America's corporate titans greeted President Trump's 2024 victory with open checkbooks, 12-figure investment pledges and fawning tributes to his coming "Golden Age," Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

• Two years later, on the eve of a potential blue wave, Democrats are preparing to greet those same executives with a stack of subpoenas.

Why it matters: The CEOs who staked their reputations and fortunes on MAGA's staying power could spend the final two years of Trump's presidency defending their dealings under oath.

🔎 The big picture: A Democratic House would carry its campaign against billionaire power and corruption deep into corporate America, scrutinizing the relationships between Trump's White House and the executives who courted him.

• Corporate leaders now face a delicate balancing act: rebuilding ties with Democrats while avoiding retaliation from a president who still controls federal contracts, tariffs and regulators.
• Already, companies that scrambled to dismantle DEI programs or fund Trump's ballroom are hiring Democratic lobbyists, pushing back against the administration and rediscovering the virtues of bipartisanship.

🥊 Zoom in: Elon Musk is taking a more confrontational approach. The billionaire, who has poured $445 million into Republican super PACs this election cycle alone, has threatened retaliation against Democrats preparing to investigate his sprawling business empire and tenure in the White House.

• DOGE: As head of Trump's short-lived cost-cutting initiative, Musk gutted USAID, drove mass federal layoffs and gave his team access to sensitive government systems. Investigators want to know whether his companies benefited from contracts or regulatory decisions while he wielded power inside the White House.
• Ukraine: A fierce critic of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Musk ordered Starlink restrictions that disrupted Ukraine's military satellite communications. Democrats are now demanding records of his communications with Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Zoom out: Across corporate America, the pursuit of Trump's favor has left a trail of donations, deals and concessions that Democrats are determined to follow.

• 🤖 AI accelerationists: Trump has made the AI boom a centerpiece of his economic agenda, while giving industry leaders extraordinary influence over regulation and chip exports. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who set the template for corporate America's reconciliation with MAGA, is among the AI leaders likely to face scrutiny for pressing Trump to back off safety regulation.
• 🗞️ Media consolidation: Trump ally Larry Ellison helped finance his son David's rise to control of CBS and CNN, culminating in a $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Along the way, Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump's lawsuit against CBS while seeking federal approval for its Skydance merger.
• ⚖️ Elite law firms: Trump's pressure campaign against the legal establishment yielded $940 million in pledged free legal services and concessions on diversity policies from nine major firms. Democrats are probing the terms of those agreements and whether the firms compromised their independence to appease the White House.
• 🥂 Ballroom donors: Trump's massive White House construction project has drawn at least $333 million in private commitments, including $25 million apiece from Apple and Nvidia. Many donors — including some who kept their contributions secret — have lucrative business before the administration.
• 💰 Equity deals: Trump has transformed the U.S. government into a major corporate investor, striking roughly $30 billion in equity and warrant arrangements spanning more than 40 companies. Democrats are questioning how the beneficiaries were selected and whether political connections influenced the deals.
• 🛢️ Fossil fuel giants: Trump asked oil executives to raise $1 billion for his 2024 campaign while promising sweeping regulatory relief. His administration has since delivered major tax breaks and environmental rollbacks, prompting a Democratic probe of the industry's political contributions and the government benefits that followed.

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The race for money among the top Democratic 2028 contenders is underway before any of them have even said they're running.

• Why it matters: "With the first candidates expected to announce their campaigns as soon as the end of this year, there is expected to be intense financial pressure in a crowded field," The New York Times' Teddy Schleifer reports. A competitive primary campaign could cost close to $100 million.

👀 Democratic megadonors are sizing up the big players — and some are revealing early favorites, Schleifer reports:

• Reed Hastings, Netflix co-founder, has signaled he's leaning toward California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
• Chris Larsen, a crypto billionaire, also likes Newsom, though he also gave $1 million to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro's reelection campaign.
• Michael Bloomberg likes Shapiro and gave $2.5 million to his reelection campaign.
• Deborah Simon, the shopping mall heiress, is impressed by Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.
• The Soros family has hosted two events for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.). Alex Soros has also praised Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who's a billionaire himself.
• Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, a longtime Democratic fundraiser, has separately hosted Ossoff and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Nantucket.
• Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder, said he's spoken with several 2028 hopefuls about AI. He gave $1 million to a super PAC backing Ossoff this summer.

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The Pentagon's top military planner admitted to leaking classified information about Ukraine and Iran to two reporters from separate outlets over a one-year period, according to an internal investigation report shared with Axios' Marc Caputo and Thomas Novelly.

Why it matters: Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia was fired this week by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the alleged misconduct, which Sylvia acknowledged on video after he failed four polygraph tests, a U.S. official said.

• The Pentagon said it referred a leak case to the Justice Department, and The Washington Post reports Sylvia is the accused.

🔎 Zoom in: The report and U.S. officials said that Sylvia's leaking began as early as June 2025 — before mainstream media outlets were removed from the Pentagon — and continued afterward via the secure Signal app and once at a Silver Diner in Arlington, Va.

• For another story, the report said, Sylvia "admitted to being one of the 20 officials" who criticized Pentagon leadership.

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Americans are optimistic AI will grow the economy — but not that it will create jobs in the process, Axios' Ben Berkowitz writes from the first release of the new Axios-CivicScience AI Sentiment Index, out this morning.

• Why it matters: The AI boom is often criticized as a jobless one, which may explain why sentiment continues to run so negative on what is otherwise such a transformative technology.

💡 The new monthly Axios-CivicScience index tracks Americans' views across six measures:

• AI's effects on quality of life, society, jobs and economic growth, plus support for AI development and new data centers.

By the numbers: October's net sentiment was 41.8 on a 0-100 scale, indicating broad negativity on AI.

• Of the six components, only economic growth had a positive sentiment score.

😨 Reality check: While economic growth net sentiment (positive responses minus negative responses) was +10, "create more jobs" sentiment was -30.4. That indicates a massive gap between what people think AI will do collectively and its individual impact.

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Cybersecurity teams are being pummeled by a relentless barrage of attacks, vulnerabilities and false alarms during what cyber pros are calling "Black October."

• Why it matters: Humans are still on the front lines of a cyber fight enabled largely by AI. They're struggling to wade through mountains of threat data to determine who's been hit and which attacks pose a real danger to companies, Axios' Sam Sabin reports.

🛡️ The big picture: The people companies call when they're hacked are being swamped, piling onto the persistent burnout that has plagued the industry.

• "The last month has been the longest year of my life," says Justin Timothy, threat intelligence consultant at GuidePoint Security.
• Troy Bettencourt, who leads Palo Alto Networks' global digital forensics and incident response practice, told Axios that demand for his team's services has climbed by double digits over the last six weeks.

What's next: AI's ability to uncover more software flaws threatens to bury defenders in even more work.

• To keep up, security firms are turning to AI themselves to spot weaknesses and speed up investigations.

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El Salvador's strongman president, Nayib Bukele, is sending thousands of troops to Haiti to boost the island's push to wipe out its gang problem — and find four of his military personnel who were captured in a recent ambush, Axios' Marc Caputo reports.

• Bukele called President Trump on Tuesday to make sure he had no problem with this major military escalation, to which Haiti's government has agreed.
• "Do what you have to do," Trump told him, according to sources briefed on the call.

Why it matters: If it works, Bukele's troop surge could stabilize Haiti, a country 700 miles from Florida that has been devastated by deadly gang violence and has lacked a president since the last one, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated five years ago.

• If it doesn't work, it could increase Haiti's death toll well beyond the 5,700-plus killed in gang violence this year, embarrass Bukele and mark yet another failed international effort to restore stability to the country.

Read on.

Reddit is becoming a primarily logged-in experience, the company said yesterday, marking one of the most significant shifts in its 21-year history.

• Why it matters: Reddit has long championed the open web, but as AI chatbots vacuum up information from websites, platforms are trying to lock down their content and build a more direct relationship with users, Axios media trends expert Sara Fischer reports.

In an interview yesterday, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said the company is making the change to improve its user experience, boost its ads business and prevent bots from scraping its proprietary data.

• "When users log in, they spend more time on Reddit, and we can better know their interests, so we can target ads better," he said.

👀 Reality check: Most other platforms have already made the log-in shift.

• Huffman said he personally resisted the changes because of his belief in the open internet. He ultimately came around because Reddit's scale made personalization more important — and because protecting content from unauthorized scraping has become more urgent.

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Milwaukee Public Schools will close today for the Brewers' World Series Parade of Champions and Championship Rally, "Won Our Way."

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says: "The Brewers are coming! Warm the buses! Clear the streets! Tap the kegs!"

🍻 Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) proclaimed today a statewide "Won Our Way" Day, honoring the Brewers and manager Pat Murphy for being "extraordinary players and people both on and off the field."

• Proclamation ... Parade map.

Above: Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Brandon Woodruff hoists the World Series trophy during the second quarter of last night's Green Bay Packers game at Lambeau Field. The Pack tamed the Carolina Panthers, 27-19.

This image, captured using a remote camera positioned above the diamond, shows Brewers catcher William Contreras celebrating after beating the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 5 in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Wednesday night.