The Social World

Category: Business

  • We begged Hollywood for Sydney Sweeney

    We begged Hollywood for Sydney Sweeney

    Sydney Sweeney is back in the news again, because the news keeps making the news about Sydney Sweeney. This week, it’s an interview with Sweeney by GQ, titled “Sydney Sweeney on Life at the Center of the Conversation.” It’s sparked a “wokelash” among people who hate Sydney Sweeney, meaning no one you actually want to know.

    Even though GQ is short for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and the audience is ostensibly gentlemen who like to look at Sydney Sweeney, Katherine Stoeffel, GQ’s features director, conducted the interview. Women have always and will continue to work for GQ, but Stoeffel seems to not understand what gentlemen want and like. Inside American women right now, there are two wolves. Sweeney is one of them. Stoeffel is the other.

    The woke left appears determined to paint Sweeney, a hustlingly entrepreneurial actress, as a gateway to white supremacist America. In the interview, Sweeney says that the response to her American Eagle “great jeans” ad was “surreal,” which I’m sure it was, down to the fact that President Trump, king of the culture war, decided to comment on it. That’s not enough for Stoeffel, who wants a scalp.

    “I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt like every day of my life,” says Sweeney.

    Same.

    “Jeans are uncontroversial, jeans are awesome,” Stoeffel says, with her best vocal fry, while Sweeney laughs.

    “I like your jeans,” Sweeney says.

    “You look great in your jeans,” says Stoeffel, suddenly raising hope that things might get a little steamy there in the garden. But then comes the boom.

    “I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but I’m going to ask anyway. I mean, the President tweeted about the jeans ad.”

    Sweeney is still giggling.

    “Or Truth Socialed about the jeans ad. And that just seems to me like a very crazy moment for anyone, and I wondered what that was like.”

    “It was surreal,” Sweeney says, the laughter having left her eyes.

    “It was surreal. And it would be totally human. I would feel thankful that somebody had my back in public. And conveniently, some very powerful people had my back in public.”

    The tone ventures into: are you now, Sydney Sweeney, and have you ever been, a member of the Republican party?

    “Ech,” Sweeney says.

    “I wondered if you felt that way.”

    “Mmm,” Sweeney goes, followed by a few seconds pause. “I don’t think that. It’s not like I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that. Of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria. So I’m working like 16-hour days. And I don’t really bring my phone on set. I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.”

    Stoeffel continues to press.

    “You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work. But the risk is that, you know, there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues.”

    At this point, you can see in Sweeney’s eyes that she truly hates this person to whom she’s committed an hour of her life.

    “Hmm,” she says, while ordering a drone strike in her mind.

    “Do you worry about that?” Stoeffel asks.

    “No,” Sweeney says.

    And yet Stoeffel doesn’t stop, and, in fact, arrives at her gotcha moment. “The criticism of the content was that, basically in this political climate, like white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority. Like that was kind of the criticism, broadly speaking. And since you were talking about this, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that specifically.”

    “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about,” Sweeney said, “people will hear.”

    Sydney Sweeney is what people have been begging for from Hollywood stars for decades: someone who looks good, works hard, shows up on time, stays sober, keeps their opinions basically to themselves and makes their studios gobs of money. Katherine Stoeffel is a striver from a dying media class. One of them is today’s internet main character. The other will be a main character in most of our media lives for the next 20 years. Sweeney’s next movie is about a female boxer. Anyone who’s betting on GQ over her in today’s tense exchange has chosen the wrong fighter. Today, Sydney Sweeney knocked legacy media flat.

  • Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount

    Why Taylor Sheridan quit Paramount

    There are many showrunners in contemporary Hollywood who are, essentially, all-powerful – Vince Gilligan and Aaron Sorkin have been able to do what they like for a considerable time now, for instance, and I doubt anyone’s giving the White Lotus’s Mike White too many notes, unless they’re blank checks – but there are two men who are primus inter pares when it comes to their relationship with their studios. Ryan Murphy more or less is Mr. Netflix, as can be seen by the streaming service merrily bankrolling everything he writes and/or creates – even something as unpleasant and morally corrupt as the recent Ed Gein show – and Taylor Sheridan and Paramount have been hand in glove for years now. Until, that is, they’re not.

    The reason why Taylor Sheridan is leaving the network with whom he has had huge success for years is, as usual, a dispute about money. His perspective is that his work with Paramount, during which time he has more or less reinvented the contemporary western with such shows as Yellowstone and Landman, as well as prequels including 1883 and 1923 and such popular crime series as Tulsa King and Mayor of Kingstown, has been exemplary both on an artistic and commercial level, and that he deserves a Murphy-level deal. Paramount’s argument, as expressed by its new CEO David Ellison, is that Sheridan may be a hugely talented writer-director-showrunner, but he is ultimately an expendable figure who has, wrongly, seen himself as bigger than the shows he has produced.

    Both sides have ground for their respective arguments. When Yellowstone was at its peak, it managed to be one of those rare shows that overcame the potential hokiness of its premise (and some terrible early reviews) to become appointment viewing, the Dynasty for our time but considerably better. And everything that Sheridan has worked on since has been similarly successful, even if the spy thriller show Lioness has never really caught fire, despite a starry cast including Morgan Freeman, Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña. In an America that is now considerably more attuned to MAGA sensibilities that it was when he began his screenwriting career a decade ago with the (excellent) films Sicario and Hell or High Water, Sheridan can convincingly suggest that he has captured the zeitgeist of his country more entertainingly than any other writer today, and that this success should be rewarded accordingly.

    Ellison, however, is said to be less enamored of Sheridan’s considerable ego. When it was suggested to the showrunner that he produce a show celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, he simply refused, suggesting that it was “too politically charged”. Sheridan, however, was smarting from Paramount’s refusal to make one of his screenplays, entitled Capture the Flag – no prizes for guessing what kind of genre of film that would have been – and seemingly decided that the studio that had built his career was no longer the right fit for him. Enter Donna Langley, all-powerful head of Universal, and a woman with considerable form in luring away talent from their former homes: it was she who convinced Christopher Nolan to leave Warner Bros and won him Oscars for Oppenheimer in the process. Sheridan’s price, paid willingly: a billion-dollar deal and complete creative control.

    There are, of course, several more shows left to run in his Paramount deal, which does not expire until 2028, but it looks unlikely that such series as the Yellowstone spin-offs 1944 and The Madison will be entered into with the same zeal that his previous work. Certainly, Sheridan has been working at a rate of energy that would kill many lesser men, and it has been whispered that Ellison believed that not only was the hyphenate at risk of creative burn-out, but that with him gone, it would be easier to control Paramount, rather than with this particular alpha male attempting to dominate proceedings.

    He may, of course, be right. Yet if there’s anything Sheridan has done successfully in his shows, it is to bring in the big dog that so many of his peers have shied away from creating, and make him not just relatable, but likable. It is not too big a stretch to believe that many of these figures were created in his own image, and that Sheridan himself is as outsized and swashbuckling as any John Dutton or Mike McLusky. What are the chances that a future show of his will feature a similarly titanic lead taking on the callow entertainment industry, and winning in the process? Sheridan – and Universal – will be hoping that life imitates art, and vice versa. Ellison will be just as fervently hoping the opposite, and the rest of us will be watching with as much fascination as we have devoted to the shows.

  • The mission to mine the Moon

    The mission to mine the Moon

    There will come a time when the richest people who ever lived will be those who control outer space, in particular the Moon and the asteroids. There are vast resources out there, bound in giant rocks hurtling through space, and in the lunar dust. But the first steps will be taken by the brave, and perhaps the reckless in pursuit of a space dream. If you dream of space, nothing can stop you. Not the disagreement of others or the judgement of experts, neither short-sighted investors nor government regulations. One such dream will happen on the Moon’s surface in just a few months.

    The space company Astrobotic will attempt to land at the Moon’s south pole – a region of extensive shadows where ice may have accumulated and the site of the next US human landing. Its Griffin Mission 1 will deploy a small rover to survey the scene with a multi-spectral camera prospecting for a stable isotope of Helium called Helium 3. Its name brightens the eyes of advocates who point out it’s the most valuable resource in space. If the moon’s surface were scattered with diamonds, it would not be worth bringing them back, but Helium 3 is a different matter.

    It is used in medical scanners. Since 9/11 the US Dept of Homeland Security has also mandated its use in border-control radiation monitors. Since then, US stockpiles have fallen to 20 percent of what they were. It is usually made from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles. This provides the US with between 22,000 and 30,000 litres a year, out of this it releases between 8,000 – 10,000 litres to maintain a national stockpile. The world is running out of Helium 3.

    The Moon could be the answer. Over billions of years it has collected He-3 from the stream of charged particles given off by the sun. Consequently, there could be a million tonnes of Helium-3 in the lunar dust. But how to get it?

    The camera on the lunar rover is a joint venture between NASA and Interlune a private company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and Harrison Schmidt the 12th person to walk on the Moon giving him some first-hand experience of the task. They have a plan for a larger rover that will crawl across the surface collecting and sifting the dust extracting the tiny amounts of Helium 3. Their focus is on its collection and they will be looking for partners to provide the means to return it to Earth. It’s estimated that over a hundred tonnes of dust will have to be processed to produce just a gramme of helium. Yet such is its value it could be worth doing at $20 million per kg.

    If it works Interlune could become the first entity to mine the Moon which is legal in US law. It already has customers. Finnish company Blufors has an option to purchase tens of thousands of litres of spending “above $300 million.” They want the Helium 3 for its chandelier-like devices known as dilution refrigerators. They are used by quantum computing leader IBM to cool their computers to a level 200 times colder outer space. This makes the fundamental computing components of a quantum computer – qbits – more stable. Existing quantum computers have more than a thousand qubits but there are plans for computers with a million or more requiring more Helium 3 than is available on planet Earth.

    The lunar dust contains a much greater amount of many other useful substances. Oxygen and hydrogen in the form of ice will give future colonists oxygen to breathe, water to drink as well as rocket fuel. The dust also has extractable iron, silicon, aluminium and many platinum group metals that will be essential for the long-term function of a moonbase.

    Beyond that there are the asteroids, debris from planet formation that contain their own treasure trove of metals and minerals. All the platinum ever mined in the world would fit into a single room. There is far more than that in even a small asteroid. But asteroids have their own problems.

    You must get there, excavate, smelt, store and return. It’s technologically beyond us but that doesn’t stop the space dreamers. The Asterank.com database provides estimates of asteroid resources and estimates a profit of $30 billion from mining asteroid Ryugu. Significantly we have already been to Ryugu when in 2020 a Japanese spacecraft returned samples from it. Importantly Ryugu is only 900 metres across which might be an advantage.

    I expect the first wave of asteroid miners to pioneer the way with most of them falling by the way. But eventually it will pay off big-time.

    Contemplate this. In the near future the very best restaurants in the world will serve you a glass of water at a fabulous price. It will be no ordinary water but brought back from the Moon. Sometime later super powerful quantum computers will power the Earth’s AI infrastructure, cooled by helium 3 mined on the Moon.

  • My son was murdered after whistleblowing on OpenAI

    My son was murdered after whistleblowing on OpenAI

    When Tucker Carlson sat down with OpenAI founder Sam Altman in an interview aired last week, the conversation took a dark and frosty turn when Carlson raised the death of a former OpenAI researcher. Suchir Balaji, who exposed the company’s systematic theft of copyrighted work, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment last November. Altman called it “suicide.” Clearly unconvinced, Carlson asserted that Balaji was “definitely murdered.” Altman was offended by his insinuation and described the death as a “great tragedy,” saying he was “really shaken” by it. But Balaji’s grieving mother, Poornima Rao, is very much in agreement with Carlson. 

    Balaji, 26, had become a key witness in lawsuits threatening to pull apart OpenAI’s facade, including the New York Times’s case over alleged copyright theft. His testimony would have contained accusations that the company built billion-dollar products by strip-mining the work of writers, artists and journalists without consent or payment. Had he spoken under oath and his evidence been accepted, the fallout for OpenAI could have been catastrophic. Lawsuits already in the works would have gained serious momentum. Damages could have reached the billions. Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on Altman’s company could have been thrown into crisis. A company cosplaying as the future of civilization could have been unmasked as a factory of stolen ideas.

    But before the young man could testify, he was found dead in his apartment. Police investigated and found no evidence of foul play, and the Chief Medical Examiner determined it was suicide, yet nothing about it sat right with those who knew him. There were no farewells, no notes, no trace of despair. His family commissioned a second autopsy and crime scene investigation, which told another story. Blood in two rooms. The gunshot’s trajectory was “atypical” for a suicide. There was evidence of another injury to the side of his head. And wires for the video cameras in his building appeared to have been cut. 

    His death came only weeks after the Florida-born researcher confided to his mother about the retaliation he faced inside OpenAI. She said he had been isolated, sidelined and quietly pushed toward the exit. He warned her that speaking up had meant career death. 

    Poornima Rao describes a deliberate campaign to marginalize him after he raised concerns about OpenAI’s methods. “He was not doing research during the last few months of his tenure.”

    She refuses to let his story end there. She does not, and never has, believed her son killed himself. 

    When asked what evidence led her to believe her son was murdered, Rao says there were “signs of struggle, injuries to the face, a head wound without any fall and ripped jeans.” She went further, stressing that “the gunshot angle was forward to backward and top down – the angle of an execution.” In other words, the new forensic details she commissioned paint a picture that contradicts the official storyline. The company strongly denies the theory.

    On September 17, she will stand in Congress, carrying both grief and conviction. Her mission is not to defend her son’s reputation, which remains untarnished, but to fight for laws that protect other whistleblowers. 

    “We were approached by Whistleblowers of America,” Rao says. “We expressed our desire to bring protection for whistleblowers. We are excited to be on Capitol Hill for the briefing of the legislature.” Her use of the word excited may sound strange in the shadow of such loss, but it signals resolve. She sees her son’s death as part of something larger. It is not only one family’s tragedy. It is about building safeguards so truth-tellers are not buried with their secrets.

    “This is the beginning of a long fight,” she explains. “We can request amendments as we learn. One change would be to retrofit the law to meet our needs.” By needs, she means more than symbolic protections. She’s talking about practical safeguards that whistleblowers can trust when the pressure mounts. 

    She’s also pragmatic. When asked whether she thinks her allegations will be taken seriously or if Congress is simply staging another show, her answer is steady. “This is the beginning of a long fight. This is not a hearing. It is a Congress session about lawmaking.” By stressing lawmaking, Rao underlines the difference between empty performance and binding change. Hearings can generate headlines, but laws reshape systems. 

    Rao is not naive. She knows the odds. OpenAI is worth $500 billion, backed by deep pockets and even deeper political clout. Altman recently attended a White House dinner where he lavished praise on President Trump with a tone that felt more like North Korea than Washington. That kind of coziness with power makes could make taking the company on even harder. But she’s focused and determined to get the justice she believes her son deserves. 

    When asked what that means, her answer is both personal and sweeping. “Justice for Suchir would be to classify his death as a homicide, hold everyone involved accountable, see the copyright lawsuit by the New York Times against OpenAI succeed, and have Sam Altman lose his position.”

    Her vision of justice cuts deep: it’s not enough to explain away one suspicious death, the entire structure that allowed it must be dismantled

  • Don’t let Serena bully you into taking the fat shot

    Don’t let Serena bully you into taking the fat shot

    Serena Williams is one of the world’s greatest living athletes, but in her retirement, she seems to have forgotten the basics of diet and exercise.

    You’ve likely seen Williams’ ad campaign for Ro, a telehealth provider that specializes in GLP-1 weight loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound. In the now ubiquitous commercials, Williams tells how she personally used the drug to burn stubborn postpartum fat, a respectable 31 pounds over 8 months.

    “It’s not a short cut, it’s science,” reads the company’s tagline.

    Williams looks great – of course, of course. But just because scientists have discovered a cure for fatness doesn’t mean she still hasn’t taken the easy way out. The traditional method is equally scientific: eat less, burn more calories than you consume and you’ll healthily lose the weight.

    After all, it’s not like these medications don’t have side effects. Potential complications are too long to list, but include everything from thyroid tumors and pancreatitis to run of the mill gastro distress. With the rush to market, long-term side effects still aren’t fully known, but you may wind up with shrunken heart muscles in addition to a flatter belly.

    Sure, Williams had kids; life changes, hormones get whacky, and I’m sympathetic to the struggle – but that still doesn’t change the basics of human anatomy. If the queen of tennis can no longer nail diet and exercise 101, then us mortals have little hope.

    Yet there’s a more cynical explanation as well.

    The central implication of the campaign is that we’re living under a new normal, and it aims to use the Williams name, synonymous with athletic excellence, to neutralize any vestigial stigma while expanding its market.

    “Serena’s on Ro. Are you next?” the front page of the website somewhat exploitatively asks.

    Cui bono? A host of pharmaceutical companies, of course, but also Williams’ own husband, Reddit billionaire Alexis Ohanian, an early investor and board member of Ro. The couple obviously don’t need the money – but that still doesn’t necessarily preclude a little quid pro quo.

    Still, I guess it’s better than the body positivity movement; being gratuitously obese has negative health effects as well, on top of the aesthetic indignity we’re all forced to publicly witness. But is there even really a stigma surrounding GLP-1’s, or is this yet another example of America’s self-legitimizing obsession with victimhood?

    The campaign does more than simply normalize Ro, it offers a hit of moral superiority to the patient for supposedly being stigmatized in using it: “be brave, be like Serena,” it implies, and “buy our product.” And if anyone criticizes you? Well, they’re a bully – and we all know who we’re meant to fawningly praise in the battle between victim and oppressor.

    But that seems more like wishful thinking. These weight loss drugs are like seeing a fat person jog in the park. Sure, you might snicker privately to yourself at the spectacle. But deep down, as well as in mixed company, you’ll earnestly commend them for taking the necessary steps for self-improvement.

    For better or worse, Ro and companies like it are simply the new jogging. We have, in fact, scientifically surpassed diet and exercise. And there’s no stigma in that.

    When the automobile replaced the horse and buggy, we didn’t shun those who sped ahead in their shiny new Ford. This is small-p progress, detached from any political connotation, and is a net boon for McAmerica.

    Over 40 percent of Americans are obese according to government data, with an additional 30 percent being generally overweight. These are just averages, and the figures get worse – much worse – in certain demographics. You can shout about the value of diet and exercise until you’re blue in the face, but these stats have been increasing since the 1970s. No one’s going to listen.

    In a choice between chronic, widespread and ultimately lethal obesity and potential pharmaceutical side effects, I choose the one I don’t have to look bulbously sweaty in the gym. So I’m pro-zempic, if you will; everyone who needs the extra motivation should enthusiastically take it. Hell, I’d rather see the feds subsidize weight loss drugs than junk food.

    Yet a lack of stigma doesn’t mean there’s no room for personal conscience. I don’t believe for a second that someone with the will power and physicality of Serena Williams needs a chemical crutch to lose weight, alongside millions of other relatively healthy people who would rather take a shot than put in a little bit of effort.

    Anyone can get in shape at any time – but you only have yourself to blame for waiting.

  • The $1,000 LEGO set and the infantilization of America

    The $1,000 LEGO set and the infantilization of America

    What can you buy for $1,000 these days? The latest smartphone? A discounted laptop? A nice trip to Mexico? Or what about a 9,000 piece LEGO set of the Death Star? The toy firm’s most expensive model yet.

    That’s right, a toy for $1,000 – the same as 35 Labubus (if you can find them), 150 packs of Pokémon cards or 80 Hot Wheels cars. It’s more pocket money than most boys and girls can afford. And as the fully built model is only a cross section of the spherical spacecraft from Star Wars, they won’t actually be able to play with it, even if they do rustle up enough cash to buy it. Really, the gigantic diorama is designed to sit on an adult’s shelf – a 31-inch wide symbol of LEGO’s shift toward an older demographic.

    Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen, who founded the LEGO Group in 1932, must be turning in his grave. The name was derived from the Danish words “Leg godt,” which means “play well” in English. The company initially got started making simple wooden toys for Great Depression-era children, but later developed its famous interlocking bricks. After injection molding became available in Denmark in 1947, the company began focusing on plastic toys and later ceased production of wooden products completely in 1960 following a warehouse fire. The iconic shape of the LEGO brick has remained largely unchanged since its updated patent in 1958 with thousands of sets using the same fundamental building system.

    Older adults will likely remember LEGO for more generic themes like cities, outer space, pirates and medieval knights. Not relying on distinguishable IP meant that costs could be kept down so even families with lower income could take part. Sets came with printed instructions to build the models, but the real fun came when you constructed your own sets. Some of the best selling LEGO products are large tubs containing a random assortment of bricks and other parts, with the only true limits being the imagination of the builder.

    Unfortunately for the LEGO Group, something eventually became rotten in the state of Denmark. By the 1990s, profits were in serious decline and there was a growing sentiment among the public that the product was old hat. Realizing that something had to be done, LEGO introduced licensed properties. Instead of some nondescript spaceship, you could now actually play with an X-wing from Star Wars and bring home a plastic minifigure of Luke Skywalker. Say goodbye to bland castles and nameless wizards; build Hogwarts instead and recreate the adventures of Harry Potter. 

    LEGO has become explicit with their attempts to court an older audience in the last few years. The company proudly displays an “Adults Welcome” section on their official website which sells everything from Formula 1 cars to van Gogh paintings all built in LEGO, and the more high-end sets cost hundreds of dollars.

    The firm is capitalizing on the infantilization of modern America. Approximately 1 in 3 U.S. adults is still living with their parents – and that’s even after the pandemic. Citing rising costs of living, Millennials and Gen Z believe that major life milestones like marriage, children and home ownership will be impossible to achieve for them. From their perspective, it’s more logical to instead use whatever disposable income they do have on hobbies which provide immediate gratification. Companies like LEGO are only happy to oblige, which is why they have the chutzpah to sell a $1000 Death Star that really isn’t worth the money.

    And there are also fewer kids for LEGO to market to.The latest CDC data reported that the fertility rate in the United States dropped to an all-time low in 2024 with less than 1.6 children being born per woman. Pivoting to selling to adults is a business necessity to stay profitable. 

    I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with adults buying LEGO and while I’m sympathetic to the economic woes of my generation, the argument that having kids is too expensive holds little water if you can blow a grand on a single LEGO set. 

    The company has clearly gone a bridge or, ahem, a brick too far this time, even for childless millennials. If it’s a choice between LEGO’s $1,000 take on the Empire’s planet killer or a nice holiday with the wife, it’s not really a choice.


  • Larry Ellison briefly eclipses Elon Musk

    Larry Ellison briefly eclipses Elon Musk

    Something happened in the news yesterday that was so monumental, it may change the course of American history forever. I’m talking, of course, about the fact that, very briefly, Oracle’s Larry Ellison overtook Elon Musk to become the World’s Richest Man. Larry Ellison life goal, unlocked.

    After Oracle’s earnings report yesterday, the stock shot through the roof, and Ellison owns 40 percent of the company. That must have been some earnings report! On the earnings call, Ellison said that his Oracle AI chatbots, run from his Oracle computing centers, are on the verge of being able to run the stock market, design drugs, fully operate factories and provide basic legal and sales services at companies. Foolish humans, you are an inconvenience. “AI changes everything,” Ellison said on the call.

    We must use this moment to contemplate what AI is doing to our society, and to our souls. To which we must answer: It is making them awesome, and making us all rich. As I reported here last week, I soon stand to bring in a five-figure windfall because a company forgot to ask me for permission to use my precious novels to train its AI writing software. Whoops, their bad, but my gain. Ellison, who, to be fair is 81 and has been waiting patiently for his turn atop the pyramid, is just like me, but $40 million times more so.

    Elon’s portfolio is more diversified, but still pretty AI heavy. Therefore, by the end of the day, Ellison’s surge ended, and Musk was back on top of the wealth ladder, $384.2 billion to $383.2 billion. This is very relatable to those of us for whom chiseling $10,000 off the top of anything is an almost unimaginable windfall. Musk wins again.

    What will the consequences of this be? I envision a world where everything is affordable, everything is convenient, and there’s nothing for ordinary humans to do all day except murder one another for their political beliefs. Oracle will upload our consciousnesses into a cloud, where they can also continue to murder one another over their political beliefs. Hell is other people, and also not other people.

    AP reports that with their net worth, Musk and Elllison could “tell all of South Africa to take a vacation for a year and produce nothing, based on its gross domestic product.” Very cute, AP. We’ve all heard what Musk wants South Africa to do, and that includes not murdering one another over political beliefs. But who does he think they are, the Amish?

    Grok, Elon’s personal AI assistant, says it matters who the world’s richest man is because it “often signals broader shifts in technology, markets, and power dynamics.” True enough, and then it adds:

    “Ultimately, it matters because the richest aren’t passive; they steer humanity’s direction. Musk’s Mars ambitions or Ellison’s AI bets could solve (or worsen) existential challenges. If nothing else, it reminds us: In 2025, tech titans aren’t just rich – they’re architects of tomorrow.”

    What are we all going to be doing tomorrow, thanks to the world’s richest men? Not a whole hell of a lot, by design. Thank you, Larry Ellison.


  • Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile

    Elon Musk is in exile. He’s forgotten by friends, embattled by enemies. He now quietly (for him) goes about his business, fighting non-government battles after those strange few months he spent standing behind the President’s desk with his toddler son X, who punched Musk in the face while he was seemingly running the country.

    Musk’s fate is a case study in what happens when Donald Trump rolls up the red carpet. Trump operated his first term as President more like a season of The Apprentice and less like an administration. It was a revolving door of exile. Reality-show worthy characters like Omarosa Manigault Newman and Anthony Scaramucci came and went with drama that fell just short of an episode-ending boardroom ceremony.

    The second attempt has been more controlled and disciplined. Trump’s original cabinet is more or less intact eight months into the term. There has been a little fraying around the administration’s edges, with the sudden dismissals of IRS head Billy Long after two months and CDC head Susan Monarez after a few weeks, but considering the man in charge, it’s been pretty much business as usual, with no major exiles from his court.

    With one notable exception: Elon Musk. Musk’s brief turn as shadow co-President already seems a distant history. But it filled our lives with intrigue. Who can forget his “Nazi salute” the day before Trump’s inauguration, accompanied by the very un-Nazi-like utterance “my heart goes out to you”? That induced a moral panic unlike any other we’ve seen in our time. Then in February, wearing sunglasses and a black baseball cap bearing the “Make America Great Again” slogan in gothic lettering, Musk waved the “chainsaw for bureaucracy” on stage, causing millions of angry liberals to soil their adult diapers.

    Musk has learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself

    For months, the world’s richest man functioned as Trump’s useful idiot, his ketamine-huffing court jester, making showy noises about reducing the size of government through his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), introducing us to sub-jesters like “Big Balls,” sleeping on a cot in his makeshift DC headquarters, and causing USAID and State Department employees to weep into their potted plants on the way out the door. While Trump began enacting his aggressive second-term agenda, Musk drew much of the flak. Angry vandals and protesters set Teslas on fire and scratched swastikas into their doors. We didn’t elect this man, the people (some people) screamed. Get him away from our Social Security numbers!

    Then, weeks before the summer solstice, it was over. On Memorial Day weekend, Trump said a fond goodbye to Musk, who was wearing a black T-shirt that read “The DOGEFATHER,” in the Oval Office. Trump said that Musk had brought about a “colossal change in the old ways of doing business in Washington.” It was the “most sweeping and consequential government reform effort in generations.” Also, Trump added, Elon was “really not leaving.” “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”

    “DoGE is a way of life,” Musk told reporters. “Like Buddhism.”

    Immediately after, Musk veered off the eightfold path. He started criticizing Trump’s tariff policies and called the Great Big Beautiful Bill “a disgusting abomination.” In response, Trump threatened to sell the “everything is computer” Tesla that he’d purchased in a showy Rose Garden ceremony. He called Musk “the man who has lost his mind.” Musk, in response, said he was starting a third political party, the “America party,” and said that Trump was named in the Epstein Files.

    After a few brief détente tweets, the Musk administration was over, and the Musk Exile had begun. By July, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Musk was “burning through executives.” Around the time that Musk’s Grok AI on X transformed itself into “MechaHitler,” Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the head of X, was leaving. “Thank you for your contributions,” Musk said, in a decidedly non-Trumpian way. Around the same time, Omead Afshar, head of sales and operations for Tesla North America, also left Musk’s orbit. In order to stabilize matters, Tesla’s board of directors offered Elon a $29 billion stock package to stay on at the company, and to stay focused, an amount of money that, even for Musk, had to reduce his attention deficit.

    As for the “America party,” it appears that will never get off the ground. The Wall Street Journal reported in late August that “Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states.” That doesn’t seem promising. “It’s almost an eerie silence,” said a previously hopeful Libertarian party official.

    Instead, rumors abound that Musk, who spent $300 million to help Trump get re-elected, including handing out random million-dollar checks to voters, is planning to throw his support behind J.D. Vance’s 2028 campaign. The world’s richest man, no longer allowed at Trump’s court, is back to courting favors with his checkbook again. Meanwhile, Trump has quietly not cut any of Musk’s government contracts, and Musk himself has been relatively silent in public. His X feed has been reduced to endless complaints about the world’s declining birthrate and wan retweets of “England has fallen” threads.

    The most manic episode in American history is over. Elon Musk has gone from shadow President to shadow-banned, but the “I bought this car before he went insane” bumper stickers remain on Teslas all around blue ZIP codes. It’s time for Elon to get back to colonizing Mars. He’s learned the hard way that America, like a Tesla robotaxi, can pretty much drive itself.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • I’m the heir to Manhattan

    I’m the heir to Manhattan

    I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine.

    Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to two brothers and subsequently died, lost at sea. That lease expired in 1877 and was supposed to be apportioned off to Edwards’s heirs. But that never happened.

    “I simply want to know if the Foreign Office is aware that Mr. Harry Wyndham Carter is, by descent, one of the claimants to the alleged Edwards estate in New York,” wrote Lord Clifton to Sir Edward Grey, then a minister in the British government and later ambassador to America. In the document, which I found in the National Archives in London, Lord Clifton says the estate was then worth about £1 million a year. If Harry had received his 77 acres, his income would have been slightly higher than Cornelius Vanderbilt’s. What Clifton doesn’t say is how exactly my cousin, four times removed, had established that he was the rightful inheritor of the estate. The letter has an air of haste, great swishes of black ink underlining facts and names. The reason for the urgency was that poor cousin Harry was in prison.

    As editor and proprietor of the Kennel Review, a magazine dedicated to dogs, he had managed to rack up some debts. His creditors planned to seize his rare books and some of his dogs from the family home in Kent. Outraged, Harry arrived just before midnight with a posse of around 20 men. They barricaded themselves in the house with “cases of champagne and other materials for conviviality,” according to one newspaper report. As well they might, given Harry was soon to be among the richest men in the world.

    After some time, he appeared at the window with a revolver and asked the bailiffs to remove themselves from his garden. “Now I give you fair warning that if you do not get off my premises when I have told you three times to do so, I will shoot you.” “Three,” he counted down from the top of the house; “two,” the bailiffs watched on, maintaining the blockade; “one.” Cousin Harry managed to clip one of them, ever so lightly, somewhere around the eye, and the man promptly took himself off to the local hospital.

    The police decided to get involved, also surrounding the home but not daring to interrupt the party. The next morning, Harry appeared again at the window and managed to negotiate an end to the siege. He emerged, “accompanied by two women, smoking a cigarette.” So began his sorry persecution at the hands of the British state.

    He was locked up for five years. Apparently, women swooned in the court as the sentence was read out. “It was the one topic of every club, inn parlor and bar,” explained another newspaper report, “the general feeling seemed to be that the sentence was too severe… especially among the fairer sex.” A petition to have his sentence commuted was organized. It was even signed by one of the jurors who had convicted Harry. Meanwhile, my cousin “made enquiries as to the allowance of cigars, wine and whiskey during his incarceration.” His imprisonment was less jolly than he’d hoped. Lord Clifton began campaigning for his release, bringing cases against prison officers for mistreatment. An exoneration and compensation committee was set up in his benefit, but it was no good. He was declared bankrupt while in prison. “Five years of penal servitude have made him wholly mad and he is now a pauper lunatic,” read the papers. On his release, he was sent to an insane asylum.

    Yet somehow he managed to escape. He was convinced that a conspiracy had deprived him of his New York inheritance, a conspiracy that went to the very top of the British state. While on the run, he wrote a letter to Queen Victoria’s private secretary, expressing his frustration in colorful language. “I am fully swindled of liberty and money… The Queen’s life is not worth a penny until she treats me properly and meets my demands.” And then he added some slightly unfortunate bits about potentially shooting the Queen.

    Royal residences across the country were put on high alert. Harry was hunted down – and found having lunch in a restaurant with a young woman. He was sent to Broadmoor Hospital for the criminally insane and, after serving 43 years, died in 1938. And with him went the proof that the Carters are the rightful inheritors of much of New York.

    But Harry wasn’t the only person seeking the Edwards estate. Over the years, thousands have claimed they are the descendants of that British pirate, and thus rightful heirs to his 77 acres of Manhattan. There was the Pennsylvania Association of Edwards Heirs which in the 1990s crowdfunded $1.5 million for a suit to reclaim the land. The courts rejected their case and the association eventually collapsed amid accusations of embezzlement and fraud.

    Historians today say the Edwards estate was a hoax. But of course they would. The great swindle of Harry Wyndham Carter continues to this day. His patient records will be declassified in 2038 and I’m confident that when they are, the world will know that I’m rightfully the heir of Manhattan – and I’ll shoot anyone who disagrees. You can join my posse if you like. I’ll bring the champagne and revolvers.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

    The West can’t afford to shun Russian oil

    Donald Trump is a radical foreign-policy innovator. Over the past few decades, the US has tried a range of non-military means to nudge, squeeze and occasionally strangle its adversaries. These range from travel bans and banking restrictions, to export controls and trade limitations. But never has the US – or indeed anyone – tried to use import tariffs as a species of economic sanction.

    Trump has threatened Vladimir Putin with introducing “secondary sanctions” against countries that import Russian oil – a threat intended to strike at the heart of Russia’s war economy. And on August 4, Trump appeared, for the first time, to make good on that threat. To the surprise of diplomats and trade negotiators in Washington and Delhi alike, Trump abruptly announced that he would be imposing a 50 percent tariff on India as a punishment for its importing Russian crude. “India… doesn’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian War Machine,” Trump wrote on social media, blindsiding officials who had been negotiating for months to reduce the $44 billion trade deficit with India. “Because of this, I will be substantially raising the Tariff paid by India to the USA.” US courts have challenged Trump’s right to tariff by executive order – but for the time being the punitive import tax stands.

    China and India are the world’s biggest importers of Russian crude, but the EU pays more into Putin’s coffers

    India was angry – and baffled. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, India has indeed become the second-largest buyer of Russian crude in the world after China. Between March 2022 and May 2023, crude oil from Russia rose from 0.2 percent to 45 percent of India imports. That leap was largely thanks to hefty discounts offered by Moscow that made Urals crude a bargain compared to full-priced oil from India’s traditional suppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq. But buying Russian crude did not violate any US or EU sanctions, which merely fixed the price at $60 a barrel. The intention of the sanctions was to squeeze the revenue Moscow received from oil exports without disrupting the world’s oil supplies. Indeed, in May last year, US ambassador to India Eric Garcetti admitted that India “bought Russian oil because we wanted somebody to buy Russian oil at a price cap; that was not a violation.” The idea was “to ensure the prices did not go up globally,” Garcetti added, and “India delivered on that.”

    There have been widespread allegations that Indian buyers have actually been paying amounts over the agreed price cap through various creative accounting tricks known as attestation fraud – for instance by inflating transportation costs or using networks of middlemen to launder the price differential. But the bottom line is that Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought India a major economic windfall in the form of cheap energy for the domestic market and massive profits from re-exporting oil products refined from Russian crude to Europe, with sales worth more than $130 billion per year. India currently supplies 15 percent of Europe’s diesel, for instance, as well as a similar amount of Ukraine’s. And the Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, whose refinery in Jamnagar is the largest in the world, has seen its stock price jump by 34 percent since 2022.

    Will Trump’s dramatic 50 percent tariff on many (though not all) Indian imports to the US force Delhi to stop importing Russian crude? That seems unlikely, since Indian companies are making so much money from refining and reselling Russian oil. India is the world’s fastest-growing economy and has no oil supplies of its own.

    The 50 percent tariff on India is double that imposed on most Asian countries. But it is in line with an equally severe rate he applied against Brazil in an attempt to pressure the leadership to end the detention of former president Jair Bolsonaro. But while Trump describes his tax on Indian exports to the US as a “secondary tariff,” in practice there is no such thing. There’s just tariffs with a political label attached.

    China and India are indeed the world’s biggest importers of Russian crude. But it’s actually the EU that pays more money into Putin’s coffers. Russia continues to be Europe’s second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG). And before Ukrainian attacks on the Druzhba pipeline disrupted supplies last month, Russian crude oil flowed through it and into Slovakia. Yet Europe has not been threatened by Trump – nor for that matter have US allies Turkey and Japan, also major customers of Moscow’s. Europe repeatedly announces its intention to free itself from its fatal addiction to Russian gas. Yet despite 18 packages of sanctions on Russia, there are as yet no actual European restrictions on buying Russian gas.

    Brussels has attempted to ban the import of refined oil products originating from Russian crude. But as well as being technically impossible to verify, a long series of carve-outs and exceptions for Canada, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and the US are buried in the small print of every one of the EU sanctions packages.

    The paradox that makes both EU and US attempts to sanction Russia incoherent and ultimately toothless is that the West cannot afford to stop Russia from exporting energy. Russia is the world’s second-largest crude oil producer and exporter (after Saudi Arabia), with an output of around 9.5 million barrels a day – nearly 10 percent of global demand. In the immediate aftermath of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, fears of Russian oil being pushed out of the market drove Brent crude prices soaring to $137 a barrel – nearly double today’s prices. Fears of a sharp, energy price-driven recession twisted both the Biden administration and European leaders into the mental pretzel that prevails today. Washington and the EU keep threatening to suffocate the Russian economy, but are in practice unable and unwilling to pay the price of losing Russian oil.

    The EU has implemented a new, lower, flexible oil-price cap for Russian crude of $47.60 per barrel, effective from September 3. This floating cap is set at 15 percent below the average market price of Russian Urals blend – but this will affect only European importers. It’s also wide open to fraud – for instance, the Druzhba pipeline carries Kazakh oil as well as Russian, allowing customers to claim they are buying from Kazakh producers.

    To date, Ukrainian saboteurs, rockets and drones have been far more effective than EU or US economic sanctions in denting Russian energy exports with attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022 and recent raids on Russian oil refineries and oil export terminals. For much of the conflict, the Biden administration consistently blocked Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure for fear of a price shock. But from the frequency of Ukrainian attacks it now seems those gloves have been taken off (as long as Kyiv doesn’t use US weapons inside Russia).

    Fears of an energy-led recession twisted the Biden administration into the mental pretzel that still prevails

    Russia’s economy has also, for the first time in the war, officially slid into recession, having shrunk for the past two quarters. But that’s still very far from a deep economic crisis of the kind that could begin to threaten Putin politically. “As long as the war machine of the aggressor does not stop, we must be ready to implement new harsh measures to increase the cost of aggression,” Kaja Kallas, then prime minister of Estonia, told European leaders in March 2022. Days later, Joe Biden also claimed that “the totality of our sanctions and export controls is crushing the Russian economy.”

    Yet three and a half years into a war that consumes a staggering 45 percent of Kremlin spending, Russia’s economy is damaged, but far from crushed. Moreover, Putin himself continues to strut the world stage, treading the red carpets laid out for him from Anchorage to Beijing.

    It’s time, perhaps, to admit that economic sanctions have failed to change Putin’s behavior or destroy his ability to fight. The reason is that neither Trump nor his allies in the West have been willing to accept the economic pain of imposing any sanctions that could materially hurt Russia.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.