Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• A race against Apple that didn’t go as expected

• Silicon Valley’s favorite new supplements

• Plus: The terrors of an AI afterlife; a CEO who loves to war; and the hit that Netflix missed.

A very rare watch sold for $1.5 million at auction a few days ago, a 14-karat gold heirloom belonging to John Jacob Astor IV, the man who opened the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan and died on the Titanic. His pocket watch, along with his body, was discovered shortly after the disaster. The man purchasing Astor’s timepiece was Patrick Grunh, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and former top FTX executive. He intends the watch as a gift for his wife, a history enthusiast and Titanic obsessive. “She’s always been keen to own some piece of it,” he told me. 

Grunh’s acquisition comes awash in irony—the survivor of an infamous corporate shipwreck buying a souvenir from a famous actual shipwreck. (And somehow the watch still works!) What’s even more amusing is his general stance on investing: Grunh, a man deeply enmeshed in the crypto world, owns very little cryptocurrency: just a small sum in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the ETF launched by Barry Silbert. And he has never held any interest in digital art and non-fungible tokens. “I have never really understood those collections that sold for several millions per piece, where you have nothing to look at and no history—nothing,” he said. 

By contrast, Grunh has preferred to buy physical assets, like real estate, and collect historic artifacts. Well, prehistoric in some cases. At his Oregon home, he proudly displays a prized woolly rhinoceros skull, a cave bear’s skeleton and the remains of a juvenile Edmontosaurus, a T. Rex–era dinosaur. “Mostly we invest in things with the expectations that in 30, 40 years—if our kids ever need to sell it—then it is something that still has value,” he said. 

Here’s another amusing thought: Think about the endearing legacy left by Astor—and the Titanic. More than 100 years since the unsinkable ocean liner sank, Astor’s watch is worth seven figures. It couldn’t have been more than a trifle to him. He died at age 47 with a fortune worth $3 billion in today’s dollars. 

Now consider how history will likely treat FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who earned far greater wealth much faster. When FTX collapsed, Bankman-Fried, then 29, had amassed a roughly $25 billion fortune nearly overnight. Of course, Bankman-Fried’s fortune was illusory, and both his net worth and his company’s worth went to zero when FTX collapsed. 

Wealth, power, influence. Someone can amass so much more, so much faster today in such huge quantities—and lose it just as fast. That’s the internet age, with speed measured by keyboard strokes, not the movements of a pocket watch. Yet it can also feel so much less substantial—it’s all just digital ether. Time will tell, of course, as it always does, but it’s hard to imagine SBF’s shorts selling for $1.5 million a century from now. 

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, firmly believes Rose could’ve made room for Jack. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

How Whoop Defied Apple—And Made Its Wearables a Hit Among Athletes

Will Ahmed, 34, has cut a long, grinding path to where he is today: CEO and co-founder of Whoop, one of the most surprisingly durable startups I can remember thinking about lately. “When I was early to building this company, I put up really tall walls: I wasn’t looking inwards, didn’t want to hear what people were saying. It was a bit of a survival mechanism,” he told our Akash Pasricha. “Because I was dealing with a lot of rejection and people telling me that the company was going to fail essentially. And so I kind of just put on blinders and earmuffs, and just said, ‘This is where we’re going.’”

As Akash details in this week’s Big Read, Ahmed has turned Whoop’s fitness tracker into a beloved product and managed to guide his 12-year-old company through a punishing industry that has bedeviled major corporations, including Apple, Google and Samsung and startups alike. The hardest challenges may be yet to come, though: A few years ago, he might have been able to give his investors an exit through a sale to a bigger competitor (or possibly to private equity). That seems a lot less likely given the Federal Trade Commission’s dim view on tech M&A. So Ahmed must figure out how to keep his investors happy and en route to an exit while continuing to contend with a crowded field of giant rivals.

The Top 5

Silicon Valley’s Favorite New Supplements

My medicine cabinet is pretty sparse—just a canister of Metamucil gathering dust. Everyone else’s seems filled to the brim these days, though, as Weekend newcomer Ashwin Rodrigues describes in this piece about the latest cult-favorite supplements. Rodrigues has kept an eye on the health and fitness worlds for quite sometime—chronicling their goings-on for publications like GQ, Men’s Health and Runner’s World—and has put together a spotlight on the latest must-have items within Silicon Valley.

Listening: AI Resurrection Goes Awry 

In Audible’s new sci-fi radio drama, “Halfway,” the CEO of the titular artificial intelligence startup has a polished promise: “The most important thing to us is the protection of our users.” Gosh, where have I heard that before? 

Well, the consequences of that false promise become clear quite quickly in “Halfway,” which divides its 3.5-hour runtime into episodes lasting about 30 minutes. And I’m sure you can imagine some of those consequences once I tell you what the startup sells: a service that creates a digital, AI-powered clone of a dead loved one to help their grieving family and friends find closure. (I wish I could say this concept sounds far-fetched, but I half expect ChatGPT could be nagging me using my grandmother’s voice—RIP, bubbe—within a year or two.) 

“Halfway” comes executive-produced by actor Idris Elba, though he does not appear in it. Instead, it stars a very capable British newcomer, Patricia Allison (Netflix’s “Sex Education”), as well as veteran British comedian Lenny Henry, who plays his part for pathos, not laughs. They’re aided by the same high-touch editing and sound design that made Audible’s recently released “1984,” which our Laura Mandaro previously recommended, so memorable. 

Reading: A Media CEO Struts His Stuff 

“I feel like I’m perpetually in wartime,” said Axios co-founder and CEO Jim VandeHei. “When I think of a peacetime CEO, I think, ‘Oh, I’ve got a 30% margin, I’m growing at 30% annually. We don’t have a ton of competition.’ That’s just not media. Media is fucking war every single day: warring for scoops, battling for ad dollars—constant war.” 

He talks about this mentality in his book released this week, “Just the Good Stuff,” and describes feeling at his best when operating under such a siege mentality. It seems to have worked out for him: VandeHei was a star Washington Post reporter, then co-founder of Politico, before he left to start Axios in 2016. “Just the Good Stuff” is both an enjoyable romp through VandeHei’s many past media battles and a call to arms for other CEOs and founders to embrace his modus operandi at their companies. This includes VandeiHei’s fondness for what he calls “radical transparency,” a pledge he has taken to answer any employee’s question that doesn’t involve salary comparisons or circumstances surrounding a colleague’s departure. “For leaders, it’s just a game changer,” he said. “People just want to feel like you got their back—that you’re smart and that you’re not full of shit. If you can do those things, people will do much bigger and better things for you than you realize.” 

Watching: The Novel Thriller That Netflix Nixed 

The next time some Hollywood executive expresses doubt in an idea because it lacks any existing franchise tie or seems like too much of a lightning rod, I think they should have to try to last a few seconds in the ring with Kid, the avenging hero played by Dev Patel in the delirious action-thriller “Monkey Man.”

In “Monkey Man,” Kid toils at the edges of society in the fictional Indian city of Yatana, boxing regularly in an underground fight club. He steadily finagles his way into the upper echelons of Yatana’s elite, who he believes massacred his home village and killed his mother. As Kid’s fighting skills grow, he nears his dream of exacting retribution, aided by a temple staff of hijra, a third gender in India. By the end, Kid could give John Wick a run for his gold coins. (“Monkey Man” owes some significant debt to the Wick movies and does pay a clever, four-legged homage to the original film, with Kid training a lovable stray mutt to accompany him on an assassination. Spoiler: Unlike in “John Wick,” the dog lives.)

“Monkey Man,” which Patel directed and co-wrote based on an Indian legend about a vengeful god, almost never made it to screens. Netflix initially bought the project in 2021 but later panicked over the film’s left-leaning subversiveness, discarding it. Jordan Peele then picked it up, purchasing it through his partnership with Universal. In less than a month at the box office, the film, which cost under $10 million to make, has already taken in more than $30 million. Every Monkey Man, it seems, gets his day.

Final Thought

But, mon dieu, why are his legs still missing?