a "pathetic excuse for a man."

By Wednesday the ad has company inside Ramaswamy's own party. Ohio's governor, DeWine, calls it wrong and asks the campaign to take it down. Vice President Vance tells Republicans to "stop whining" about it instead, and go win the race. Ashley Hinson, running her own Senate campaign in Iowa, does not take the instruction; she condemns the ad and, per ABC, lands at odds with the President.

Thursday the President settles which column the ad belongs in. "Who wouldn't use such an Ad?" he writes. "I would, it's called, hitting pay dirt."

Here is the reconciliation, hon. The ad was built as a debit against Acton: an unanswered rape charge, a mother estranged since 1978, run to cost her the race. Instead every entry lands on the other side of the ledger. DeWine's "wrong," Hinson's dissent, Vance's order to stop whining, the President's own "pay dirt" — four Republican voices, four lines added to the same receipt. The one number everyone agrees on is that Acton's donations keep climbing while the party argues over the ad's manners. An attack ad is supposed to withdraw from a candidate's account. This one keeps making deposits.

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Trump's fourth wartime-statute invocation this fall: $150 million for diesel, after a donor's $6.6 billion shipyard

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the evening edition, 23 October 2026

Four times this autumn, and not a comma of the statute amended. The Defense Production Act was drawn for wartime. Nothing in it was bent to get here. October 6: a $6.6 billion shipyard at Baltimore, partly funded by the government, owned by Anduril, whose founder Palmer Luckey is a major Republican fundraiser. October 13: the Vice President in Tyler, Texas, campaigning for Ken Paxton, announces the Delek refinery expanded under the same authority — "millions of gallons of commercial-grade and military spec fuel." October 19: the Energy Department, up to $42 million for the Constitution Pipeline, a project once scrapped. Thursday, a Sioux City rally: $150 million for gas and diesel, by presidential memorandum, against record-high prices. You are thinking emergency. Four emergencies, rather — a standing line of credit drawn on the fisc, and whichever private project wants one this week ... has one. Owned privately. Funded publicly. The bill is yours.

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