Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Inside Jeff Bezos’ plan for Blue Origin to rocket past Elon Musk’s SpaceX

• They counsel Zuckerberg and advise Sam Altman: our picks of the top lawyers for startups

• Plus: “3 Body Problem”; a startup’s glowing Frankenplant; and an unshakable source of American anxiety

Over the last few days, I’ve spent much of my time thinking about Jeff Bezos and his ambition to transform life on Earth by extending life beyond it. We have an interview with Bezos for this week’s Big Read, a story that reports extensively on how the billionaire has pushed his rocket startup, Blue Origin, to move faster and more decisively. It needs to do both if Bezos hopes to overtake Elon Musk and SpaceX.

As we finished this story, MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’ ex-wife, offered the latest glimpse into her plans to change our lives through an update on her philanthropic giving. After posting an open call for applications, Scott has awarded $640 million to 361 small nonprofits across the country, continuing work she started in 2019. 

In a few short years, Scott has developed a reputation as a giving maverick, eschewing the traditional tools and maneuvers billionaires typically utilize. In many cases, the rich “gravitate to big, safe blue-chip institutions when they give away large amounts of money, like Harvard or a museum or a symphony,” said David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, which chronicles how the wealthy give. “Or they set up elaborate foundations,” like Bill Gates'. 

Scott, by contrast, has few staff working with her and has a desire to enrich lower-profile institutions, like the Baltimore Tree Trust, Minnesota-based Gender Justice and South Bronx United. “She’s been able to show other billionaires, ‘Hey, if you really want to give away a lot of money, it’s not that hard. You don’t have to spend all this time hiring staff and creating a big foundation. You can just add a zero to all those checks,’” Callahan said. 

But who will have more lasting impact, Jeff or MacKenzie? We’ll know more about that shortly. Blue Origin faces a pivotal year in which the launch of its New Glenn rocket could make it a more credible competitor to SpaceX. Meanwhile, a Trump reelection could imperil Scott’s liberal-minded philanthropy, with a second Trump administration likely to set legal roadblocks that curtail her efforts on issues like gender equality and climate change. Such a scenario could prompt Scott to take the natural next step in her giving journey—donating to liberal politicians who could set her vision into law. Then again, judging by the past few years in Washington, space travel may be a more attainable goal than Congressional action.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is packing up his apartment for a new home, which he intends to keep free of Frankenplants. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Jeff Bezos Readies Blue Origin for Its Biggest Test

My colleague Nick Wingfield has been covering Jeff Bezos long enough to remember pre-billionaire Bezos toiling away at Amazon’s start. In a 1999 Wall Street Journal story that Nick co-wrote, Bezos explained the site’s expansion into selling hardware tools with an impromptu product demonstration: He hoisted a pair of whirling power drills, desperado-style, donned a cowboy-style hard hat and held up what he proclaimed “the world’s best hammer.” 

“It’s called the Death Stick,” Bezos said. “You don’t just hit the nail, you kill it.’” 

Bezos is now trying to nail space travel, as Nick and our fellow Information colleague Becky Peterson report in this week’s Big Read. Since leaving as Amazon CEO in 2021, Bezos has concentrated full time on reenergizing Blue Origin, his rocket startup, which has fallen behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin faces a critical 2024, a year in which a successful launch of its New Glenn rocket could put it on a path toward substantial customer contracts—and make it a more meaningful SpaceX rival. Bezos gave a lengthy interview for their piece, revealing his deep obsession with conquering space. “I know more about rockets than anything else in the world,” he said. “I’ve been studying rockets since I was 5 years old—I only started studying e-commerce when I was 30.”

The Top 5

The Absolute Best Attorneys for Startups

Given how hapless Twitter’s executives seemed when Elon Musk burst down their door in April 2022, I have to wonder how much they—and Twitter shareholders—should thank the company’s attorneys who guided them through the saga. Those besuited saviors came from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, one of the firms that appear on this list of the top lawyers for startups, which we compiled by speaking with founders, executives, investors and, yes, attorneys. Even if you don’t expect a Musk attack, the firms on this list have decades of experience across many different endeavors, and some are willing to relax fees and negotiate pricing for first-time founders.

Buying: A Light that Blooms

In the 900-square-foot Brooklyn apartment I share with my fiancé, he has somehow managed to cultivate 68 thriving plants. He’s got orange, fig and lemon trees, white wizards, polka-dot begonia maculata, and a philodendron ring of fire, a rare, jagged-edged hybrid. In other words, I generally don’t bother trying to surprise him with a plant-related gift.

Then I heard about some newly available flora I knew he would love: a glowing firefly petunia ($29, available through light.bio), which, yes, is bioluminescent. I initially read about the plant’s existence in a new Atlantic magazine piece this week that delved into the origins of the glowing petunia, which the biologist founders of Light Bio created by implanting genes from a bioluminescent fungus. Some scientists see the glowing petunia as a veritable breakthrough in botany that could have applications in the medical world, like using bioluminescence to visualize tumors or show insulin levels. It’ll be a wait to see if those predictions come true. In the meantime, I’m waiting for our glowing petunia to arrive: The plants sold out online—all 50,000 of them— when they debuted this week amid demand from wedding planners as well as “representatives from a futuristic planned city,” according to The Atlantic. I’m hoping for a spring bloom delivery, but if not, it’ll make a great present for my fiancé’s birthday in August.—Julia Black

Listening: The Tramp’s Timely Reboot

“Hollywood Exiles,” a new podcast from the BBC and its Canadian counterpart, begins with a question. “You’ve heard of Charlie Chaplin?” the host asks in a teacake-sweet English accent. I have. So have you. And so has the host, Charlie’s granddaughter, Oona. But you’ve probably not heard the story of his rise to moguldom, and his late-in-life expulsion from Hollywood during the Red Scare of the 1950s, told with such intimacy and honesty.

Commendably, Oona doesn’t gloss over her grandfather’s flaws—his romances, his tax problems—while she offers an inviting history of a dark time in Tinseltown that threw the film industry into tumult. Her exploration traces America’s fears about Communism back to Hollywood’s very start, highlighting an uncomfortable truth: Toxic patriotism and anxiety about foreign influences seem as much part of the American psyche as any celluloid performance.—A.B.

Watching: Worlds at War

On screen and off, there’s a lot at stake in “3 Body Problem,” Netflix’s adaptation of Liu Cixin’s bestselling books, which debuted Thursday. The highly watchable sci-fi series flips between present day and the Cultural Revolution of 1960s China as scientists and researchers in both eras confront an otherworldly threat that changes the trajectory of the human race. I can’t say much more without revealing spoilers. 

As “3 Body Problem” questions whether the world can earn redemption, the series’ creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, hope to seize some for themselves. They’re the pair behind “Game of Thrones,” which, of course, ended in flames. And even with a budget of $20 million per episode, making “3 Body Problem” was no easy feat. It involved a dramatic, multiyear journey, and here’s just some of what happened: One of the show’s producers was murdered; the book’s author (who Netflix insists has had no hand in the series) endorsed China’s imprisonment of the Uyghur Muslims; and in 2020, some conservative U.S. senators wasted Congressional time with an attempt to shut down the production, citing the author’s troubling views.  

Benioff and Weiss somehow survived the chaos, producing a fittingly dark, addicting roller coaster that puts them well en route to creative absolution. At the same time, humanity’s fate in “3 Body Problem” remains intriguingly less certain.—Margaux MacColl 

Makes You Think

I’m sad they lost my invite in the mail.