Wealthy millennials
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 (100% legal) hocus-pocus.
How to Make Amends When an Adult Child Cuts Off Contact With a Parent
Descriptions of abuse or neglect are common in an estrangement between an adult child and a parent. Many parents are baffled and hurt by this perception.
As a practicing psychologist who also researches estrangement, I’ve found that one of the most important predictors of reconciliation is the parent’s ability to make amends to their adult child. Parents are often confused by this recommendation, believing that making amends is the same as completely endorsing the child’s perspective. While sometimes that is required, more often amends should be viewed as a starting point; a frank recognition that there is something deeply wrong in the relationship with the parent that needs addressing.
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But some parents didn’t love that recommendation: “I’m not going to beg for forgiveness when I didn’t do anything wrong,” she told me. “I would’ve killed for a childhood like hers and now I’m supposed to apologize in order to get her back? I have no idea what she’s even talking about.”
Elon Musk’s Embrace of Trump is Turning Off These Tesla Lovers
The entrepreneur’s provocative online posts repel some EV buyers, but he may be winning over some conservatives, analysts and consumers say.
Vibhor Chhabra once identified as a Tesla fan.
A decade ago, the 44-year-old Bay Area product executive saw the brand as a signifier that a driver wanted to fight climate change, electrify transportation or back CEO Elon Musk’s vision for a sustainable future. “You could make a statement while having a great car,” said Chhabra, who has owned three different Tesla vehicles and for a time held stock in the company.
But Chhabra is now shopping for a new vehicle — and looking elsewhere. Tesla’s brand “comes with a lot of baggage,” he said, and he no longer wants to be associated with Musk.
Chhabra is part of a movement that appears to be growing: Drivers who have bought or considered buying Tesla vehicles are now eyeing EVs from competitors, partially because of Musk’s polarizing persona or recent endorsement of former president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
As Controversies and Accusations Swirl, YouTube’s Biggest Star, MrBeast, Carries On
O.K. I probably should have known about this and shared it earlier since I wrote an entire newsletter about MrBeast. But we're here now!
Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube star better known as MrBeast, faced some of the most intense scrutiny of his career recently as numerous controversies surrounding his production blew up on social media.
The 26-year-old became the biggest YouTuber in the world through his unique videos featuring big stunts and even bigger giveaways on his channel, where he has 308 million subscribers. But he now finds himself at the center of mounting criticism on social media, citing speculation that he must’ve known about his former collaborator Ava Kris Tyson’s inappropriate messages to a minor as well as allegations that his new Amazon Prime Video show had unsafe working conditions and that he made racist and homophobic comments in the past.
The criticism does not seem to have swayed the creator, who has gained about 3 million subscribers since the incident involving Tyson incited backlash toward him in late July, according to social media analytics website Social Blade. His Amazon competition series, which the streaming giant reportedly paid him $100 million to make, is set to continue filming. Many major sponsors of MrBeast’s brand, including the video game Monster Hunter Now and Samsung, have not publicly issued any response to the recent backlash.
The Dramatic Turnaround in Millennials’ Finances
Soaring home prices and smart investments have helped boost a generation once considered perpetually behind.
Millennials are now wealthier than previous generations were at their age. They can’t believe it either.
Fifteen years ago, Andy Holmes was a college graduate living with his parents, mowing lawns and digging ditches for extra income. He and his college pals who could only get low-paid jobs wondered if they would have a shot at the success their parents had.
Today, Holmes is a chief financial officer in Kansas City, Mo., on track to retire at 52.
“I’m in a place financially that I couldn’t have imagined coming out of college,” he said. “At age 37, my net worth is closer to what I thought it’d be at 47.”
The change in fortune for Holmes’s generation, now between 27 and 44 years old, was recent and swift.
The turnaround has been so dramatic that millennials—mocked at times for being perpetually behind in building wealth, buying homes, getting married and having children—now find themselves ahead.
Vince Vaughn Turned This Interview Into Self-Help
The Vince Vaughn who lives in my head is one of my favorite comedic actors. He’s the swaggering, charmingly sarcastic and cheerily ingratiating star of that great run of hit comedies from the early 2000s: “Old School,” “Dodgeball,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up.” And putting my own preferences aside, I’d argue that there’s a whole microgeneration of dudes who tried to swipe the neo-Rat Pack vibes that Vaughn was able to deploy so winningly in “Swingers.”
In more recent years, though, after the often R-rated, kind of bro-y comedies with which Vaughn made his mark lost some of their cultural mojo, he has focused more on dramatic roles: the highly anticipated, widely maligned and then critically reconsidered second season of “True Detective,” for example, or his performances in the brutally uncompromising crime films of the director S. Craig Zahler (“Brawl in Cell Block 99,” “Dragged Across Concrete”).
But as good as Vaughn can be with darker characters, I never connected those parts to the man who played them. Ahead of our interview, I made the perhaps-common journalist’s mistake of expecting to talk with someone akin to the playfully glib guy from those comedies I love. But what I was expecting from Vaughn wasn’t what I got. Instead, I found someone more provocative and earnest, who came most alive when he put me under the conversational microscope. Which is to say, I got a surprise.
Inside Worldcoin’s Orb Factory, Audacious and Absurd Defender of Humanity
Dystopian doesn't begin to describe this, and I had a hard time pulling a few paragraphs to make the story clear. You really just have to read it -- or at least, skim.
The startup, co-founded by Sam Altman, is determined to verify every human on Earth, one iris at a time.
Tools for Humanity wants to create a global identity system for humans. The thinking is that artificial intelligence is improving so quickly that we soon will—or may already—need a way to separate humans from machines. In other words, to prevent supersmart AIs from flooding the internet with deepfakes, scams and the propaganda of their choosing, we must have a way to answer the modern existential question: bot or not? And this is where the Orb comes in. It takes images of people’s irises under the supervision of a human Orb associate and grants them a unique World ID, which certifies that a real person belongs to a string of characters the machine generates.
You might then use your World ID to log in to Shopify or Reddit or a Discord server, and everyone can feel safer knowing they’re dealing with an actual, fleshy human and not an AI.
I Was an Escort for the 1%. It’s Not What You Think.
Charlotte Shane reflects on years of business and pleasure in an excerpt from her new memoir, ‘An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work.’
It took me years to learn that truth in all advertising is rare. Until then, I worried I wouldn’t be able to charge what the other women did, and therefore wouldn’t be able to live the lives I imagined they led. I wasn’t cultured or polished, though I aspired to be. I went to a state school for undergrad, and at my more prestigious graduate university, I pursued a master’s devoid of utility. My sporadic childhood vacations involved Holiday Inns. I mispronounced words I’d never heard spoken aloud, like “homage,” and when I moved from the chicken farming land where I’d grown up to D.C., people laughed at my accent.
Clients who especially enjoyed the fantasy of the modern-day courtesan—as the most self-serious escorts called themselves—sent courtly, almost formal introductory emails.
They were answering our marketing with their own. It helped that illegality-induced euphemisms tipped the dialogue into affectation: “intrigued” meant horny, “visit” or “spend time with” meant have sex with, “friend” meant repeat customer.
As in: I’m intrigued by your website. I would love to visit with you for two hours on Thursday evening in the hope of becoming good friends.
Enough with Elon Musk already, geez.
Could not access the Washington Posts articles thru your link without subscribing which I don't want to do