Patrick Collison’s Palace Intrigue Complaint

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Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Kings League, a fast-growing, internet-savvy soccer startup, takes a lean approach to pro sports• Tech Culture: Can protein-obsessed techies help save Sweetgreen? • Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Real Vikings,” “Kutchinsky’s Egg” and “Sirat”Patrick Collison, one of the most interesting people in Silicon Valley, made a very exasperated comment this week about the media—and why it seems to cover tech and the tech elite differently than everything and everybody else. “There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects,” Collison wrote on Twitter. “How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture?”Uh, it’s obvious. Chevron is boring, one of the least interesting companies in an industry that pulses with little change, and its CEO has made it his very mission to run his company with unambitious placidity.For years, Mike Wirth has described his approach to captaining Chevron as “capital discipline,” and since he took over in 2018, he has devoted himself to cutting costs and boosting Chevron’s cash flow. It hasn’t made the company’s stock a gusher: It has gone up 49% in his tenure, trailing both the S&P 500 (147%) and close rivals like Exxon (72%). Nonetheless, Chevron in 2023 decided to bend its rules so Wirth would stay on past the company’s mandatory retirement age. Wirth is happy being dull, and Chevron is equally happy with it. No one in Silicon Valley wants to be like Mike. Mostly everybody wants to be like Collison, someone who has not only built one of the world’s largest private companies in the span of two decades—rewiring how money moves across the planet—but has also devoted himself to promulgating a neo-moderate political philosophy that hopes to rework several layers of U.S. domestic policy. Like Collison, they covet importance and influence and aren’t afraid to visibly pursue them.In Silicon Valley, everyone wants to do something new. They want to invent, you know, the hot, new thing—thus attracting the attention of the people who report on…the news. Wirth and the other oil giants aren’t interested in being new and novel. Oil is old—literally so. We only ever really think about oil when there’s some occasional crisis—like the Iran war—that means we might pay more for it. But we’re so committed to oil staying exactly the same that we’ve rejected new technological replacements for it, which could save us money and, you know, prevent the planet from turning into a Turkish bath. To give Collison his due, I do think he makes a fairer point about how little coverage gets devoted to many important areas of the federal government. But then again, many within tech groused heavily last year when the media turned its efforts toward the varied DOGE machinations, which stretched across many federal agencies.If Silicon Valley’s elite want to stop attracting the media’s attention, then they might consider settling for the old, boring thing—which would mean accumulating less money and less influence. Trade-offs! What else from this week…• In Britain, reimagining the country’s paper currency has come down to a debate between lions and hedgehogs. • Some locations of Amazon’s Whole Foods apparently devote a section of their stores to a “jail” for shoplifters. That comes as a surprise to me, though I’ll certainly admit that waiting at a Whole Foods meat counter sometimes feels like a prison sentence. • The New York Times has discovered the existence of San Luis Obispo! • “I feel like I’m under siege,” Harvey Weinstein told the Hollywood Reporter, describing how other Rikers Island inmates treat him. “They come up and say, ‘Weinstein, give me some money. Weinstein, give me your lawyer.’ ‘Weinstein, do this. Weinstein, do that.’” Sounds a lot like, you know, being a Hollywood producer. • A new NBC poll finds Americans still think Republicans are better at dealing with issues like immigration and crime while Democrats more capably handle topics such as healthcare. In a tellingreflection of our moment, though, the poll found that Americans are totally split over which party has a better handle on the economy—and think neither the left nor the right has any idea about AI. • E-commerce’s mass embrace of drops, when it releases a limited amount of goods amid massive hype, has made them hard to promote. • McKay Coppins, who wrote that very good Mitt Romney biography in 2023, has just spent a year as a “degenerate gambler.”• Felicissima!—to this Wall Street Journal headline: “The Espresso-Chugging, Wine-Guzzling Italian-Americans Who Took Down Team USA.” • Phillip Picardi, the former Out magazine editor in chief, is the new editor in chief and chief brand officer at Playboy. His ascension makes me, a gay man, wonder what other frail temples of straight, white masculinity could be improved by the homosexual agenda: Hooters, perhaps—or maybe the U.S. Senate. • A Cambridge University graduate student stumbled upon documents in the school’s library that shed important new light on how the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq went so wrong. What a story—what a testament to the resilience of library-loving nerds! And what a reflection of how we keep misjudging politics and people in the Middle East.—Abram Brown (abe@theinformation.com)Weekend’s Latest Stories The Big Read Big Read Sudden Death, Giant Dice, Internet Spectacle: Kings League Exports New Pro Sports ModelThe three-year-old startup has seen revenue double in each season, exporting its online-savvy remix of soccer across Europe and South America. Brands such as Netflix like its expansive approach to sponsorships. Investors include names like Aryeh Bourkoff’s LionTree. Next stop: the States.Tech CultureCan Protein-Obsessed Techies Help Save Sweetgreen? The restaurant chain has lost much of its initial fan base, and as a result, CEO and co-founder Jonathan Neman is hungry to win over Silicon Valley’s wellness crowd. Listening: “Real Vikings” Remember a while back when everyone was so unashamedly obsessed with ancient Rome? Well, I’m here to suggest we direct our attention to another group of bloodthirsty, empire-building Christo-pagans—a belated proposal, I know, but such is what happens when your longboat runs aground between Dyflin and Hlymrekr. “Real Vikings” repositions its titular warriors as more than a roving horde, examining their mastery of navigation, engineering and commerce. Such skills fueled their expansiveness and string of trade-route colonies, many of which remain major cities (like Dyflin and Hlymrekr—Dublin and Limerick, respectively). Naturally, narrator Iain Glen (Ser Jorah from “Game of Thrones”) devotes plenty of attention to their prowess in mayhem, too, labeling the Vikings as the Hells Angels of gruel-and-chainmail Europe. The series comes with high-end sound and editing from Noiser, a history-focused podcast studio that also did “Titanic: Ship of Dreams,” a 2025 hit. With “Real Vikings,” London-based Noiser has the type of podcast that would play especially well on a family road trip with a car full of kids interested in the blood-stained past, just as Terry Deary’s “Horrible Histories” series delighted a previous generation.—Abram BrownReading: “Kutchinsky’s Egg” by Serena Kutchinsky In the go-go late ’80s, Paul Kutchinsky dreamed of turning his Knightsbridge jewelry company into an even grander affair—something like Cartier—no, something like Fabergé. Subtlety wasn’t Kutchinsky’s game. To pull off the transformation, he decided to supersize Fabergé’s signature motif and produce the largest bejeweled egg ever made: a gilded, 2-foot-tall objet d’art encrusted with thousands of Barbie-pink diamonds. And for a minute, the Argyle Library Egg captured the world’s attention, winning Kutchinsky BBC and “Today” show appearances and even earning the egg a display in an exhibit at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. As media attention mounted, Kutchinsky figured he might sell it to one of his regular customers, like the Sultan of Brunei. And if not him, maybe Malcolm Forbes, the larger-than-life magazine publisher who famously possessed an extensive Fabergé collection. Or maybe that crass, gold-mad real estate developer further uptown: Donald Trump. None of that came to pass: Honestly, the folks chasing the Maltese falcon found greater joy in that totem than Kutchinskyever found in his. His daughter, British journalist Serena Kutchinsky, recounts her father’s life and obsession in “Kutchinsky’s Egg” and documents how she too fell under the egg’s spell decades after her father’s death, embarking on her own quest to track it down years after it had disappeared from public sight.—A.B.Watching: “Sirāt”With most studios increasingly content to turn to reliable intellectual property, surprise is a novelty at movie theaters. And that’s one of the main selling points of “Sirāt,” a Spanish film about a father looking for his missing daughter at a rave in Morocco: You absolutely cannot predict all the turns in this movie, which is part adventure film, part meditation on a person’s purpose (in Islam, Sirāt is a bridge between hell and paradise). Maybe you won’t like all the directions “Sirāt” goes in—one woman pulled me aside as I waited for the bathroom after the film to tell me that she “didn’t get” its acclaim. Or you might love it—a man in my theater gave it a standing ovation, and the Oscars have nominated it for Best International Feature Film. But it will certainly keep you guessing, and two weeks after seeing it, I haven’t been able to forget it.—Catherine Perloff

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