Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Lists: 20 great books to read over the holidays.

• Artificial intelligence: A marketplace for solving AI’s copyright woes? 

• Plus: The crust czar; a go-to travel shoe; and birds with bullets.

Elon Musk really has reached a remarkable place within our lives, a type of ubiquity few other business titans have ever enjoyed. Sure, each decade always has its cast of famous, well-followed faces—Milken in the ’80s, Bezos in the ’90s, Jobs in the aughts and so on. But very few achieve an equivalent omnipresence and public fascination, and my certainty that Musk is a different kind of business celebrity was renewed over Christmas when my mother, a retired Latin teacher who generally has zero interest in technology and business, had several questions about him for me.

Musk’s behavior and the media attention given to his actions illustrate this observation about his profile nearly every day, and that reality was further underscored when I went to assemble a list of holiday vacation books and realized I could do nearly an entire subsection of very good books all about Musk. These include Kurt Wagner’s “Battle for the Bird,” Zoë Schiffer’s “Extremely Hardcore” and Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s “Character Limit.”

Few outside observers know Musk better than these authors, so I asked them what they thought might happen in 2025 and the near-distant future for him. 

Wagner, a Bloomberg reporter, had a reasonable-sounding guess: X gets bought by xAI, Musk’s increasingly valuable artificial intelligence startup. It would provide a plausible exit strategy to X’s investors, who likely don’t have too many other options for one. “Well, ultimately, how do you get those people their money back? The easiest way to do that is to strap X onto something that is more successful,” Wagner said. “It makes logical sense because X is already the data that they need to train” the models developed by xAI. 

Schiffer sees X becoming what amounts to a state-run media network if Musk stays a central figure in the new Trump administration. “It will look a lot like that,” said Schiffer, an editor at Wired magazine. “If Trump is trying to get people to support a specific policy or get people excited about something or get people to protest against something, all of those things are going to play out on X, and it's going to be a really good platform for that.”

As for Mac, he and I used to work together at Forbes on the team that values the 10-digit-and-up fortunes on the World’s Billionaires list and the Forbes 400. (For context, Forbes currently estimates Musk’s fortune at $435.9 billion, a more than 4,000% increase since 2016.) So Mac, who’s now at The New York Times, had a prediction he knew would amuse me, given our shared background: “world’s first trillionaire.”

Look, I know inflation has been crazy, but…

“I don’t say that in the, like, admirational way that Sam Bankman-Fried was written up in that Sequoia profile,” Mac assured me. “Elon’s in an incredible position of power: SpaceX has a stranglehold on space—Tesla’s only getting bigger. And now he has his fingers on the controls of the federal government.”

Well, when you put it like that. “There is nothing to stop him from reaching that,” said Mac. “Except maybe himself.” 

Terms of Descent

Within tech, is there a more dreaded bit of startup speak than “down round?” 

Yes, I’m teasing a little, but only just a touch: Startup valuations are meant to only go up. When founders have to accept lower valuations, it’s a pretty clear marker things have gone awry. No one wants to end up in such a situation. Everyone does their best to avoid it, and when founders do need to accept it, they usually do so silently—out of view of the media.

But not Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl, whose public openness about his jet startup’s recent down round intrigued me (as did the investors in the fundraising, a group that included Sam Altman, Paul Graham and Reid Hoffman). 

Scholl, whose startup hit unicorn status in 2021, has done some soul-searching and hopes other founders will buy into his perspective, which he thinks is a better long-term strategy than hiding in shame. 

“I went through that need to remind myself I’m not my valuation,” he said. “When people are building things that can take years to fruition, the gratitude cycles can be very long. And as founders, it’s very natural to look for things to latch on as signals of whether we are making progress or not: Valuation can be one of these things. Then, psychologically, when the valuation goes down that hurts.”

Scholl founded Boom in 2014 and acknowledges his initial plans for Boom have shifted. In the past, he liked to talk about tickets on a Boom plane possibly getting down to $100. Today he keeps the conversation to what he thinks is a more achievable situation: a Boom ticket priced at what a business class ticket on a traditional airplane currently costs. 

I asked Scholl how he was maintaining his enthusiasm a decade later. “My first company was a barcode-scanning game, and I would get up in the morning, and I would think, ‘Why am I doing this?’” Scholl recalled. “With Boom, I’ve never had a moment where I questioned whether it was worth giving it everything.” 

Oh, why’s that? 

“The world needs—and deserves—supersonic flight. And I think it’s important to the country: important economically, important to national security. We’ve got to invent and build the next generation of airplanes in the U.S. or else they’re going to go to Asia just like chips,” he said. 

Still, Scholl’s candidness has a limit: He wouldn’t disclose what Boom’s latest valuation is.—Abram Brown

Lists

20 Great Books to Read Over the Holidays

As we end 2024, I’m encouraging everyone to turn the page on the year by turning a few pages—more like I’m pleading with everyone to log off for a bit and pick up a book, like Parmy Olson’s “Supremacy,” one of the year’s best on artificial intelligence. 

“What’s fascinating to me is that you have these people who think they’re chasing a utopia,” Olson told me. “And that creates tension.”

Artificial Intelligence

A Marketplace to Solve AI’s Copyright Woes?

Trip Adler, a co-founder of Scribd, hopes he has an answer to the latter question: His new startup, Created by Humans, wants to establish a thriving digital marketplace where copyright holders and AI companies meet and strike licensing deals. Some of that is happening, but not with great frequency—or great clarity for either party. Adler pictures his startup acting like a Spotify of the AI era. 

“With music, there was all this piracy, and then Spotify came along and created a legitimate model for the industry,” he told me. “We see this playing out similarly here.” 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, wonders if a foreigner like Santa Claus will eventually need an H1-B, too. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Buying: Dry and Fly 

A couple years ago, I was planning a trip through the Italian Alps and then Venice, Milan and Florence. This was in May, and the weather forecast made it clear I would get drenched someplace, which made me seek out what I figured might be impossible to find: stylish—OK, presentable enough—waterproof sneakers.

Nike’s line of Gore-Tex sneakers are now my go-to travel shoe unless a trip requires some type of formal dress—rain or shine. They fit the bill exactly: a shoe with a classic sneaker silhouette…that stays absolutely dry but can pair with plenty of fits. They can go toe to toe with my Blundstone and L.L. Bean boots any rainy day, and they’re much easier to pack than either of those chunkier options. And I do take them everywhere, since I find travel in even ostensibly precipitation-free locales often leads to far more varied and unexpected circumstances than you’d see in a normal day. A tough shoe comes in handy on those occasions. 

I bring all this up at this moment because Nike has been running a series of deep discounts lately, and in a recent one a few weeks ago, I picked up my third pair of Gore-Tex Nikes. It’s a nice occasion for deal shoppers like me, but it’s a grim reflection of the times for beleaguered Nike, and Sara Germano, Weekend’s new reporter on the business of sports, had more on the company’s turnaround efforts last week.—A.B.

Listening: The Pie Guy 

J. Kenji López-Alt is a modern-day pie expert: His 2007 recipe for Cook’s Illustrated, “Foolproof Pie Dough,” became one of the internet’s first true viral recipes—famous for substituting vodka for some of the customary water.

Which means my internal temperature shot up to 400 degrees with excitement a few weeks ago when I saw López-Alt had dropped an entire episode devoted to apple pie on “The Recipe,” the podcast he co-hosts with Deb Perelman, a fellow recipe developer and cookbook author. Hearing López-Alt talk about pie is like listening to Scorsese speak about film or Seinfeld discuss comedy—such is the level of his expertise.

What I appreciate most about Alt-López on “The Recipe” is his commitment to making the craft approachable, and he and Perelman maintain a chatty-with-Chardonnay demeanor. Sometimes they go in depth on ingredients and technique. At other moments, they’re gastro-historians: Who knew McDonald’s basically invented the breakfast sandwich—or why real old-fashioned bagel shops typically didn’t offer one? (It was to keep kosher.) Their conversations meander, and I’m never displeased by them: How else would I know a Staub braiser is actually far more practical than a Dutch oven in many circumstances?—A.B. 

Watching: His and Hers, Weapons Edition 

Until “Black Doves,” the closest Ben Whishaw came to playing a gun-toting secret agent was in a role as a secret agent’s sidekick: He’s been the new Q in the James Bond series since “Skyfall.” Nothing much about his performance as 007’s gadget dispenser suggested he could carry a series in which he did more than hand out the lethal goodies. 

But he really can. And so can his costar, Keira Knightley, who surely was a more straightforward choice for this sort of thing: “Black Doves” is a winky, bloody British spy thriller, with the intrigue unspooling around Christmas. (It’s obviously going to get another season, and I’ll be amused to see if this remains a Christmas show or if Netflix does what it did with “Stranger Things” and hopscotches plots between holidays.) Whishaw and Knightley have an easy, platonic charm together—don’t they, darling?—which keeps you from thinking too hard about whether the latest twist really makes complete sense.—A.B.

Final Thought

Safe(ish) travels, all!