Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Dawn of the Silicon Valley superbaby

• New tech mogul must-have: a Jensen jacket 

• Plus: A witty, extremely online weatherman; the ladies at Luxor; and Nicolas Cage goes Hannibal.

Elon Musk is pledging to leave California—and to take his companies with him. As with many Musk declarations, his vow seems more performative than substantive. 

On Tuesday, Musk said he planned to relocate SpaceX’s and X’s headquarters from the Golden State to Texas. SpaceX will move to Starbase, Texas—near existing SpaceX operations—and X will go to Austin. 

Who wins and who loses here?

I don’t think Texas gains much, and let’s talk just about Austin for a second. Even if all the Twitter remnants went there, those few hundred people wouldn’t be enough to shift the city’s status as a tumbleweed town for anyone with significant ambitions in tech. (Don’t y’all rush out to tar and barbecue me for saying so. The numbers support my assessment: Austin startups saw a 30% drop in venture capital funding last year.)

And it’s unclear exactly how many X and SpaceX employees would land in the Lone Star State. Tesla still keeps major facilities in the Bay Area even though Musk previously shifted the car-maker’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin in 2021. So I could see some Musk employees finding a way to stick around California. (I guess the environment could be counted as a very marginal winner: in the past, SpaceX has operated commuter flights for employees traveling between Texas and California nearly every day. When SpaceX moves to Texas, maybe it can cut back on those jet flights—fewer PJs, fewer carbon emissions!) 

Generally, these types of HQ decisions tend to be less meaningful than you’d think. In 2020, for instance, Oracle said it was moving to Austin. But even after that, CEO Safra Catz has been living in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, while co-founder Larry Ellison remained in Hawaii. Then, in April, Oracle said it was moving again—this time to Nashville.

Still, I suspect SpaceX leaving southern California could hurt the space race boom town formed around El Segundo. There, a cluster of fledgling space startups have risen alongside SpaceX, partly because they could pull from the SpaceX talent pool and partly because SpaceX’s presence made the place feel vibrant and important—a destination. True, some major traditional aerospace companies, like Boeing, will remain in town. But I wonder if the startups will find fewer investors and potential business partners stopping to take a meeting if they can’t also call on SpaceX during the same trip.

What Musk, an outspoken Trump supporter, does get from moving SpaceX’s and X’s headquarters is a chance to publicly needle California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a top Democrat. (Musk even got to make a fellatio joke!) But poking Newsom likely wasn’t as delicious as Musk might’ve liked. It occupied no more than a fifteenth of a newscycle, since so much else was happening.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, tried not to bring up politics at all this week but just couldn’t. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Dawn of the Silicon Valley Superbaby

Back in 1997, “Gattaca,” a film starring Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law, imagined a future in which genetic engineering is common, and natural-born humans are the society’s commoners. Hawke’s character, Vincent, is one such peasant, and with Highsmithian hijinks, he finds a way to move up in his world. 

“Gattaca” didn’t do well at the box office, but critics generally liked it, especially Roger Ebert. “At a time when we read about cloned sheep and tomatoes crossed with fish, the science in ‘Gattaca’ is theoretically possible. When parents can order 'perfect' babies, will they?” he wrote in his review, giving the film three out of four stars. “How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That's how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.”

“Gattaca” has since enjoyed an afterlife as a deep-cut favorite, and it’s immediately what I thought about when our Julia Black and Margaux MacColl first told me they wanted to report this week's Big Read on the gigantic boom in fertility tech startups. Those companies aren’t quite at “Gattaca” level, though the most daring among them have ambitions that sound quite sci-fi-ish: They want to develop artificial wombs and human eggs grown from stem cells, among other projects. Billionaires like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman have invested. And people like Elon Musk are eager customers.

The Top 5

Get Yourself a Leather Jacket as Cool as Jensen’s

Like the black turtleneck and the humble hoodie in past Silicon Valley eras, the leather jacket has become a cool new techland garment after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made it his default look—as Silicon Valley has reconsidered him as a corporate rockstar. “The hoodie reigned for decades, now our tech clients—founders and CEOs of billion dollar companies—are building a wardrobe of leather jackets,” a stylist with Silicon Valley customers told returning Weekend contributor Antonina Jedrzejczak. 

With Antonina’s assistance, you can duplicate Huang’s preference for café racer-style jackets or choose to draw loser inspiration from him and pick up a wilder leather number, like one in a bold color or a newly cool-again trench coat. 

Following: Snark and Stormy

Last weekend, a basement Manhattan comedy club filled up for a sold-out show from a born-and-bred New Yorker. The headliner was not a Seinfeld type but meteorologist John Homenuk, who runs a beloved series of social media accounts all with the same purpose and name, New York Metro Weather. 

With 200,000 followers across X, Instagram and TikTok, Homenuk’s succinct, colorful posts give a zero-to-10 rating of the day’s weather and a pithy description of the day’s expected weather-related vibes. This past Tuesday, for instance, received a 1/10. "Comically bad," Homenuk wrote in an early morning Instagram post. "High temps in the upper 90s with heat index values over 100F. Ridiculously high dew points and storms later, too. The vibes are extremely not good out there."

A 0/10 is rare. Homenuk has issued only five since he began in 2021: In three instances, the heat index neared 110 degrees. The other two involved torrential rain. Actually, he’s often optimistic: 10/10s are more common. Last year, he doled out 21 perfect 10/10 days, with a daily average rating of 5.64.

Homenuk has a pleasant, extremely online sense of humor, which makes him fun to follow even if you don’t live in the area he covers. I asked him if there’s a Bay Area equivalent to his particular brand of meteorology. Not really, he said. Perhaps that could change. “I love SF,” Homenuk said. “So maybe I need to start an account and head out there half the year.”—Paris Martineau

Reading: Matriarchs with Mummies

In our collective consciousness, we hold some images of Egypt: a bandaged-up mummy; Brendan Fraser in “The Mummy”; an Egyptologist running around with brushes, shovels and a pith helmet in pursuit of a mummy, among others. 

The helmeted scientist: a guy, right? Historian Kathleen Sheppard asks us to reconsider our answer with “Women in the Valley of the King” (St. Martin’s Press), which excavates the lost legacies of women Egyptologists like Marianne Brocklehurst, Emma Andrews and Margaret Alice Murray. Their stories are exceptional not just because we haven’t heard them as often as we’ve heard about Howard Carter and Tutankhamun’s tomb: By a measure important to us today, those women were better than their male contemporaries. Indeed, the women studying ancient Egypt in the late 19th century and early 20th century tended toward “work that was more constructive and sustainable, and less destructive, than men’s work.” 

Also consider: the Linda Blairs of TikTok; an audio-only detective; Ken Griffin’s problematic new prize.—A.B.

Watching: The Devil’s Right-Hand Man

Horror fans—and Nicolas Cage devotees—will enjoy “Longlegs,” a serial killer thriller in which the actor delivers an eerily quirky performance as the titular demented murderer, Longlegs. Just the villain’s face, which has been botched by plastic surgery, will make you uneasy. Maika Monroe (the star from the earlier cult horror film “It Follows”) plays the socially awkward FBI detective trying to catch him.

“Longlegs,” which is in theaters now, takes obvious inspiration from the 1992 best picture winner “The Silence of the Lambs” but falls short of achieving the same type of scares. The movie’s supernatural storyline really doesn’t quite live up to expectations. Still, it’s far better made than most in the campy genre of slasher flicks, and Cage’s commitment to the character is enough to justify the price of admission. “Longlegs'' exceeded expectations in its opening weekend, earning $22.6 million, which ranks it among the Top 15 biggest opening weekends for a film released by an independent studio, Variety reported.

Now for a little trivia: The film’s director, Osgood Perkins, is the son of Anthony Perkins, who played the titular role in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” a film that another recent horror release, “MaXXXine,” pays homage to.—Kate Clark

Final Thought

There is no turning back: You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed.