Ah yes, that followup all of 5 days later, repeating the same assertions. After which it has been... almost 4 years of silence. (Your WaPo link notes about Bloomberg's followup that "It is unclear what, if anything, resulted from those efforts." Gosh, you'd think they'd just go ask their many, many, oh so reliable sources, about all the damning evidence all of the subsequent investigations turned up by looking at the little Chinese doodads sitting on all those hacked motherboards, waiting to be forensically examined.)

There is a world in which Bloomberg reported on some of the most serious widespread compromises of scores of companies ultra-paranoid about security who are appalled to learn about the hack long before Bloomberg, triggering countless deep investigations, discoveries of devices & disassemblies, analyses, tracing the APTs back to their Beijing or Shanghai offices (and maybe hacking their office cameras etc), wholesale upheaval of the supply chain, bankruptcy of compromised firms, becoming a touchstone for the intelligence & infosec communities, a cautionary lesson about supplychain hacks & hardware which must never happen again, in which, like the Snowden leaks, the hits just keep on coming, Bloomberg avidly using its deep sources and secret access to report on it every step of the way for clicks, and the naysayers are silenced by public & private evidence and all the experts quietly stop doubting it or endorse it as they learn the truth and leave comments on Twitter & HN about it being legit etc.

There is another world in which the Bloomberg report was ginned up and was some sort of fabrication or Chinese-whispers or severe misinterpretation and nothing like the big hack happened, and so it appears and that's that, and they double down denying there's anything wrong with it while preferring to never talk about it again.

>> “The Big Hack” suffers from something of a time bind: If Bloomberg was on the mark with its claim that about 30 companies were affected by the hack, it stands to reason that further details of this wide-ranging intrusion would surface sooner or later. The Erik Wemple Blog asked Bloomberg if it is aware of any developments on that front. A Bloomberg spokesperson declined to comment.

I am fairly sure which world we live in.

> Riley was even promoted about a year later

Fair enough.

> and claimed billions in damages

Of which they have thus far earned $0, and changed no one's beliefs. Regular people continue to have no idea who Dominion is and think Fox was wrong, security experts continue to believe Dominion is insecure hackable junk, and QAnoners continue to believe that the reincarnated JFK hacked the voting machines to steal the election or something.