Business Pants
Business Pants
Free Float Media Inc.
Companies kill benefits, activist wants manly Victoria’s Secret, Buffett turns off the lights
58 minutes Posted May 15, 2026 at 7:59 pm.
0:00
58:23
Download MP3
Show notes
Story of the Week (DR):
Trump is bringing Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and a dozen other CEOs to Beijing for his Xi summit
Technology & AI
Elon Musk – CEO, Tesla and SpaceX
Tim Cook – CEO, Apple
Jensen Huang – CEO, Nvidia (joined as a last-minute addition after a personal call from the President)
Cristiano Amon – CEO, Qualcomm
Sanjay Mehrotra – CEO, Micron Technology
Dina Powell McCormick – President, Meta
Jim Anderson – CEO, Coherent
Finance & Investment
Larry Fink – CEO, BlackRock
Stephen Schwarzman – CEO, Blackstone
David Solomon – CEO, Goldman Sachs
Jane Fraser – CEO, Citigroup
Aerospace & Manufacturing
Kelly Ortberg – CEO, Boeing (reportedly finalizing a massive 500-jet deal during the trip)
Larry Culp – CEO, GE Aerospace
Payments & Services
Michael Miebach – CEO, Mastercard
Ryan McInerney – CEO, Visa
Agriculture & Biotech
Brian Sikes – CEO, Cargill
Jacob Thaysen – CEO, Illumina
Paypal agrees to $30 million settlement with Trump's Justice Department over 'illegal DEI'
The company launched a $530M Economic Opportunity Fund in 2020 for Black and underrepresented minority businesses
Did not fight this in court, just surrendered
To make the DOJ happy, PayPal had to ditch its race-based criteria; instead, it now funnels that financial support to veteran-owned businesses and companies in farming, manufacturing, or technology. A direct “black” to “white” transfer
Any company that launched a race-specific grant or loan program after 2020 is now officially in the DOJ’s crosshairs, and "social justice" is being litigated as "civil rights fraud."
PayPal board:
“Independent” chair David W. Dorman (2015-; 17%)
member of the Dell Technologies Board
Michael Dell and Donald Trump are BFFs: Dell pledged $6.25B to Trump Accounts
Jonathan Christodoro (2015-; 13%): a disciple of billionaire Carl Icahn (former Managing Director at Icahn Capital), one of Trump’s oldest and most vocal allies
Founder PayPal Mafia Trump BFFs: Musk (DOGE), David Sacks (AI and Crypto Czar), Peter Thiel (JD Vance creator)
Frank Yeary (2015-; 12%): Intel director since 2009 and chair since 2023
It Was One of DOGE’s Most Absurd Abuses. A Court Finally Exposed It
This whole saga centers on a major legal showdown between the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
The case is a consolidated lawsuit (often called the NEH-DOGE lawsuit) filed in May 2025 by groups including the Authors Guild, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association.
On May 7, 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon issued a massive 143-page ruling. She essentially nuked DOGE’s attempt to defund hundreds of humanities projects, calling their process a "textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination."
The AI Purge: Instead of a professional review, DOGE staffers (described in court as young "technologists" with no background in humanities) ran thousands of grant descriptions through ChatGPT.
DOGE staffers—mostly described as 20-somethings with "zero experience in the humanities"—attempted to dodge government transparency laws by conducting official business on Signal with auto-delete enabled. The court found this was a blatant violation of the Federal Records Act, proving that "efficiency" is often just code for "avoiding a paper trail."
The Woke Filter: They told the AI to flag anything related to "DEI." This backfired spectacularly when the AI flagged projects on Holocaust survivors, Appalachian history, and Italian-American archives simply because they used words like "identity," "culture," or "women."
DOGE didn't actually read the grants they cut. Instead, they used ChatGPT and basic keyword searches to flag any program containing "incriminating" words like "history," "culture," "identity," or "BIPOC." If the AI thought it sounded "woke," the funding was axed—a move Judge Colleen McMahon called a "textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination."
In perhaps the most