Zuckerberg Texted Musk — Offered Meta’s Machinery to Shield DOGE
On February 3, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg texted Elon Musk offering to deploy Meta’s content moderation systems to protect members of the Department of Government Efficiency. This is a remarkable pivot from a relationship once sour enough to nearly end in a cage fight.
The messages, released March 28, 2026 as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI (the nonprofit-turned-for-profit AI lab he co-founded), show Zuckerberg writing: “Looks DOGE is making progress. I’ve got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.” Musk responded with a heart emoji, then floated the idea of Zuckerberg joining a consortium to bid on OpenAI. Zuckerberg suggested moving the discussion to a phone call. Court documents released earlier confirm he never joined the bid.
The timing matters. Days before, Zuckerberg had appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast complaining that corporate America had become “emasculated.” The offer to shield DOGE staff from online harassment aligns Meta — a platform built on speech moderation — with a government agency tasked with mass layoffs. For investors, the subtext is clear: Meta’s relationship with the incoming administration is strategic, not ideological.
xAI’s Last Two Co-Founders Exit — Musk Now Alone at the Top
On March 28, 2026, Business Insider reported that Ross Nordeen, the final co-founder still working at xAI (Musk’s AI startup launched to compete with OpenAI), had departed. Manuel Kroiss, the second-to-last co-founder, left earlier in the week. This brings the total co-founder exodus to 11 out of 11.
Kroiss led xAI’s pretraining team. Nordeen, a Tesla veteran who helped orchestrate mass layoffs after Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, reported directly to Musk and served as his operational deputy. Both departures follow Musk’s public admission that xAI “was not built right [the] first time around” and is now “being rebuilt from the foundations up.”
The timing coincides with SpaceX acquiring xAI, folding it into the same corporate umbrella as SpaceX and the platform formerly known as Twitter. SpaceX is reportedly preparing for a public offering, which could value the combined entity at over $200 billion. For growth investors, the question is whether Musk’s willingness to admit structural failure and restart — twice — signals discipline or distraction. The complete co-founder departure suggests the latter. No response from xAI was available at press time.
Claude Paid Subscribers More Than Doubled — Feud With Pentagon Became Marketing Gold
Between January and February 2026, Anthropic’s Claude gained paid consumer subscribers in record numbers. The company confirmed to TechCrunch on March 28 that paid subscriptions more than doubled this year, though it did not disclose total user counts.
An analysis of billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers, conducted by Indagari (a consumer transaction analysis firm), shows the majority of new subscribers joined at the $20-per-month Pro tier. The surge began in late January, when media outlets including the Wall Street Journal and Axios reported that Anthropic was refusing to allow the Department of Defense to use its AI models for lethal autonomous operations or mass surveillance of American citizens. The dispute escalated through February, culminating in DoD labeling Anthropic a supply risk. CEO Dario Amodei issued a public statement on February 26 defending the company’s position. A federal judge this week temporarily blocked the DoD designation.
Anthropic also credits developer tools released in January — Claude Code and Claude Cowork — and the Computer Use feature launched this week, which allows Claude to navigate a computer independently. These features require a paid subscription. ChatGPT remains the largest consumer AI platform by a wide margin, but Anthropic’s willingness to pick a public fight with the Pentagon appears to have resonated with users willing to pay for an alternative.
OpenAI Still Dominates Consumer AI — Despite Losing Users Over Pentagon Deal
Despite a spike in uninstalls after OpenAI announced a deal with the Department of Defense, Indagari’s analysis shows OpenAI continues to gain new paid subscribers at a rapid rate through early March 2026. The company remains the largest consumer AI platform.
The contrast with Anthropic is deliberate. While Anthropic refused to allow military use of its models for lethal operations, OpenAI signed a deal that triggered immediate backlash among privacy-conscious users. The uninstall spike was real but short-lived. OpenAI’s consumer momentum suggests that brand dominance and feature velocity still outweigh ethical positioning for most paying users.
For enterprise buyers, the divergence creates a strategic choice: OpenAI’s scale and Pentagon endorsement versus Anthropic’s safety-first positioning and recent surge in developer adoption. The commercial AI landscape is fragmenting not by technology, but by institutional alignment. Investors betting on a winner-take-all outcome should note that both companies are gaining paid users simultaneously — the market is expanding faster than either can capture alone.
The most valuable signal today isn’t which AI startup is winning. It’s that platforms are now competing on institutional allegiance, not just model performance. Zuckerberg offering Meta’s moderation machinery to DOGE, Musk burning through co-founders while folding xAI into SpaceX, and Anthropic’s paid subscriber surge tied to a Pentagon feud all point to the same shift: tech’s next decade will be defined by who you align with, not just what you build. The capital will follow the alliances.
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