One of the most important stories in some time came out two days ago. But with so much else going it didn’t get quite as much attention as it should have. It’s from ProPublica. And it’s about a Peter Thiel-backed start up Startup called Ramp. It’s a corporate credit card processing outfit. The game here is pretty straightforward. Trump and Musk are looking to hand some or all of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program (SmartPay) over to Ramp. A bunch of the meetings were organized by Josh Gruenbaum, a private equity guy who Trump and Musk installed as chief acquisitions officer at the GSA. (He was also the lead signatory on the demand letter to Harvard we’re now told, as of last night, was accidentally sent. So Gruenbaum’s got a lot going on.) Ramp’s value add is supposed to be the use of AI to monitor spending.
The overall picture is a standard on: Come in, take over the data and financial architecture; discredit it by having your media arms dish out mountains of phony stories about fraud and abuse; fire all the employees and hand a cash-drenched, sweetheart contract to yours and your friends company.
Or maybe it’s a start up, which has already raised about $2 billion from the likes of Peter Thiel and the Kushner family, among others, and thus needs a pretty big exit. It all comes together quite nicely. It’s good to be the King, as Mel Brooks once put it. And I suspect that’s just a prelude to a vastly bigger prize: contracts to manage payments of the more than $1.5 trillion that goes to Social Security recipients and likely other government programs that disperse money directly to individuals.
