Speculation About A SpaceX–Tesla Merger Is Already Growing
SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO has fueled speculation that Elon Musk could take an even bigger step: merging SpaceX with Tesla to create a roughly $4 trillion technology conglomerate spanning rockets, AI, satellites, electric vehicles, robotics, energy, and social media, according to a new report from the New York Times.
The idea has gained traction among investors, analysts, and even SpaceX executives. Tesla and SpaceX already share personnel, collaborate on major projects, and have business ties through AI development, data centers, batteries, and vehicle sales.
Because Musk controls SpaceX and is Tesla’s largest shareholder, any merger would effectively be a deal with himself, raising concerns about conflicts of interest and shareholder lawsuits. However, legal experts say Texas corporate law—where both companies are now incorporated—makes such challenges difficult. Shareholders generally need to own at least 3% of a company’s stock to sue, a threshold that would require roughly $45 billion in Tesla shares.
The Times notes that approval would still require support from two-thirds of Tesla shareholders. Musk controls about 20% of Tesla’s voting power, and many investors have historically backed his initiatives. Tesla’s board has also frequently aligned with Musk, while SpaceX recently added longtime Musk associate Roelof Botha to its board.
Supporters argue a merger could unlock significant synergies. Tesla’s expertise in chips, AI, and data-center construction could complement SpaceX’s ambitions in orbital infrastructure, satellite communications, and space-based computing. Ark Invest, which owns shares in both companies, has said the combination makes strategic sense, though it would prefer Tesla’s self-driving taxi business to mature first.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has acknowledged potential benefits, saying a merger could simplify Musk’s responsibilities and noting clear overlaps between the companies’ futures: “There’s no question that there are synergies between Tesla and SpaceX in our futures.”
Opponents could challenge the deal through securities-fraud claims, antitrust scrutiny, or national-security concerns, particularly given the companies’ combined presence in AI, robotics, communications, and space technology. Still, experts believe regulators would face significant hurdles, especially if the combined company continued to perform well.
“As long as he keeps running the business well and the stock price keeps going up, that is a pretty good bar to bringing a securities fraud suit,” said James Spindler, a professor of corporate law at the University of Texas School of Law.
Ultimately, the greatest obstacle may be financial rather than legal. As one corporate-governance expert noted, investors tend to support ambitious deals when markets are rising and shareholders are making money.
Charles Elson, the founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware told The New York Times that Musk “has got this cheering section who will follow him to the gates of Hades or gates of heaven, wherever he leads them.”
“Basically he’s gotten to the point where he can do almost anything he wishes…”
The US House and Senate have reached a deal to move forward with a housing bill that includes a ban on the Federal Reserve creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC) until 2030.
A bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders released an updated version of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act on Tuesday, which aims to address housing affordability and bans institutional investors from buying existing single-family homes to rent out.
The bill has included a CBDC ban since the Senate passed it in March. The House also passed its version of the bill with strong support in May, but the House and Senate disagreed on some aspects. The Senate has now added further amendments that will be put before the House for a final vote.
The bill is likely to pass quickly and would hand a win to Republicans who have tried to pass a CBDC ban for years, as earlier standalone bills had stalled in Congress. Crypto advocates have long criticized CBDCs, which they see as an attempt by governments to repurpose crypto technology to a centrally-controlled asset.
The deal also means Congress can focus on passing other legislation before the August recess and the November midterm elections, in particular, the crypto-regulating CLARITY Act that many lawmakers have been pushing to advance.
House Republican leaders plan to put the bill up for a vote after the House returns from recess on June 23, two people familiar with the plan told Politico.
The housing bill includes language that says the Federal Reserve may not, directly or indirectly, “issue or create a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency.”
It adds the clause will expire on Dec. 31, 2030, and creates a carveout for crypto stablecoins, or “dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless, and private.”
The clause revives much of the language from Republican Representative Tom Emmer’s Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which was introduced in June 2025, passed by the House the next month, but was never picked up in the Senate.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 banning federal agencies from all work related to CBDCs, saying they threatened “the stability of the financial system, individual privacy, and the sovereignty of the United States.”
Ferrari Reportedly Tells Buyers To Buy Unpopular Luce To Move Up On Wait List
Ferrari is reportedly using its first-ever EV, the Luce, a €550,000 model that looks more like a cross between a Tesla and a Kia, as a loyalty test inside its highly coveted allocation system.
Ferrari’s allocation system is a notoriously exclusive, invitation-only process managed directly by the factory in Maranello. Rather than using waitlists, Ferrari curates ownership by evaluating a buyer’s loyalty to the brand, requiring customers to build a multi-million-dollar history of ownership, participate in factory events, and retain cars in order to qualify to buy hypercars right off the production line.
Bloomberg sources say Ferrari is dangling the Luce to buyers in its allocation program, not only to offload the widely unpopular EV but also to give clients a path to move up in the allocation system.
“It is like a restaurant where it is impossible to get a table,” Max Girardo, founder of collector-car advisory firm Girardo & Co. and a former RM Sotheby’s auctioneer and motor-car specialist, told the outlet in an interview.
Girardo noted, “If you go every week, eventually they find you one. With Ferrari, the more you buy, the more you are treated as an important client.”
Here’s more detail on what Ferrari is telling clients in their allocation system:
Bloomberg spoke with more than half a dozen investors and collectors from Italy to China to gather details about how Ferrari communicated with clients following the Luce’s presentation.
One buyer said Ferrari made clear to him that taking the car mattered if he wanted to keep his place among top clients.
Another collector said the company is signaling to many clients, especially potential new buyers, that access to a future one-off model may first depend on buying the Luce or cheaper entry-level models.
Ferrari has long preserved its pricing power by intentionally keeping production below market demand, with output capped at roughly 14,000 vehicles last year. That scarcity drives the brand’s exclusivity and fuels its coveted allocation system.
The Luce will likely still be purchased by clients looking to leapfrog in the allocation system, especially if it helps secure access to more desirable future releases.
Our view is that the Luce risks becoming a modern repeat of the Mondial, the less-loved Ferrari produced in the 1980s and early 1990s that has been shunned by collectors.
There are few sights more comic than a modern minister pretending to be the stern parent of the nation.
We know the routine. The concerned expression. The voice lowered half an octave. The carefully arranged background of flags, earnest young people and laminated safeguarding jargon. Then comes the announcement. The government is going to protect children online.
At which point every parent in the country is expected to breathe a sigh of relief, put down the gin and thank the Department for Being Sensible on Our Behalf.
This would be comic enough at any time. It is even better when the Government now proposing to supervise teenagers online gives the impression of being unable to supervise itself. Sir Keir Starmer wants to childproof the internet while presiding over a state that cannot produce a defence policy that convinces its own side, let alone our allies or enemies.
Still, never mind the Russian threat. Has anyone thought about Chloe scrolling Instagram?
To be fair, there is a problem. Social media is not exactly a moral health spa. Much of it resembles a Victorian freak show redesigned by behavioural psychologists and funded by advertising executives. It is addictive, vain, cruel, stupid and often deranging. The idea that a 14 year-old girl with a smartphone is simply exercising ‘choice’ while being stalked by an algorithm designed to exploit insecurity is absurd.
So no, this is not a libertarian hymn to TikTok.
The problem is not that politicians worry about the effect of social media on young people. The problem is that they worry about it selectively.
The same political class that increasingly tells us young people must be protected from online manipulation is also very keen to tell us that those same young people are mature enough to vote.
This is where the argument begins to wobble like a drunk on a paddleboard.
Apparently, a teenager may not have the judgement to scroll through Instagram without state supervision, but does have the judgement to help choose the next government.
This is not a principle. It is a convenience.
Defenders of the idea will say social media and voting are entirely different activities. One involves psychological harm. The other involves civic empowerment.
Up to a point. But both depend on the same basic faculties. Judgement, emotional maturity, resistance to manipulation, the ability to process information and some capacity to distinguish truth from nonsense.
These are precisely the faculties politicians tell us young people lack when the topic is social media. Yet they mysteriously reappear when the topic is extending the franchise.
If a 16 year-old is too impressionable to cope with Andrew Tate videos, dieting influencers or Chinese-owned dopamine dispensers, why is he or she suddenly immune to political propaganda?
Modern electioneering is not a seminar in constitutional philosophy. It is organised emotional manipulation. It uses fear, flattery, identity, resentment, slogans and carefully tested nonsense. It promises free things that are not free. It manufactures panic. It tells voters that unless they vote correctly, the planet will boil, fascism will return, public services will collapse and everyone decent will suffer.
But this, apparently, is citizenship.
The difference is not that social media manipulates while politics enlightens. The difference is that one form of manipulation sits outside the control of approved institutions. The other benefits them.
That is the real story.
The modern state has developed an elastic theory of childhood. Young people are treated as children when the state wants more power over families, technology, schools or speech. They are treated as adults when the state wants their votes, their assent or their moral authority.
Too young to smoke. Too young to drink. Too young to rent a car. Too young, increasingly, to open an app without the digital equivalent of a permission slip.
Yet old enough to help determine who runs the country.
Parents have been quietly demoted in this arrangement. A mother and father may apparently lack the wisdom to decide how their child uses a phone. Yet that same child, guided by teachers, activists, celebrities and taxpayer-funded campaigns, is expected to make profound democratic choices.
The absurdity is not hard to spot. It merely requires the increasingly unfashionable skill of noticing.
This is not an argument that teenagers are stupid. Many are thoughtful, curious and better informed than adults who spend their evenings shouting at the television. Nor is it an argument that all social media regulation is wrong. Some of it may be necessary, particularly where very young children are concerned.
It is an argument for coherence.
Parliament cannot say young people need protection from algorithms then invite them to swim in the sewage works of political campaigning and call it citizenship.
It cannot claim to defend autonomy while constantly transferring authority from families to bureaucracies.
This is the contradiction at the heart modern government. It does not want young people to grow up. It wants them managed, mobilised and morally useful.
So by all means let us have a serious debate about children, screens and harm. Let us talk about addiction, anxiety, pornography, bullying, parental responsibility and the tech companies that have turned childhood attention into a commodity.
But let us also drop the pretence.
A government that does not trust teenagers or their parents to navigate social media cannot then turn around and declare those same teenagers mature enough to help govern the nation.
Barnacle Scrapers Cash In As Persian Gulf Shipping Bottleneck Eases
Demand for commercial divers who clean ship hulls has surged as vessels stranded in the Persian Gulf prepare to leave following a tentative US-Iran peace agreement reopening the Strait of Hormuz, according to Bloomberg.
According to Captain Manandeep Singh Kukreja of Prominence Shipping Services, requests for hull-cleaning crews have increased more than 30-fold since the announcement. Fees for cleaning a single vessel could rise up to 60%, from about $5,000 to $8,000.
Bloomberg reports that around 600 ships remain stuck in the Gulf after more than three months of disruption. Many have accumulated algae, slime, and barnacles, which can prevent entry into ports due to invasive-species concerns.
“The next 30 days, it’s going to be like striking gold for diving companies,” Kukreja said. “Everyone wants to get out of Hormuz and get back to earning money.”
“They’re going to make the best out of this opportunity. It’s a no-brainer that they will hike their prices.”
Cleaning needs vary by vessel. Some ships require only light slime removal, while others need extensive barnacle scraping after months in the warm Gulf waters.
The surge in demand for hull-cleaning crews reflects the broader disruption caused by months of conflict around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints.
Since fighting erupted in late February, hundreds of vessels have been stranded in the Persian Gulf, disrupting oil shipments, driving up shipping and insurance costs, and creating the largest interruption to global energy flows in decades. As a tentative peace deal raises hopes that traffic can resume, shipowners are racing to prepare vessels for departure, underscoring the scale of the operational and financial fallout from more than three months of turmoil in the region.
Poland’s government has approved a one-off windfall tax on fuel companies that benefited from soaring energy prices during the U.S.-Iran-Israel war, seeking to recover part of the billions spent protecting consumers from higher fuel costs.
The proposed levy would impose a 60% tax on excess profits generated between March and December 2026, during the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The Polish Finance Ministry estimates the measure will raise around 4 billion zloty $1.1 billion.
Under the proposal, excess profits would be calculated using fuel sales margins that exceed a company’s average 2025 margin by more than 20%, reflecting profits from an extraordinary geopolitical supply shock instead of improved business performance.
“Exceptional economic and geopolitical conditions” created unusually high profits across parts of the fuel sector while imposing significant costs on the state budget, the Finance Ministry said in a statement carried by Polish news outlets.
State-controlled energy giant Orlen is expected to bear the largest share of the tax burden, accounting for roughly 60% of the projected tax base according to the government’s impact assessment.
The proposal follows months of emergency measures introduced by Warsaw to shield households and businesses from soaring fuel prices. Poland temporarily reduced VAT and excise duties on fuels and imposed price controls designed to ensure consumers benefited from the tax cuts. According to government estimates, the fuel excise reduction and reduced VAT collections cost Poland around $435 million a month.
The measure still faces political hurdles, though. Tusk’s coalition controls parliament; however, the legislation must also be signed by President Karol Nawrocki, an opposition ally who has repeatedly blocked government fiscal initiatives.
The government initially proposed a 75% windfall tax before reducing the rate to 60% following consultations with industry groups, which warned that the original proposal would have pushed the effective tax burden on some companies to nearly 94%.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) continues to run away from its main rival, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU) in a new poll, which shows the AfD nine points ahead.
The AfD achieved a new record in the current YouGov poll, reaching 29 percent, while the CDU/CSU and SPD have hit all-time lows. The results are expected to pile on the pressure on a governing coalition the German public increasingly despises.
In the YouGov poll, CDU/CSU achieves 20 percent of the vote and SPD earns 12 percent. The Union parties have never been worse in a YouGov poll.
However, the Greens at 14 percent and the Left Party at 12 percent are making slight gains.
The FDP is also gaining ground, reaching 5 percent for the first time in a year and a half after a new chairman was elected, Wolfgang Kubicki.
The results for the CDU in particular are bound to spark further turmoil in the party, with some members perhaps even eyeing a future coalition with the AfD, a move that has been soundly rejected by CDU leadership. In particular, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to never work with the party.
The conundrum for the CDU remains that the party is forced to build coalitions with predominately left-wing parties like the Greens, the SPD, and even the Left Party, through its firewall against the AfD. The resulting politics have left CDU voters increasingly unhappy with the results, but remarkably, about half of CDU voters also reject a coalition with the AfD.
Majority of Germans reject politicizing the World Cup
YouGov also found that a majority of Germans do not want the World Cup politicized. The German national team has a history of taking a “woke” stance in the last two World Cups, but the German team was eventually humiliated in each tournament, failing to advance past the preliminary round in both World Cups.
However, Germans soundly reject politics in football, with 65 percent of respondents saying they want the World Cup and politics to be strictly separated. AfD voters (82 percent) and CDU/CSU voters (74 percent) are especially in favor of this position. More than half of SPD voters at 55 percent also share this view.
However, those on the more extreme left, back politics in football, like the Left Party (41 percent) and the Greens (34 percent).
As we approach the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations, the American Enterprise Institute released a new public opinion survey exploring Americans’ views about the nation’s past and present. The survey is part of AEI’s America at 250 initiative, and it expands on a survey conducted 30 years ago by the Public Agenda Foundation in NYC.
Americans continue to endorse many of the ideals the founders championed, and they worry about their erosion. Nearly eight in 10 believe Americans take their freedoms for granted, while only 19% say Americans appreciate the freedom we have.
More than two-thirds of Americans believe that society has to teach kids what it means to be an American, while three in 10, 31%, believe this is something that happens naturally as they grow up. Three-quarters think high school students should be required to study the Declaration of Independence this year as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary, including 61% of Gen Z-ers. Twenty-nine percent nationally say they have read the Declaration in full, while 45% have read it in part. Slightly more than a quarter, 26%, say they have not read the document. Still, 85% said they could give a good answer to what the 4th of July holiday actually celebrates, while 13% said they would be more comfortable looking it up.
Americans don’t want to gloss over their history, and 65% said it was important to have public discussions of the nation’s historical failures and flaws. In another question, 90% said it was very or somewhat important for high school students to learn how slavery and racial discrimination shaped the country. Forty-two percent said the public schools these days do not pay enough attention to the harm done to African Americans in U.S. history. Still, 75% in another question agreed with the statement “America is not perfect, but the country’s leaders have worked hard to make it better.” To this group of Americans, it was important to teach the country’s failures and flaws but also its successes and strengths.
The survey revealed some significant gaps between members of the Gen Z cohort and baby boomers. Thirty percent of the Gen Z-ers strongly agreed that the Founding Fathers deserved respect for how they created the country compared to 60% of baby boomers. Two-thirds of Gen Z compared to 89% of boomers said they were very or somewhat proud to be an American. There were also big gaps between the parents surveyed in 1998 and parents today. Parents today are less likely to see the country and its history positively and also less likely to insist that schools teach positive claims about it.
Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute where she studies public opinion.
Nicole Penn is the assistant director of AEI’s Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department.
The Qwen-Robot suite was developed by Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab and is undergoing pilot testing with selected Alibaba Cloud enterprise clients.
The suite comprises three models focused on navigation, manipulation, and world modeling for robots operating in physical environments.
Alibaba said the models enable machines to perceive, reason, and interact with the real world, joining a growing global push to advance embodied AI beyond traditional chatbot applications.
Robots meet reasoning
Alibaba says its Qwen family of AI models has become very good at understanding the physical world. These models can recognize objects, understand spatial relationships, follow complex visual instructions, and reason about real-world environments. For example, a model can understand a command such as, “Go to the kitchen, find the red cup, pick it up, and place it on the shelf.”
However, understanding a task is different from actually performing it. While a vision-language model (VLM) can describe the steps needed to complete a task, it cannot directly control a robot’s movements.
The challenge is connecting human language and visual understanding with the motor actions required to interact with the physical world.
This problem is difficult because robot training data is very different from internet data. Information collected from navigation systems, robotic arms, vehicles, and cameras comes in different formats and is expensive to gather. Simply combining all this data often creates conflicts rather than improving performance.
To address this, Alibaba developed the Qwen-Robot Suite, which includes three specialized models. Qwen-RobotNav focuses on movement and navigation. It helps robots follow instructions, navigate to locations, track targets, and support autonomous driving.
According to its website, Qwen-RobotManip focuses on physical interaction. It enables robots to grasp, move, and manipulate objects using a large training dataset collected from different robotic systems. Qwen-RobotWorld acts as a world model, predicting how environments may change and helping robots understand the likely outcomes of their actions.
Together, these models aim to enable robots to understand instructions, interact with objects, navigate environments, and make decisions in the real world.
Physical AI accelerates
Alibaba showcased Qwen-RobotNav on a Unitree Go2 quadruped powered by NVIDIA Jetson Thor hardware and a single low-resolution camera. The robot successfully navigated an unfamiliar apartment, following spoken instructions across multiple rooms without preloaded maps, while maintaining an inference latency of 196 milliseconds.
The company claims that Qwen-RobotManip, its robotic manipulation model, was trained on more than 38,000 hours of open-source data covering object handling and interaction tasks. According to Alibaba, the model recently achieved the highest score in the generalist category of the RoboChallenge real-world robotics benchmark, earning a process score of 59.83 and a task success rate of 45 percent.
The company also unveiled Qwen-RobotClaw, a robotics agent framework that enables Qwen models to use the Qwen-Robot suite as physical-world tools. In one demonstration, an agent searched for a restroom, identified an out-of-order sign, and independently rerouted to another location. Alibaba further open-sourced Chat2Robot, a browser-based platform for testing embodied AI interactions.
As competition in embodied AI intensifies worldwide, Alibaba has expanded its ambitions beyond language and multimodal software with the launch of its Qwen-Robot models. The move reflects a broader industry shift toward creating AI systems capable of understanding and interacting with the physical world.
Alibaba’s move comes as competition in physical AI accelerates globally. In the US, Google DeepMind is advancing Gemini Robotics, while Nvidia is expanding its robotics ecosystem through Cosmos, Isaac, and GR00T. Start-ups, including Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, and Figure AI, are also developing general-purpose robotic intelligence, according to the South China Morning Post.
China is strengthening its position by pairing its manufacturing advantages with growing investments in AI software for autonomous decision-making. The sector now spans AI developers, robotics firms, and EV makers. Companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Unitree, AgiBot, UBTech, Galbot, Spirit AI, GigaAI, Xpeng, and Xiaomi are actively pursuing embodied AI technologies.
The dim tunnel passage hugs narrow, winding concrete steps that lead 55 feet down, with a ceiling no higher than 4 1/2 feet, making it a claustrophobe’s nightmare.
The underground passage stretching from Tijuana, Mexico, to a warehouse in California near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry known as “Buy 4 Less” is about 2,000 feet long and features reinforced walls, rail, ventilation, and electrical systems.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California said on June 1 that the tunnel had been discovered during a Homeland Security investigation involving a suspected drug smuggling operation.
Four people were charged with conspiring to distribute more than a ton of cocaine worth $45 million. Authorities said the discovery dealt a blow to the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars of narcotics have probably made their way through this tunnel. Imagine the national security implications of that,” drug czar Sara Carter told host Jan Jekielek on a recent episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Power Play
Carter said federal agencies have been turning to technology to help combat cartels, although she couldn’t disclose details. She said the cartels’ use of tunnels to transport illicit drugs shows that they are feeling U.S. pressure along the border.
“They’re having a much harder time getting their product across the border because we’ve shut it down,” she said.
Carter attributes it to the Trump administration’s whole-of-government approach to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the country, at the border and beyond.
Carter was sworn in this January as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates anti-narcotics policy for 19 federal agencies. The office leads the Trump administration’s effort to reduce illicit drug manufacturing, trafficking, drug use, and overdose deaths.
“Our Homeland Security task forces, now under President Trump, have the capability … to do what’s needed to cut off the heads of the snake,” she said.
Carter attributed President Donald Trump’s efforts to close the border to illegal immigrants and designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as significant factors in reducing the flow of drugs across the border, and ultimately driving overdose deaths.
Yet Carter said the cartels aren’t the only problem fueling drug use in the United States – adversarial nationals are also part of the problem.
“We have adversaries that have contaminated our supply chain. We have cartels that couldn’t care less,” she said.
Carter acknowledged the Chinese Communist Party’s involvement in the precursor chemicals to make fentanyl distributed by the cartels.
“It is unrestricted warfare,” she said.
“I have already spoken with Chinese counterparts about this. I have made it very clear that we understand, and we know where these precursor chemicals are coming from, and that it will not be tolerated.”
Carter said China has been put on notice to disclose such chemicals in shipments coming into the United States. Likewise, she has been talking to Mexican officials about safeguarding their own ports against the importation of illicit drugs.
At U.S. ports, the government is also working to hold private industry accountable. If cargo ships are caught with precursor chemicals, then the federal government will hold them accountable, she said.
“We’re looking at all kinds of new technology, technology that was unheard of in the past,” she said. “How can we implement this technology to ensure that the cargo that is coming in is clean?”
Cooperation Through Strength
Carter said that countries understand that Trump is willing to wield U.S. power to stop the drug trade, putting nations on notice around the world.
Trump’s military operation in Venezuela resulted in the arrest of former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, who had a $50 million bounty on his head as the alleged leader of the De Los Soles cartel, which was designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
“One of the best operations I’ve ever seen conducted,” Carter said. “We have done what we said we were going to do. There were no more games.”
She also said that the amount of cocaine and other drugs flowing from Venezuela has dropped since Maduro’s capture.
Trump’s projection of strength has led to unprecedented cooperation from both Mexico and China, she said.
One example is a February operation in which the United States provided Mexico with intelligence that they used to take down the Jalisco New Generation cartel’s kingpin, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as “El Mencho.”
Mexican officials cooperated with the United States, sending in the Mexican National Guard and special forces to confront the cartel’s leader, Carter said.
“We said, ‘Look, here’s the information, go get them,’ and they did, and we’d never seen that before, not like that, not in that same way, not with that cooperation,” she said.
Likewise, China’s Ministry of Public Security has been uncharacteristically cooperative, she said. FBI Director Kash Patel traveled to China in November 2025 to meet with his counterpart to discuss stopping the flow of fentanyl precursor chemicals.
During Patel’s visit, the Chinese regime agreed on a plan to stop fentanyl-related chemicals as part of its deal with the Trump administration to crack down on the lethal synthetic opioid.
Two milligrams of fentanyl – the size of a few grains of salt – can be fatal. The drug has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
‘Don’t Give Up’
Overdose deaths have been decreasing, but Carter said there are still far too many.
She said 68,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2025, down from a high of 112,000 in 2023. Some have attributed that decrease to a reduction in the amount of fentanyl found in street drugs.
Carter said she does not consider it an overdose when a person orders what he believes to be Adderall online and then dies because the pills are laced with fentanyl.
“This is unacceptable. This is the United States of America,” she said.
