Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Musk’s Memphis supercomputer fixer  

• The Arena: The highlightification of sports. 

• The Top 5: Tech elites turn to luxury matchmakers to find love.

• Plus, our Recommendations: “Home Cooking,” “The World’s Worst Best” and “Three Days of the Condor.”

It definitely wasn’t the opening question Carlos Alcaraz was expecting.

As I sat four feet from the world no. 1 tennis player—and full disclosure, my absolute favorite athlete in the sport—I asked him what he thought of being in the Bay Area and whether he was visiting any tech companies during his trip to play this weekend’s Laver Cup tournament.

He looked surprised, to say the least. I narrowed my question to whether he has used Meta Platform’s glasses—a timely topic this week—and whether technology had a role in sports training.

“To be honest, I haven’t tried them,” he said. 

Then his buddy world no. 3 Alexander Zverev butted in and said, “Just say you love them.”

His teammates laughed. 

The Bay Area has tennis fever this weekend as Roger Federer’s Laver Cup tournament has been underway at the Chase Center. For the uninitiated, the Laver Cup is a team competition (Team Europe versus Team World). Europeans like Alcaraz and Zverev will face off against players like the American Taylor Fritz and Brazil’s João Fonseca. There’s a complicated points system. A team winner will be crowned.

Throughout the week, tech’s most connected watched Federer play some exhibition games and hit a few balls with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie. VCs volleyed with Alcaraz—and documented it on social media of course. The who’s who of the tennis world attended a lavish Laver Cup ball at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Thursday evening.

I’m unabashedly part of it. I’m a proud investor in Racquet magazine, a publication devoted to the sport. And, as an editor who is mostly behind my desk these days, I couldn’t resist the chance to attend my first tennis press conference.

To that end, Alcaraz was far more eloquent when describing his mental state during his epic French Open final victory in June against Jannik Sinner than he was on the subject of tech. (And it says something that he is still getting asked about that match months later.)

“I believed the whole time that I was able to win that match,” he said. “And that was the best thing I could do in that moment.” (If you didn’t watch the match, this statement is quite remarkable given it was in no way clear that he was going to win, being down three championship points at 0-40.)

Hearing these tennis greats discuss their rivalries, their team dynamic and even the higher risk of inquiry during a tough end-of-season tennis schedule was, thankfully, far more satisfying than listening to them on tech. 

I still wonder whether there is more room for tech and tennis partnerships. After all, these athletes track their training to finer and finer degrees and have growing celebrity power for brands. As my colleague Sara Germano has written about in her regular Weekend sports column, the Arena, the pro tennis tours are turning to TikTok and Roblox to reach new fans. 

Or maybe tennis doesn’t need tech. It’s perfect just the way it is.

Well, we know more about who will soon own TikTok’s U.S. business, a group that includes Larry Ellison and Silver Lake. But we still don’t know exactly what they’re going to pay for the company, and it’s going to be a fascinating number. Perhaps an absurd one. 

Yeah, I’m as eager to see the growth multiple put on the business—a reflection of how well the new owners think the company will fare—as I am for Michael Mann to finally get to work on “Heat 2.” Look, all private company valuations involve some cross-eyed math and wishful thinking, but this one will involve President Donald Trump, who’s not a fellow known for reality-based arithmetic. So I expect the multiple could be based on incredibly fanciful thinking that chooses to ignore a mountain of challenges ahead for the company, such as:

Who will run it? How successfully will it be at pushing its users from the existing TikTok to a new app? (As many of you know: It is damn hard to simply get people to download a new app and then use it with even monthly regularity.) Will advertisers choose to focus on TikTok US? Will the new company focus on its TikTok Shop as much as the old one has?

(As much as I enjoy arguing a bearish take out loud over Saturday morning coffee, I’d be remiss not to note that, a couple days ago, my colleague Martin sounded more optimistic about TikTok’s chances of growth.)

Still, TikTok US’s new owners won’t worry a wink about whether they can get richer from all this as long as they can push the company onto the public market quickly, allowing them to begin to cash out: An IPO next year certainly doesn’t seem crazy. And once the business lists, it’s pretty easy to imagine TikTok US becoming a meme stock—particularly if it follows a trajectory similar to Elon Musk’s X, establishing itself as a haven for conservatives, particularly conservative young people. Think I’m nuts? Well, Trump Digital Media is somehow a nearly $5 billion company even though it manages to bring less than a million dollars in quarterly million, which makes it among the meme-iest of meme stocks. 

 Right now, TikTok US reportedly has about 170 million users, and I’m not suggesting the number will halve in a year or anything. A company that size tends to deteriorate slowly, and even after decades, it can still manage to live on. Just ask the worsted wool suits over at Apollo: They’re apparently looking for someone willing to pay $1.5 billion for AOL.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

How an Ex-Oilman Became the Face of Elon Musk’s Supercomputers

As Silicon Valley hurries to build the infrastructure required to keep the AI era going, plenty of billionaire founders and major corporations are going to need their version of Brent Mayo, a rising star at xAI who has became an all-purpose fixer for Elon Musk in Memphis, where the startup is assembling two gigantic data centers. 

Yet as our Theo Wayt details in this week’s Big Read, Mayo—a young, bearded Texan who a decade ago was an oil fielder welder—is indeed a distinctly Muskworld character and to understand him is to understand the type of people who flourish in that realm.—A.B.

The Arena

NBA Commissioner’s Viral Comment Sparks a Sports Highlights Debate

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver's recent comment about basketball being a “highlights-based sport” sparked a debate among fans, some of whom felt he was devaluing full games or implying that those who can’t afford streaming should settle for short clips. 

This prompted Sara Germano to examine a key challenge for sports leagues and media companies: How they’re trying to convert a generation of fans who primarily consume sports through social media highlights into viewers of full games. Sara looks at the efforts of one media executive, Bleacher Report’s Katie Arkins, who is tasked with amplifying live sports content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.—Nick Wingfield

The Top Five

$500,000 to Find Love? Silicon Valley Upgrades From Dating Apps

A decade ago, dating apps seemed like another way to optimize and streamline a frustrating, time-consuming process—just as Uber made it easier to get a ride downtown. Yet attitudes toward the apps have noticeably shifted in recent years, leading to a boom time for the high-end matchmaking services highlighted here by our Jemima McEvoy. “It’s about ROI,” said the founder of one such company. “As one venture capitalist told me, the ROI is just not there on dating apps.”—A.B. 

Jessica E. Lessin is The Information’s Editor in Chief. You can reach her at [email protected] or find her on X. 

Abram Brown is the editor of The Information's Weekend section. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: “Home Cooking” (Radiotopia)

Back in the pandemic, much of the world found itself cooking at home a great deal more—myself included. For me, cooking went from a thrice-weekly chore to a chief pastime, and helping me figure out what to do with the eggs, asparagus and chili crisp in my fridge was “Home Cooking,” a podcast that began as someone else’s lockdown project: bestselling cookbook author Samin Nosrat (2017’s “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat”) and her friend Hrishi Hirway, who also co-hosts the “Song Exploder” pod. At a time when life seemed confounding, I appreciated their approachable simplicity to food. (“I’m not a chemist, I’m a chef,” Nosrat has stressed at one point or several on the show.) 

As restaurants and the rest of life reopened, I kept up my newfound hobby. Disappointingly, Nosrat and Hrish didn’t display the same stick-to-itiveness, and they stopped podcasting near the end of 2020. Well, they’re back and as cheerily helpful as ever: They devote most of their time to answering listeners’ questions, like what to do with tasty but malformed peach jam (use the syrup for bellinis, the fruit for Hungarian shortbread cookies) and how to improve shoofly pie (add streusel).—A.B.

Reading: “The World’s Worst Bet” by David J. Lynch 

“Globalization—what a disaster!” is not quite what I might’ve expected as the full-throated thesis issued by someone with the same credentials as David J. Lynch, the Washington Post’s global economics correspondent. Yet Lynch has been knocking around the world long enough—with earlier positions at the Financial Times and Bloomberg—to argue the point after watching deals like NAFTA and the one President Bill Clinton struck with China amount to two-fold failures.

On one level, they failed to help usher in liberal democracy and political stability to the developing world. And on the other, they only worsened economic disparity in developed nations, which has led to bouts of political instability and the rise of nationalist politicians resembling the strong men from the developing world.

Lynch, bless his heart, tries his level-headed best to offer a roadmap out of the mess, outlining what he calls “a la carte globalization.” It envisions an America that gets tougher with China “without acting as if military conflict were inevitable” and isn’t afraid to have “the government take a more active role in critical markets in order to safeguard national security, given the lessons of the pandemic, China’s inward turn and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.”

“But uncommon political discipline will be required,” Lynch warns. Otherwise, these efforts risk “descending into boondoggles, waste and cronyism.”—A.B.

Watching: “Three Days of the Condor”

A little after President Richard Nixon resigned, an excellent political-paranoia thriller starring Robert Redford (R.I.P.!) hit theaters. No, I don’t mean “All the President’s Men.” I’m talking about a movie that came out a year before Redford skulked around as Bob Woodward: “Three Days of the Condor,” which often gets short shrift in discussions about Redford’s better films.

By the mid 70s, Redford had already established a type for himself as a magnetic, golden-haired leading man. In “Three Days of the Condor,” he’s a dweeb, a low-level CIA analyst who only narrowly avoids the same sticky end as the rest of his outpost when a rainstorm delays his return from lunch. 

Well, dweeb is a relative term. Redford still manages to dodge a series of follow-up assassins, unravel a conspiracy within the Company and win over Faye Dunaway. As the title suggests, the film barrels at a quick clip over the course of 72 hours— condensing the action from its source novel,“Six Days of the Condor,” and resisting the usual temptation to explain everyone’s motivations. Yet everything that happens feels entirely plausible. Then as now, the film came out at a moment in American history marked, grimly, by political violence and a profound distrust of the government.—A.B.