AI IPO Race Heats Up, DOGE Whistleblower Sues Elon Musk, and Instagram Gets Hacked
Zoë Schiffer: Deviants and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this, I mean, going back to redlining, that’s the work that the trust and security team usually does. And those groups—
Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore.
Zoë Schiffer: They are not as big as before. It’s not that much work. So yeah, I mean, it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Obviously within Meta, we’ve been talking to people this week who met the news with a sigh of relief. The company recently laid off a large portion of its workforce. We wrote about that. We have talked about that. And I walked in with people like, “Well, how’s it going now?” Hacking was an excuse to talk to people, see how they were doing. And they’re like, “I mean, as you would expect, we’re being asked to do two jobs now instead of one.” So you can imagine how that plays out.
Brian Barrett: And also, we’ve been talking about AI legislation before and all this emphasis on national security and these high-level things, but again, not so much on consumer-facing products, which would be if you were to say some kind of office that takes care of consumer finances and protects that, that would be useful to have at this moment as well. We used to have one of those. Technically, I think we still do. Not really. So all this extensive deregulation is coming at this moment when the tools that were once available are not available. These new tools are very infallible. We will see more of this.
Leah Feiger: Can I bring it to a non-AI topic, guys?
Brian Barrett: Please.
Zoë Schiffer: Wow. I didn’t know you were there, but yes, go, queen.
Brian Barrett: Also, I think maybe we can try to find a way to bind it again.
Zoë Schiffer: We can. We can.
Leah Feiger: No, it’s not. Well, OK. This story is something we’ve been thinking about, putting together, looking at for a long time, but it’s about the DOGE whistleblower who recently indicted Elon Musk. This all started last year actually. On April 14, 2025, Dan Berulis, an IT employee at the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB, filed a complaint for a large claim. He said the DOGE has compromised the agency’s information and appears to be releasing it to the NLRB.
Audio archive: The report comes forward with claims that DOGE not only accessed data from his agency but also took a large amount of sensitive data with it. According to the disclosure shared with Congress, “Approximately 10 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of a stack of encyclopedias would be worth it if someone printed these files as hard copy documents.”
Leah Feiger: This was a big claim, especially at the same time as you guys remember all too well, DOGE teams were firing government employees and accessing sensitive data all over the country. We were at our peak last year in April. Berulis went public in the NPR article. His name was attached to it, he said there was a threatening letter taped to his door, and he was afraid to speak. Fast forward a bit, Berulis has now filed a defamation suit in DC court against Elon Musk. He said Musk made him the target of further violence by falsely claiming that Berulis’ claim to DoGE was bogus. This is a heated claim for a variety of reasons, and what this all comes back to is that Musk last year re-shared X from a right-wing person who claimed that DOGE had been cleared and that the whistleblower’s testimony was false. After that –
