TNB Tech Minute: Senators Call for DOJ Probe of X’s Advertiser Pressure Campaign
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Here's your TNB Tech Minute for Thursday, March 6th. I'm Julie Chang for The Wall Street Journal. We exclusively report that five Democratic senators have asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Elon Musk is leveraging his influence in the Trump administration to bully advertisers into returning to Musk's social media platform X.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that X pressured Interpublic Group to spend more on the platform. In a letter dated Wednesday, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Chris Van Hollen wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying that if Musk is using his government position to harm those who do not do business with him, he may be in violation of ethics and extortion rules.

X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment and didn't previously comment on the interpublic allegations. There's a new GOP bill aimed at ending the debanking of cryptocurrency companies and conservatives' accounts. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who's also the leader of the Senate Banking Committee, introduced a bill today that would prohibit regulators from considering so-called reputational risks when evaluating banks' business practices.

Scott called the bill a first step toward ending discrimination against clients. He says regulators worrying about customers causing reputational damage to banks is fueling debanking, where banks allegedly avoid certain businesses. Banks have largely blamed regulators for a hesitancy to work with certain crypto companies.

And Hewlett Packard Enterprise expects its fiscal 2025 profit to be hurt by tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Its CFO said today that the tariff situation is highly fluid and that the company anticipates some pricing adjustments.

HPE has been taking steps to limit the effects of tariffs for several months, including relocating pieces of its global supply chain. The CFO also attributed HPE's weaker outlook to server execution problems. In its recent quarter, HPE posted a profit of $598 million. That's up from a profit of $387 million a year earlier.

Revenue increased 16% to $7.85 billion. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out tomorrow's Tech News Briefing podcast.