Axios C-Suite: What Jim learned for the week of April 25
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Intel I've picked up from top officials in government, AI and business. It was shared confidentially, but with the knowledge I'd use it without sourcing it:
📈 Resistance rises: Three big Trump-skeptical media properties are all surging at once: The New York Times (13M paid subs), The Atlantic (1.5M paid subs) and MSNOW (viewership rising). All three are on hiring binges and racking up bigger audiences on- and off-platform.
- Progressives like Mehdi Hasan and Hasan Piker are surging on social video, but the left's version of an alternative MAGA mediasphere with institution-sized swat — podcasts, personal brands, Turning Point-style events, all working in concert — has yet to emerge.
- Why it matters to you: There's not a buried media ecosystem you need to unlock to make sense of what has momentum on the left. You can track liberal politics quite well by focusing on old reliables: the NYT op-ed page, Atlantic columnists and MS NOW commentators.
💻 In-office AI: Apple named hardware chief John Ternus its next CEO at the exact moment the Mac Mini faces 12-week shipping delays because developers are stacking them to run AI locally. That's not a coincidence. It's a thesis.
- Why it matters to you: Apple just told the world where it thinks the AI war gets won — not in a data center, but on a desk or in a pocket.
- The CEO math: Training is Big Tech's heavy upfront cost to improve AI. Inference is AI actually doing the work. It's perpetual opex. Every query and token is a recurring bill. Apple wants to win the inference war with its products.
🤖 AI truce: Trump insiders think the Pentagon's blacklist of Anthropic will end soon — because top officials know the power of Claude. "We need them," one person involved in the negotiations told us.
- So expect a settlement of Anthropic's suit against the administration over being labeled a national-security risk.
👀 Nothing to see here: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has forced out five two-star-and-up generals since the run-up to the Iran war. He abruptly fired Navy Secretary John Phelan this week. Military staffs inside and outside the Pentagon are a bit spooked — and worried they'll hear about their boss' demise over X.
- Hegseth's also locked in a persistent personnel-and-power struggle with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a very close friend of Vice President Vance and possible Hegseth successor.
- Why it matters to you: This is a textbook paranoid-leader-purging-named-successor story — the kind of governance breakdown that, in corporate form, would have a board stepping in. And it's happening during a shooting war. Interestingly, House Rs seem to side with Driscoll.
🍿 Size matters: President Trump is annoyed by the thin crowd Vice President Vance drew at a Turning Point USA arena rally in Georgia earlier this month.
- "Why go to Georgia and have no crowds? It looks bad," one person who discussed the matter with Trump told Axios.
- Trump still favors the VP as his successor, but his support seems wobbly. POTUS is still quizzing guests about Vance's performance — and Marco Rubio's upside.
- All of this sends a message to Vance: Trump's endorsement — and, therefore, the 2028 nomination — aren't 100% guaranteed.
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