20 Comments

It never won't be funny that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is still running a crowdsourced, mostly nonpaying twee art factory amidst all his tech connections...

Expand full comment

This cursed ass lead photo

Expand full comment

Google Meet is one hell of a platform to get fired on. Is it better or worse than Microsoft Teams?

Expand full comment

Better, but the really funny thing is that Microsoft owned 49 percent of this company and provided its entire cloud platform and they STILL refused to use Teams.

Expand full comment

Footnote 6 is key. Most employees were/are about to become millionaires.

Expand full comment

You are clearly trying to avoid your family over the holidays. Totally get it. (Also: nice job.)

Expand full comment

Thanks for doing that. I will never read anything about that ever again.

Expand full comment

The other big unanswered question is why is the ghoul, Larry Summers, now on the board.

Expand full comment

The whole thing from the outside is like when a roomful of adults at a party feign responsibility by taking interest in their kids' endless game of musical chairs for five minutes...

Expand full comment

Thank you. I considered reading one of the several (?, or was there only one but with bigger and bigger font) Times articles on this, but just couldn't muster the interest. My only remaining question, and apologies for even asking, what's the Larry Summers connection?

Expand full comment

The AGI insisted that one board member have a close and longstanding personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein ?? Weird request but it's a superintelligence

Expand full comment

Honestly sad this solid gold take was relegated to the comment section

Expand full comment

It's quite revealing that OpenAI's idea of an upgrade is to remove two women and install Mr. "Let me tell all the Harvard professors that men are naturally smarter than women in selective environments like Harvard because The Bell Curve". What a creepy, bigoted wankfest.

Expand full comment

you're right, i should have moved on

Expand full comment

it made no sense that Microsoft could announce they’d hired him, then he could back out of it instantly. I guess they never actually did. the weird details of Microsoft’s investment in the company provide some insight there. there was probably some protection in the paperwork saying they couldnt just poach 90% of the company they’d invested in.

Expand full comment

Seems very clear "in retrospect" (and basically at the time) that it was an attempt at leverage over the board—Sam kept threatening this fake "deadline" via Bloomberg and I guess he and his team had to come up with *something*

Expand full comment

Thank you for shedding light on one of my burning questions throughout this whole saga: what’s the deal with the Quora guy?

He’s Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate now it makes sense. And seems to be the only rebellious board member still standing. Real Nelson Bighetti energy

Expand full comment

Thanks Max, I admire the dedication you poured into such a corpo snoozefest of a story. Seriously! I meant it as a compliment lol

My only real takeaway is that you should make a Venturkapitalschadenfreude tier of ReadMax where you review S-1s, I’d pay extra for that content

Expand full comment

This made me lol

Expand full comment

This is an excellent summary, I think you didn’t miss anything at all.

Expand full comment