Money

Griffin's $3 billion and Thiel's $130 million house cleared this week; the billionaire tax cannot clear a majority.

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the supper edition, 30 September 2026

Three billion dollars, and you will want to know what it buys at a university. Carnegie put up one million in 1900 and western Pennsylvanians got a school for practical skills. Ken Griffin put up three billion on Wednesday, and Pittsburgh gets a strengthened campus, Miami a new one. The largest gift in American higher education, ever. Sixfold the five hundred million he gave Harvard before he stopped.

August, this year, was slower. On the twenty-fifth, committees including Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes opened advertising against Proposition 40 — a one-time five percent tax on California's richest residents — backed in reporting by Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin. It still polls short of the majority it needs in November.

Thiel also closed on the most expensive house in Los Angeles. A hundred and thirty million, the conveyance recorded ... more than the tax can say.

The tax needs a vote.

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Congress passed no AI law, so no senator could say who stops a nuclear AI glitch.

By SalStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 30 September 2026

On September 12th, the House took up a bill meant to keep data-center electricity costs off ordinary ratepayers' bills. On September 15th, OpenAI sent its own lobbyists to Capitol Hill with language it wanted built into the FRONTIER Act, industry authoring the leash it would wear. On September 16th, Rep. Don Beyer and a coalition of House members warned where all of it was headed.

By September 30th it had arrived. Trump convened a $1.8 trillion AI summit and came out with a "morally binding" pledge from the labs — the same voluntary-controls script Biden had run, recycled with a new signature page. The same week, the FTC opened an investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and the rest of the signers. Senate Democrats killed the data-center ratepayer bill. A separate group of lawmakers asked regulators to block the sale of AES, the utility, to a buyer they said had not answered basic questions about the power it would owe the next data center. Congress adjourned having passed no AI safety law of any kind. A pledge is not a statute, and the industry picked the pledge.

Nine days before any of that, on September 21st, a Washington Examiner column had already laid out the stakes in first-person terms — a lifetime spent managing threats you could see and count, now watching a technology arrive faster than any safeguard built for it. The same day, The Nation put the mechanism plainly: as long as the weapons exist, ending the species stays as easy as the push of a button, or an AI agent finding its way into the command-and-control system that watches the button.

That is the scenario a Senate hearing sat with on September 30th. CBS News brought on John-Clark Levin, head of research for Kurzweil Technologies and former head of research for Google's chief futurist, to walk the panel through it: a cyberattack targeting nuclear command and control. Count the agencies that answered: zero. The FTC is busy with the pledge. Congress just left town. The hearing room had a name for the risk and no name for the regulator — which is the whole arrangement working exactly as signed, and exactly as unenforced.

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THE LEDGER

Trump's own ad campaign gets a clean bill; Powell's does too, so Trump orders a second opinion.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early evening edition, 30 September 2026

Citing decades of precedent that a sitting officeholder cannot direct a super PAC's spending, the watchdog called his control of that money "a clear-cut violation of campaign finance law."

Five days later, on September 30, the Fed's own inspector general closed a different file: the $2.5 billion renovation of the central bank's headquarters, the cost overrun Trump cited all summer as grounds to remove Chair Jerome Powell. The inspector general found no criminal wrongdoing. Powell's ledger came back clean too.

The same day, FCC Chair Brendan Carr was asked about the taxpayer-funded ad campaign promoting Trump's agenda. Carr called it "normal" and said it raised no "red flag." Two reviews closed within hours of each other, both reaching the same conclusion: nothing here.

On Wednesday, a third entry moved, the only one with a signature on it. Trump wrote that he had asked Attorney General Todd Blanche to "study" the inspector general's report, the one that cleared Powell, and "make a determination" about it. The report that found no crime is getting a second look from the Justice Department anyway. The report that found a clear-cut violation is not getting one.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. Two clean bills closed within five days of each other: the Fed's, on Powell, and the FCC's, on Trump's own ads. Only one of those clean bills gets reopened. The finding that cleared the man Trump wanted out goes back for restudy. The finding that named his own war chest a violation stays exactly where it landed, unreferred.

The gap is not in the paperwork. The inspector general's math is public; so is the Campaign Legal Center's. The gap is in which clean bill gets accepted on first read and which clean bill gets sent back for a second one, and whose name sits at the top of each file. Powell's clearance gets study. Trump's clearance gets "normal." The ledger does not balance by accident. It balances toward the column that already carries the president's name, and it moves against the one his position cannot survive.

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Daily Caller calls economy resilient, Americans get a decade-high holiday airfare for the trouble.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early evening edition, 30 September 2026

The ledger today runs through five dates and lands on one word, hon: resilient.

On September 23, a column argued the economy was fine beneath the complaints about gas prices, citing a preliminary second-quarter growth figure of 1.5 percent. On September 30, the government revised that quarter upward to 2.2 percent, the kind of correction that happens when fuller data arrives. That same day, the Daily Caller filed its own read of the revision, calling growth, spending and business activity resilient against headwinds from the Iran war.

The headwinds were already on the record before the ink dried. On August 31, AAA's tracking average showed gas priced above $4 a gallon on all thirty-one days of August, the first time that has happened. On September 4, diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, an all-time high, with the Associated Press noting that diesel prices move through freight and delivery networks into the price of everything they haul. On September 8, gas reached $4.14 for the Friday of Labor Day weekend, the highest holiday price on record, beating the prior Labor Day high of $3.82 set in 2012 by thirty-two cents.

Today the ledger adds its newest line. CBS News reports that high jet fuel prices have pushed holiday airfares to a ten-year peak, the fare now sitting where the gas and diesel numbers predicted it would sit three weeks ago. Jet fuel is refined from the same crude the diesel price already told you about; an airline that pays more to fill a tank passes that cost to the traveler buying a ticket home for the holidays, the same way a trucking company passes diesel's cost to whatever that truck is hauling. The mechanism is not subtle. It is the supply chain, named twice, once in diesel and once in jet fuel, arriving at the same conclusion.

What "resilient" described on September 30 was a quarterly growth figure revised upward on paper. What it did not describe was the traveler who checked airfares the same week and found them at a ten-year high, for reasons the column had already filed under headwinds and moved past. The growth number and the airfare number are drawn from the same economy. One of them went into the column. The other went into the traveler's bill. The gap between them is not a mystery; it has a price, and the price is written down above.

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City builds 200-strong influencer army, dodges disclosure questions, then aims it at CEOs over taxes

By MitchInvestigations · the early evening edition, 30 September 2026

The file arrives in three dated folders, and if you stack them in order they read like a flip book of a City Hall discovering its own leverage.

Folder one, September 2nd: the city has assembled two hundred and some digital influencers, a payroll army built to make a young mayor look good online. That's the item itself, nothing more — count the heads if you want, the number is in the piece.

Folder two, September 8th — six days later — a reporter puts a plain question to Governor Hochul at a podium: does anyone on this list have to say, publicly, that City Hall pays them? The governor's answer is that she isn't aware of any law requiring it. All together now — that's the whole exchange, clause by clause: question, non-answer, no law cited, move to the next topic.

Folder three, September 28th — twenty days after that podium, not six — the plan's purpose turns up in print: the same network, discussed internally for use against the city's chief executives, framed as support-building for the administration's tax package.

So the arc, filed end to end: build the army, decline to answer whether it has to register as what it is, then turn it on the people being asked to pay more. Each folder on its own is a local-politics item. Stacked, they're a sequence — payroll, no disclosure, deployment — and the order is the whole story. I didn't write the order. The dates did.

What the plan is reported to produce is not in dispute in these pages: a public campaign aimed at CEOs, timed to a tax fight. What's missing from the folder is anything saying the influencers' arrangement was ever disclosed to the people reading their posts, or that anyone asked them to. The governor was asked. She said she didn't know of a rule. That's the file.

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White House declares taxpayer-funded Trump ads patriotism; Senate's top Republican declares them someone else's bill.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the late evening edition, 30 September 2026

The norm against spending the public's money to promote the man spending it did not go quietly, and it did not go unanswered. It went on September 25, when the White House answered complaints about a pro-Trump ad campaign timed to the midterms with a line built for a plaque: "Patriotism isn't partisan." The ads, repurposed from the 2024 campaign, carried a disclaimer at the bottom reading "Paid for by the U.S. Government."

Two days later, on a Sunday, Richard Painter, who once served as the White House's own ethics lawyer, wrote that the ads could be "an impeachable offense" and that the president "has no right to use taxpayer money for campaign ads." The next day, a Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, joined the criticism against what the administration was calling a public-service campaign. He did not need Painter's word for it. He needed only to read the invoice.

By September 30, the defense had not moved an inch. Trump told reporters he is "not running for office," so the ads are not his to be accused of running on. "That's an ad for the spirit of our country," he said. The spirit of the country, in this telling, airs on a loop with his voice on it and the taxpayer's signature at the bottom.

This is not a new argument so much as old hogwash dressed for a different anniversary. The office of the presidency has always had access to the government's megaphone; what died this week was the agreement that the megaphone stops short of the ballot box. A government announcement that reuses a campaign reel and swaps only the disclaimer is not public service.

The norm leaves no immediate survivors in the executive branch, which has shown no sign of mourning. It is survived by Thune, who broke with his own White House over the ad campaign, and by Painter, who used the word impeachable out loud and on the record. It is preceded in death by every assurance that a disclaimer settles the question of who the ad is for.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the public be told, before the next invoice comes due, what in this country still isn't partisan.

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Senate Democrats block two reform bills this week, replacing both with nothing.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the late evening edition, 30 September 2026

The week's ledger opens on September 15, when the Senate moved toward a vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill drafted alongside the crypto industry during a $190 million lobbying push. Two days later, on September 17, Senator Martin Heinrich blocked a different bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require data centers to help cover their own electricity costs, when Senator Jon Husted tried to pass it by unanimous consent. By September 28, the Senate Democratic leader was working to kill that same bill on the floor, even as his own caucus split: House Democrats had voted for it overwhelmingly before it ever reached the Senate.

The caucus held. On September 30, Senate Democrats blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act outright, calling it toothless. The bill had passed the House with bipartisan support. The next day, October 1, Senate Democrats blocked a second bill, one that would have restricted lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks, over a voter ID provision Republicans had attached to it. The objection was the same one used one day earlier against the data-center bill: the restrictions did not go far enough.

Here is the filing against the table. Two bills arrived this week carrying the word reform. Two were blocked by the party that says it wants reform, each time citing the other side's addition as the reason. The count of what got rejected is two. The count of what replaced either one is zero.

Neither bill reached the sixty votes the Senate requires to move.

Hon, when the books close on a week like this, the entry that matters is not which rider killed which bill. It is which bill had no rider attached and kept moving anyway. That bill had the industry's own lawyers at the table. The other two had one sentence somebody didn't like, and that sentence was reason enough to walk away from the whole bill.

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THE UNUSED TOOL

Sen. Ron Johnson holds the vote that could save $810 million, declines to cast it.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the late evening edition, 30 September 2026

On September 3, Congress passed and the president signed a stopgap bill, funding the government through the midterms into December — the machine running as built: Congress approves, the executive spends.

Six days later, at the party's midterm convention in Dallas, the president promised every adult American a $5,000 check if Republicans hold Congress in November. Congress had approved no such thing. The same week, 750,000 Americans lost their health coverage.

The chief sent the crew to the next job: on September 24, an advocacy group sued on behalf of Iranian Americans to stop the war with Iran, because Congress, again, had not voted to stop it — the courts standing in for a legislature that declined to use the power it already had. Two days later, the administration canceled nearly $1 billion in federal funding by pocket rescission, a process that lets the executive sidestep congressional approval entirely. Most of what it cut funded HHS's Minority Health office and programs for unaccompanied immigrant children already in court.

That left the parts on the bench by September 30: a law — the Impoundment Control Act — written to make exactly this move answerable to a floor vote, and $810 million already approved by Congress sitting on the chopping block. The planner liked the assembly fine: the tool existed, Congress held it, a senator could call the vote. The tinkerer set it out in plain parts — holder of the vote, trigger of the vote, floor to hold it on. Senator Ron Johnson held the part. He did not use it. The muscle had nothing to wreck; the structure that needed wrecking was the one nobody touched. The pilot's job was never to promise the fix flies. It was to point at the tool, sitting there the whole time, and let the reader watch it not get picked up.

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