Mark Walter is buying majority ownership of the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation, reports ESPN. Walter runs TWG Global, which owns chunks of other sports teams, and also owns a fun grab-bag of other companies, including Shield AI and Slate Auto. LeBron-themed pickup truck when?
You may remember, he funded a literal version of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Well, first of all, it turns out shattering world records in sports like swimming is a little more complicated than just adding steroids. But second: The Enhanced Games are a fancy way to sell supplements.
Out at Vice Media: former CEO Bruce Dixon. In: new CEO Adam Stotsky, “A lot of the sort of messy stuff has been cleaned up,” Stotsky told The Wall Street Journal. We’ll see about that — when I wrote about Vice last year, there was still plenty of mess under Dixon.
Yesterday I wrote about Elon Musk’s fall from power. Today he is beefing with the president on X, instead of picking up his phone to make a call. Hm!
Isn’t it funny how all these tech and science men have ties to Epstein? I wonder why! Anyway, Epstein invested with Thiel’s Valar Ventures — and that investment hasn’t previously been disclosed. Guess what that means? “There’s a good chance much of the windfall will not go to any of the roughly 200 victims whom the disgraced financier abused when they were teenagers or young women.”
One thing that has irritated me for years is the claim AI will change everything — it’s just an article of faith, and I’m not inclined toward religion. Here is a rational argument about how AI will change programming, and it also level-sets by saying what that means: “If you’re making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you’re not doing what the AI boosters are doing.” We all deserve better arguments for AI actually being useful, like the one Thomas Ptacek makes here.
[fly.io]
Were you feeling left out by the terrible economics of Musk’s Twitter buyout? Great news! xAI, which now owns Twit — I mean, X — is selling shares. Also, Neuralink, newly freed from those pesky FDA staffers overseeing its applications, raised more money. has raised $650 million. Plus, there will be a public demo in two weeks! You know, if I were a cynical person, I might think Musk was trying to publicly distance himself from his time at DOGE.
The National Science Foundation — which developed tech such as the literal internet — now has a 23-year-old to veto funding to projects he doesn’t understand. That’s DOGE’s Zachary Terrell, who can barely pretend to pay attention in meetings. Anyway, this is who’s deciding which grants go forward — some guy with no experience in anything except getting a company acquired by Coinbase. Scientific experts? Those are a luxury for functioning countries.