Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: The father-son duo who sparked a spy scandal 

• The Arena: The WNBA and its new tech owners have a merch problem

• Plus, our Recommendations: A Birkin bag version of “Succession”; Amy Poehler, podcast goddess; and why America loves a cult

Well, look at that: We’ve broken ChatGPT. 

A full week after OpenAI debuted an improved version of the bot with better image-making abilities, the tool has experienced a gigantic surge in demand and has at times been totally unavailable to use. (Sigh. I still haven’t gotten the darn thing to finish generating mocked-up images to inspire my slow-moving bedroom renovation. Sam—a little help, please!) 

Now, if I could draw our attention away from all the Ghibli memes, another startup has also debuted a shiny new AI, and it points to the direction competition in the industry is heading in. 

That spiffy AI belongs to Runway, a New York–based startup focused on generative video AI. It released a new version of its video-editing tool that makes it easier to construct longer, more sophisticated clips. A few days later, Runway formally announced what was a poorly kept secret: It had secured a gigantic new chunk of funding from General Atlantic and other investors, reportedly valuing it at $3 billion. And it publicly highlighted a new part of its operations that we spotlighted in a recent Big Read on Runway: The startup will begin financing filmmakers, hoping to deepen connections it has made in Hollywood. 

Runway’s AI is rather obviously a significant step forward from what it offered before, and it seems pretty inevitable that OpenAI will shift to concentrating on videos in earnest given Runway’s very public advancements. (In December, OpenAI released its first version of its video-editing tool, Sora.) Runway hopes to capture a different market than OpenAI’s. It wants its tools used by professionals, while OpenAI targets a more general mass market. When Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela described the strategy in an interview for our earlier Big Read, I found myself nodding along: Yeah, they want to be the Adobe of AI—got it.

It seems like he’d have real room to maneuver away from OpenAI and establish his own territorial claim. Yet as this week has proven again, no AI company has proven to be better at capturing everyone’s attention than OpenAI, and I suspect it’s just a matter of time before OpenAI sets out to really squash the competition in video. (I wonder if concerns about that explain why Runway didn’t get the $4 billion valuation it initially wanted from its latest fundraising.) We’ll know that moment has fully arrived when Sora breaks down in public, too.—Abram Brown

The Big Read 

How Deel’s Combative Father-Son Duo Sparked a Spy Scandal 

The allegations of corporate espionage that Rippling has brought against Deel are the stuff of Hollywood spy films. And that’s just one part of the strange tale around the father-son duo, Alex and Philippe Bouaziz, behind the fast-growing startup, our Michael Roddan and Cory Weinberg show in Weekend’s latest Big Read. Indeed, the pair have long labored to erect a family empire and have employed combative tactics against competitors and partners to establish their realm. 

The Arena

The WNBA and Its New Tech Owners Have a Merch Problem

There’s a lot going right for the WNBA at the moment. It has seen an influx of fans—and Silicon Valley investment, with members of the tech elite eager to snap up ownership stakes in the league’s teams. But things are almost going too well: Merchandise partners are struggling to keep up with demand for items like jerseys and collectible toys, a problem exacerbated by the antiquated nature of the sports merch world, our Sara Germano reports. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, plans to rewatch “The Phantom Menace” this weekend—apropos of absolutely nothing. Reach him at [email protected].

Listening: “Good Hang With Amy Poehler” (Spotify)

Give an old hand like Amy Poehler the credit she deserves: Her new podcast, “Good Hang With Amy Poehler,” is exactly as described—a good hang. As Poehler describes it: “I’m not a therapist. I’m not here to change your life. I don’t care if you get any better. I don’t have advice for you. I just want us to have fun and light up a little.” 

For “Good Hang,” Poehler mostly relies on her well-honed ability to make us laugh—and the depth of her Rolodex of famous friends, with each episode centered around a conversation with one such pal. It’s all very straightforwardly assembled, and I do appreciate the opening segment, which is a trick journalists employ all the time: She calls up people who know her forthcoming guest—she refers to this as “talking well” behind someone’s back—and asks them what they think she should bring up in the conversation to come. 

The series’ first couple episodes featured such famous funny people—Tina Fey, Martin Short, Rashida Jones—that it was sort of impossible for the show to falter. And as much as I was enjoying it, I was wondering how well it could hang together in the inevitable moment when Poehler didn’t book an A-lister. The most recent episode eased my doubts. Actor-comedian Ike Barinholtz visited Poehler, and at one point they fell into a discussion about perverts and creeps, with Poehler arriving at an important distinction between the two: Every creep is a pervert, but not every pervert is a creep. “Could not be more well said,” Barinholtz concludes. “I believe it was Mark Twain who first coined that phrase.”—A.B.

Reading: “Cults Like Us” by Jane Borden 

What do the Pilgrims, the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors and Amway have in common? I suppose the title of Jane Borden’s book is stepping a little on my punch line, but—hey, lemme finish: They were all cults! (Yes, especially the Pilgrims, who had to flee England because they were so damn cultish.) Borden, a Vanity Fair veteran, takes a pleasantly light touch to a topic often treated with far more solemnity, and she gets away with it by delving mostly into the past. I suppose it’d be rather gauche to do a tongue-in-cheek chronicle of a group like the Oneida Bible Communists, whose 19th-century leader encouraged adherents to have sex with their siblings, if Borden was revealing some more recent depravity with living victims. (To follow Amy Poehler’s taxonomy, many of these factions would definitely fall into the “creep” category.)

As Borden threads through history, she points out the similarities between these different clans, arguing that it’s practically un-American not to fall for a cult. After all, the country has done it again and again. And again. “My dad would’ve fit right in with the QAnon people,” said the son of one 20th-century cult czar. He thinks the pizzagate followers largely relied on “recycled stuff from my childhood.”

Borden can’t resist making another observation—that much of capitalism is rather cultish. Yeah, well, duh!—A.B. 

Watching: “La Maison” (Apple TV+)

I first encountered “La Maison” the way anyone finds their next great Apple TV+ watch: by falling down a deep social media rabbit hole and stumbling upon an unrelated interview with one of its actors. Did you know Apple made a French-language prestige drama in the mold of “Succession” that came out in September? No, of course not—no one in Cupertino knows how to properly telegraph these things. 

“La Maison” is set, bien sûr, within a Paris fashion house. The eponymous star designer, Vincent Ledu, has been canceled after his racist tirade gets recorded, kicking off an emergency search for his replacement. Will it be his bumbling nephew, who has suffered long in Vincent’s shadow but consistently distracts himself by cruising every hot cater-waiter he sees? Or maybe it will be Paloma Castel, a renegade Gen Z eco warrior with a secret past who is bent on changing the wasteful fashion industry. The matriarch of rival house Rovel compounds the drama further: She schemes to weaken Ledu, infiltrate its ranks and acquire it for her fast-growing conglomerate.

The 10-episode arc of “La Maison” has plenty of twists and turns, and like HBO’s “Succession,” the series is rife with insufferably rich antiheroes heavily inspired by a real-life corporate dynasty: News Corp and the Murdochs are to “Succession” what LVMH and the Arnaults are to “La Maison.”

It’s campy, soapy—and full of lust-worthy interior design. I just hope the secretive studio wizards at Apple don’t make an additional error and fail to greenlight a second season.—Sara Germano

Final Thought

Agreed—that market is outta control. 

Correction: In an earlier version of this newsletter, we inadvertently said Deel had accused Rippling of corporate espionage. Obviously, it’s the reverse: Rippling alleges Deel carried corporate espionage.