Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Big Read: Sports execs’ favorite pastime? Venture capital

• The Top 5: The best new startup accelerators 

• Plus, our Recommendations: “Autocracy in America,” “I Regret Almost Everything” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”

LeBron James would like the internet to behave itself. Of course, it won’t. 

The NBA great has apparently become deeply annoyed by the proliferation of AI-generated videos depicting him as pregnant—I wouldn’t dare share a link to them, but they’re definitely easy to find—and he’s now sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creators of a small-scale AI tool, InterLink AI, that he thinks is powering those clips. And because the internet works as it does, the legal threat has itself gone viral, drawing even more attention to the pregnant LeBron videos. 

I really don’t think LeBron fully considered the letter’s ramifications. Will it get the creators of InterLink—a group of AI hobbyists who spread the tool via a Discord channel—to change the program? Maybe. But I’m positive several dozen more people in Silicon Valley can quickly build an AI that does the same thing. And now LeBron has quite publicly revealed how much the videos bother him.

Web culture is impish. The internet is a place where memesters are the political cartoonists of our age—the shitposters are our foremost humorists. And given the chance, they’d joyfully flood him with so many pregnant LeBron videos that the Ghibli deluge from earlier this year would look like a light mist. 

I’m always baffled when a mogul like LeBron can’t figure out how to use his billion-dollar fortune to buy himself a distraction from whatever’s irritating him. (It’s like French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, suing Candace Owens for saying Madame Macron was born a man.) But then I thought more about LeBron specifically. Essentially, he’s made the classic elementary school mistake: letting everyone see how much the teasing gets to him. I guess that playground lesson isn’t one an athletic demigod thinks much about. 

Tech’s Trump Bet Pays Off

Quite a scene unfolded on Wednesday, one that four years ago might’ve seemed a little strange: President Donald Trump, seven months into his second term, laid out a sweeping new policy framework for AI that aims to throw the industry into even greater overdrive. He did so at a conference co-hosted by venture capitalists, including a quartet of investors turned podcasters, one of whom has used the podcast’s national audience to become Trump’s AI and crypto czar. 

That’s almost a Mad Libs version of everything the technorati could want from a president, and it underlines how well Silicon Valley’s bet on Trump has paid off. 

Despite worries over Trump’s tariffs, the stock market has steadily risen, with the S&P 500 up about 7% since he took office. The iced-over IPO market has thawed: Figma will likely make a long-awaited public debut next week, following strong outings for CoreWeave and Circle. And Trump’s support of AI pales in comparison to the full-throated endorsement he has given the cryptocurrency industry, steering his administration away from the strong-handed regulatory approach favored by Joe Biden’s White House. As a result, crypto prices have soared. That’s been good for the venture firms invested in crypto startups. More generally, it’s a boon for the tech elite who hold substantial personal wealth directly in crypto. 

Granted, Trump’s first few months have brought substantial drama. The person who led the industry’s embrace of Trump, Elon Musk, has exiled himself from the White House. But even without Musk in Washington, Trump hasn’t gone cold on tech. And yes, Trump’s peripatetic tariffs strategy could still tank the markets at some point—and so might a decision to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. But so far the markets keep chugging up. 

The most remarkable element: With so much of Silicon Valley’s hopes pinned to AI, even the lefties in tech are sitting pretty right now—at least from an economic perspective.

Bye-Bye, Bezos 

Back in sunnier days at The Washington Post, the publication’s popularity on TikTok seemed an amusing and unique reflection of its ability to appeal across platforms and audiences.

The guy powering that popularity was Dave Jorgenson, who not only launched the Post’s TikTok account but also starred in many of its videos—earning himself a healthy amount of internet fame in the process. Now he’s leaving the Post to strike out on his own.

His departure intrigues me for several reasons. In this interview with The New York Times, he talks up his YouTube channel but seems to have nothing to say about TikTok, a telling signal of the creator economy’s current state, I reckon. And then there’s the fact that he’s departing with two other Posties in tow, one of whom was his direct manager. Bosses often quit and take along their subordinates, but I don’t know too many people who quit and take along their bosses.—Abram Brown

Weekend’s Latest Stories

The Big Read 

Sports Leagues Hunt for Startup Investments in a Chummy Version of Venture Capital

In the last several years, sports leagues have swiped a page from the Silicon Valley playbook and developed an interest in startup investment. What’s motivating them? The answer is all the money they’ve raised from some mega media deals—and the sense among league executives that they risk falling behind if they don’t develop some relationships with younger businesses. Their style of venture capital isn’t quite the Silicon Valley version: It’s quite gentlemanly, with the leagues sharing tips and leads and happily co-investing with each other, as our Sara Germano reports in the latest from The Arena, our new franchise on the business of sports.

The Top Five

The Best New Startup Accelerators

The very first startup accelerators appeared about two decades ago—a wave led most prominently by Y Combinator, the brainchild of Paul Graham, then a popular web essayist and former Yahoo executive. Dozens more accelerators have launched in the years since, and our Alex Perry highlights the ones that have risen to prominence in the last five years and carry significant word-of-mouth recommendations. Several come from major venture firms, like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. One is rigorous as hell: HF0 features a 12-week program where participants live together in a San Francisco mansion with no visitors allowed for the first 20 days. The program’s founder, Dave Fontenot, refers to it as his “startup monastery.”

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, wonders how many V-Bucks it took to win over Paul Thomas Anderson. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Listening: “Autocracy in America” (The Atlantic)

In 2005, Garry Kasparov’s anti-Putin politics put him in harm’s way when an angry young man hit him over the head with a chessboard Kasparov had just autographed. “Thank god it was not a baseball bat,” he says as he introduces his latest project: hosting the second season of The Atlantic’s “Autocracy in America.” The podcast’s subject is obviously thorny, and were it not for Kasparov taking over the hosting duties, I’d probably be reluctant to include it here. But Kasparov has real authority on the subject of authoritarianism, having spent much of his life fighting first against the Soviet Union and later against Vladimir Putin.

Reading: “I Regret Almost Everything” by Keith McNally

How did Keith McNally, a stevedore’s son from east London, ever end up in New York City? He watched “Klute,” a 1971 thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda set in New York. In one scene, the two stop at a sidewalk produce stand, the supple fruit an obvious metaphor for the budding sexual tension between the characters. It made McNally long to escape to New York. “It wasn’t the scene’s eroticism that triggered the longing,” he acknowledges in his memoir, “I Regret Almost Everything.” “It was the idea that you could buy fresh fruit in Manhattan after midnight.” 

“I Regret Almost Everything” is a no-holds-barred feast from the person who has done as much as anyone to shape New York’s tastes—and as a result shape the world’s. McNally is, of course, the restaurateur (a word he despises for its obnoxious Frenchness) behind Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and The Odeon, among many other establishments. He’s the guy who banned James Corden from eating at his restaurants a couple years ago, one of the many vivid moments he recounts in his book. As with many of those instances, he regrets the altercation. Well, kinda. He’s careful not to say Corden didn’t deserve the internet hate. “The bastard probably did,” McNally writes. “I’m just saying I didn’t see the incident that, to some degree, jeopardized his career. If this is the power of Instagram, I want no part of it.”

Watching: “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount Plus)

Plenty of megafranchises haven’t fared well in recent years. And for Paramount, “Star Trek” is an outright shipwreck. The studio has canceled or ended nearly all its shows set within Federation Space, and the most recent film, “Section 31,” was a total stinker. 

A lone outpost is “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which has recently returned for a third season after a two-year hiatus. Know the difference between a bat’leth and a lirpa? Convinced Garak really did have the hots for Dr. Bashir? If so, I’m not sure you’ll like “Strange New Worlds,” which isn’t as densely packed with mythology and backstory as most “Trek” outings. Rather, the show is light and approachable, relying mostly on an adventure-of-the-week style and Anson Mount’s well-coiffed charm as Captain Christopher Pike. It’s perfect for newbie Trekkies and the “Trek” curious. 

If I was David Ellison, Paramount’s about-to-be new owner, I’d find the first opportunity to stick “Strange New Worlds” into a replicator and get myself a dozen more “Trek” properties just like it.—Abram Brown

Final Thought

[Trump voice]: A lot of people don’t know this—Jason was actually the first investor in Uber. Can you believe it? Saw it before anybody else.