Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
The Unflattering Secrets Revealed So Far in Elon Musk’s Latest Legal Feud
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, are scheduled to face off in court next week
The bitter legal feud between the two tech titans is prying open the industry’s most powerful circles by spilling the tea of Silicon Valley VIPs. Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringey texts, emails or private diary entries of Musk, Altman, other OpenAI founders and other public figures. They include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to use his social platforms to help Musk’s interests, Musk insulting Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos (twice) and a journal in which a big MAGA donor muses about becoming a billionaire, according to the filings.
Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the company in an acrimonious split in 2018. His lawsuit, originally filed in 2024, alleges that OpenAI broke its founding pledges to share its technology openly with the world as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab. Musk argues that Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, conspired to enrich themselves at Musk’s expense and asks the court to remove them from their leadership positions and to restore OpenAI to a full nonprofit.
Shivon Zilis is a longtime ally of Musk and has worked at several of his companies. She acted as an “Elon whisperer” to OpenAI, Altman said in his deposition, and the company says she served on its board of directors from 2020 to 2023. In 2022, it was revealed publicly that Zilis and Musk had twins together the prior year. The pair started a brief romance around 2016, Zilis said in her deposition in the lawsuit. They now have four children together and are in a romantic relationship, she said.
Link: Washington Post (Multiple reporters) Backup: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/the-unflattering-secrets-revealed-so-far-in-elon-musks-latest-legal-feud-174615161.html
Trump Fought to Keep the Ballroom Fundraising Contract Secret. Here’s What’s in It.
The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed
The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show. The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing.
The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public. Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration.
“This document reveals that anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement,” said Jon Golinger, a lawyer and public policy advocate with Public Citizen. “Who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?” Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who spent three years on a congressionally authorized commission scrutinizing wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the anonymity provisions potentially set up the Trump administration to block congressional inquiries into the project’s funding.
Link: Washington Post (Dan Diamond)
America’s New Tax Mantra: ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’
The battered Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees—and more taxpayers appear eager to cheat
The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak. “There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,’” said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington.
Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year. Partnership audits declined, reversing an attempt to scrutinize private-equity firms and other complex entities that have long bedeviled the government. In fiscal 2025, the IRS collected less direct revenue from audits and appeals than in any year since at least 2012, though the money can arrive years after audits start.
The IRS started January 2025 with about 103,000 employees. Then Trump returned, determined to undo Biden’s initiatives and shape a pro-taxpayer IRS. The administration fired probationary government employees, those who held the job for less than a year, which disproportionately hit agencies that just hired heavily, including the IRS. Some later returned after a court challenge. The administration also offered buyouts that were attractive to the aging IRS workforce. By May, head count at the IRS had declined by more than 25,000, including about a quarter of auditors.
Link: Wall Street Journal (Richard Rubin)
If He Leaves You on a Mountain, End Your Relationship
The “Alpine divorce,” in which one partner leaves another stranded while hiking, is more serious than the name implies
One afternoon in July 2024, Stefanie Peiker, a hiking guide in the Austrian Alps, came across a woman lying on the ground, heavily injured after falling off her electric bike. “Her face was completely destroyed, she was bleeding and crying,” Ms. Peiker said. “The first thing I asked was, ‘Are you alone?’” The woman explained that she’d been cycling with her boyfriend, Ms. Peiker said, but he had left her after an argument. “I called the ambulance, took out my first-aid kit,” said Ms. Peiker, 31, who was on duty as a park ranger in a nature reserve that is part of a network of protected areas called Natura 2000. “Then, the boyfriend came back and screamed how stupid she is and that she destroyed his holiday.”
Though this was an extreme case, Ms. Peiker said she often comes across women who are alone on mountain paths because their partners are hiking ahead. So she wasn’t surprised when, during the past weeks, women on Reddit, Instagram and TikTok began sharing stories of being left behind by their partners while hiking, biking and climbing in nature, calling it “Alpine divorce.” Often, the women described risky or uncomfortable circumstances where their partners had more knowledge of the terrain or more experience with the sport.
The flurry of social media posts during the last few weeks appeared to have been triggered by a criminal case in Austria focused on a mountaineering expedition that ended in death. In February, Thomas Plamberger, 37, was found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter for leaving his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, 33, to die of hypothermia on Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner. “In the mountains, it can quickly become dangerous,” said Andreas Truegler, 44, a squad leader and deputy head of mountain rescue in the Austrian Alps.
Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)
The Last Time Everyone Watched the Same Thing
No one knew it at the time, but 2014 — more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment — marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists
At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep, Lupita Nyong’o and Jennifer Lawrence. DeGeneres’ Twitter account posted it immediately afterward, and it became the most retweeted post in the platform’s history at the time. The selfie was an instantly viral moment in a telecast that drew the Academy Awards’ largest audience in 14 years — 43.74 million people.
No one knew it at the time, but in retrospect the selfie moment feels like the last stand of a shared popular culture that no longer exists. Monoculture didn’t die with Cooper’s selfie, but that night may have been its last peak. It wasn’t just the Oscars that were big that year, either. Broadcast and cable outlets were arguably at their peak in terms of reach, with more than 100 million households in the United States subscribing to a multi-channel provider. The 2014 Grammy Awards drew 28.5 million viewers, and the Golden Globes brought in almost 21 million.
If awards shows are a proxy for what people — both the folks who make the things nominated for awards and the public that consumes them — are dialed in on at any given time, then our collective attention has steadily waned over time. None of the big awards telecasts has approached its 2014 audience numbers in the 12 years since. The Oscar broadcast is still usually the biggest non-sports primetime show of the year on a broadcast network, but that now means 18 million or so viewers rather than 40 million-plus.
Link: Hollywood Reporter (Rick Porter)
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters
In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.
At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
Link: The Atlantic (Noah Hawley)
In a World Obsessed With Productivity, the Case for Strategic Laziness
Downtime isn’t an enemy of progress—artists and athletes explain how rest fuels creativity and performance
In a world obsessed with ticking off goals, downtime is seen as the antithesis of the progress we’re all supposed to be striving for. These days, everything has to be tracked; even reading and sleeping have been sucked into a vortex of apps and metrics. As a result, any period of time where we aren’t “achieving” can now make us feel guilty, and even — whisper it — lazy. I know this feeling well. As a freelance writer, every day feels like starting from zero.
“Laziness is actually a vital part of fitness,” says Dhara Patel, a physician associate at Kuon Healthcare, who’s worked with athletes for over a decade. “The body doesn’t improve during workouts; it improves during rest, when it has time to recover and adapt,” she says, adding that athletes who don’t rest face higher injury risk, slower progress and performance plateaus — no matter how hard they train. Aubrey Hunt, a psychology educator at Willow Ridge, says that being lazy is equally as important for the mind.
“Creativity does not come from forcing it,” says writer S.J. Watson, whose novel Before I Go to Sleep was adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman. “Following the success of my debut novel, I experienced a profound shift in my sense of self. I was no longer someone with a day job who also wrote — I was a writer. Full time. And so, any time I wasn’t writing? That was nothing more than laziness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that approach backfired dramatically.”
Link: InsideHook (Tom Ward)