Hi, welcome to your Weekend!

If you’re like the rest of the tech world, you may have spent the latter part of this past week flipping through “The Texts”—Elon Musk’s subpoenaed SMS chats with a rogues’ gallery of Silicon Valley power brokers and suck-ups. They make for fascinating reading, revealing how a bunch of guys named Joe, Jason and Jack Jack appear to run everything in the Valley. 

Is it any wonder, given the nexus of power, money and sycophancy that these texts reveal, that there is simultaneously an eruption of secret-leaking going on? Between Frances Haugen, who Abe profiles in this week’s fascinating cover story, and Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who recently alleged all manner of wrongdoing at Twitter, whistleblowers are rising up like weeds in tech tycoons’ gold-brick driveways. As Abe reports, the SEC received a record 12,210 whistleblower tips last year, up 76% from 2020. At least 1,000 of those tips came from California—which means the call is coming from inside the house. 

There is a formula at work here: The more cloistered the power holders and the more opaque their transactions (and their algorithms), the more likely that whistleblowers will keep turning up on their doorsteps. Especially when there’s a strong financial incentive for them—the thousands of potential whistleblowers—to do so. 

The men of The Texts may not fear many things in life. But they have reason to fear this.

the big read

Saint Frances of the Whistle: One Year After Frances Haugen’s Facebook Leak, Every Corporate Secret Is Up for Grabs

Almost a year to the day after she came out as the person behind the Facebook Papers, Haugen meets Abe for lunch at a Manhattan Whole Foods, where they discuss her changed life—and the larger whistleblowing renaissance. Haugen believes Meta still poses a grave danger to young people, U.S. democracy and parts of the developing world. And she's launching a new non-profit, publishing a memoir, and lobbying lawmakers and regulators to try to prove it. 

market research

Silicon Valley’s ‘Swag Gap’: A Colorful Rival Comes for Patagonia’s Abdicated Throne

Long beloved for its warmth and comforting blandness, the corporate-branded Patagonia vest became a 2010s time-capsule item last year when the company announced it would permanently stop selling logoed merchandise. As Annie explains, Patagonia’s loss appears to be Cotopaxi’s gain. With its brightly colored fabrics and subtle use of company branding, the Utah-based gear company is likely bringing its backpacks and jackets to an office or pickleball court near you.

my life's work

The Founder Who Escaped Deportation by Building a Business in 60 Days

When he left Vietnam for Boston at age 17, Sampei Omichi felt lost in the maze of decision-making. Later, with his international student visa running out, he was faced with another crisis: deportation. Speaking with Margaux, Omichi walks us through his remarkable life journey, from selling dung beetles as a child in Japan to desperately raising $5.7 million to launch his startup Ellis.

saved you two hours

Requiem for the Memestocks

When your documentary makes CNBC’s Jim Cramer look both sage and sober, you know you’ve done something...maybe not wrong, but certainly weird. Netflix’s new three-part docuseries “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” chronicles the 2021 memestock boom from the vantage point of the memesters. While it gives air time to Cramer, Citron Research’s Andrew Left, and others from the financial and advisory world who warned Redditors about their inevitable fate, its sympathies are reserved for the retail investors who piled into GameStop. The result is less illuminating than it is aggravating: Many of the amateur investors the series lionizes lost a lot of money in what ultimately became a fiasco for the little guys. But “Eat the Rich” doesn’t have much interest in examining the power dynamic that allowed that to happen. What it does have an interest in are cha-ching-style sound effects, novelty raps and meme videos, which are admittedly fun. But I couldn't help feeling that everyone involved deserved a little better, including Netflix subscribers. —Jillian

Watching: Emma Chamberlain’s dream house
A sage green marble kitchen! A custom rainbow onyx cocktail table! A braided bacbac (banana-tree bark) wall covering with metallic shimmer! God, it’s good to be a YouTube sensation. In Emma Chamberlain’s Architectural Digest home tour, she shares a house that is 100% her. Chamberlain came of age as one of the most famous people online, and now, at 21, she’s reaping the rewards of her perma-vlogging. Her 1950s Los Angeles cedar shake shingle-clad abode is what she describes as “Wet Hot American Summer meets Troop Beverly Hills.” It won’t be everyone’s taste, but it is a refreshing contrast to the white-washed, light wood West Elm interiors that have taken over Instagram. And, at least she doesn’t have Gigi Hadid’s pasta cabinets. —Annie 

Reading: How a founder’s mansion trumped his company’s valuation
Pity the founder who flies too close to the real estate sun. The latest Icarus is Bird founder Travis VanderZanden, whose scooter startup was valued at $2 billion a year ago. As Crunchbase’s Joanna Glasner notices, VanderZanden used some of his net worth to buy a $22 million, 9-bedroom, 11-bathroom mansion in Miami, formerly the home of a narcotics trafficker. One year later, VanderZanden has resigned from Bird, and his 13 percent stake in the company is worth  $12 million—about half the price he paid for his house. Don't cry for VanderZanden, though: His manse is now on the market for $39.9 million, proving that while startup valuations can be fickle, real estate is still worth its weight in gold. —Arielle

Listening: Why be a popstar when you can be a “metastar”? 
It’s official: Pop stars are out, “metastars” are in. Hume, a new Web3 record label, is betting that the next wave of singers will exist only in the metaverse, with songs minted as NFTs for fans to drop thousands on. Investors like Winklevoss Capital and TCG Crypto handed over almost $12 million dollars last week to make Hume’s vision a reality, betting that NFT songs will earn songwriters more income than streaming platforms. The Hume team includes songwriters who have worked with stars like Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa, and has already launched its first virtual influencer: angelbaby, an animated bunny who unironically rhymes “THC” and “NFT.” – Margaux

Makes You Think

A new recession indicator: The Hamburger Helper Index. 

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Jon

Weekend Editor, The Information