After Trump pulled NASA nomination, Musk ally Jared Isaacman says stint in politics was ‘thrilling’
Inspiration4 mission commander Jared Isaacman, founder and chief executive officer of Shift4 Payments, stands for a portrait in front of the recovered first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) on February 2, 2021 in Hawthorne, California.
Patrick T. Fallon | Afp | Getty Images
Days after his nomination for NASA was pulled by President Donald Trump, Jared Isaacman told investors in his payments company Shift4 that his “brief stint in politics was a thrilling experience.”
Isaacman said in the letter that he was resigning as CEO of Shift4, which he founded in 1999 at age 16, and will assume the role of executive chairman. He had been planning to leave the company if his nomination was confirmed by the Senate. But it never got that far.
In a post on Truth Social over the weekend, Trump said that he was withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination “after a thorough review of prior associations.” The president didn’t indicate what those associations were, though some reports have suggested that it was a reference to Isaacman’s prior donations to Democrats.
“Even knowing the outcome, I would do it all over again,” Isaacman wrote in the letter.
In an episode of the All-In podcast that went live on Wednesday, Isaacman, who has close ties to Elon Musk, indicated that his past donations weren’t likely the reason for Trump’s decision. He noted that his donations were public long before he was nominated, and he described himself as “right-leaning” and a supporter of the president’s agenda.
“I don’t want to play dumb on this,” he said. “I don’t think the timing was much of a coincidence.”
The timing he was referencing was Musk’s official exit from his government service work at the end of May.
In addition to his career in finance, Isaacman has led two private spaceflights through Musk’s SpaceX, in 2021 and 2024, commanding crews on multiday trips around the Earth. Shift4 also invested $27.5 million in SpaceX, according to a 2021 filing.
Musk became one of Trump’s biggest backers and, until last week, was leading the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with slashing the size of the federal government. With Musk’s official time as a “special government employee” coming to an end because of the 130-day limit, the world’s richest person has quickly turned into a vocal critic of Trump’s massive tax-cut bill.
On Wednesday, Musk ramped up his attacks on the bill that Trump is pushing Congress to pass, claiming it will condemn America to “debt slavery” and urging lawmakers to “KILL the BILL.” A day earlier, Musk slammed what Trump has dubbed the “big, beautiful bill” as a “disgusting abomination.”
Trump’s decision to pull Isaacman’s nomination came before Musk’s latest tirade. But Musk had been distancing himself from the administration in recent weeks.
“You got one person,” Isaacman said on All-In, referring to Trump as the one making the call. He said he doesn’t “know what the trigger was or wasn’t” and said he doesn’t “fault the president for it.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
At Shift4, Isaacman said in Wednesday’s letter that he’ll be succeeded as CEO by Taylor Lauber, who started at the company in 2018 and has been serving as president.
“I have been working since I was a teenager and not planning to stop now,” Isaacman wrote. “I love this company, the strategy and our team. As the largest shareholder, I am eager to continue contributing where I believe my efforts will have the most impact.”
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny and MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event, at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said Shengjia Zhao, the co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will serve as the chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence hiring blitz in recent weeks, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI. In June, Zuckerberg announced a new organization called Meta Superintelligence Labs that’s made up of top AI researchers and engineers.
Zhao’s name was listed among other new hires in the June memo, but Zuckerberg said Friday that Zhao co-founded the lab and “has been our lead scientist from day one.” Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who is acting as Meta’s chief AI officer.
“Shengjia has already pioneered several breakthroughs including a new scaling paradigm and distinguished himself as a leader in the field,” Zuckerberg wrote in a social media post. “I’m looking forward to working closely with him to advance his scientific vision.”
In addition to co-creating ChatGPT, Zhao helped build OpenAI’s GPT-4, mini models, 4.1 and o3, and he previously led synthetic data at OpenAI, according to Zuckerberg’s June memo.
Meta Superintelligence Labs will be where employees work on foundation models such as the open-source Llama family of AI models, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects.
The social media company will invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into AI compute infrastructure, Zuckerberg said earlier this month.
“The next few years are going to be very exciting!” Zuckerberg wrote Friday.
WATCH: Meta announces massive ‘Prometheus’ & ‘Hyperion’ data center plans
Technology
Palantir joins list of 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with stock more than doubling in 2025
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, speaks on a panel titled Power, Purpose, and the New American Century at the Hill and Valley Forum at the U.S. Capitol on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
Palantir has hit another major milestone in its meteoric stock rise. It’s now one of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies.
The provider of software and data analytics technology to defense agencies saw its stock rise more than 2% on Friday to another record, lifting the company’s market cap to $375 billion, which puts it ahead of Home Depot and Procter & Gamble. The company’s market value was already higher than Bank of America and Coca-Cola.
Palantir has more than doubled in value this year as investors ramp up bets on the company’s artificial intelligence business and closer ties to the U.S. government. Since its founding in 2003 by Peter Thiel, CEO Alex Karp and others, the company has steadily accrued a growing list of customers.
Revenue in Palantir’s U.S. government business increased 45% to $373 million in its most recent quarter, while total sales rose 39% to $884 million. The company next reports results on Aug. 4.
Earlier this year, Palantir soared ahead of Salesforce, IBM and Cisco into the top 10 U.S. tech companies by market cap.
Buying the stock at these levels requires investors to pay hefty multiples. Palantir currently trades for 273 times forward earnings, according to FactSet. The only other company in the top 20 with a triple-digit ratio is Tesla at 175.
With $3.1 billion in total revenue over the past year, Palantir is a fraction the size of the next smallest company by sales among the top 20 by market cap. Mastercard, which is valued at $518 billion, is closest with sales over the past four quarters of roughly $29 billion.
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