The Hackening

Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening. As in, within 6-12 months, many predicted that due to advanced AIs and AI agents the internet would become a severely hostile place. Some worried that this could rise to the level of ‘assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted’ and several people urged doing general crisis preparations on a personal level, in case of disruptions in supply lines, power, water or internet.

It did not take long for things to escalate.

The biggest hack is a flaw in PHP, which can be exploited to take control of the computer running any website using an unpatched version of PHP. There are many others.

On a personal level, you want to do at least some basic prep and get your security in order. It is cheap to do as a form of insurance, and being caught not having it when you need it is a large mistake. That doesn’t mean you should panic, or cancel travel plans or anything like that. But there is low hanging security fruit out there. Pick it.

And So It Begins: PHP

Joshua Achiam (Formerly OpenAI): Feels like March 1, 2020 for Cyber. Not normal, something is happening. Internet lockdowns in a couple of months?

Multiple sources using GPT-5.6 Sol identified a critical flaw in PHP. Okay, identified two critical flaws in PHP. The plan was to deploy the patch first before announcing the flaw, but the embargo on the fix got broken more than six hours in advance, so here we are.

Dan Lorenc: I wanted to share what happened with the PHP embargo, our role in it, and my decision process last night to ship the fixed builds early. First of all, the PHP Foundation and maintainers did an amazing job here in a high stress situation. I'm sorry that my decision led to even more stress for them.

We first got read in that there was something coming up in PHP last Friday by one of the original researchers that discovered this issue. That night we were able to independently discover the same issue using our harness and a frontier model with a basic prompt of "find bad vulnerabilities in PHP".

We got fully read in Saturday and confirmed that some our findings matched those from the initial report, and worked to help test the fixes.​

They may have been in a rush due to attackers finding the exploit. Amazon reports that this was happening as early as October 17, four days before disclosure. We are fortunate that this did not scale far larger than it did. [...]

Jonny G: Can somebody explain this to me like I’m 5 years old please? Ta.

BRYNMAWR ∴ SHERLOCK: Websites are files on a computer. When you view a website, you are asking the computer to send you the files, then your browser shows them to you.

70% of the websites you see use PHP to make them interactive. So you can send things to the website too and it can respond. E.g. filling in a comment box and hitting ‘post’ adds the comment as a row to a spreadsheet.

PHP has a flaw in its code that allows anyone to gain control of the computer that has the website on it.

The organisation that provides PHP announced the vulnerability before a patch was available, meaning we’re in a window where everyone knows about it (including baddies) but the good guys don’t have an official solution.

Some are just turning off their websites and waiting for the solution. Others are trying to fix it themselves. General chaos and lots of stressed techies across literally the entire planet because this affects the entire internet.

The bug has been there for 14 years and was discovered in 2024, but it was not considered significant at the time. A lot more bugs are significant now.

The PHP Bug Was Kind of a Big Deal

Things could have gone very, very badly, the same way Y2K could have gone quite badly if we had not done the work to prevent it. These days we are on rather tighter deadlines.

Internet Archive: https://Archive.org is currently offline. We are working to restore service now.

Brewster Kahle (21 hours later): Internet Archive ops staff were heroes last night.

PHP vulnerability announced, soon saw attacks, isolated the vulnerability, used Claude to make fixes for our older php versions, used local models to run simulated attacks, deployed.

In summary:

j🫪e: ICYMI: Today was basically the worst day of the year for cyber security incidents

On Your Marks

Now the race is on to patch all the systems before attackers can go on the offensive. OpenAI is helping race to get that done to the greatest extent possible, and are looking for better methods for fixing vulnerabilities in time.

John David Pressman: I know everyone is rightfully freaking out but it must be noted that the worst case scenario isn’t you receiving lots of patches you have to apply, the worst case scenario is receiving zero patches and waking up to everything having been stolen.

John David Pressman: My takeaway so far is that we do not have a good way to coordinate the distribution of patches to vulnerable software.

This one was important enough the NSA got in on the act.

NSA Cyber: Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.

We are going to need better procedures for updates.

The best case scenario is that a defender finds the bug first, has enough time to figure out a solution and creates a patch. Then, the moment the patch is rolled out, every attacker gets what are effectively very clear instructions on how to exploit any unpatched systems.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: The Simpsons; uncredited

[ed. So far, zero coverage in the mainstream media. See also: If the vulnpocalypse is the apocalypse, where are the agentic attacker hordes? (Joshua Saxe):]

*****

We’ve ignored how cybercriminals are unskilled and get arrested a lot

Here’s the first part of my theory: cybercriminals are not the organized geniuses we implicitly imagine. Anyone building a criminal gang has to find candidates willing to forgo more stable opportunities in the formal economy. My modeling estimated that something like 720,000 people are involved in the online criminal economy, 90% of them in scam and fraud call-center type operations, some of them human-trafficked. Of the 76k or so actual hackers, the vast majority work for governments. Of the remaining few thousand criminal hackers, most work in ransomware. 

Alaskan Gasbags

A $54 Billion Exercise in Revisionist History

So here we have Republican former legislator Charisse Millett claiming that President Donald Trump never claimed that a deal had been approved with Korea to pay $54 billion for the Alaska LNG project.

Millett claims that Trump, Sen. Dan Sullivan, Rep. Nick Begich the Third, Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Glenfarne did not portray the Korean “investment” as a done deal.

Perhaps Millett was fed bad information by Sullivan.

Perhaps she failed to do any homework.

Perhaps she didn’t pay attention to what Trump said.

Perhaps she thinks she can get away with rewriting the history of the past three weeks to improve the campaign picture for Republicans.

What’s certain is that her analysis is completely wrong.

Larry Persily wrote a good column in the Anchorage Daily News in which he told the truth about the gas line campaign fraud perpetrated on Alaskans right before the election.

The column obviously touched a nerve with Sullivan, who had been hoping to ride to reelection on the basis of winning the gas pipeline deal to end all gas pipeline deals.

Millett’s response in the ADN touched on exactly the same points that Suzanne Downing, whom Sullivan portrays as an exemplar of integrity, used to attack Persily — that his column was motivated by politics alone. That no one promised a gas pipeline, etc.

What the Sullivan apologists can’t confess is that Persily’s column was exactly right — the White House claimed it has a $54 billion deal in hand with Korea, but that nation says the claim is not true.

As they stood behind Trump in the Oval Office at the Sept. 30 campaign stunt, however, Sullivan, Begich and Dunleavy led a gas line victory dance.

I still don’t know if they knew the $54 billion was a charade or if they were desperate to believe a Trump lie because it would help con Alaskans into thinking a miracle had happened.

There was nothing conditional about the Trump announcement at all or how the Alaska politicians received it, contrary to Millett’s meandering missive.

“Thank you Mr. President!” Sullivan said afterward. “Glad we could get this across the finish line for Alaska!”

Fresh from the White House gas line party, Sullivan went on a right-wing talk show in Anchorage to say the money was in hand to build the gas pipeline, attack his challenger Mary Peltola and praise Trump, who had said that the pipeline would be built because of Dan Sullivan.

“I think the president has no interest in switching horses when he just said the guy who’s getting it done for Alaska and us is me right now,” Sullivan told Mike Porcaro, adding that the president of Korea had agreed to pay for the massive project.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “really really drove a hard bargain with the Koreans,” Sullivan claimed. “But this is a really important day. It’s exciting.”

“It’s a big announcement. $54 billion. It’s a president to a president of an important ally,” said Sullivan. As Sullivan went after Peltola for being soft on the gas line, he said she was “saying anything to get elected.”

Dunleavy, who also appeared on Porcaro’s talk show Sept. 30, said, “Whenever you can get $50 billion plus coming your way for the largest gas project in the Arctic’s history and probably the largest project in the Pacific and certainly the largest project on the map in the world right now, that’s a good day Mike.”

Dunleavy said on social media it “was a fantastic day both for Alaska and for America as President Trump announced that the Republic of Korea is investing $54B into the Alaska LNG project, ensuring affordable, reliable gas for Alaskans.”

“Our South Korean allies are partners now, they are providing a lot of funding for this, upwards of $50 billion plus,” Dunleavy said.

Begich the Third also claimed the $54 billion deal was a historic accomplishment that Alaskans could take to the bank. He said the delegation was excited about what the pipeline would mean for the state.

And Sullivan and Begich should be reelected, Begich the Third said.

“When you’re putting up championships, you don’t trade Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. You come back and you win again,” Begich the Third told Porcaro.

The Third did not say whether he sees himself as Jordan or Pippen in that analogy.

by Dermot Cole, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image:AP Photo/Alex Brandon
[ed. Man, they're trying everything. See here and here. See also: In U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project Emerges (NYT):]

*****

An American energy company intends to buy Russian technology and use it to access a massive supply of natural gas in Alaska, liquefy it and export it to allies abroad.

The Kremlin and the White House were interested in the idea. President Vladimir V. Putin discussed the plan last month with President Trump’s peace envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, people familiar with the negotiations said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. It is one of a series of energy deals White House officials believe could help smooth relations with Moscow and eventually pave the way to end the war in Ukraine.

But it turns out that the company was not an All-American affair. The multibillion-dollar project has received secret funding from the same powerful Russian company that was to provide the technology, according to the energy executive who until last month led the U.S. firm and two others involved in company negotiations. [...]

“It’s not only unlawful, but it’s not in the U.S. interest to have Russian technology controlling the commercialization of Arctic gas in the North Slope,” Mr. Riddle said in a brief interview.

These previously unreported tensions were also detailed in legal memos that Mr. Riddle attached to his resignation letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The memos, prepared by Baker Botts, an international law firm, said the Treasury Department’s sanctions enforcement unit had raised concerns that Polar LNG had ties to Novatek that might present “potential Russia-related sanctions concerns.”

Polar LNG on Friday issued a statement announcing a new acting chief executive, Tim Talkington, and described Mr. Riddle as a “disgruntled former employee.”

But in a statement to The Times, Novatek said on Friday that it, in fact, was moving to acquire “minority shareholder” status in the Polar LNG project — a striking effort by the Russian energy giant to seek ownership of American gas production.

The project, if it happens, is a long way off. In addition to the sanctions issues that would have to be negotiated, the technology envisioned is highly complex and must overcome some of the most brutal weather conditions in the United States. It also is competing with another Alaska gas plan that already has the support of the Trump administration. But that the Polar LNG deal is being discussed at all shows how business deals of almost any stripe are on the table during the talks with the Kremlin.

Why So Many Men Aren’t Working

Thirty years ago this summer, the sociologist William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears, in which he attributed high unemployment in urban, largely Black neighborhoods to structural changes in the economy. Conservatives dismissed his argument, contending instead that the problem was a poor work ethic enabled by a welfare system in desperate need of reform. But as a new unemployment crisis has arisen—this time more white, male, and rural—many figures on the right have discovered their inner structuralist.

Prevalent conservative explanations of why one in 10 “prime age” men (25-to-54-year-olds) are economically inactive focus on the decline of industries such as manufacturing and construction that traditionally have employed many men without college degrees. Sounding a lot like Wilson, some of these commentators indict trade policy. “They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs, and rob us blind,” President Trump has said of Obama-era policy makers. This critique dovetails with charges that Americans have been forced to fight for the remaining scraps with outsiders. “Legal immigration has been at such high levels, and it’s driven down wages and taken a lot of jobs,” Senator Tom Cotton has argued. And, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently described, the women’s-rights movement and affirmative action are also frequently invoked as forces that feminized the workplace and brought an end to the kind of work that gave men meaning (and that maybe made women want to date them).

From this diagnosis of men’s woes has followed a misguided attempt at a cure: setting tariffs in the hopes of bringing back manufacturing jobs, kicking out immigrants who might “steal” these jobs from “real” Americans, and vanquishing the DEI culture that has supposedly made workplaces hostile to white men. But the diagnosis is not correct: “Manly” jobs exist and employers are hiring. The trouble lies in finding men who are willing and able to take them.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that, at the end of August, the mining, logging, construction, and manufacturing sectors had about 800,000 job openings. This represents an increase of 148,000 job openings in the past year, during which job openings across the entire economy increased by 160,000. Police departments and other law-enforcement agencies also have had high vacancy rates and difficulty filling those jobs. If the problem were a shortage of work in predominantly male occupations, these vacancies wouldn’t exist.

Does every one of these open positions pay excellent wages, offer good benefits, and allow upward advancement? Surely not, and improving all of those things should increase the willingness of men to apply for work. But the dynamics that have led about 6.7 million men to drop out of the workforce go beyond that.

Part of the problem (so to speak, because in fact it is a virtue of our current system) is that, for many, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust. In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, forgoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was.

The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without Work, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three. The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.

This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.

These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills. (This is the reality that Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently invoked in an ad depicting a welfare recipient as a young white man playing video games and eating junk food—prompting a number of conservative podcasters and commentators to take to their channels to condemn Sanders over what they felt was an unfair portrayal.) Men of course can still be asked to take more responsibility for themselves to be productive, but modern technology and drug legalization do make the boulder that they are rolling uphill much heavier than what their fathers pushed, and exacerbate the temptation to give up and let it roll back over them.

by Keith Humphreys and Brett Orell, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic. Sources: PhotoObject.net Getty; iStock/Getty

[ed. I'd be cautious about applying overly broad generalizations. For example, with limited housing options, many men might still be living at home and have other means of support. Or it could be the cultural messaging they're receiving: college degree (high status) vs. trades (low status); quick and easy riches (online gambling/prediction markets); fame and fortune (YouTube star/influencer) etc.]

Billionaires Want to Buy This Election. It Isn’t Working.

Two weeks from now, the midterm elections will deliver an explosion of narrative meaning: about the country and its future, the president and his movement and his legacy. But the election cycle has already taught us a couple of very important things about money’s place in our democracy.

One, after about a decade of national confusion on this point, the Republicans have shown themselves to be the unmistakable party of wealth, particularly the smash-and-grab kleptocratic variety. And two, at least in this election cycle, money by itself doesn’t really seem to matter. In critical races in red states, national Republicans are dumping unheard-of sums of money to save their majority — and barely making a dent in Democratic leads.

Let’s take the first point. This election will be the most expensive in history, with more money projected to be spent on political advertisements than even during the presidential campaign of two years ago. And though President Trump’s popularity is at historic lows and the Republican Party regularly registers tsunami-scale deficits in polling, Republicans are actually leading in the overall spending race. How? According to calculations by The Washington Post, the four biggest donors this cycle (including groups, nonprofits and firms) have given to Republicans, as have seven of the top ten. The single largest donor, Elon Musk, has donated 3.6 times as much money as the biggest Democratic donor, George Soros, and is almost single-handedly bankrolling Ken Paxton’s U.S. Senate race in Texas against James Talarico, as my colleague Teddy Schleifer reported last week.

In that race, more than $367 million has been spent on ads promoting the Republican, nearly three times as much as has been spent on behalf of the Democrat. But look at direct fund-raising by the campaigns and the story is very different: By that metric, Talarico is out-raising Paxton by about 8 to 1. The Texas Republican has attracted more spending on his campaign than any Senate candidate in history despite raising less money in his state of 31 million people than New Hampshire’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Chris Pappas has in his state of 1.4 million. It is only somewhat misleading to shorthand this fund-raising battle as pitting Musk against the wallets of Texans.

The disparities are similar in other high-profile midterm contests, which is why when it comes to fund-raising by actual candidates Democrats are ahead of Republicans by about $285 million in house races and $425 million in senate races. Factor in national spending, PACs and outside groups and Republicans are significantly ahead — to the tune of about $400 million, according to recent tabulations by Nate Silver. That national advantage is not powered by local voters and donors but by plutocrats. Two years ago, a chunk of the plutocracy went all in on Trump in a sharp ideological break from longstanding tradition, according to which the wealthy mostly stayed neutral or cautiously played both sides. In Maine, for instance, Senator Susan Collins and allied groups have spent 40 percent more than her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, and his allied groups — even though in the third quarter Jackson raised four times as much money from Maine voters as did Collins.

This may sound like an old, familiar story: big money parachuting into local races to ensure future policy flows to its benefit. Actually, the pattern has changed quite a lot since not just Citizens United but the ascension of Donald Trump and his particular style of pay-to-play coalition-building — which is perhaps one reason so many Democratic candidates this cycle are talking so much about getting money out of politics.

Those kinds of appeals used to sound like weak gestures lifted from middle-school civics. But billionaire spending on presidential elections grew about 160-fold between 2008 and 2024 — from $16 million when Barack Obama was elected the first time to $2.6 billion when Trump was elected the second. And the trend is only more striking given the increasing centrality of tech money in our political economy. As recently as the last midterms, in 2022, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent barely $2 million on political donations; this time, it was up past $115 million by May. (In retrospect, you can see the whole Silicon Valley “vibe shift” as an all-in effort to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence, with the stakes only rising since 2024.) Nationally, three billionaires have donated more than $600 million to Republicans this cycle, as Politico has reported. It isn’t just Texas that proverbially pits Musk against the people.

Conspicuously, this spending is happening against a very visible and particular backdrop: two years in which the Trump administration has seemed more focused on securing financial windfalls for itself and its allies than on pursuing an ideological policy agenda; in which the president has nearly doubled his net worth and made more than a billion dollars just from crypto; and in which right-wing intellectuals and influencers have increasingly embraced a social Darwinism so boldly that they now mock Americans for complaining about the price of a burrito. This is the coalition that rode back into power in 2024 thanks to cost-of-living frustrations, the corruption of the “Biden crime family” and the rot of a hopelessly out-of-touch liberal elite.

By David Wallace-Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ibrahim Rayintakath

[ed. The party of grift overplayed its hand. But, never underestimate the gullibility of the American public.]

Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling

There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).

It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions.

Having slept on this, I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session. They are trying to use this last time with a Republican Congress to pass preemption of exactly the important state laws, and get some transparency but not much enforcement in exchange.

This reads as intentional, that Anthropic is more afraid that the government might enforce rules against Anthropic, than they are worried about the ability of the government to enforce rules against everyone. Anthropic’s policy team seems to have, chosen protecting their business interests and guarding against their political risk, at the expense of safety considerations.

There was no need for the company purportedly existing to promote safety to propose a bill that is not even actively stronger than the FRONTIER Act, when the FRONTIER Act was a compromise bill proposed back in June.

Even if you were fine with what is being given up, what you get in return very obviously does not meet the moment. Nor is there any need for such compromises. It seems rather insane for Anthropic to be proposing it now. This seems like the bill that someone on the anti-regulatory side should be pushing. It is not obvious this makes us safer than doing nothing, even if the alternative is fully nothing at all levels.

Say it isn't so, Anthropic, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.

If you want the full text, here is a copy.

Others RTFB (Read the Bill)

I have not had the time to do so, but the other usual suspects quickly sprinted to RTFB (read the bill) and they did not like what they saw. You can try to call this a ‘pretty reasonable AI safety bill’ as Charlie Bullock does, but that is by the standards of people trying to protect the industry from more impactful regulation. [...]

Charlie Bullock: Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that’s more than other frontier labs have done.

But they don’t deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.

To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic’s bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn’t trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.

There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).

Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it’s encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far. [...]

Nathan Calvin: Charlie’s analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.

Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:

1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that “suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model” to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.

2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.

First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.

This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic’s proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??

There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.

Charlie Bullock: Nathan’s righteous anger has inspired me to make one more mildly disapproving observation: it’s kind of wild that the Anthropic bill has no government licensing for the independent auditors.

Licensing is, IMO, the bare minimum thing that you need to even be able to pretend that your auditing regime isn’t just going to devolve into a race to the bottom. Without it, auditors will inevitably compete with each other to offer their customers, the labs, the least bothersome audits available at the lowest possible price point. Obviously Anthropic trusts itself to do a great job of picking great auditors, but do they trust OpenAI to do the same? What about SpaceXSI?

Why Would Anthropic Do This?

The new Anthropic bill is weaker than their June framework, and offers both forward-looking and backward-looking preemption in exchange, despite months of movement to enable us to do more. What are we even doing? [...]

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV |  Read more:

Image: Draft bill

[ed. Best I can tell (haven't RTFB) the draft seeks to: 1) preempt state's rights to write and enforce stronger safety provisions - so, in effect, we get a single point of federal decision-making/enforcement vs. 50 votes; 2) install "independent auditors" to evaluate model safety who's credentials and funding sources are undefined; and 3) set an arbitrary trigger for a single federal judge to intervene/block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people - all to be decided using a set of process provisions that are ambiguous at best - see the REQUIRED FINDINGS above - and over some unspecified period of time. So, all in all, not good. And, even more not good - other frontier labs don't seem to be on board with even these few minimal restrictions. As one commenter notes: there aren't really any Good Guys in this race anymore (if there ever really were), just Bad, Badder, and Baddest. Good Intentions Paving Company secures lucrative "Hell" contract, news at 11.]

[ed. Addendum: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is now streaming on Netflix. Highly recommended.]

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]

 

If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.

But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

Monopoly Roundup: AI Cockroaches Scurry Out from Under Nvidia

Before we get to the Good and the Bad news, after the jump for paid subscribers only, I want to highlight an important but little-noticed story that has implications for the AI bubble, and particularly, for the most valuable company in the world, Nvidia. Nvidia is the center of the AI revolution, with its software layer CUDA and its AI chips dominating training and inference for models. It is worth $6 trillion, and its CEO, Jensen Huang, is now a global superstar who regularly sits down with national leaders and puts Donald Trump on speakerphone at major conferences.

Nvidia, despite its immense profits and prestige, is known for doing something a bit scuzzy, called “circular financing.” That is, it invests in its own customers so they can buy its chips. Sometimes it goes through multiple layers, like investing in OpenAI, which buys from Oracle, which buys from Nvidia. But there are a host of smaller AI companies in which Nvidia, as well as hedge funds and banks, have put a lot of money. And one of them, a little noticed AI data center company called Firmus, tried to sell shares to on the stock market this week. Yet investors revolted, and the company had to scrap its initial public offering.

Aside from Nvidia, Firmus was backed by blue chip financial firms Jane Street and Blackstone, and it was set to become Australia’s biggest IPO ever, at $30 billion in valuation. So this failure is a big deal, and it raised eyebrows all over Wall Street.

What happened? It turns out, Firmus executives got a little too greedy. In a normal initial public offering, companies restrict insiders from selling their shares for a time period. There are a few reasons to do so. First, restricting insiders sales is a vote of confidence in the new firm, a statement from executives and early investors that “hey yeah we want your money investors, but we have skin in the game in the form of owning our own stock.” Second, it’s a statement that the stock won’t be met with a lot of immediate selling pressure in the markets, since insiders can’t dump their shares.

This time, however, Firmus set up terms to let them sell immediately, meaning those who were most in-the-know wanted to cash out ASAP. That looks bad, a clear indication that insiders don’t think the company is a valuable going concern but see it as a temporary vehicle for self-enrichment. On a practical level, huge selling pressure would have flooded the market and crushed investors. So money managers, after being harmed with Paramount bonds, SpaceX, and a number of others, refused to bid, and the banks behind Firmus had to pull the offering. It’s one of the biggest flops in recent capital markets history.

What matters here are three things. First, the Firmus IPO was backed by the most prestigious companies in AI. Second, there are many companies like Firmus. And third, the company’s co-founder, Oliver Curtis, has a criminal background in stock manipulation, and yet the banks still went ahead with the offering. Yes, you read that right:

A decade ago, Oliver Curtis was at the lowest point in his life as he was sent to prison for pocketing $1.4 million in insider trading. Now, he is one of the richest people in Australia and preparing for a $6 billion move he sees as his redemption.

There’s another co-founder of Firmus, Tim Rosenfeld. He’s not a criminal, but he’s a cousin of Curtis, and his background was running a loss-making lingerie company called Steadmark.

What makes this situation more than a run of the mill scam is the involvement of Nvidia in Firmus and its criminal co-founder. Why would Nvidia get in bed with a crook? Well, Firmus is in an important industry segment that generates demand for Nvidia chips. Firmus is a “neocloud,” which are basically racks of servers funded by venture capitalists and Nvidia to buy chips and rent out computing power. Think of a neocloud as a way to keep debt off the books of the big AI firms. Neoclouds are a corporate shell containing real estate, chips, and financing. Often there are multiple layers of investors, phantom contracts or insider self-dealing, all wrapped in a narrative that they are engaged in “advanced AI” deployment.

This move has tended to work because of the involvement of the most prestigious players in AI. When Nvidia (or Google or Anthropic) backstops or does business with a neocloud, investors think there must be something there. So the neocloud’s valuation goes up a lot. Then that neocloud raises more money at a high valuation, announces more data centers, and orders more chips. That’s more profits for Nvidia, more investments, and so on and so forth.

These investments take place in the private market, with hedge funds and insiders thinking they are getting in at a low valuation. They often don’t even care if there’s a good business model here, since they think someone else will be left holding the bag. The business model never really made much sense, with Firmus starting as a bitcoin miner, before pivoting to AI. But it didn’t matter, because Firmus was about to sell shares to the last set of investors out there - you and me in the public markets. Fortunately, it looks like the public market participants have wisened up, at least in this case.

Firmus, however, is not the only scam in the AI space. Many such neoclouds started as bitcoin miners before jumping to the AI boom, often funded by a prestigious AI firm like Nvidia. And that suggests there’s something systemic going on.

Here are a few other neocloud or adjacent plays: There’s TeraWulf, which has big leasing deals with Anthropic and Google, and whose backers have been allegedly caught engaged in market manipulation. Google bankrolled the company’s shift from bitcoin mining to AI data center. Here’s Grizzly Research:

Our research uncovers that TeraWulf’s third-largest shareholder is an entity controlled by the wife of John O’Rourke, the disgraced CEO of Riot Blockchain, who was charged for his part of a $27 million “Lucrative Market Manipulation Schemes” by the SEC.

There’s Sharon AI, a competitor to Firmus, which also has deals with Nvidia and is backed by Oaktree Capital management. Here’s Sharon AI’s owner, who was involved in a mysterious fire [...]

There’s Applied Digital. According to the Bear Cave, this company started by providing staff to production companies, pivoted to plasma technology, then processing potatoes, then to blockchain, and finally to AI with financing from Nvidia in 2024. However, here it gets creepier, since Nvidia sold its stake in 2026, after Applied Digital had bought its chips with billions in borrowed money.

There are so many of these dodgy firms with no obvious business model and billions or tens of billions of valuation. Nscale. Celsius Mining. Coreweave. Nebius. Crusoe. SB Energy. Hut 8. Lancium. Iren. Bitdeer. And so on and so forth. With lots of stories like this.

How did I hear of this situation? Well there’s a document floating around Wall Street that describes this set of companies. Short-sellers, and there aren’t that many left, know the best way to understand where the scammers are isn’t to look at a particular industry sector, but to follow the scammers from industry to industry. As a contact put it, “This is like the SPAC craze of 2021. Whatever the hot thing of the day is, that is what the grifters will gravitate to. Shell companies did reverse takeovers with Chinese firms, the biotech bubble, shale, and others. Stock promoters will promote.” In other words, the same people just move from scam to scam, since unethical stock promotion itself is their business.

This whole scene is reminiscent of a specific part of the global financial crisis in 2008, which had a similar dynamic. Subprime lenders like Ameriquest were fly-by-night operations that somehow suddenly grew into multi-billion dollar lenders from 2003 onward. These guys weren’t particularly good at credit analysis, they were simply promoters willing to break the law. As Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean wrote in All the Devils Are Here, some salesmen were using meth or cocaine to lend more money to bad credit risks.

Now, at some level, this situation made no sense. Lending out money that was sure not to be paid back is a bad business. However, there is one way in which losing money deliberately can be quite profitable. If you are charging fees on your loans, and the money you are losing is not yours, then it works out great, at least for the scammer. But how did these operators get access to huge amounts of capital?

Here’s where the analogy to Nvidia comes in. The actual prestigious actors losing other people’s money were companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and so forth, who were backstopping these subprime lenders with warehouse lines of credit. This loan was a special kind of facility that let the subprime lenders keep lending, and then send the mortgages they were creating to Wall Street, where they would be processed into mortgage-backed securities.

These securities were then sold to pension funds, who bore losses. Sometimes, as Naked Capitalism noted, Goldman was even shorting these securities, so they wanted bad credit risks. At any rate, the prestige of Wall Street banks masked the obvious graft going on, and the credit tripwires that ordinarily would have slowed a credit cycle. Michael Lewis wrote up a fake version of this story in The Big Short, portraying Wall Street bankers as foolish instead of on the take.

Since we never fixed anything in our credit markets, we keep having such scams, whether the fracking guys, the China reverse mergers, WeWork, crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried, and now, the AI neoclouds. But the scamming isn’t just a result of grifters who want to steal, those kinds of people are always around. It’s that Nvidia, with its immense prestige on Wall Street and access to power in DC, is playing the role of Goldman in 2005. And with the important exception of Elizabeth Warren, there’s not a lot of interest in reimposing any controls on capital.

That’s not good. It’s also not surprising.

All that said, the residual memory of scams and crises and bailouts among the public is real, and impossible to ignore. And in a few weeks, voters may decide they’d like to have Elizabeth Warren holding the gavel running the Senate Banking Committee.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. So much graft. Everywhere. See also: How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices (BIG).]

UnitedHealth Group’s Corporate Empire Grows

Updated Sunlight Report Reveals 2,807 Entities Across UnitedHealth Group’s Corporate Empire (Healthcare Un-covered)

The Center for Health & Democracy has released the latest edition of its Sunlight Report on UnitedHealth Group, revealing 2,807 entities that make up the world’s largest health care conglomerate, including 376 additional entities identified since the report’s initial release in July 2025.

The Sunlight Report is a first-of-its-kind project that uses publicly available regulatory filings and other records to document UnitedHealth’s sprawling and often opaque corporate structure, shedding light on the company’s growing influence over American health care.

The October 2026 update finds that UnitedHealth’s rapid acquisition growth has slowed considerably, although its vast network of insurance companies, physician practices, surgery centers, pharmacies and other health care businesses remains largely intact.

The report highlights UnitedHealth’s $3 billion acquisition of Alegeus Technologies, which administers health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts and other health benefit accounts for more than 26 million people. The deal gives UnitedHealth a greater role in managing patients’ own health care dollars, in addition to the insurance premiums it already collects. All at a time, mind you, when HSAs and other “savings vehicles” are being considered by Republicans in Washington as part of a potential health care plan.

by Wendell Potter, Joey Rettino, and Seth Glickman, Healthcare Un-covered | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Remember those "death panels" Sarah Palin whined about during debate over Obamacare? Well, they're here, and they're real. What does it mean? Well, definitely no antitrust/monopoly investigations from this administration. But, practically? From the comments:]

*****

The number that stops me isn't 2,807 — it's 26 million. The Alegeus acquisition means the same conglomerate that already collects the premiums, owns the PBM, the pharmacies and the physician practices now also administers the health savings accounts patients are supposed to use to pay their own way. From the pharmacy counter, that completes a circle worth naming: one corporate structure decides what your plan covers, what your pharmacy gets reimbursed, what shows up in your doctor's office, and now how your own health savings dollars flow. I see the seams of that arrangement every day — the prior auth arriving from the same company that owns the prescriber, the reimbursement pressure on the independent pharmacy across the street, the patient who thinks they're choosing when the choices were already made upstream. Consolidation doesn't just reduce competition; it moves the point of accountability so far inward that it's invisible. Reports like this matter precisely because they make the structure visible. Who else has felt the consolidation from the patient's side of the counter?

Don’t Trust People Who Talk Like This

A few days ago, David Ellison took control of Warner Bros for $111 billion—and is now merging it into Paramount (which he acquired back in 2024). But he needed some help from Dad to make this happen. Tech titan Larry Ellison gave personal guarantees to the tune of $40 billion in order to seal the deal.

As a result, this son of a Silicon Valley CEO is now the most powerful person in Hollywood. So I watched with interest when David Ellison appeared on CNBC to talk about his plans for the future.

I’m still in a state of shock—because he speaks a language that, a few years ago, nobody in the creative community would even have understood.

You might think that Ellison would talk about making great movies or bringing audiences back to theaters—or, at a minimum, creating entertainment for the masses, if not something more artistic.

But that’s not what he has in mind.

Instead Ellison boasts: “We are positioned to win in every single vertical that we operate in….We have the greatest content engine with marquee intellectual properties. You’re immediately getting to scale in streaming” he adds; and then there’s his “incredibly profitable linear portfolio.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to get to this point. Ellison recalled his previous visit to CNBC. “We launched the hostile on your show,” he tells the host, “so coming full circle today is quite remarkable.”

Have people in the creative world ever talked like this? Did Picasso win in every vertical? Did Shakespeare brag about his “content engine”? Did Beethoven ever achieve a “profitable linear portfolio”?

But those saps were losers by today’s standards. Maybe they should have launched a hostile, instead of wasting so much time on their craft.

I still remember the first time I heard someone describe different vocations and livelihoods as verticals. That was right before the dotcom bubble burst, and I’d been called in to help a web business that, a few weeks later, went broke. The people who spoke in such a cavalier way were soon unemployed.

I felt sorry for them. But I viewed that obfuscating way of speech as a contributor to the problems that brought them down. I still feel that way. I just can’t trust people who talk like this. It’s like they just took a Voight-Kampff test, and failed miserably. I fear I’m talking to replicants, not human beings.

Judging by the news stories out of Hollywood, there are a lot of replicants in the film business nowadays.

On the other hand, I’ve talked to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of artistic people over the years. Against long odds, they somehow manage to make a living in creative pursuits. That is their vertical, so to speak. Sometimes they don’t even want to talk about how creativity happens—it seems almost magical, and the process is very fragile, even for the greatest artists. [...]

But I can’t just blame David Ellison, because he’s not alone. Business and finance jargon is now the only language spoken among the people who make the final decisions on almost every aesthetic or artistic matter.

So when the head of Warner Bros music gets asked about AI, he describes it as “an incredible value creation opportunity.” Say what? But at least that’s better than the CEO who praised AI’s ability to “eliminate lower-value human capital.”

The brutal reality is that we have reached the stage where artistry can be discussed without any consideration of the artist—who is now an inconvenience in the value chain.

And that value chain is all that matters anymore. [...]

Nowadays the decision-makers have other priorities. They have verticals to dominate. If they could, they would do it with bots instead of artists.

We deserve better stewards for our creative culture.

It’s not clear that we will get them. I’ve predicted that tech will eventually swallow up almost the entire creative economy—and I shudder to see how rapidly that forecast is coming true. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve called for creators and fans to support alternative channels.

We need to create our own parallel ecosystem—and as fast as possible. We’re fortunate that some people and organizations are already working on it.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Picasso, Three Musicians

[ed. See also: When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag? (NYT):]

***

There’s a little phrase that has been creeping further into American speech over the past decade. That’s how it seems, anyway, based on the ever-growing number of complaints about its use. Online, people grumble that it’s all over podcasts, movie podcasts in particular...

The phrase in question is: the X of it all. We have to talk, somebody might say, about the renovating-the-Kennedy-Center of it all, or the Dolly Parton’s nephew of it all, or the Greta Gerwig of it all. The “X” can be replaced with any noun or noun phrase you like: This is the kind of plug-and-play template that’s often called a snowclone, like “X is the new Y” or “the mother of all X’s.” “The X of it all” is the whole gestalt of that thing, all its baggage and implications, in the present context. [...]

This would hardly be the first bit of language to hit the entertainment industry and then spread — partly through that industry’s public mockery of its own smarmy, jargon-spewing suits — to everyone else... This is an industry whose language revolves around story, producing narrative shorthand so familiar that young people on TikTok sometimes describe their own lives in terms of seasons, casts, canon events, lore. Its “executive-ese” may seem gauche, reductive or laughable at first — but if it’s efficient shorthand, it will probably reach you eventually.

How a 'Hardwired Pause' on AI Development Might Work

If the world’s government and AI leaders ever agree to pause frontier AI training, is an international pact really feasible? How would it be implemented, coordinated and monitored?

In a first-of-its-kind academic study released today (Friday, Oct. 9), a multidisciplinary team of 26 researchers maps out a path toward an international, mutually verified pause of frontier AI training of at least 10 years. The team — which includes professors Barry Eichengreen and Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley and faculty from other top institutions, including Princeton, Stanford, Harvard and Oxford — combines expertise in computer science, economics, history, international relations, and Chinese and American politics with practical experience in diplomacy and government.

 

The researchers focus primarily on a plan that halts the production of AI training chips and replaces them over time with specialized “inference-only” chips, which serve fast, efficient inference on existing AI models but are not practically useful for training new models. Such a plan would permit the continued use of currently available AI products, while preventing new AI models from overwhelming states with social or economic disruption or threats to their national security. They also suggest verification measures that would allow world leaders to assure nervous rivals that they are upholding the pause agreement.

“We consider a scenario in which world leaders want to pause if they can be confident that others are pausing or that defections would be detected quickly enough,” writes co-organizer Wesley Holliday, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, in the study. 

Frontier AI training refers to the development of ever more powerful AI models. In a hardwired pause of such training, societies could control how powerful these models are allowed to get. If they judge that certain models can offer economic and scientific benefits, a hardwired pause could give them a way to reap the benefits before they become powerful enough to pose catastrophic risks, thus avoiding the dangers of an uncontrolled AI race.

The rapid progress of frontier AI systems, combined with leading AI companies’ recent struggles to prevent their models from escaping containment and committing cybercrimes, has prompted widespread calls for a global pause until these systems can be built safely and controllably. For strategic reasons, however, a long-term pause could be difficult to arrange even if parties agree that it would be in their interests: without effective verification measures, rival companies or nations may fear that others will defect and thereby put them at a commercial or geopolitical disadvantage.

But the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility’s detailed, 200-page report addresses such roadblocks with a framework for mutual verification.

Stopping, replacing, retiring AI training chips is key

Frontier AI training requires AI chips, which states can govern. The supply chain for AI chips is highly concentrated with several chokepoints, bolstering governments’ ability to enforce rules on their production.

“Bypassing existing supply chains is extraordinarily difficult,” writes study co-organizer Will Fithian, UC Berkeley associate professor of statistics. “An international prohibition on frontier AI training can take advantage of this fact about the hardware needed for AI training.”

The report proposes halting the production of AI training chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time, most or all of the pre-pause stock of such chips would be phased out. They would be replaced by inference-only AI chips, which are capable of fast, energy-efficient AI inference on approved models but are not practical for training new frontier AI models — even if stolen or seized — due to constraints hardwired into the chips.

During the chip replacement process, other verification measures would prevent residual training-capable AI chips from being used for frontier AI training.

Fithian and Holliday add that technologies needed for inference-only AI chips already are being developed for purely economic reasons, but that their economic attractiveness is currently limited by the rapid turnover of new models. If the training of new frontier models were prohibited, a hardwired pause would increase the economic advantages of these specialized chips and spur innovation in the development of other inference-only chips.

Other highlights of the report include:

• How a hardwired pause could be made politically palatable by offering ways to pursue AI-powered scientific and medical research, retain strategic insurance against being left behind in the AI race by defecting states, and pass on the economic benefits of cheaper inference to consumers.

• The new chips’ reduced resource demands, which would decrease their environmental impact and improve frictions in the U.S. between data center operators and local communities.

• How a hardwired pause safeguards against both covert evasion — when a state secretly trains new frontier models while ostensibly adhering to verification procedures — and overt breakout — when a state openly abrogates the pause in an attempt to build a much more powerful frontier model before other states could respond.

The researchers agree that a hardwired pause’s success depends on the cooperation of world leaders and their willingness to retire or transfer pre-pause stock to other jurisdictions or internationally governed data centers, such as scientific preserves. [...]

“Coordination is possible if the decision makers care enough about the future,” the authors write, “not just immediate payoffs, and if monitoring is adequate to support credible consequences for defections.”

by Sarah Fullerton, UC Berkeley News |  Read more:

Image: Yuki Iwamura/AP
[ed. Executive Summary here. Full Report here. Stop feeding the beast. Sounds reasonable until you consider a couple of constraints: like, tanking the economy (AI spending is the biggest single factor propping it up); and trillion dollar IPOs hanging in the balance (who's failure could also produce a cascade of financial failures).]

Inside Larry Ellison's Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics

PROLOGUE: THE ISLAND

The first sign was the orange Corvette.

In the early days of July, the residents of Lanai started seeing a C8 Stingray the color of a traffic cone tearing along the island’s switchback roads. Then other signals came. The clerk working the cigarette counter at the Pine Isle Market said her nephew, a private chef, had flown in and had been shopping for a big group.

At the Four Seasons down in Manele, the island’s pharmacist Kert Shuster was leaving brunch at Nobu when he saw a security detail he recognized moving through the lobby. It’d been a while, but Shuster knew—he’d just missed Larry Ellison.

A few years had passed, it seemed, since the man who owns all but a sliver of the Hawaiian island nine miles west of Maui had last set foot there. Now Ellison and his extended family were staying in a new compound above Manele’s steep volcanic shoreline. The cluster of houses was built by Japanese carpenters whom Ellison had once brought in and boarded in private barracks up-island.

For Lanai’s 3,000 regular residents, actually seeing Ellison is rare. His presence is more typically sensed—like a change in air pressure.

“I noticed the salad bar was really good that day,” Shuster tells me. “That’s what it’s like when Larry’s back. People step up. Things just get better.”

For the past 40 years, the people of Lanai have lived at the pleasure of one billionaire or another. Before Ellison there was David Murdock, a real estate magnate who took control of the island in 1985, when it was still a pineapple plantation. Murdock was a visible ruler who’d make his rounds in the local stores, attend community meetings, and give employees he had fired 30 minutes’ notice before sending them off in a helicopter. But Lanai had been a ­money pit for him, and the 2008 crash was the final straw. In 2012, he sold it to Ellison for a reported $300 million.

If Murdock ran the island like the plantation owner he was, Ellison runs it like a distant god. He points, and an amenity appears.

His first move was refurbishing the community pool that Murdock had closed. He answered the housing shortage with the Hokuao development, where the homes are pastel-colored and stamped everywhere with the touch of their benefactor. Each has a Tesla solar roof, a Big Green Egg in the yard, two Japanese Toto toilets, and interiors painted a custom color called Ellison White. (It’s a Benjamin Moore white base with a shot of oxide yellow and a half shot of black, your choice for sheen may vary.) Shuster, who lives in Hokuao, once told Ellison how much he loved the place. “I feel like I moved into your house,” he had said.

“Good,” his host responded. “I wanted to make it like a place that even I could live in.”

Ellison owns Lanai’s only gas station, where a sign reminds customers they’re paying “the Lowest Prices in Hawaii.” And he upgraded the movie theater that today bills itself as being “the crown jewel of theater experiences in Hawai‘i.” In July it was showing Supergirl, which was produced by Warner Bros., the movie studio Ellison, along with his son, will soon control.

“Sigourney Weaver lives here part-time, and she says that this is the most beautiful theater in the world,” Gail Allen, a longtime Lanai resident, tells me. “It serves truffle-oil popcorn,” she adds.

The sense is that life is pretty good on the island since Ellison bought it. Or at least could be worse. “We could have become Molokai,” says Alberta de Jetley, another longtime resident who ran the island’s newspaper, Lanai Today, before selling it to Ellison.

At a picnic table outside Richard’s Market, the other grocery store on Lanai (this one Ellison owns), a handful of residents hold a coffee klatch de Jetley calls the Laugh Group. That morning, beneath overcast skies, the Laugh Group was discussing the island’s recently arrived proprietor.

One member, Mari Lynn Di Lullo, brought up a time she saw a Tesla straddling two stalls in a parking lot. “Jeez, look at the way they parked,” she’d uttered to members of a security detail loitering nearby. “If you didn’t know better, you would think he owned the place.”

Just then the owner of the car—and everything else—appeared, laughing.

“He’s not pretentious,” Di Lullo told her coffee group. “He’s low on the radar.”

The radar. Interesting choice of words about a man who has made a case for a mass AI-enabled surveillance system.

That afternoon a woman came through the grocery checkout line wearing a Sensei Farms sweatshirt. The company is one of Ellison’s island projects: a hydroponic greenhouse concept meant to be the Tesla of agriculture. Eight years in and ­several hundred million dollars later, Sensei Farms describes itself as “a thought ­leader in greenhouse-grown produce.” It has an endcap with boxed salad mixes at the island’s grocery stores.

I introduced myself to the woman and asked what she did for the farm. She smiled.

“They said there would be a journalist on the island today,” the employee told me before starting to walk away. “They warned us about you in our morning meeting.”

I hadn’t told anyone at Sensei Farms I was coming.

Ellison’s newest gift to Lanai is at the entrance to the Four Seasons. In a man-made lagoon surrounded by fake lava rock stands a monumental bronze he commissioned from British artist Damien Hirst. It shows a crew of Polynesian voyagers in an outrigger canoe flung skyward on a cresting wave that up close is revealed to be not water but a knot of sea monsters. A shark bursts through the swell, its mouth open wide enough to take the canoe whole. A mo‘o, the lizard spirit of Hawaiian water, coils below the hull. Amidships, a chief in a feathered cape clutches the ankle of another paddler who is facing away. A loose paddle, some cargo, and a few bronze flowers slide down a wave. And above all of it, from something beneath the surface, hang two giant octopus arms with suckers the size of dinner plates, muscular and curled and about to crash down on everyone.

It’s titled Overcoming Adversity.

PART I: THE CEPHALOPOD

Ellison has long been fixated on the octopus. Cephalopod Corp is what he named the corporate entity atop his private investments. He has another company called Octopus Holdings LP, which, with its general partner Tentacle Corp, put up the money behind Lanai. His venture capital firm that over the years has backed Netsuite, Theranos, and Sensei Farms is called Tako Ventures, tako being the Japanese word for octopus. In many of the villas he built on Lanai hang ukiyo-e prints, many with a tako.

For years it was Ellison’s quiet way to talk about himself.

“His joke is he is the octopus,” says a former executive who worked closely with Ellison. This person was one of several dozen sources I spoke to for this story, most under the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive matters.

“He loves being the éminence grise. He loves the notion that he’s so powerful, there’s nothing he can’t get into.”

The joke has become a fact in full view. At 82, the last of the founding moguls of Silicon Valley who’s still in the game has extended his grasp into a convergence of power that no other fortune could manage. Where Elon Musk built an empire that’s loud and cultish, Ellison—his mentor and close friend—has pieced together something patient, proximate, and structural. The kind whose shape is clear once you see how far it goes.

One arm of the octopus is wrapped around Oracle, the 49-year-old company he is dragging from dull database vendor into one of the essential data center providers of the AI boom. It is a damn-the-torpedoes move into infrastructure that’s risky even for an executive who nearly lost the company once before. He has saddled Oracle with $130 billion in debt, turned its free cash flow negative, and chained its fortunes to a single volatile partner, OpenAI.

A second arm has closed on American media. Larry’s son David has transformed the independent production company Skydance into the last great consolidator in Hollywood, largely with Dad’s money. Skydance has gobbled up Paramount and with it CBS News; now it has won Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110 billion deal. Ellison also has the American spin-off of TikTok, which an Oracle-led consortium pried loose from its Chinese owner.

A third appendage winds toward political power. As Silicon Valley staged its noisy migration to Trumpism, Ellison worked quietly to influence the president, establishing an effective if not always close relationship. Outside America, he bankrolls his friend Tony Blair’s nonprofit organization, which pushes governments to adopt new technologies like AI. And he has been a steadfast supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu, hosting the prime minister on Lanai while the Israeli leader faced corruption charges at home.

Ellison has had a reputation as a killer in Silicon Valley for decades. In 2011, Bryan Cantrill—who quit Oracle within a year of its taking over Sun Microsystems—told a roomful of engineers not to “anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.” Instead, said Cantrill, think of him as a lawnmower: It doesn’t hate you, it just mows, and if you put your hand in, it’ll chop it off. Cantrill told me recently he hasn’t changed his mind.

by Tom Dotan, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Images: Yuko Shimizu; Damien Hurst

[ed. Vicious and evil.]

Mark Zuckerberg Is Trying Something On

When I meet Mark Zuckerberg, currently one of the poster boys for evil tech billionaires, a man whose products are used by about 46 percent of all living people in the world and whose company has a market cap of more than a trillion dollars, he is wearing sky-blue, cable-knit shorts that look an awful lot like bloomers.

That was just over a month ago, before what is turning out to be a style-centric period for Meta. It started this week at Connect, the company’s annual new products reveal, where Zuckerberg took to the stage wearing a T-shirt with the words “Building is my love language.”

He waxed enthusiastic about the future, including the many new styles of smart glasses, and the company’s personal A.I. assistant, Muse, which looks a lot like a customizable stuffed animal in a onesie. This was just after Vogue World kicked off Milan Fashion Week with Meta glasses as a sponsor, and around the same time W magazine produced an entire stand-alone advertorial zine devoted to a new glasses collaboration with the K-pop star Lisa.

Ahead of all of that, I had come to the compound in Lake Tahoe to try to understand the role style has come to play in the Zuckerberg saga, including the very public rebrand of 2024, when he went from robotic coder in a gray hoodie to fashion-conscious bro next door. That the latest version of Zuckerberg coincides with Meta’s push into wearables, as well as with Silicon Valley’s obsession with the idea of taste and how important a role it will play in the future, may explain why he was finally willing to talk about it.

“I want to make sure that we really immerse ourselves in what people care about,” Zuckerberg told me. It turned out he had started with himself, his own preferences, and where they took him.

Zuckerberg knows that what he does reflects on Meta. “I care about that,” he said. “I think the company is an instantiation of my values.” And, he said, he wants to “be intentional about how I program that.”

Meta is fighting on many fronts at once. Though it settled a case for $17.1 billion in August that positioned social media as the Big Tobacco of the 21st century, it is still embroiled in other lawsuits. Then there is the growing backlash against what critics call its “pervert glasses” (they have been used to secretly record video and audio), which have been banned from courts in England and New York, with organizations like the ACLU alleging that they could become a tool of the surveillance state.

And on Oct. 9, “The Social Reckoning” opens as a sequel to the “The Social Network” — the film responsible for cementing Zuckerberg’s reputation as a revenge-hungry nerd — starring Jeremy Strong as an older Zuckerberg, with a Caesar haircut to crown his march toward world domination.

Despite the push into fashion, it doesn’t add up to a great look.

But whatever Zuckerberg’s or his advisers’ agenda, the more he speaks about his life and newfound interest in outfits, the more insight he provides, sometimes inadvertently, into his otherwise highly guarded psyche. How he approaches clothes is how he approaches everything.

“A few years ago, he made this point,” said Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief of technology. “He said, ‘I’m willing to not be liked. I just want to be understood.’” [...]

“We have an off-site in Hawaii at Mark’s ranch,” Bosworth said. “I remember getting there, and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’” Then his team arrived. “We’re all listening to Mark,” Bosworth said, “and on the back channel we’re all like: ‘Is this his new style? Are we commenting? Are we not commenting? How do we feel about it?’”

How Bosworth feels is, this is the authentic Zuckerberg. “He knows he’s going to be judged no matter what,” he said. So why not?

In this version of the story, Zuckerberg has been freed from the fetters of his self-imposed gray T-shirt prison. A less charitable view, however, is that his fashion glow-up has been so fortuitously timed that most people assumed it was a marketing choice created by a stylist. Rumor had it Karla Welch, who works with Tracee Ellis Ross and Sarah Paulson, was involved. This turned out to be false, though Welch sometimes works with Chan. Zuckerberg said he mostly styles himself. The multiprint Loewe shorts he wore during the Sun Valley conference? Totally his idea.

Fashion-wise, he seems to be experiencing a sort of delayed adolescence. “This is stuff we did in college, or in high school,” said the designer Mike Amiri, who helped Zuckerberg design his first high-fashion T-shirt, in 2024, with “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” embroidered across the front, Latin for “all Zuck or all nothing.”

“You’re figuring out: ‘Am I a baggy fit guy? Am I a vintage type? Who am I?’” Amiri said. It’s just that Zuckerberg is doing it in his 40s, with unlimited resources.

by Vanessa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press; Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
[ed. Pathetic and clueless. See also: Why Does The Times Care About Mark Zuckerberg’s Style? (NYT).]