Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Teddy Schleifer, filling in for Julia Ioffe, who will be back in your inbox tomorrow. Tonight, a smattering of scoops from across the world of Silicon Valley politics and philanthropy. (If you want to sign up for my personal email, as well, you can do so here.)

Mentioned in this email: Larry Ellison, Brad Gerstner, Keith Rabois, Matt Huang, Otis Reid, Cari Tuna, Eric Schmidt, G.B.F., Vivek, David Sacks, Elon, and many more.

But first…

• Will Moskovitz Commit? I’ve gotten a lot of questions from Democrats about whether Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook and Asana co-founder and one of the party’s largest donors, will be a major contributor this cycle, or whether he’ll sit this election out and return to his pre-Trump level of political engagement. (Moskovitz had previously told me it was all very TBD.)

  One tea leaf: I hear that Otis Reid, Dustin’s top political adviser in the 2020 cycle, is reprising his role for 2024. Otis, an MIT economics PhD with an encyclopedic knowledge of political-science literature, was previously stationed at OpenPhil, Dustin and his wife Cari Tuna’s philanthropy. But Otis recently decided to work full-time with Dustin to determine what role the billionaire could play in the coming elections (while remaining part-time at OpenPhil). I’m told Dustin hasn’t made any major decisions yet, but he is at least preparing for the possibility of repeating his historic 2016 and 2020 political investments.

• About Schmidt: Speaking of donor-advisors, I wrote a popular story last November about P150, a new community of aides to the world’s wealthiest people that had quietly formed under the tutelage of mega-philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Schmidt’s people suggested at the time that this was just a pilot project, and it was unknown if it would become anything more substantial—suffice it to say I was skeptical that it wouldn’t become something more. Well, one of you flagged a new job posting that suggests P150 is indeed becoming an independent organization with multiple outside funders beyond Schmidt: P150 is hiring an Executive Director who “will be charged with setting and operationalizing the vision for the next five years, moving this community from a promising pilot to an enduring organization.” More than 300 advisers are now a part of it.

• Nauru on My Mind: Remember that viral story about Gabe Bankman-Fried, the king of Sam’s political and philanthropic world, wanting to buy the island of Nauru in order to create a new superspecies to withstand the end of the world? It was one of those pitch-perfect stories perfectly made for Taboola and got reported as fact everywhere from CNBC to New York Post. The genesis was a lawsuit filed by FTX against some former executives in which the lawyers said there was a “memo exchanged” between Gabe and an FTX Foundation official that “describes a plan” to, yes, buy the sovereign nation. (The effective altruism movement produced some wild ideas to stave off existential risks.)

  Alas, the “memo exchanged”—which gives the wild impression that Gabe was actively working on the plan—was actually an unsolicited Google Doc. His lawyer, Michael Tremonte, tells me that G.B.F. “did not create, endorse, contribute to, or draft a plan to acquire the island of Nauru. In truth, Gabe received by email a link to the memo, which he did not write or request, and did not forward to anyone else.” Yes, that’s where we’re at. A bunch of the stories, it looks like, have been quietly corrected over the last few weeks.

For one, just about everyone in the Washington Republican class has been involved in some kind of whip operation and lost. Every single speaker’s candidacy, every strategy, every backup plan, every nascent idea about how to move forward has disintegrated—usually mere hours after being proposed. It’s as if this afternoon, the House G.O.P. conference opened the car trunk after a blowout and realized that Emmer was the spare tire. And yet that didn’t work, either.

It’s gotten so rough that even Democratic schadenfreude is dissipating. People are growing more concerned by the hour that a resolution is impossible. The focus is slowly shifting away from the latest candidacy du jour and toward Nov. 17, when government funding runs out. The hope is that the specter of that deadline will get members in line. Or, short of that, the notion that exhaustion and attrition will have taken hold by then, and Republicans will settle on some sort of compromise candidate.

Frighteningly, a government shutdown could happen passively, amid the anarchy. And getting out of it could be as difficult as the current predicament. But the difference is that while a speaker’s fight is something of an abstraction, shutdowns tangibly hurt real Americans…

Continue reading online…

Until now, Elon’s attendance at the Ramaswamy fundraiser, the only 2024 finance event he has attended, was kept a secret. But their bromance is now playing out in full public view. On Monday, Musk and Sacks co-hosted a fawning Twitter/X “Spaces” event with the Republican presidential candidate, in which all three of them lavished praise on one another for making points “very elegantly” and “beautifully” about how to “Prevent World War 3,” as the event was billed. (Musk said that the risk is “increasing rapidly”; Ramaswamy agreed that “if we do enter World War 3, the United States, as we know it, will cease to exist.”)

To wit: The aides running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s super PAC have been in discussions with Elon and his team for weeks to secure a donation, as I have reported. (Kennedy will actually be in Silicon Valley later this week, including for a high-dollar event with some prominent vaccine skeptics, like host Steve Kirsch, who Elon unbanned from Twitter.) Elon has also taken a look at Tim Scott, tweeting positively about him after he launched his campaign a few months ago. That tweet was likely sent at the encouragement of close Musk friend and Scott mega-donor Larry Ellison, I’m told.

Elon also initially had warm relations with Ron DeSantis, famously launching his campaign on an ill-fated, glitchy Twitter Spaces of his own. But the perception among DeSantis insiders is that the relationship with Elon has cooled, and they say that there hasn’t been much in the way of substantive developments between the two camps. The second-tier candidate who probably has the least claim to Elon’s heart is Nikki Haley. One friend of Elon, famed tech entrepreneur Keith Rabois, who worked with Musk back at PayPal, recently committed to Haley and is planning to host a fundraiser for her in Miami. But Rabois hasn’t pitched Elon on her, I’m told.

In the meantime, it’s Vivek who appears to be running away with the sweepstakes, despite trolling him earlier this year. I’m told Elon and Vivek have spent time with each other, in-person, at least twice in recent months: once at Chamath’s residence, and a second time in Texas. That facetime has been invaluable. Elon is now expected by Vivek aides to make a significant contribution, at some point, to the new-ish 501(c)4 dark-money group behind Ramaswamy, called the American Exceptionalism Public Policy Committee. I do not have any details about size of the check or timing, but Elon has expressed an interest in keeping any contributions private. The 501c(4) entity can’t do too much overt politicking for Vivek, but it can do research, polling and make a contribution to American Exceptionalism, the Ramaswamy super PAC that reaped the $50,000-a-head proceeds of the Chamath fundraiser.

Still, Elon has developed a reputation among Republican fundraisers during his redpilled era as a political flirt—big on tweeting about the “woke mind virus,” and yet not so big on writing seven-figure checks. As far I’m concerned, the donation hasn’t happened until it’s happened, no matter what the Vivek people “expect.”

So, as I’m being asked by Scott allies… where’s Larry? I reported in early August that Ellison had decided to make an eight-figure donation to the Scott super PAC, timed to avoid the June 30 reporting deadline, giving the Oracle billionaire the chance to not tip his hand to other candidates. But all the evidence suggests that he has yet to follow through. I’ve spoken with plenty of sources in the weeks since to figure out the state of play, and there is plenty of bad blood and finger-pointing all around: campaigns vs super PACs, operatives vs candidates, Ellison friends vs Ellison friends, the whole shebang.

The long and short of it is that Ellison, according to my conversations with well-placed sources, is that I do not believe he has cut the massive check that has been promised. “There’s frustration in Tim world that Larry has not contributed,” said a source in Scott’s big-money orbit. “Everyone in Tim world seems mystified.”

Ellison’s wallet hasn’t closed—his people still think the money is in play. But it hasn’t been wired yet, which is why the Scott super PAC had to abandon their television advertising plans for the fall. The group believed it had big money incoming, and you don’t need to have the money in-hand simply to reserve an ad-buy. “That buy was predicated on Larry Ellison giving and he has not given,” said the source. Now, that’s not to say that the super PAC’s stated reason for shelving the television advertising buy—the notion that there does not appear to be space for a non-Trump challenger right now—is total B.S. That much is true to even a casual observer of the Republican primary. But, of course, both things can be true at once.

I should note that Ellison has a long history of breaking donor promises. And there are plenty of excuses one could offer: Namely, would more money really help at this stage? I reached Ellison last week, believe it or not, and he displayed some comedic lack of awareness when I asked if he had any “thoughts on the decision” to cancel Scott’s ad campaign. (I even linked to an article about the news.) “What decision?” he wrote back. He didn’t return follow-up questions.

Among them was a dark-money group called Future Now Action, which received $6 million in 2022 from S.B.F., according to the exhibit. That didn’t surprise me: The group was a 2022 top priority of Mind the Gap, the donor network long supported by Sam and founded by Sam’s mom, Barbara Fried. In fact, a few weeks ago—before the government’s evidence—I had actually pinged Future Now to ask if they’d be returning the money that I assumed they had gotten, given Sam’s donations to Mind the Gap’s 2022 programming. I received a very polite, very unsatisfying cop-out on Sept. 26: “As a matter of policy, we do not disclose the identity of anyone who has not specifically authorized us to do so in the press.”

Now that the government has disclosed the check, the group is singing a different tune. “Sam Bankman-Fried donated to Future Now Action during the 2022 election cycle, as he did to many organizations on both sides of the aisle,” the group said in a statement. “Future Now Action was unaware of any impropriety regarding Mr. Bankman-Fried until news reports surfaced after the election. FNA is currently working with the appropriate authorities to resolve this matter.” Translation: The 501(c)4 is trying to figure out what to do with the seemingly illegal money in their bank accounts.

At least they’re addressing it. Plenty of dark-money groups are pretending that the disclosure in federal court didn’t happen and avoiding questions about it. I reported last month, for instance, that One Nation—Mitch McConnell’s dark-money group—got a $10 million check from S.B.F. in August. The group didn’t comment on my reporting at the time. Now, government evidence shows that, indeed, S.B.F. gave $10 million to the McConnell group in August. But, alas, One Nation didn’t return requests for comment on whether they’re planning on returning the money, seemingly hoping this will all go away.