| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: Parties, PR and Epstein—inside investor Masha Bucher's charmed ascendance |
| • Artificial Intelligence: OpenClaw, agents and a mania within a mania |
| • Power and Influence: How the architect behind California's billionaires tax became tech's villain |
| • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: "Two Guys, Five Rings" and "The Rest Is History: Modern Olympics," "Exiles" and "Rental Family" |
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| The Justice Department's recent release of 3.5 million documents connected to its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein has made more than a few Silicon Valley titans uncomfortable. |
| Many of tech's prominent names—Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, among others—have been previously linked to Epstein, so the newly public documents present a familiar type of discomfort. But the files also shed fresh light on other aspects of Epstein's world, including his relationship with Masha Bucher, who acted as his publicist and as a guide to Silicon Valley startups in the years before she became a well-known venture capitalist. Our Jemima McEvoy scooped the details of Bucher's presence in the Epstein files, and she has quickly followed up her news report with a Weekend piece that probes Bucher's, uh, complicated rise. |
| Everything we continue to learn about the Epstein-verse paints an uncomfortable, unglorious picture of how the planet's wealthiest and most powerful people conduct business and play. And while the files reveal—and reinforce—many ugly truths, I tried to mull over what might count as the most damning revelation. After some consideration, I decided it relates to a matter as incontrovertible as the pull of gravity: Great wealth can't buy a person good taste. Rather, it provides an excuse to be a weird, picky eater. |
| I was reminded of this fact when I spied a memo from Peter Thiel's former chief of staff buried in the Epstein files that gives a lengthy list of what Thiel wants to eat—and what he won't eat. |
| When someone gets as wealthy as Thiel, they have a tendency to lean into their eccentricities and preferences, which is not always the most charming characteristic. And amusingly, the Thiels of the world are often completely OK with how their various preferences and ideas seem to conflict with each other. Thiel, for instance, apparently insists on avoiding mayonnaise. But he also specifies that he enjoys spicy tuna with avocado, which, of course, usually involves sriracha sauce and…mayonnaise. He's the type of guy who insists he's on a diet and then gets caught knuckle-deep in a can of frosting, fingers full of Funfetti. |
| Thiel avoids dairy, fruit, gluten and grains. Such abstinence makes me worried about his digestive system. If the Antichrist doesn't actually show up soon, the venture capitalist might instead suffer an untimely death by constipation. |
| What we learned about Thiel's diet is a small encapsulation of a broader truth about moguls and machers. Behind closed doors, they often act weird as hell. (Epstein understood that as people grow richer, they feel more entitled to indulge in whatever weirdness they can imagine, and he catered to their behavior.) Occasionally, we get glimpses of just how weird they can be, which they dislike. That's because we generally spend our time lionizing these people, and they've come to expect and covet such adoration. |
| And I think "weird" is the most generous characterization I can muster for why anyone would've deigned to stand within nine feet of Jeffrey Epstein. No recipe for mayo-less spicy tuna could've been worth it. |
| What else from this week… |
| • The Kalshi-Polymarket grocery wars—eesh. Surely some of the people who lined up for the gambling companies' free food giveaways are folks who can't afford groceries, let alone gambling. And you know the last time venture-backed companies delighted in giving away food? Yeah, it was the meal-kit delivery boom, and look how that turned out. |
| • According to Politico, the Rosebud moment for Kevin Warsh—President Donald Trump's pick to run the Federal Reserve—happened at a Saratoga racetrack. |
| • "I couldn't sleep. It was crazy. I mean, I was just LLM psychosis to the max," said the 36-year-old Idahoan entrepreneur who figured out how to turn Claude into a plant daddy, jury-rigging the AI into what amounts to a greenhouse-management system. |
| • Olympic snowboarder Maddie Mastro trained for the Milan Cortina games with AI supplied by Google DeepMind. |
| • A rocky few days that illustrate the current state of media: mass layoffs at The Washington Post that amount to a "murder"; a sell-off in the stock of The New York Times; a new Disney CEO, which represents a period of decline for the Mouse House; and a surprise Super Bowl ad for "TBPN" (well, a regional ad, not a national one, but it's telling that it wasn't immediately implausible the talk show had done a million-dollar marketing ploy). |
| • The "it" collectible in China in 2026, the year of the horse? A frowny-faced stuffed-toy horse, which originally was a factory error. In other words: hasta luego, Labubus!—Abram Brown |
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| The Epstein files show how the investor got started. That's just part of the story: What has followed since is a charmed run as a venture capitalist and communications guru. |
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| Silicon Valley had been hoping for an opportunity to take agentic AI mainstream. Now there's an outright frenzy for it. |
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| Dave Regan has embraced a divisive, inexpensive political strategy that has now put the Silicon Valley elite in the crosshairs. |
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| Listening: "Two Guys, Five Rings" and "The Rest Is History: Modern Olympics" |
| The Olympics have officially returned, with the Winter Games' opening ceremony presenting a star-studded celebration last night. I trust NBC, ESPN and the fine folks at The Ringer have us covered every which way when it comes to traditional, straightforward sports talk, so I'd like to spotlight some alternative programming. |
| One is "Two Guys, Five Rings," where comedians Bowen Yang, the recently departed "Saturday Night Live" star, and Matt Rogers get together to yap about the games—much as they do on "Las Culturistas," their long-running pop culture podcast. They're friends in real life—resulting in some superb banter, hun-nee—and they seem to share a genuine interest in the Olympics' storylines, backstories and subplots. Moreover, they're unafraid to ask the most overlooked questions about the games and their host country—like how exactly do skis get onto a baggage carousel—and are Milanos a genuine Italian-ass cookie? |
| I also think it's more than worthwhile to reach into the archives of "The Rest Is History" for a pair of 2021 episodes that the pod's cheery, brainy hosts—Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook—devoted to the Olympics as the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games finally commenced. |
| If spinning minutiae from the past into captivating stories qualified as an Olympic game, Holland and Sandbrook would surely hold a Michael Phelps–size pile of gold medals: They're simply giants at the task. With these Olympics-centric episodes, I especially enjoyed their brisk review of the games' Cold War ties; the golfer who never knew she was America's first female gold medalist; and dwile flonking, a competition staged at a proto-version of the modern Olympics in 17th-century Britain, which involved dancing, beer and a sugar beet.—Abram Brown |
| Reading: "Exiles" by Mason Coile |
| "Exiles" is Agatha Christie on Mars. Instead of an eerie country house, there's a creeptastic space base, deep gouges carved into its exterior walls. A brooding butler? Not quite: brooding robots instead. Dead bodies? Mounting nearly by the minute as a three-person crew—the first humans on Mars—sets foot on the planet's dusty red surface. And while Mars may be short on breathable oxygen, it is apparently a place full of mystery and tension, with the astronauts trying to figure out whether their robot helpers have gone insane—they have already spontaneously gendered and named themselves—or whether they are facing an extraterrestrial threat. As is often the case in such genre fare, it's also unclear just how much of a threat the humans pose to themselves.—A.B. |
| Watching: "Rental Family" |
| Oscar winner Brendan Fraser plays a down-on-his-luck actor adrift in Tokyo in the movie "Rental Family," a fictional portrayal of the very real-world phenomenon of Japanese rent-a-family companies. Fraser brings just the right mixture of melancholy and chagrin to his character, Phillip Vanderploeg, hired by one of the companies to fill the role of "sad American" at a fake funeral. Soon, though, he finds himself wrestling with increasingly complex moral quandaries as he takes on other assignments and grows a little too attached to some of his clients. "I know that it's fake, but there were moments it felt real," Phillip says, a lament that encapsulates not only his own difficulties finding a way to bridge the gap between fiction and reality but also the loneliness that has come to define so much about modern culture. |
| In fact, what's most moving about "Rental Family" is how the film's director, Hikari, captures the quotidian details that both immerse the viewer in the specifics of Japanese culture and reflect a very universal yearning: a shared connection with other people.—Amy Dockser Marcus |
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