tech

Elon Musk Takes Twitter, and Tech Deals, to Another Level

Forget about the endless drama, the bots, the abrupt reversals, the spectacle, the alleged risk to the Republic and all we hold dear. Here is the most important thing about Elon Musk’s buying Twitter: The moguls have been unleashed.

In the old days, when a tech tycoon wanted to buy something big, he needed a company to do it. Steve Case used AOL to buy Time Warner. Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods for Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus and on and on. These were corporate deals done for the bottom line, even if they might never have happened without a famous and forceful proprietor.

Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which finally became a reality on Thursday, six months after he agreed to the deal, is different. It is an individual buying something for himself that 240 million people around the world use regularly. While he has other investors, Mr. Musk will have absolute control over the fate of the short-message social media platform.

It’s a difficult deal to evaluate even in an industry built on deals, because this one is so unusual. It came about whimsically, impulsively. But, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where billions are casually offered for fledging operations — and even by the wallet of Mr. Musk, on most days the richest man in the world — $44 billion is quite a chunk of change.

the midterm elections’ most prominent campaign contributor, pumping tens of millions of dollars into right-wing congressional candidates. Two of his former employees are the Republican nominees for senator in Ohio and Arizona.

Richard Walker, a professor emeritus of economic geography at the University of California, Berkeley and a historian of Silicon Valley, sees a shift in the locus of power.

“In this new Gilded Age, we’re being battered by billionaires rather than the corporations that were the face of the 20th century,” he said. “And the tech titans are leading the way.”

bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Marc Benioff of Salesforce owns Time magazine. Pierre Omidyar of eBay developed a homegrown media empire.

Deals have been a feature of Silicon Valley as long as there has been a Silicon Valley. Often they fail, especially when the acquisition was made for technology that either quickly grew outdated or never really worked at all. At least one venerable company, Hewlett-Packard, followed that strategy and has practically faded away.

$70 billion-plus acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which is pending, has garnered a fraction of the attention despite being No. 2.

said in April after sealing the deal. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”

He cared a little more when the subsequent plunge in the stock market meant that he was overpaying by a significant amount. Analysts estimated that Twitter was worth not $44 billion but $30 billion, or maybe even less. For a few months, Mr. Musk tried to get out of the deal.

This had the paradoxical effect of bringing the transaction down to earth for spectators. Who among us has not failed to do due diligence on a new venture — a job, a house, even a relationship — and then realized that it was going to cost so much more than we had thought? Mr. Musk’s buying Twitter, and then his refusal to buy Twitter, and then his being forced to buy Twitter after all — and everything playing out on Twitter — was weirdly relatable.

Inescapable, too. The apex, or perhaps the nadir, came this month when Mr. Musk introduced a perfume called Burnt Hair, described on its website as “the Essence of Repugnant Desire.”

“Please buy my perfume, so I can buy Twitter,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Oct. 12, garnering nearly 600,000 likes. This worked, apparently; the perfume is now marked “sold out” on its site. Did 30,000 people really pay $100 each for a bottle? Will this perfume actually be produced and sold? (It’s not supposed to be released until next year.) It’s hard to tell where the joke stops, which is perhaps the point.

Evan Spiegel.

“What was unique about Twitter was that no one actually controlled it,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at LightShed Partners. “And now one person will own it in its entirety.”

He is relatively hopeful, however, that Mr. Musk will improve the site, somehow. That, in turn, will have its own consequences.

“If it turns into a massive home run,” Mr. Greenfield said, “you’ll see other billionaires try to do the same thing.”

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Who Gets the Last Word on Steve Jobs? He Might.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis meticulously curated the memory of her husband after he was assassinated, reimagining President John F. Kennedy as a fallen King Arthur in a modern-day Camelot.

Now some historians wonder if Laurene Powell Jobs is also trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complicated and transformational figure who was shadowed by his flaws as a father and belligerence as a boss.

Last month, Ms. Powell Jobs introduced the Steve Jobs Archive. It aspires to reinvent the personal archive much as Mr. Jobs, in his years running Apple, remade music with the iPod and communication with the iPhone.

Rather than offering up a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research and inquiry, as other influential figures have done, Ms. Powell Jobs, who did not respond to requests for comments, said at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Archive would be devoted to “ideas.” Those ideas are primarily Mr. Jobs’s philosophies about life and work.

Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.

Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.

Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research.

“We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”

The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Mr. Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Mr. Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”

The next steps for the archive are shrouded in the kind of mystery associated with the way Mr. Jobs ran Apple. About all that’s been publicly disclosed is that Ms. Powell Jobs hired a documentary filmmaker to gather hundreds of oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues. Where that material will be stored and who will have access to it has not been revealed.

She married Mr. Jobs in 1991, two years after meeting him as a graduate student at Stanford. Since his death, she has used her estimated $16 billion fortune to fund the Emerson Collective, a philanthropic and commercial operation that owns The Atlantic magazine and funds an organization trying to reduce gun violence in Chicago.

During his life, Mr. Jobs admired and encouraged historians to preserve the history of his Silicon Valley predecessors such as Robert Noyce, who co-founded the chip maker Intel. But he put little value on his own history, and Apple has seldom commemorated product anniversaries, saying it focuses on the future, not the past.

Stanford spent years cataloging items such as photos of a barefoot Mr. Jobs at work, advertising campaigns and an Apple II computer. That material can be reviewed by students and researchers interested in learning more about the company.

Silicon Valley leaders have a tradition of leaving their material with Stanford, which has collections of letters, slides and notes from William Hewlett, who founded Hewlett-Packard, and Andy Grove, the former chief executive of Intel.

Mr. Lowood said that he uses the Silicon Valley archives to teach students about the value of discovery. “Unlike a book, which is the gospel and all true, a mix of materials in a box introduces uncertainty,” he said.

After Mr. Jobs’ death in 2011, Mr. Isaacson, the author, published a biography of Mr. Jobs. Some at Apple complained that the book, a best seller, misrepresented Mr. Jobs and commercialized his death.

Mr. Isaacson declined to comment about those complaints.

Four years later, the book became the basis for a film. The 2015 movie, written by Aaron Sorkin and starring Michael Fassbender, focused on Mr. Jobs being ousted from Apple and denying paternity of his eldest daughter.

according to emails made public after a hack of Sony Pictures, which held rights to the film. She and others who were close to Mr. Jobs thought any movie based on the book would be inaccurate.

“I was outraged, and he was my friend,” said Mike Slade, a marketing executive who worked as an adviser to Mr. Jobs from 1998 to 2004. “I can’t imagine how outraged Laurene was.”

In November 2015, a month after the movie’s release, Ms. Powell Jobs had representatives register the Steve Jobs Archive as a limited liability company in Delaware and California. She later hired the documentary filmmaker, Davis Guggenheim, to gather oral histories about Mr. Jobs from former colleagues and friends. She also hired Ms. Berlin, who was Stanford’s project historian for its Apple archives, to be the Jobs Archive’s executive director.

Mr. Guggenheim gathered material about Mr. Jobs while also working on a Netflix documentary about Bill Gates, “Inside Bill’s Brain.” Mr. Slade, who worked for both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates, said he sat for an interview about one executive, stopped to change shirts and returned to discuss the other one.

Ms. Berlin assisted Ms. Powell Jobs in gathering material. They collected items such as audio of interviews done by reporters and early company records, including a 1976 document that Mr. Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, called their declaration of independence. It outlined what the company would stand for, said Regis McKenna, who unearthed the document in his personal collection gathered during his decades as a pioneer of Silicon Valley marketing and adviser to Mr. Jobs.

Ms. Powell Jobs also assembled a group of advisers to inform what the archive would be, including Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive; Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer; and Bob Iger, the former chief executive of Walt Disney and a former Apple board member.

Mr. Cook, Mr. Ive and Mr. Iger declined to comment.

Apple, which has its own corporate archive and archivist, is a contributor to the Jobs effort, said Ms. Berlin, who declined to say how she works with the company to gain access to material left by Mr. Jobs.

The archive’s resulting website opens with an email that Mr. Jobs sent himself at Apple. It reads like a journal entry, outlining all the things that he depends on others to provide, from the food he eats to the music he enjoys.

“I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being,” he wrote.

The email is followed by a previously undisclosed audio clip from a 1984 interview that Mr. Jobs did with Michael Moritz, the journalist turned venture capitalist at Sequoia. During it, Mr. Jobs says that refinement comes from mistakes, a platitude that captures how Apple used trial and error to develop devices.

“It was just lying in the drawer gathering dust,” Mr. Moritz said of the recording.

It’s clear to those who have contributed material that the archive is about safeguarding Mr. Jobs’s legacy. It’s a goal that many of them support.

“There’s so much distortion about who Steve was,” Mr. McKenna said. “There needed to be something more factual.”

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How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable

On the morning of July 8, former President Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social, a social media platform he founded with people close to him, to claim that he had in fact won the 2020 presidential vote in Wisconsin, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Barely 8,000 people shared that missive on Truth Social, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of responses his posts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly generated before those services suspended his megaphones after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.

And yet Mr. Trump’s baseless claim pulsed through the public consciousness anyway. It jumped from his app to other social media platforms — not to mention podcasts, talk radio or television.

Within 48 hours of Mr. Trump’s post, more than one million people saw his claim on at least dozen other media. It appeared on Facebook and Twitter, from which he has been banished, but also YouTube, Gab, Parler and Telegram, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

gone mainstream among Republican Party members, driving state and county officials to impose new restrictions on casting ballots, often based on mere conspiracy theories percolating in right-wing media.

Voters must now sift through not only an ever-growing torrent of lies and falsehoods about candidates and their policies, but also information on when and where to vote. Officials appointed or elected in the name of fighting voter fraud have put themselves in the position to refuse to certify outcomes that are not to their liking.

a primary battleground in today’s fight against disinformation. A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

continued to amplify “election denialism” in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.

Another challenge is the proliferation of alternative platforms for those falsehoods and even more extreme views.

new survey by the Pew Research Center found that 15 percent of prominent accounts on those seven platforms had previously been banished from others like Twitter and Facebook.

F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago thrust his latest pronouncements into the eye of the political storm once again.

study of Truth Social by Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group, examined how the platform had become a home for some of the most fringe conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump, who began posting on the platform in April, has increasingly amplified content from QAnon, the online conspiracy theory.

He has shared posts from QAnon accounts more than 130 times. QAnon believers promote a vast and complex conspiracy that centers on Mr. Trump as a leader battling a cabal of Democratic Party pedophiles. Echoes of such views reverberated through Republican election campaigns across the country during this year’s primaries.

Ms. Jankowicz, the disinformation expert, said the nation’s social and political divisions had churned the waves of disinformation.

The controversies over how best to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic deepened distrust of government and medical experts, especially among conservatives. Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election led to, but did not end with, the Capitol Hill violence.

“They should have brought us together,” Ms. Jankowicz said, referring to the pandemic and the riots. “I thought perhaps they could be kind of this convening power, but they were not.”

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China’s Communist Party Congress: What It Means for Business

The DealBook newsletter delves into a single topic or theme every weekend, providing reporting and analysis that offer a better understanding of an important issue in business. If you don’t already receive the daily newsletter, sign up here.

At a Communist Party congress starting in Beijing on Oct. 16, Xi Jinping is expected to be named to a third five-year term as the country’s top leader, paving the way for him to consolidate power to an extent not seen in decades.

Under Mr. Xi, China has become the world’s dominant manufacturer of everything from cement to solar panels, as well as the main trading partner and dominant lender for most of the developing world. It has built the world’s largest navy, developed some of the world’s most advanced ballistic missiles and constructed air bases on artificial islands strewn across the South China Sea.

in a tailspin. Its property market, which over the last ten years contributed about a quarter of the country’s economic output, is melting down. Foreign investment has faltered. And widespread lockdowns and mass quarantines, part of China’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19, have hurt consumer demand and stalled businesses.

At the same time, Mr. Xi has worked to turn China into a more state-led society that often puts national security and ideology before economic growth. He has cracked down on Chinese companies and limited their executives’ power. Some of China’s best-known entrepreneurs have left the country and others, such as Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, have largely disappeared from public view.

All of this has hurt China’s economy, which was just 0.4 percent larger from April through June than during the same period last year. The growth was far below the government’s initial target for growth of about 5.5 percent this year. For the first year since the 1990s, China’s economic growth is expected to fall below the rest of Asia’s.

at the start of the last party congress, in 2017, lasted more than three hours. But buried in that jargon are likely to be some important messages. Here’s what finance leaders and corporate executives around the world want to know.

Domestic Ideology: ‘Common Prosperity’

One of Mr. Xi’s favorite economic policy initiatives in recent months has a simple, innocuous-sounding name: “common prosperity.” The big question lies in what it means.

Common prosperity, a longtime goal of the Communist Party, has been defined by Mr. Xi as reining in private capital and narrowing China’s huge disparities in wealth. Regulators and tax investigators cracked down last year on tech giants and wealthy celebrities. Beijing demanded that tycoons give back to society. And Mr. Xi has strongly discouraged speculation in housing, pushing instead for government subsidies for the construction of more rental apartments.

A regulatory crackdown on tech companies and after-school education companies contributed to a wave of layoffs that left one in five young Chinese city dwellers unemployed by August. Lending limits on China’s highly inflated housing sector have triggered a nosedive in the number of fresh construction projects being started and a wave of insolvencies among real estate developers. Many Western hedge funds that bet heavily on the real estate developers’ overseas bond issues incurred considerable losses.

The term “common prosperity” was seldom used by top officials last spring during those setbacks. But Mr. Xi conspicuously revived it during a tour of northeastern China in mid-August. The Politburo subsequently mentioned common prosperity when it announced on Aug. 30 the starting date and agenda for the party congress.

first put forward in May 2020, is a theory of what he calls “dual circulation.” The concept involves relying primarily on domestic demand and innovation to propel the Chinese economy, while maintaining foreign markets and investors as a backup engine for growth.

Mr. Xi has pushed ahead with lavish subsidies to develop Chinese manufacturers, especially of semiconductors. But the slogan has attracted considerable skepticism from foreign investors in China and from foreign governments. They worry that the policy is a recipe for replacing imports with Chinese-made goods.

China’s imports have indeed stagnated this year while its exports have soared, producing the largest trade surpluses the world has ever seen. Those surpluses, not domestic demand, have sustained China’s economic growth this year.

Chinese officials deny that they are trying to discourage imports, and contend that China remains eager to welcome foreign companies and products. When the Politburo scheduled the party congress for Oct. 16, it did not mention dual circulation, so the term might be left aside. If it goes unmentioned, that could be a conciliatory gesture as foreign investment in China is already weakening, mainly because of the country’s draconian pandemic policies.

Pandemic: ‘Covid Zero’

China’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 has prevented a lot of deaths and long-term infections, but at a high and growing cost to the economy. The question now lies in when Mr. Xi will shift to a less restrictive stance toward controlling the virus.

in Tiananmen Square, on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, when he reiterated China’s claim to Taiwan, a self-ruled island democracy. President Biden has mentioned four times that the United States is prepared to help Taiwan resist aggression. Each time his aides have walked back his comments somewhat, however, emphasizing that the United States retains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding its support for the island.

Even a vague mention by Mr. Xi at the party congress of a timeline for trying to bring Taiwan under the mainland’s political control could damage financial confidence in both Taiwan and the mainland.

New Leaders

The most important task of the ruling elite at the congress is to confirm the party’s leadership.

Particularly important to business is who in the lineup will become the new premier. The premier leads the cabinet but not the military, which is directly under Mr. Xi. The position oversees the finance ministry, commerce ministry and other government agencies that make many crucial decisions affecting banks, insurers and other businesses. Whoever is chosen will not be announced until a separate session of the National People’s Congress next March, but the day after the congress formally ends, members of the new Politburo Standing Committee — the highest body of political power in China — will walk on a stage in order of rank. The order in which the new leadership team walks may make clear who will become premier next year.

a leading hub of entrepreneurship and foreign investment in China. Neither has given many clues about their economic thinking since taking posts in Beijing. Mr. Wang had more of a reputation for pursuing free-market policies while in Guangdong.

Mr. Hu is seen as having a stronger political base than Mr. Wang because he is still young enough, 59, to be a potential successor to Mr. Xi. That political strength could give him the clout to push back a little against Mr. Xi’s recent tendency to lean in favor of greater government and Communist Party control of the private sector.

Precisely because Mr. Hu is young enough to be a possible successor, however, many businesspeople and experts think Mr. Xi is more likely to choose Mr. Wang or a dark horse candidate who poses no potential political threat to him.

In any case, the power of the premier has diminished as Mr. Xi has created a series of Communist Party commissions to draft policies for ministries, including a commission that dictates many financial policies.

What do you think? Let us know: dealbook@nytimes.com.

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TikTok’s CEO Navigates the Limits of His Power

TikTok recently tried to tamp down concerns from U.S. lawmakers that it poses a national security threat because it is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance. The viral video app insisted it had an arm’s-length relationship with ByteDance and that its own executive was in charge.

“TikTok is led by its own global C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean based in Singapore,” TikTok wrote in a June letter to U.S. lawmakers.

But in fact, Mr. Chew’s decision-making power over TikTok is limited, according to 12 former TikTok and ByteDance employees and executives.

Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder, as well as by a top ByteDance strategy executive and the head of TikTok’s research and development team, said the people, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals. TikTok’s growth and strategy, which are led by ByteDance teams, report not to Mr. Chew but to ByteDance’s office in Beijing, they said.

increasingly questioned TikTok’s data practices, reigniting a debate over how the United States should treat business relationships with foreign companies.

On Wednesday, TikTok’s chief operating officer testified in Congress and downplayed the app’s China connections. On Thursday, President Biden signed an executive order to sharpen the federal government’s powers to block Chinese investment in tech in the United States and to limit its access to private data on citizens.

a March interview with the billionaire investor David Rubenstein, whose firm, the Carlyle Group, has a stake in the Chinese giant. Mr. Chew added that he had become familiar with TikTok as a “creator” and amassed “185,000 followers.” (He appeared to be referring to a corporate account that posted videos of him while he was an executive at Xiaomi, one of China’s largest phone manufacturers.)

Jinri Toutiao. The two built a rapport, and an investment vehicle associated with Mr. Milner led a $10 million financing in Mr. Zhang’s company that same year, three people with knowledge of the deal said.

The news aggregator eventually became ByteDance — now valued at around $360 billion, according to PitchBook — and owns TikTok; its Chinese sister app, Douyin; and various education and enterprise software ventures.

By 2015, Mr. Chew had joined Xiaomi as chief financial officer. He spearheaded the device maker’s 2018 initial public offering, led its international efforts and became an English-speaking face for the brand.

“Shou grew up with both American and Chinese language and culture surrounding him,” said Hugo Barra, a former Google executive who worked with Mr. Chew at Xiaomi. “He is objectively better positioned than anyone I’ve ever met in the China business world to be this incredible dual-edged executive in a Chinese company that wants to become a global powerhouse.”

In March 2021, Mr. Chew announced that he was joining ByteDance as chief financial officer, fueling speculation that the company would go public. (It remains privately held.)

appointed Mr. Chew as chief executive, with Mr. Zhang praising his “deep knowledge of the company and industry.” Late last year, Mr. Chew stepped down from his ByteDance role to focus on TikTok.

Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, left after the Trump administration’s effort to sunder the app from its Chinese parent. China was also cracking down on its domestic internet giants, with Mr. Zhang resigning from his official roles at ByteDance last year. Mr. Zhang remains involved in decision making, people with knowledge of ByteDance said.

Mr. Chew moved to establish himself as TikTok’s new head during visits to the app’s Los Angeles office in mid-2021. At a dinner with TikTok executives, he sought to build camaraderie by keeping a Culver City, Calif., restaurant open past closing time, three people with knowledge of the event said. He asked attendees if he should buy the establishment to keep it open longer, they said.

a TikTok NFT project involving the musical artists Lil Nas X and Bella Poarch. He reprimanded TikTok’s global head of marketing on a video call with Beijing-based leaders for ByteDance after some celebrities dropped out of the project, four people familiar with the meeting said. It showed that Mr. Chew answered to higher powers, they said.

Mr. Chew also ended a half-developed TikTok store off Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, three people familiar with the initiative said. TikTok briefly explored obtaining the naming rights of the Los Angeles stadium formerly known as the Staples Center, they said.

He has also overseen layoffs of American managers, two people familiar with the decisions said, while building up teams related to trust and safety. In its U.S. marketing, the app has shifted its emphasis from a brand that starts trends and conversations toward its utility as a place where people can go to learn.

In May, Mr. Chew flew to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, speaking with European regulators and ministers from Saudi Arabia to discuss digital strategy.

June letter to U.S. lawmakers, he noted that ByteDance employees in China could gain access to the data of Americans when “subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls.” But he said TikTok was in the process of separating and securing its U.S. user data under an initiative known as Project Texas, which has the app working with the American software giant Oracle.

“We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms,” Mr. Chew wrote.

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‘Glass Onion’ Review: A Middling Satire With Appealing Performances

By Daniel Feingold
September 15, 2022

The highly anticipated sequel to “Knives Out” is never dull but not as sharp-witted as its predecessor.

“It’s so dumb!” – Daniel Craig in one of the more entertaining scenes of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”, but also an accurate description of how I felt for stretches of the sequel to 2019’s widely beloved “Knives Out.” That’s OK, though. While “Onion” lacks the same charisma, charm and wit as its predecessor, it’s still undoubtedly a crowd pleaser that buzzes along despite a 139-minute runtime.

Craig’s shtick as renowned detective Benoit Blanc is perhaps even more fun this time around. Rian Johnson is also back as writer/director, with a new murder mystery that, to his credit, has an entirely distinct setup from the last film.

A group of friends (Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Kate Hudson, Jessica Henwick, Dave Bautista, Madelyn Cline), all successful in their very different careers, receive an invitation in the mail. Their ultra-rich tech buddy, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), is inviting them to stay at his remote Greek island to solve his own murder — as in a dinner party murder mystery. (Blanc also gets an invite, though Bron swears he never sent him one. Blanc would like a prize… perhaps an iPad… for whoever solves the mystery). But when this much wealth, privilege and ignorance among friends considered “disrupters” in their respective fields gathers under one roof, something bad is bound to happen. It does, of course – just not in the way, or when, we expect. And so, we’re off.

Johnson ratchets up the comedy in “Glass Onion” to mixed results. The first third of the film is an unwelcome (and unnecessary) reminder of pandemic lockdowns and mandates, along with an over-reliance on spoofing the ultra-wealthy. Of course, lampooning the ignorance of privilege is part of the fun of both “Knives Out” movies, but some of the satire in this case is so on the nose that it feels patronizing. You can almost feel Johnson elbowing the audience saying, “Rich people, am I right or what?!” There must be a more creative, thoughtful way to riff on toxic greed and influencer culture than, for instance, Hudson’s character casually tweeting an antisemitic remark because she’s a self-proclaimed “truth teller.” These types of punchlines are neither nuanced nor outrageous enough to be particularly funny.

The hit-and-miss nature of the laughs isn’t helped by a cast of characters I just never wanted to spend time with. Johnson mostly gives his actors caricatures to work with, and the dialogue does a little too much winking to the audience for its own good. Again, both “Knives Out” movies featured mostly unlikeable characters. I found the first bunch deplorably fun, while I wouldn’t want to RSVP to a party with this crew — even on a Greek island with a literal onion-shaped glass room.

Along with Craig, Monáe is excellent as Andi Brand, the lone member of the friend group with a soul. Monáe is asked to carry large parts of the movie. She succeeds, giving us some of the most intriguing moments of the film as the puzzle pieces come together. Norton also completely works playing the insufferably snobbish genius who feels compelled to rent the actual Mona Lisa from The Louvre (the museum needed some money during the pandemic) just to remind his friends — and himself — how impressive he is. The entire ensemble, really, understands the assignment here. This is a big, ridiculous, meta whodunnit. The talent of the main cast (plus fun cameos!) is not in question.

The good news is “Onion” begins to click once we get all the unpleasantries of meeting these unsavory characters out of the way and the mystery plot kicks in. The more screen time for Craig and Monáe, the better. Johnson clearly recognizes what he has with the pairing, not unlike Craig and Ana de Armas in 2019. Their chemistry is delightful, and their comedic moments feel organic and earned.

What starts as Johnson’s forced attempt to show he can still subvert the murder mystery genre with biting social commentary turns into another fun trip through the peculiar mind of one Benoit Blanc. “Glass Onion” is consistently entertaining; and just as Johnson said after the TIFF premiere that he’ll keep making these movies until Craig blocks his number, I’ll keep watching Craig have fun in this role. I can’t help but feel, though, that this second entry into the franchise suffers a bit from the Netflixification of cinema, with a baseline level of competence from everyone involved in a big-budget production that’s just serviceable; you stream it and move on. At least that iPad will come in handy.

: newsy.com

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Whistleblower Lays Out Twitter’s Data Security Troubles

Former head of Twitter security Peiter Zatko explained the company has previously employed foreign agents.

Former head of Twitter security Peiter Zatko on Tuesday told Congress about the tech giant’s widespread issues with keeping foreign adversaries from working at the company and exploiting internal data.

“Twitter would be a gold mine for people in the community who focus on foreign intelligence organizations and assets,” Zatko said. “If you placed somebody in Twitter, as we know has happened, it would be very difficult to Twitter to find them. They would probably be able to stay there for a long period of time and gain a significant amount of information.”

In his opening remarks, Sen. Chuck Grassley noted that Zatko’s disclosures helped uncover evidence that India was able to place at least two foreign assets on payroll at the company, and that China had at least one agent at Twitter as well.

Zatko noted those agents could be embedded to figure out what information Twitter might censor, or to use internal software to find user phone numbers, current and former email addresses, and even where Twitter thinks a user lives.

“This is the information that you need to start taking over other people’s accounts […] Once I know your home address and your home phone number, I can approach you in real life. I can put pressure on you, I can possibly recruit you,” Zatko said. “You could be a witting or unwitting accomplice. And then I could influence you or target you for influence operations in the real world.

Zatko also said that former users may be at risk of having their data exposed, too.

“I was told straight out by the chief privacy officer that the FTC had come and asked, ‘does Twitter delete user information when they leave the platform?’”

“Instead of answering whether we delete user data, we have intentionally replied, ‘we deactivate users,’ and try to sidestep the program because we know we don’t delete user data, and cannot comply with that if they demand us to.”

A Twitter spokesperson told Newsy that “Today’s hearing only confirms that Mr. Zatko’s allegations are riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies.” The company also said its hiring process is independent of foreign influence and includes background checks.

: newsy.com

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U.S. Hiring Slows As Employers Add Just 315,000 Jobs In August

The August hiring gain was down from 536,000 jobs added in July, and fell below the average gain over the previous three months.

America’s employers added a healthy number of jobs last month, yet slowed their hiring enough to potentially help the Federal Reserve in its fight to reduce raging inflation.

The economy gained 315,000 jobs in August, a still-solid figure that pointed to an economy that remains resilient despite rising interest rates, high inflation and sluggish consumer spending. Friday’s report from the government also showed that the unemployment rate rose to 3.7%, up from a half-century low of 3.5%. Yet that increase was also an encouraging sign: It reflected a long-awaited rise in the number of Americans who came off the sidelines and started looking for work.

Prices are rising at nearly the fastest pace in 40 years, which has handed congressional Republicans a hammer to use against Democrats in the fall congressional elections. Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady noted Friday that rising wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, leaving Americans with “shrinking paychecks.”

The White House, in turn, has claimed credit for a robust pace of job growth. On Friday, Brian Deese, a top economic adviser to President Biden, said in an interview on CNBC that the economy is shifting to a more sustainable path.

“We want to see a transition from a very strong economy to one of stable growth,” he said.

The August hiring gain was down from 526,000 jobs added in July, and it fell below the average gain of the previous three months. Wage growth also weakened a bit last month, which could also serve the Fed’s inflation fight. Average hourly pay rose 0.3% from the previous month, the smallest gain since April. Businesses typically pass the cost of higher wages on to their customers through higher prices, thereby fueling inflation.

The Fed is rapidly raising interest rates to try to cool hiring and wage growth, which have been consistently strong. Fed officials hope that by raising borrowing costs across the economy, they can reduce inflation from a near-40-year high. Some economists fear, though, that the Fed is tightening credit so aggressively that it will eventually tip the economy into recession.

Most industries added workers last month, with the biggest increases in professional and business services, which gained 68,000 jobs. That sector includes architects, engineers and some tech workers. Health care added 61,500 jobs, retailers 44,000.

Job openings remain high and the pace of layoffs low, indicating that most businesses still want to hire. The broadest measure of the economy’s output — gross domestic product — has shrunk for two straight quarters, meeting one informal definition of a recession. Yet another measure, focused on incomes, indicates the economy expanded in the first half of the year, albeit slowly.

Chair Jerome Powell, in a high-profile speech last week, made clear that to curb inflation, the Fed was prepared to continue raising short-term interest rates for the foreseeable future and to keep them elevated. Powell warned that the Fed’s inflation fight would likely cause pain for Americans in the form of a weaker economy and job losses.

The Fed chair also said the job market is “clearly out of balance,” with demand for workers “substantially exceeding” the available supply. Friday’s jobs figures and a report earlier this week that the number of job openings rose in July after three months of declines, suggested that the Fed’s rate hikes so far haven’t restored any such balance. There are roughly two advertised job openings for every unemployed worker.

Wages are rising at their fastest pace in decades as employers scramble to fill jobs at a time when fewer Americans are working or seeking work in the aftermath of the pandemic. Average hourly pay jumped 5.2% in July from a year earlier. Still, that was less than the 5.6% year-over-year in March, which was the largest annual increase in 15 years of records outside of the spring of 2020, when the pandemic struck.

Some skeptics warn that the Fed may be focusing excessively on the strength of the job market when other indicators indicate that the economy is noticeably weakening. Consumer spending, for example, and manufacturing have slowed. The central bank might raise rates too far as a result, to the point where it causes a deeper recession than might be needed to conquer inflation.

The economic picture is highly uncertain, with the healthy pace of hiring and low unemployment at odds with the government’s estimate that the economy shrank in the first six months of this year, which is one informal definition of a recession.

Yet a related measure of the economy’s growth, which focuses on incomes, shows that it is still expanding, if at a weak pace.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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Rapper Lecrae, Hip-Hop Contestants Bring Hope To Inmates

In the latest story in Newsy’s American Heart series, participants were asked to compose original song lyrics and a title to one of three beats.

A very special contest spearheaded by Grammy award-winning rapper Lecrae to bring hope to incarcerated people in our country, their families and their communities is the focus of one of Newsy’s American Heart series segments. In the series, Newsy looks for and amplifies the best in America.

Participants in this special contest were asked to compose original song lyrics and a title to one of three beats. They got them over technology and then they sat down and they came up with it. The winning track, “I Think” was composed by Carmela Mose, also known as Good, who is currently serving time at the Central California Women’s Facility. Her track was chosen from hundreds of submissions around the country. Rapper Lecrae met Carmela to record the song on site with the help of technology company Securus.

You can check out more of my work w. @SecurusTech & Carmela: https://t.co/VWaSIYlAiv & go download the song: https://t.co/1jRhm4OaOq. All proceeds from the song will be donated to @prisonfellowshp pic.twitter.com/fsKDizg0o8

— Lecrae (@lecrae) August 31, 2022

NEWSY TONIGHT’S CHANCE SEALES: Joining me now are two people very intimately involved with this project: Dave Abel is the president and CEO of Securus Technologies and with him, Grammy award-winning artist Lecrae. Lecrae, good to have you. Let’s start with you. You’re lending your name, passion, followers, your presence to this first-ever original hip-hop track contest. What hooked you about this? What got you excited?

LECRAE: Well, you know, I’ve been involved with the corrections community for years and Securus gave me the opportunity to kind of broaden my access to people behind those walls and you know, just to be able to deliver hope through music to over half a million incarcerated people was a very fulfilling and important aspect of my life and so it’s important to me and my history and my story.

SEALES: Hope. Yeah, I mean, in churches or in the crowds that you play to, I’m sure people are there and they’re excited. Hope is not a word generally associated with a penitentiary. That seems like a really unique opportunity.

LECRAE: It is, man. It’s a really unique opportunity. The reality is that there are people behind those walls who are family members of folks like you and I. Some have made some mistakes; some may be there for different reasons that are questionable, but at the end of the day, they’re still human beings and they have a voice and often times their voice is not heard. So, we’re providing them with an opportunity to be heard, to be seen and to participate in an aspect of society that demonstrates that rehabilitation and restoration is possible.

SEALES: Dave, this is kind of a novel idea. Plenty of prisons have reading programs or you can become a paralegal or something of that sort. I know you work with new technology to keep people who are incarcerated connected to the outside world every day. But rap music — Why rap music?

DAVE ABEL: Well, music, in general, has the ability to be able to inspire. It has the ability to be able to connect people. It allows people to be able to express their feelings and emotions in a way that, throughout history, has helped to be able to create better rehabilitation through prisons. Go back to Johnny Cash, recording a song by Glen Shirley on “Live at Folsom Prison.” There’s a long history of artists collaborating in prisons and with incarcerated individuals to help to be able to express positive outcomes for individuals who are incarcerated.

SEALES: Lecrae, the winner of the contest is Carmela Mose, who is 37 years old. She’s of Mexican and Samoan descent, I believe. She’s serving time in the Central California Women’s Facility. There were tons of submissions. It got whittled down to 25, and then she was ultimately chosen. As an artist, as a philanthropist who really cares about not just, you know, prison populations, but the hearts and souls who are there. What spoke to you about her?

LECRAE: Carmela Mose is just a phenomenal person in general. Ms. Mose, a.k.a. Good, which is her rapper name — Good just represents a voice that would otherwise have been silenced. She’s talking about things in her lyrics, you know, from the submissions we saw, she was talking about such profound and ingenious things in a creative way that I was like, “Wow, how in the world has this voice not been heard?” And so, to get the opportunity to give her a voice to speak to the world is actually a gift to me.

SEALES: Dave, your company Securus is more of a tech company than it is a music company. Why did you decide, when speaking with your board and speaking with your fellow employees, that “This was something we want to put our resources behind.”

ABEL: Our company is focused on being able to get a tablet in the hand of every incarcerated individual in the United States. We deploy technology that helps rehabilitative justice and we were watching all around the industry and it was an absolute no-brainer to work with Lecrae. He has spoken for years, not only in his lyrics, but in his public statements, about the need to reinvest in the community of people who are incarcerated and help to be able to create better outcomes. So, in partnering with Lecrae and being able to use our technology, we felt that it would be a great outcome for those who participated, for those who submitted lyrics and and frankly, being able to provide resources to the Prison Fellowship Program. We thought it would be a great outcome for everybody involved.

SEALES: In the end, I know that this is not something you just came to in the last few weeks or a year, that this is something you’ve cared about for a long time. If there are themes that you hear, if there are lyrics that speak to you, do you think the broader world should hear? Because we get to hear Carmela, but there are so many more. Anything that you think we need to know as a society?

LECRAE: Yeah, I think that again, you know, I’m the product of somebody who has had family incarcerated, my father being one of them. And you know, when you can humanize folks behind those walls, you also send a message to their children and their family members that they matter as well. And so, giving them a voice on this original hip-hop track contest opens the door for other creative opportunities to showcase the talent and the humanity of people behind it, as well. Often times they’re typecast as you know, just anything other than human. And I think this humanizes them and it helps us to see ourselves in them.

SEALES: Dave, Lecrae has talked about the importance of finding an inspiring hope within every population inside and outside prison walls — connectedness. I know people do better when they reenter society when there’s a connection, a deep connection and I know you work to keep people connected to the outside. Did that seem to be in the same way wavelength here?

ABEL: Absolutely. And study after study shows that individuals that have greater connection with friends and family outside facilities are much more likely to successfully reenter society after their sentence is complete. And we also find that when individuals are sharing music, when they’re sharing stories about songs that they’ve heard or experiences that they’ve had with people on the outside, that it creates a connective bond that also aids towards successful reentry.

SEALES: Lecrae, I was reading up on your Prison Fellowship Program and I loved part of the tag line: “working to bring hope and restoration to the incarcerated, their families and communities impacted by crime and incarceration.” And what does this world need more than hope right now? I think that’s phenomenal. Dave Abel, Lecrae, thank you both for your time and all the work you’re putting in.

ABEL: Thank you.

LECRAE: Thank you. I appreciate you having me.

: newsy.com

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New NIL Benefits Turn College Athletes Into Millionaires

Name, image and likeness deals have taken hold at college campuses across the country, turning some student-athletes into millionaires.

Glance around the parking lot of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center at The Ohio State University this fall and you might come across a $200,000 palace on wheels, the kind of luxury ride more likely to be found in the garages of movie stars, music moguls and titans of business than on a college campus.

That’s assuming Buckeyes quarterback C.J. Stroud hasn’t swapped out his silver Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon for a Bentley or a Porsche, which his name, image and likeness deal with Sarchione Auto Gallery allows him to do every 45 days.

“It’s definitely changed my life for the future,” Stroud said of the several NIL deals to flow his way over the past year, “and I think it’s a jump-start to being a businessman before you get to the NFL, if that’s your path.”

More than a year ago, the NCAA lifted long-standing restrictions on players profiting from their celebrity status, and in some cases it turned elite players such as Stroud and Alabama quarterback Bryce Young into instant millionaires. But the financial benefits for some athletes are being weighed against the possibility that such deals will divide locker rooms, create tension within programs, produce an uneven playing field across college athletics and overwhelm students stretched for time.

“As far as NIL goes in the locker room, you see stuff, but no one ever talks about it,” Oklahoma wide receiver Marvin Mims admitted. “It’s never like, a competition, like, ‘Oh, I got this much more money than you did. I’ve got this deal. You couldn’t get this deal.’ But you do notice the NIL deals that other guys are getting.”

College football has witnessed the biggest impact from NIL legislation, though athletes in all sports have tapped into the sudden cash flow. Of the estimated $1.14 billion that will be poured into the pockets of athletes in Year 2, the NIL platform Opendorse predicts nearly half of it will be spent on the gridiron.

The largest and most prominent deals are going to individual athletes who have successfully leveraged their exceptional ability, potential, influence and exposure: Young’s portfolio is believed to have exceeded $1 million before he ever took a snap for the Crimson Tide, while Alabama teammate Will Anderson signed an NIL deal that allows one of the nation’s best linebackers to drive a $120,000 Porsche Cayenne GTS.

At Texas, running back Bijan Robinson has deals with Raising Cane’s restaurants, C4 Energy drinks and sports streaming platform DAZN, while also forging a partnership with an auto dealership for the use of a Lamborghini. At Notre Dame, tight end Michael Mayer has parlayed his first-round draft stock into deals with clothing brands Levi’s and Rhoback.

They are precisely the types of endorsement contracts, and cozy relationships with boosters and businesses, that once landed players on suspension and programs on probation.

“I feel bad for the older players that didn’t have the opportunity to get money from this, like Braxton Miller, Cardale Jones, Justin (Fields),” Stroud said of the Ohio State quarterbacks who came before him.

“They should have made a killing,” added Stroud, who also works with Value City Furniture, Designer Shoe Warehouse and the trading card company Onyx Authenticated. “It’s just good that players have control now when it comes to money.”

Along with deals signed by individual athletes, collectives have become a major player in the NIL landscape. Some are organized by schools and others by boosters acting on their own, but both distribute money gathered from businesses and donors for everything from endorsements to meet-and-greets and charitable work.

The Foundation, a third-party collective at Ohio State, says it has raised more than $500,000 for Stroud, running back TreVeyon Henderson, wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and cornerback Denzel Burke. Texas Tech boosters have formed The Matador Club collective, which says it is signing all 85 scholarship players and 20 walk-ons to $25,000 contracts this season in return for appearing at club events and doing a certain amount of community service.

“I think we are well into the seven figures with all of our collectives,” said Morgan Frazier, a former gymnast at Florida and now the general counsel for Student Athlete NIL, which operates collectives at Penn State and several other schools.

Asked where the majority of money is going, she replied: “Overall, definitely football.”

It’s almost impossible to determine how much players are earning from NIL deals, in part because reporting rules differ from state to state. The vast majority are relatively modest — perhaps $50 for a tweet or $100 for an autograph signing on platforms such as Cameo, vidsig and Engage. Rarely do deals exceed $1,000.

But for premier position players at marquee programs, with NFL potential and huge social media followings, the money on the table can be life-changing. Twelve college players have a valuation of at least $1 million entering this season, according to On3, a platform that uses an algorithm to factor such things as social media reach to project NIL worth.

More than 50 players have a valuation of at least $500,000, with most of those playing in the SEC and Big Ten.

“Having an opportunity to change other peoples’ lives, that’s what’s cool about NIL,” said Penn State quarterback Sean Clifford, who founded Limitless NIL, which is believed to be the first agency created by an athlete to help other athletes. Its clients include Nittany Lions receiver Ji’Ayir Brown.

The spoils can come at a price. For one thing, players who may have already struggled to juggle classes and study halls with practice and film sessions now must balance meet-and-greets, autograph sessions and other work.

Then there’s the often-combustible locker room atmosphere, where lines have always existed between haves and have nots. In the past, those might have been between walk-ons and scholarship players. Now, they could be between players driving exotic cars or wearing expensive jewelry and those trying to scrape together rent.

“I know it could be a distraction,” Robinson said, when asked what it’s like driving his Lamborghini to practice. “If a teammate would bring it up, I would just joke around, be like, ‘Oh, man, but it’s not like what you’re getting out there right now.’ Just to not make it about yourself, because it’s not about you.

“If you’re not winning,” Robinson said, “none of us can get these NIL deals.”

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.

: newsy.com

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