Elizabeth Lopatto

This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.

Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale are doing their best to make sure “the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.” The extractive world of today’s technology — harvesting your data and attention, among other things — has created the Texan Ideology.

Forget for a moment that it’s morally disgusting to let people bet on wildfires; people have already spent $1.2 million doing it. The real question is when someone will commit financially-motivated arson in order to win their bet — because unlike other major environmental events, massive fires are easy to create.

SpaceX bonds are creating losses for the fast-money types who piled in at the offering. “Bond types either aren’t sure that SpaceX will hang on to its investment-grade credit ratings, or will only get involved if they get paid a fat risk premium for doing so,” the Financial Times explains. SpaceX stock is, as of this writing, trading below its IPO price. Gee, if only someone had pointed out that this company is a stinker.

You may remember the period when Zuck tried to pretend he was Very Manly (MMA fighting, Joe Rogan appearance). He seems to be walking that back now, like he realized he overstepped with that horrible attempt at streetwear. Gentlemen, if you want to look like a grown-ass man, the kind who is competent and in charge? Make a mood board of Cary Grant outfits. (If you want to go more contemporary, Colman Domingo.) Fashion is only trivial if you’re stupid — your style expresses your persona before you say a single word, and Zuck’s is still “wannabe.”

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has been known for banning “visible homelessness” — moving tents off the street and dropping more people in jail since he hasn’t expanded the homeless shelters like he promised he would in his campaign. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that his brother is a real estate broker who services the tech elite, and that their home valuations are skyrocketing. Alexander “Lurie estimates that by the end of May, he’ll have sold more than $100 million worth of real estate, about his entire total for all of 2025, which was, to be clear, a very good year itself.“