Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• Inside Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman

• How an LA backwater turned into a hotbed of America-first capitalism

• The Top 5: Best summer camps for future tech moguls

• Plus: The guy who cost Reddit billions; a blast from Marvel’s past; an incredible shortcut through Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker”; and the AI of the 18th century.

The New York Times Co. bedeviled the internet earlier this week with an April Fools’ Day edition of its new word-association game, Connections: a version containing no words—only emojis.

“That puzzle was superfun,” said Jonathan Knight, the company’s San Francisco–based head of games. “I didn’t even know it was coming, to be honest with you. I had talked with our editorial director about a concept like that, but I try to give them the freedom and independence to make the most creatively satisfying puzzles.” 

The puzzle certainly got people’s attention. After Connections’ emoji edition debuted, the Times’ Games app was at No. 3 on Apple’s Free Games chart—behind only Call of Duty and Monopoly Go! Millions of people play Connections daily, Knight said, making it the most popular Times game behind only Wordle, after a quick rise following its launch last August. 

More broadly, Connections’ popularity reflects the enormous—and carefully managed—growth of the company’s games division, which has lately become a bit of a viral talking point in Silicon Valley and New York media. The conversation was sparked after Matthew Ball, a widely followed digital media analyst, shared a chart showing how the Times’ Games app attracts more engagement than its sports, news and cooking apps. (Surely readers of The Information couldn’t have been that surprised! They got treated to a deep dive on the company’s bundled-product strategy a year ago.)

The Times’ high-touch, slow-paced creation of Connections is reflective of its broader strategy for its Games division. The initial idea for Connections came in 2022 during one of the Times’ semi-regular internal hackathons for game development. “Then we sort of put it on the shelf,” Knight said, to focus on integrating Wordle into the Times after its 2022 acquisition and launching another game, Digits, that they developed in-house. Near the end of 2022, Knight brought a Connections prototype “to dinner parties and company holiday parties and just sort of dropped it on the table for people to play around with it,” he said. “There was such excitement. It gave me a good sense that it was going to be popular.” 

Knight arrived at The Times in 2020 after a burnished career at videogame giants like Activision and Electronic Arts, as well as time at Zynga during its heyday, working on games like Farmville and Words With Friends. “And I think you can draw a line from Words With Friends to The New York Times” with its array of word games, Knight said.

What might come next for The Times? “I’ve been really interested in logic-based mystery puzzles,” Knight said. “A daily mystery puzzle—sounds great, right? Figuring out how to make a very approachable version that doesn’t feel like homework has been the challenge.”

The Guy Who Cost Reddit Billions

“This is not a Facebook,” insisted Andrew Freedman, a 35-year-old partner at little-known Hedgeye Risk Management, whose short call last week on Reddit has sparked a rapid decline in the newly public stock. 

Freedman thinks Reddit will struggle to monetize its base of adoring users to the same degree as Facebook and other social media companies, a factor Wall Street wasn’t fully appreciating, he said. Still, it’s a bold proposal, considering how Redditors have managed to propel stocks against the traditional laws of corporate gravity. You can read more from my conversation with Freedman here.

I also recommend what my colleagues Martin Peers, Cory Weinberg and Stephanie Palazzolo have written about Reddit. They and Freedman would have a lot to chat about.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is, embarrassingly enough, no more than a Wednesday crossword man. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

The Big Read

Behind the Marriage of Microsoft and Mustafa Suleyman, a Bid for Redemption

Thought we might take a breather after our initial scoops on Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman? Hardly! Suleyman had barely set foot in Redmond, Wash., when our reporter Julia Black set out on writing this profile. 

She captures a man in transition. If Suleyman succeeds as Microsoft’s new consumer artificial intelligence chief, it will make him one of the most important people in technology—and conclude his journey beyond his fiery exit from Google. Where could this new role take him? Within the halls of Microsoft headquarters, there’s even some speculation that CEO Satya Nadella could groom Suleyman as his replacement. It would make sense. Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist who sits on Microsoft’s board and who co-founded Inflection with Suleyman, told Julia that Suleyman will flourish at Nadella’s Microsoft. 

“He is very entrepreneurial and very hard driving: ‘We need to get this done this week. We need to launch. We need to go!’” Hoffman said. “One of the things that’s really good about Satya, his leadership, the Microsoft team, is they’re willing to go bold and take risks. That level of ‘Go, go, go! Make it happen!’ fits well within Satya’s Microsoft culture.”

Rockets, God and Peter Thiel: 36 Hours in the Gundo, Tech’s Latest Startup Haven

Ahhh, I remember my first time in El Segundo, Calif., very well. I got lost leaving a Los Angeles Airport rental car lot and spent a frustrating 15 minutes trying to navigate out of El Segundo to find the highway and get to a proper part of town. (I think Spago reservations awaited me.)

By contrast, our Margaux MacColl couldn’t get enough of the place last week in reporting this story on a boomlet in defense tech and cutting-edge manufacturing startups in El Segundo—or the Gundo, as those founders like to call it. They’ve collectively raised more than $1 billion in funding from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and, yes, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In fact, when Margaux was in town, she found Thiel over at a brewery on El Segundo’s Main Street, deep in conversation with many of the young founders, including 23-year-old Augustus Doricko, who showed up clad in a beige suit and cowboy boots. 

Doricko’s Rainmaker Technology hopes to prove that cloud seeding—dispersing chemicals into existing clouds to increase precipitation—can actually work, and he sees himself drawn to capitalism by a force from high above.  “What we’re working on is like part of us working out our faith and trying to help bring about the kingdom of God on earth,” he told Margaux.

The Top 5

The Best Summer Camps for Future Tech Moguls

Quick: If I asked you to imagine a scene at summer camp, what would it entail? Lakes, canoes and three-legged races, probably. 

Whatever your answer, I expect the picture in your mind isn’t quite what happens at the places Weekend newcomer Brigid Mander—a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler and other publications—found for this week’s Top 5. These camps somehow achieve that impossible balance of rigorous study and summertime joy. I only wish Farm Camp in Sonoma County accepted adults: I’d have already booked myself a spot.

Listening: Robert Caro’s Staying Power

Confession: I’ve committed a felony. At least, that’s how “99% Invisible” host Roman Mars might describe my decadeslong reluctance to read “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, city planner for New York. “As influential and amazing as this bestseller is, many people own an unopened copy gathering dust on their bookshelf,” Mars explains as his podcast began a yearlong exploration of the tome in January. “That is a crime.” 

Guilty as charged then! And, you know, I probably never will after listening to Mars’ excellent exploration. The episodes examine the work’s famous author and its famous subject, the architect behind modern New York and our modern idea of what a city is. Indeed, at times, Moses lived “as if he were an emperor,” Mars said. “This is Great Gatsby–style wealth porn at a certain point.” Sure sounds infinitely more enjoyable than another attempt at “Infinite Jest.”

Reading: Sam Altmans in Frock Coats  

Artificial intelligence is to our century what biology was to the 18th century, with each scientific pursuit and time period marked by larger-than-life figures, battles—and heedless quests for great wealth. The realization dawned on me while I was reading “Every Living Thing,” an excellent chronicle (due out next Tuesday) of how scientists initially developed the field of biology and how their work continues to affect our world today. “The book begins in the 1680s and ends with modern gene-transferring and genomic technology—an epic saga,” promised author Jason Roberts, a Marin County fellow who gave up an Apple engineering job several decades ago to write for a living.

Still worried that Roberts’ book seems as boring as fifth-period science class? I assure you it’s not. I didn’t like fifth-period science, and I found “Every Living Thing” lively—brimming with the stories of interesting lives. The two main characters are Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist Georges Buffon, who developed opposing theories of biology. Linnaeus was outright rapacious. “He wasn’t just pursuing abstract science,” Roberts said. “He was very interested in getting rich.” He tried to corner the British tea market as well as the market for cochineal bugs, little red critters that get turned into red food dye. (We still use that dye in things like candy and Campari.) Neither plan worked, but Linnaeus eventually did get wealthy off developing a new process for harvesting pearls. “With that, he was able to buy a country house,” Roberts said. “And die a fancy-schmancy person.”

Watching: A Return of Marvel Magic

In 1992, Fox Kids (remember that?) debuted an unheralded animated series from Marvel, “X-Men: The Animated Series.” Marvel then was not the Marvel we know today. It mostly did comic books; its most recent feature film had starred Howard the Duck. When “X-Men: The Animated Series” started, “we didn’t have a writers’ room,” the series’ showrunner, Eric Lewald, recalled. “We had our dining table.” That’s all they needed. The show was a hit and has since become a beloved bit of ’90s pop culture.

A rather masterful reboot arrived last month on Disney+ at just the moment when Marvel could again use a jolt of energy. “X-Men ’97” picks up where the original series ended—with Professor X gone and his X-Men adrift. Yes, the show’s greatest superpower is its sonic discharge of nostalgia, but it wields that tool with deftness. The new series makes some updates to the original—introducing biracial teen Sunspot, tweaking the opening credits scene—while bringing back several of the original voice actors. And in true comic-book form, a villain from “The Animated Series” has forsaken the dark side and turned hero. Or has he?

Final Thought

On Friday, all of New York entered its Noe Valley era.