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Hogs at the AI Slop Trough, Gulf States, UFC Edition

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The era of AI slop is taking place under the banner of Trump 2.0, and its important to remember there is an international cast of hogs nosing up to feed at various troughs in the Gulf States.

It’s been too long since I followed up on any of the various techbros who aspire to build the AGI godhead out of Large Language Model (LLM) AI tech and I’ve also never dived into any of the Gulf State financial links to Silicon Valley (and other places) that frequently I cover at my dayjob.

Readers might want to skim these related pieces for background:

Elon Musk Juices the AI Slop With Gulf State Cash Infusions

Let’s start with this Jacob Silverman piece for The Nation, subtitled “The tech lord’s recent bid to reshuffle the ownership structure of his empire reinforces the clout of the Middle Eastern strongman regimes in its orbit. which links Elon Musk with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf State financing many of his shenanigans.

The subtitle of Silverman’s Nation piece is “The tech lord’s recent bid to reshuffle the ownership structure of his empire reinforces the clout of the Middle Eastern strongman regimes in its orbit.”

Silverman’s Nation piece builds on previous work for The Guardian:

Some relevant points from The Guardian:

Prince Mohammed used his country’s bottomless reserves of oil and capital to flood Silicon Valley, politics, sports leagues and other power centres with cash and influence. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s investment vehicle, Founders Fund, were among the most notable recipients of Saudi money, but they were just two among hundreds. In 2016, Uber received an astonishing $3.5bn from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Blackstone’s infrastructure fund got $20bn. By autumn 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported, Saudi Arabia had become “the largest single funding source for US startups”.

The Saudi-Silicon Valley relationship represented a convergence of shared interests. Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf dictatorships, wanted to wash its money, diversify its investments, deepen influence with its most powerful ally, extend soft power and counter its image as a repressive state responsible for a devastating war in Yemen. Silicon Valley offered all of that, along with access to cutting-edge technology and a business elite coming into its own.

“They’re surveillance states. They’re police states,” said Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University. “They want to use the latest technology in order to continue to remain in power and surveil their populations. So they have another interest in trying to sort of be the beneficiaries of hi-tech developments, hoping that that will help them internally with their own political rule.”

The Saudi government had vast assets held in the names of senior members of the royal family. Through his Kingdom Holding Company, Prince Alwaleed had interests in businesses like Lyft and Snapchat. And until Elon Musk came along, he was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder. As Saudi Arabia became the pre-eminent source of Silicon Valley capital, Alwaleed emerged as the country’s most recognisable mogul, taking the role of leading shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. By 2015, the prince owned an estimated 5.2% of Twitter. In November 2017, Alwaleed was arrested and confined to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh as part of a sweeping “anti-corruption” purge that forced numerous wealthy Saudis and members of the royal family to sign over their assets to Prince Mohammed. That may well have included Alwaleed’s Twitter shares.

Silverman starts out the Nation piece by emphasizing the outsize role of financial engineering such as “selling carbon credits or stashing Bitcoin on the company balance sheet” in the Silicon Valley AI slop hogs economy and how “Musk has made it a high wire act.”

Then he references an Axios piece titled “AI eats social media as xAI swallows X” that has some relevant background on Musk’s current bid to merge his AI company xAI with his “flailing social media concern” X.com into the new x.AI Holdings Corp, market cap: $113 billion.

Some relevant quotes that set the stakes facing Musk, one of the biggest hogs at the AI slop trough:

Musk’s move is a maneuver to spruce up his overall financial picture — leveraging the AI industry’s fizzy valuation arithmetic to shore up X’s stagnant revenue and debt-loaded capital structure.

High expectations for xAI and every other AI darling are buoying the rest of the tech industry for now — but all that ends the moment the AI bubble bursts.

The entire social media world — including X, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, Google-owned YouTube, even the younger TikTok — has become a legacy platform.

While this inherited business is still huge and in many cases profitable, it’s not going to grow or innovate at the pace Silicon Valley and Wall Street demand.

Right now, X may be the most financially challenged of the large social-media platforms. But Meta’s and Google’s properties are also benefiting from investors’ bets on the parent companies’ AI growth.

Axios also underlines the differences between X.com and xAI, mainly Share Price/Earnings ratios:

X is a mature business with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of customers and about $2 billion in estimated global ad revenue.

Musk’s drastic spending and staff cuts brought its overhead down, but it doesn’t seem to have found a way to return to the revenue levels it last saw as the public company known as Twitter (a little over $5 billion) — let alone spark significant growth.

xAI, on the other hand, is a growing two-year-old startup that won headlines for getting a giant new data center in Memphis, Tennessee, built fast.

The company’s AI models have become contenders in the bigger AI race, earning comparisons with better-known rivals like OpenAI and Google.

But for most of xAI’s existence the bulk of its usage has come from the X network.

Musk says xAI’s paper valuation based on its most recent private investment round is now $80 billion.

Its exact revenue is a tiny fraction of that — maybe $100 million — meaning investors are paying 800 times revenue for their shares. (The equivalent figure for Tesla right now is about eight times revenue.)

And some insights about the relationship between X.com and xAI:

xAI’s modest revenue stream in turn comes chiefly from X itself.

For the moment, these dollars are all just circling the Musk-o-sphere in a slightly different configuration.

Silverman connected these dots to the Gulf State monarchy and its sovereign wealth fund’s investment in the “Muskonomy”:

In taking over X, xAI conveniently bailed out Musk’s unhappy X investors by turning them into shareholders of his red-hot AI startup. It was also a chance to win back at least some of the waning favor of X’s stable of sovereign wealth investors.

Then Silverman brings it back to in our friends from The Gulf. Starting on June 29, 2025:

…reports had surfaced that xAI was set for yet another fundraising round that would value the company as high as $200 billion, with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund set to lead the round, building on its $800 million xAI stake. Musk was now planning to double the new company’s assessed value in less than four months. The Muskonomy was booming.

To raise money for his companies, Musk has frequently turned to the same set of investors, some of whom seem to think that access to Musk and the power he holds may be more important than producing steady financial returns. There’s no other reason why his investors would bankroll something like the Boring Company, Musk’s highly touted initiative to install high-speed tunnels in major cities, which has been a near-­complete bust. So if Musk’s financial backers aren’t expecting maximum quarterly returns on their investment, just what is the gain they’re seeking to realize?

The short answer would appear to be much the same thing that the shadowy corps of crypto high rollers expect when they sink their millions into Donald Trump’s value-challenged crypto offerings at World Liberty Financial: the promise of access to one of the most influential men in the world. In Musk’s case, a key source of his continually releveraged financing is from sovereign wealth funds controlled by Middle Eastern monarchies—most significantly, Saudi Arabia. If the $400 million deal that Trump struck with Qatar to supply a luxury aircraft to serve as Air Force One poses questions of foreign-enabled corruption, what does it mean that a significant share of the backing behind the world’s richest man derives from a similarly opaque, authoritarian, and surveillance-minded regional monarchy?

Describing the fruits of a legal motion to unseal the investors in Musk’s X.com that he filed with the help of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Silverman shares some key deets about the ME sovereign wealth fund involved:

the most important names were associated with several authoritarian Middle Eastern states—especially Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who had also been one of the largest shareholders of Twitter when it was a public company. Prince Alwaleed had initially criticized Musk’s planned takeover, but he later came around, rolling over his $1.9 billion stake into the new entity.

…
Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest investors in US tech start-ups, and the ties between Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia have deepened under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)

In April 2018 … MBS staged a charm offensive in the sanctums of American financial and political power, scheduling prominent visits with leading tech companies as well as a dinner with a dozen top venture capitalists. It was a rare public celebration of a relationship usually kept sotto voce.

But Trump 2.0 is anything but an era for sotto voce, at least for the AI slop hogs and maybe even their crypto and cocaine-dealing bros, many of whom also come together in the Gulf States.

In Trump 2.0 Not All the Fights Happen Inside the Cage

The AI hogs tend to get especially loud when they meet up cage side at The UFC Octagon.

The word is out about the deals cut there after UFC’s Hollywood billionaire owner Ari Emanuel brought Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby son David to meet POTUS Donald Trump, not once but twice, to get his acquisition of Paramount past the president.

Elon Musk attended at least one of those fight cards before Scott Bessant reportedly physically kicked Musk out of the MAGA 2.0 entourage. Violent hogs brawling in the West Wing.

Let’s revisit that ridiculous occasion for those who aren’t regular Steven Bannon listeners, via The UK Independent:

Bessent clashed with Musk in April over choices for next acting leader of the Internal Revenue Service, according to The Atlantic and subsequent media reports. The pair reportedly traded jabs and fired off expletives near the Oval Office. One witness described the fight as “two billionaire, middle-aged men thinking it was WWE in the hall of the West Wing,” Axios reports.

MAGA ally Stephen Bannon even told The Washington Post the pair exchanged blows. Musk rammed his shoulder into Bessent’s rib cage “like a rugby player,” and Bessent hit him back, Bannon recounted. Multiple people then intervened to break up the fight, the Post reported. Weeks later, Musk arrived at the White House with a black eye.

Bessent, in a lengthy interview with Bloomberg published Monday, addressed what had happened with Musk but offered few details. He did, however, confirm he didn’t give the SpaceX founder a black eye.

“I can 100 percent say I did not give him the black eye,” Bessent said.

Elon Musk may beg to differ:

And while we’re talking about Bessant, here’s a little caper that would have fit well in my “Drugged, Delusional, or Disinformed” post last week.

Now let’s get back to the Middle East.

AI Slop Hogs at the UFC in Abu Dhabi

No word on if Ari Emanuel’s one of the AI slop hogs but he’s definitely at the Gulf State trough when it’s time to finance his various businesses, whether it’s his “Hollywood Super Agency” WME Group (formerly Endeavor, formerly William Morris Agency) or his combat sports multi-monopoly TKO Group which owns the UFC, pro wrestling’s WWE, and a new boxing entity called Zuffa Group which it co-owns with Saudi Arabia.

As for UFC CEO Dana White, he’s definitely one of the AI slop hogs, at least when he reports to META board meetings to pick up his reported seven-figure compensation for serving on Zuckergerg’s board.

I’ve covered the UFC boss’s relationship with META in a previous Coffee Break.

But I don’t believe that I reported that one of Dana White’s duties as a META board member includes being an AI ambassador for the hapless social media giant turned AI loser.

Fortunately I covered that at The MMA Draw under my nom de combat sports:

There’s no doubt that Dana is one of the best hype men on the planet. He can sell sand in the desert, ice in the Arctic, and lots and lots of not-so-great fights.

This will come in handy for Zuck since he’s bet a fortune on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI isn’t always a crowd-pleaser, especially when it’s putting Jesus shrimp all over your mom’s Facebook feed.

Dana’s already been laying the groundwork by bragging about consulting Zuck about using AI to “fix” the UFC’s jacked fighter rankings:

“We’re working on it right now,” White said. “We’ve literally been working on it all last week and I will have some answers on that soon, but the rankings system drives me crazy. From the pound-for-pound to each division, there’s huge mistakes.

“We literally had meetings this week to work on it,” White said. “I actually talked to Mark Zuckerberg, too, about AI. So I’m totally going to fix the rankings. We’re going to make a lot of strong moves here coming in to ‘25.”

Not Just for AI Slop Hogs, Cryptobros Welcome Cageside Too

That’s right, you are seeing-recently-pardoned-by-Trump Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao cageside at the Octagon with UFC CEO Dana White last weekend at Abu Dhabi.

For those who didn’t follow that particular Trump-pardons-a-criminal-caper, here’s from The BBC coverage:

Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has been pardoned by US President Donald Trump.

Zhao, also known as “CZ”, was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024 after pleading guilty to violating US money laundering laws.

Binance also pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $4.3bn (£3.4bn) after a US investigation found it helped users bypass sanctions.
…
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called Zhao’s prosecution under the Biden administration part of a “war on cryptocurrency”, pushing back on critics who said the pardon appeared motivated by Trump’s personal financial interests.

“This was an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration,” she said, adding that the case had been “thoroughly reviewed”. “So the president wants to correct this overreach of the Biden administration’s misjustice and he exercised his constitutional authority to do so.”
…
Zhao, who stepped down as Binance chief executive in 2023, wrote on social media on Thursday that he was “deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice”.

The pardon lifts restrictions that had stopped Zhao from running financial ventures, but it’s not yet clear whether it changes his standing with US regulators or his ability to lead Binance directly.

In a statement Binance called the decision “incredible news”.

The exchange, which is registered in the Cayman Islands, remains the world’s most popular platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.

It did not respond to further questions about the conflict of interest claims.

Before the pardon, Zhao’s companies had partnered with firms linked to Trump on new digital-currency projects including Dominari Holdings, where his sons sit on the board of advisers and which is based in Trump Tower.

The Wall Street Journal also previously reported representatives of the Trump family – which has its own crypto firm World Liberty Financial – had recently held talks with Binance.

Asked about the decision to pardon Zhao on Thursday, Trump appeared not to not know who he was.

“Are you talking about the crypto person?” he asked, later saying he had granted the pardon at the “request of a lot of good people”.

I’ve covered the Trump sons Eric and Don, Jr. and their crypto grifting in previous Coffee Breaks. Those Trump boys may not be AI slop hogs, but they’ve got their noses in the tough.

Not One of the AI Slop Hogs, But an Irish Coke Dealer in Dubai

Just 140km up the UAE coast from Abu Dhabi is Dubai where notorious Irish boxing promoter Daniel Kinahan is currently residing.

No word yet on whether he bopped down to see last weekend’s UFC (maybe he doesn’t like AI slop hogs and cryptobros), but that hasn’t kept him out of the news, or in this case the latest New Yorker:

Underneath a giant chandelier in the ballroom of the Burj Al Arab, (Daniel Kinahan and Caoimhe Robinson) sat on thrones, surrounded by a colorful crowd of family, friends, and business associates.

One of the revellers was Tyson Fury, the six-foot-nine former heavyweight champion of the world. He has sometimes worked with Kinahan—a boxing impresario who is also known, to law-enforcement officials, as the head of the Kinahan Organized Crime Group. (Although social media was banned at the wedding, Fury reportedly tweeted about his attendance before deleting the post.)
…
“Dubai has never cared too much about people’s reputation, as long as you’re not committing crimes in their country,” Greenaway said. “So some hardened criminals come in, they bring in their money, they put it in real estate, they use the gold exchange—they can use all this stuff to launder their money. And Dubai just doesn’t care.”

The Kinahans have taken full advantage of “this stuff.” According to Europol, the family has made extensive use of a Dubai hawala network—an untraceable money-transfer system based on trust among individual brokers. (The process has often been used in money laundering.)
…
There are indications that even the U.A.E.’s ruling élite may be entangled with criminal groups. In 2015, Sheikh Marwan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, a son of Dubai’s ruler, bought a majority stake in AA Real Estate Development, a company in which Imperiale had invested, shortly after the Spanish extradition request was filed. Imperiale personally signed the sale documents transferring the majority stake to the prince. Similarly, decrypted chats suggest that another Super Cartel member, Edin Gačanin, secured protection in the Emirates through associates of the royal family.
…
The extradition of McGovern has given rise to some speculation that the Kinahans might attempt to move to a friendlier jurisdiction: Russia, perhaps, or Iran. Recent developments in the Emirates indicate that the family’s situation is precarious.
…
Daniel Kinahan may feel safe as long as there are no charges against him, and an indictment is unlikely to come from the U.S. The Trump Administration has different drug-interdiction priorities, notably fentanyl and Latin American cartels.

A D.E.A. source told me that the agency currently has little interest in pursuing people like the Kinahans.

Well that ought to bring Daniel Kinahans a few nights’ sleep, but your poor scribe will be tossing and turning, fretting that Trump 2.0 is sleeping on an opportunity to extort a juicy bribe from the Irish crime titan or his protectors in the UAE.

But perhaps they remember the old maxim, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

P.S.:Apologies to my human readers, but Google’s robots want to see me use the word hogs more in this post so here we go: hogs, hogs, hogs, hogs, hogs, and hogs.

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2 comments

  2. Zephyrum

    I suspect in the long run AI services will migrate to friendly legal jurisdictions so they can train on proprietary content without paying license fees. At the moment the content owners in the US are mostly biding their time, but they will come for their royalties in a big way once they think there is enough free cash to extract. AI puts just enough plausible deniability into the IP-laundering that it will be difficult to litigate across borders with countries that aren’t complete lapdogs.

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