Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Anthropic’s different approach to Trump 

• The Arena: Steve Ballmer may be too rich for the NBA

• Artificial Intelligence: AI boom complicates how schools recruit, retain doctoral students 

• Plus, our Recommendations: “Fiasco: Benghazi,” “Make Me Commissioner” and “And So It Goes”

Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of defrauding investors in 2022, seems intent on winning back the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley—one Twitter shitpost at a time. We’d be fools to think she can’t pull it off. In fact, she already sorta has. 

Ever since her long-dormant X account, @elizabethholmes, sparked to life about a week ago, quite a few of its posts have gone viral. And the account has deliberately interacted with some of the technorati who think of X as a pied-à-terre, such as Jason Calacanis and Bryan Johnson. Their replies to @elizabethholmes in front of their large followings have made the account’s return even more unmissable, and generally, the retweets have been done with misty-eyed good humor. You’d think Holmes was just that absent-minded friend who finally replied to the birthday party chat. 

Holmes’ apparent industriousness has impressed Justin Paperny, a consultant to the rich and infamous about life in the cooler. “Certainly your body is confined in prison, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be productive,” said Paperny, who speaks with experience. He kept a handwritten diary while serving 18 months in federal prison for securities fraud in the 2000s, passing entries to someone else to type up and post on a blog. “Writing for me was cathartic. It was a way to provide the outside world a glimpse of that foreign world of imprisonment and a way to share plans for the future with my network,” said Paperny, making sure to emphasize that Holmes can only earn full redemption by actually completing the plans she proposes via Twitter.

Holmes currently resides at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan in east Texas, which provides her with plenty of opportunities to get her voice onto the internet. How exactly? Well, smartphones and other contraband are easy enough for inmates to obtain while at low-security prisons like Bryan, where guards aren’t shy about “turning the other way while the drone drops the In-N-Out burger,” Paperny said. (He swore he wasn’t kidding.) Still, he suspects Holmes wouldn’t risk getting caught with a phone, which could get her transferred to a more restrictive facility. She’s probably just communicating with someone from the outside through her regular access to email, the telephone and in-person visits on weekends and holidays.

(@elizabethholmes’s bio includes this phrase: “Mostly my words, posted by others.” I suppose a reasonable guess at her chief partner in prose is her husband Billy Evans, who recently unveiled plans to start his own blood-testing startup. He wouldn’t comment for this column.) 

Holmes’ bid for a social media-led resurrection reminds me of what happened with Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder recently pardoned by President Donald Trump. As the New York Times noted in a recent lengthy feature on Ulbricht, his supporters waged a substantial part of their campaign to earn his freedom through Twitter. Trump then vowed to release him if he won reelection, courting votes from digitally native libertarians. He won and made good on the promise. 

If Holmes can turn herself into an online cause célèbre, I can see how it could get passed on to Trump, who has shown an obvious interest in championing things that the internet enjoys. And c’mon, face it, Trump pardoning Holmes would only be the 37th most unexpected thing he’s done.

And even if Holmes can’t land a pardon, I’m still willing to bet that she’s greeted pretty warmly when she gets out—if the reaction to those tweets are any measure. (She has about seven years left.) After all, the only thing Silicon Valley loves more than a dramatic flameout is a comeback story.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

As Tech Leaders Flatter Trump, Anthropic Takes a Cooler Approach

In the second Trump era, Washington and Silicon Valley have gotten close. I could point to a dozen examples of the newfound chumminess, but let’s just stick to the easy pickings: the recent White House dinner, where CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook were all forced to go around the table, talking about how happy they were to be there—like some demented Thanksgiving scene. 

One firm has adopted different tactics for dealing with Trump and politics: Anthropic, the fierce rival to OpenAI founded by two former OpenAI executives, Dario and Daniela Amodei, our Sylvia Varnham O’Regan reports in this week’s Big Read. While the Trump administration has sought to eliminate AI regulation, Dario Amodei has essentially argued for the necessity of regulation. Anthropic has filled its lobbying ranks with Democrats and former Biden staffers. And as for that dinner, Amodei was conspicuously absent.

The Arena

Maybe Steve Ballmer Is Too Rich for the NBA

Everyone who owns an NBA team is rich. But there’s rich, and then there’s Steve Ballmer, whose $152 billion fortune dwarfs everyone else’s. That seems to be setting up a tense situation within the league, where Ballmer's unmatched ability to reward stars like Kawhi Leonard could upend the league’s power dynamics, according to our Sara Germano in The Arena, Weekend’s new franchise on the business of sports.

Artificial Intelligence

AI Talent Frenzy Complicates How Universities Retain, Recruit Doctoral Students

The great demand for AI researchers, developers and executives has thrown life in Silicon Valley out of whack. It is also beginning to cause worry and disruption on campus: Universities are concerned that doctoral students entering AI-related fields will simply begin leaving their programs early and that fewer will eventually want to become full professors.  “I think everybody feels a little bit of the fear of missing out,” Harvard assistant professor David Alvarez-Melis told returning Weekend contributor Andrew Zucker. 

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

Listening: “Fiasco: Benghazi” (Pushkin)

More than 10 years after an attack on U.S. facilities in Libya killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, “Benghazi” is a pretty crisp synonym for “big ass blunder.” Yet I challenge you to recall exactly what happened in Benghazi—not the theories woven by the internet into a vast tapestry of conspiracies—and exactly why America was there in the first place.

Leon Neyfakh, that inimitable demystifier of convoluted history, spends the fourth season of his “Fiasco” pod untangling those details. With those efforts, he presents “a story about political warfare: how it was waged in the pre-Trump era through the media and the justice system and Congress,” as he puts it. “And how it laid the groundwork for the politics we live with today.”—Abram Brown

Reading: “Make Me Commissioner” by Jane Leavy 

Jane Leavy, the venerable former Washington Post sportswriter, possesses a charming frankness. “Baseball is never going to be the National Pastime again. Get over it,” she writes in “Make Me Commissioner.” “Nobody would invent baseball today. It’s far too elegant for our brutalist age. They’d invent pickleball.” 

Over the course of a year, Leavy traveled around America to examine the various attempts at sprucing up the sport—even putting in a few innings with the Savannah Bananas, who approach baseball with the same circus-like attitude that the Harlem Globetrotters apply to basketball. She returned with “Make Me Commissioner,” a reportorial assessment of the ol’ ball game’s current standing and her argument for how Major League Baseball could liven it up. Leavy, a veteran bestseller, dispenses her observations with authority and levity: It’s obvious that she’d make a terrific commissioner, even if some of her more radical proposals—two outfielders rather than three, a resized baseball, among other concepts—will jolt what remains of the peanuts-and-crackerjack set.—A.B. 

Watching: “And So It Goes” (HBO Max)

The rock ‘n’ roll artist Billy Joel holds to a guiding ethos that I suspect might appeal to many of you, too. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he acknowledges midway through “And So It Goes,” HBO’s new two-episode, 5.5-hour documentary about the Piano Man. “That’s my life philosophy: If I want to do it, I’ll do it.” 

Yeah, Joel’s always been a bit of a jerk—a talented, industrious, likable jerk but a jerk none the less. The tension between those elements animates the doc, which is directed by a pair of PBS vets, Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin, and comes produced by Tom Hanks and Sean Hayes. Guest interviewees include plenty of fellow celebs—Springsteen, Sting, even Nas—and an impressive amount of friends and family, including all four of Joel’s wives, who talk about him with engaging candor and a shocking amount of genuine affection. (Imagine marrying a Mr. I Do What I Want.) Joel himself indulges in a little frankness, too, when he describes the inescapable tradeoffs involved in fame. “You have to give up other things. You give up a certain amount of your life,” he says. “If you’re enjoying it, you don’t realize how much life’s going by.”—A.B.