Benson Boone, Tech’s Go-To Performer
Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:
• The Big Read: The tech elite are using AI to supercharge their cancer battles
• Artificial Intelligence: Should AI and Christianity mix?
• Tech Culture: Amid AI backlash, billionaires demand new breed of bodyguard—plus, inside the star-studded Breakthrough Prize gala
• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Family Lore,” “The Long Run” and “Scream 7”
Let’s get straight to one of the biggest happenings at Google Cloud Next, the company’s annual cloud conference: singer Benson Boone’s performance, which closed out the evening on Thursday. Boone gave the crowd what they wanted—two backflips, two frontflips and one roundoff back handspring situation. Every time he climbed on the piano, people started chanting: “Backflip! Backflip! Backflip!”
Boone, a mustachioed 23-year-old with a mop of floppy Zoomer hair and biceps visible from the nosebleed seats, is as famous for those acrobatics as he is for his treacly, earwormy pop songs. Together, they’ve made him an inescapable cultural presence over the past year—at least for certain demographics. One such group: teen girls on TikTok. Another is the tech elite.
Last February, Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, performed as Boone at his wife Priscilla Chan’s 40th birthday party, clad in the same open-to-the-navel blue jumpsuit that the pop star donned in his Grammy performance. (Rolling Stone’s headline: “Mark Zuckerberg Does Benson Boone Cosplay Nobody Asked For.”)
In the fall, Boone performed at Dreamforce, Marc Benioff’s festival celebrating customer-relationship software, clogged San Francisco streets and the aggressive importation of Hawaiian culture.
And then there Boone was at Google Cloud Next at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, with Weezer as his opening act.
Why is tech so Boone-pilled? I posed the question to Zuckerberg, Benioff and Google Cloud, all of whom addressed it with the same secrecy as their AI model weights. In an email, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg said: “Going to pass on participating but such a cute story.” Later, my colleague Laura Bratton texted Benioff on my behalf and asked him why he’d gotten Boone for Dreamforce. He replied simply by sending a picture of himself standing next to Boone.
Then I went to Google. Does Thomas Kurian, the company’s cloud chief, have a favorite Benson Boone song? Did Google decide to book Boone as part of its rivalry with Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms? All a spokesperson would say is that Boone felt like “a natural fit for our community” and noted that he has previously appeared at YouTube events.
On the floor at Allegiant Stadium, with thousands of agentic AI’s most fervent—or reluctant—Boone viewers, Joanna Duff, 45, a marketing associate director at Accenture, diagnosed him with having a certain appeal. “What is it the kids say, ‘rizz’?” she asked.
Matt Hull, a Google vice president, had worked his way to the barricades to FaceTime his 11-year-old daughter. He didn’t care about Boone himself, he said. Then he pointed to his phone’s screen, where I could see his daughter dancing joyously at home. “That’s what it’s all about,” Hull said.
Meanwhile, Bentley, a 22-year-old who would only tell me her first name, was sobbing after the concert wrapped, overwhelmed by the opportunity to see Boone. She said she had initially discovered his music at the end of high school. “I’m the biggest fan,” said Bentley. She was lucky enough to walk away with a memorable souvenir: a towel used by Boone to wipe his face, which a stagehand gave her. “I stood out because there were a lot of old men in the front.”
On Friday, I returned to San Francisco, the land of college dropouts and 20-something billionaire founders, and I thought: Boone, in many ways, is not so dissimilar from how our technologists like to perceive themselves. Tech has always loved a 23-year-old with stage presence: fresh-faced and affable, oozing showbiz and literally draped in the American flag. So what if his PR team ignored my request to learn his favorite AI models? At least, he can do a backflip.—Erin Woo ([email protected])
What else from this week…
• A tiiiiny bit of news from Cupertino: Tim Cook is leaving Apple, and his departure has prompted a lot of takes on his legacy: Tim Cook, cash machine; Tim Cook, subscriptions czar; Tim Cook, chief AirPodder; and Tim Cook, empire builder, among many others.
• Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the more prominent white-shoe law firms, had to fess up in court that a legal document was full of AI hallucinations.
• At this very moment, the crooks behind the largest-ever crypto heist are quite actively laundering their ill-gotten gains.
• Resurrection is, in fact, possible—at least in the hands of data-recovery specialists, who are in demand enough to merit their own New Yorker story.
• Ever wonder what Jeff Bezos’ annual Campfire microsummit is like? Hollywood director Noah Hawley found out when he got an invite a few years ago, seemingly an attempt to woo him away from Disney. (Speaking of microsummits, more on how that type of social gathering has gotten popular among the tech elite in this Weekend story from last year.)
• Is Elon Musk really the John Rockefeller of the future?
• As often seems to happen when YouTubers and podcasters try their hand at mass expansion, things are not going very well for Alex Cooper of “Call Her Daddy” fame.—Abram Brown ([email protected])
Weekend’s Latest Stories
Can AI Help a Tech CEO Cure His Spouse’s Brain Cancer?
Chatbots are helping techies come up with daring treatment plans for themselves or loved ones facing dire medical diagnoses. But those plans can be risky and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put into action.
Should AI and Christianity Mix? Pat Gelsinger and Gloo Holdings Sure Think So
The ex-Intel CEO is helping lead a fast-growing company’s efforts to sell AI to Christian companies and Christian-inspired AI to everyone.
Tech Elite Embrace New Breed of Bodyguards After Altman Attack, AI Backlash
The technorati are unsettled. And as business booms for bodyguard firms, the wealthy want their protectors to be smarter—and chummier—than the old school muscled-up goons.
The Night Hollywood and Silicon Valley Celebrated Together
Inside the Breakthrough Prize gala, the annual, star-studded occasion that marks the world’s most significant scientific achievements.
Listening: “Family Lore”
Lore is quite like trauma: Every family has some. Mine has a story about a great-grandmother who once performed with Annie Oakley and another about a grandfather from Canada who worked as a carnie and moonlighted as a bootlegger. (Unsurprisingly, he is also a source of a great deal of trauma.) In “Family Lore,” host Lloyd Lochridge sets out to unravel the mystery behind various pseudo-myths handed down in clans across America. Lochridge, a podcast veteran and former documentary producer of series like ESPN’s 20-hour “Basketball: A Love Story,” is an able, amiable detective, generally finding that many supposed truths are at least semi-real. Take the legend passed along in the family of Martha Sayers, of Laredo, Texas, the one about her beautiful Aunt Margherita being the person who turned a concoction of lime juice, orange liqueur and tequila into, yes, the Margarita cocktail. Turns out, it’s mostly true.—Abram Brown
Reading: “The Long Run” by Martin Dugard
I enjoy running, but I’ve never wanted to do a marathon. I suppose it’s for the same reason that while I’ve happily dated many men one at a time, I’ve never had any interest in polyamory: All good things are best enjoyed in moderation. Still, I'm an exception to the general cultural norm these days—especially when it comes to marathons. In the past several decades, these 26.2-mile quests have become a mainstream hobby; fueled an ever-burgeoning and increasingly high-tech business of running apparel; and given birth to major tourist draws for cities worldwide. Here in New York, for instance, almost as many people turn out on the first Sunday in November to watch the New York City Marathon as they do on the third Thursday of the month to see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
As one race organizer tells author Martin Dugard, a longtime correspondent for publications like Runner’s World, a marathon is today “the great suburban Everest,” a totally achievable bucket-list goal held by millions of people.
“Running has always been a low-cost way to exercise—no balls, no sticks, you can do it naked if you like,” notes Dugard, himself a passionate former marathoner. (The Greeks went au naturel, as he notes, as regularly do some folks in San Francisco’s annual Bay to Breakers 12K.) “But for years it languished in the deep and lonely bunker of cult status.” With admirable fleet-footedness, Dugard charts how a “collision of events, gold medals, legislation and popular culture” have produced “a movement radically altering not just how we approach fitness but our lifestyles and communication and good health.”—A.B.
Watching: “Scream 7”
“Scream 7” reconfirms an existential fact about Hollywood: The industry is deeply freaked out about AI, an honest-to-goodness subplot within this movie. Amid the technology’s proliferation, the usual anxiety around career longevity among entertainment’s old hands has deepened; writer-director Kevin Williamson, 61, who has penned three other “Scream” films, including the original, makes the worry plainly apparent here in the series’ latest installment.
But part of the fun of the “Scream” franchise has always been to watch the zeitgeist and cultural tropes of the moment get splattered around. And besides, “Scream 7” is just a good ol’ smirky, bloody romp, with Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) once again at the center of things, pulling her daughter Tatum (Isabel May) into the ever-present danger of attracting masked, knife-wielding looneys. Of course, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) shows up, trailed by a pair of young survivors from previous Ghostface encounters who’ve become eager apprentices (Mason Gooding, Jasmin Savoy Brown). As they try to parse the connection between digital bogeymen and IRL corpses, I especially enjoyed a gunshot-loud comment on teens and their AirPods.—A.B.