(🧵1/10) With renewed attention on my recent @NewYorker reporting about Sam Altman and OpenAI, it's worth revisiting a piece I wrote for the magazine about another tech billionaire who has accumulated unusual leverage over the US government—and whose hand many readers have lately seen at work in their feeds.

For that story, I spent months interviewing more than thirty of Elon Musk's current and former colleagues, along with current and former officials at NASA, the Department of Defense, the FAA, the Department of Transportation, and OSHA. Many of their observations have only grown more relevant since.

Read the full investigation here: newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…

And a thread on a few of its findings below. (2/10) In 2022, SpaceX gave the Pentagon an ultimatum: pay roughly $400 million a year for Starlink service in Ukraine—crucial infrastructure the country's military was relying on for battlefield communication—or it would be cut off.

Colin Kahl, then Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, called Elon Musk and pleaded with for more time. Officials told me lives hung in the balance. But they had to be deferential. "Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue," Kahl told me. A Pentagon official described the dynamic more bluntly: "We are living off his good graces. That sucks."

(🧵1/11) When OpenAI board members hired the law firm WilmerHale to investigate Sam Altman's firing over two years ago, many executives at the company expected to see extensive findings. Instead, OpenAI released a brief announcement with few details. One new disclosure in our @NewYorker investigation: there was no written report, and findings were kept deliberately out of writing.

Full story here: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

And a thread below. (2/11) When Altman sought the removal of board members who had fired him over an alleged pattern of deception and manipulation, they made an independent third party investigation a condition of their exit. Altman initially resisted any inquiry, but eventually acceded to a review.

1/9 🧵Iran's military recently released a video threatening the "complete and utter annihilation" of the $30 billion OpenAI Stargate data center being built in Abu Dhabi. My @newyorker investigation with @andrewmarantz into Sam Altman and OpenAI helps explain how we got here—and the geopolitical entanglements at the heart of OpenAI's expansion into the Gulf.

Thread below, read in full here for much more: newyorker.com/magazine/2026/… 2/9 During the Biden administration, Altman explored getting a security clearance to join classified AI policy discussions. A staffer at the RAND Corporation, which helped coordinate the process, wrote that Altman had been "actively raising 'hundreds of billions of dollars' from foreign governments," and that the UAE had gifted him a car—"I assume it was a very nice car." The staffer continued: "The only person I can think of who ever went through the process with this magnitude of foreign financial ties is Jared Kushner, and the adjudicators recommended that he not be granted a clearance." Altman withdrew.

(🧵1/11) For the past year and a half, I've been investigating OpenAI and Sam Altman for @NewYorker. With my coauthor @andrewmarantz, I reviewed never-before-disclosed internal memos, obtained 200+ pages of documents related to a close colleague, including extensive private notes, and interviewed more than 100 people.

OpenAI was founded on the premise that A.I. could be the most dangerous invention in human history—and that its C.E.O. would need to be a person of uncommon integrity. We lay out the most detailed account yet of why Altman was ousted out by board members and executives who came to believe he lacked that integrity, and ask: were they right to allege that he couldn't be trusted?

A thread on some of of our findings:
(2/11) In the fall of 2023, OpenAI's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, acting at the behest of fellow board members and with other concerned colleagues, compiled some 70 pages of memos about Altman and his second-in-command, Greg Brockman—Slack messages and H.R. documents, some photographed on a cellphone to avoid detection on company devices. One memo begins with a list: "Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of . . ." The first item is "Lying."

Separately, Dario Amodei—who left to co-found Anthropic—kept years of private notes on Altman and Brockman. More than 200 pages of related documents, never before publicly disclosed, have circulated in Silicon Valley. In one document, Amodei writes that Altman's “words were almost certainly bullshit.”

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post offering “financial runway." This month it gutted its newsroom—more than 300 layoffs.

Whatever you think of legacy news, the hard data shows us that newspaper closures hurt Americans. Here's how: 🧵 Between 2008 and 2020, U.S. newspaper newsroom employment fell 57%.

More than 200 counties are now "news deserts"—no local outlet at all. In another 1,500+ counties, only one remains.
pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

(1/10 🧵) If you live in NY, you may see a new warning: “THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA.” This mandatory disclosure went into effect late last year, and it’s the first attempt by a US state to grapple with a new generation of surveillance pricing.
(2/10) You know dynamic pricing—think Ubers, flights, or concert tickets that surge based on supply and demand. “Surveillance pricing” takes this to a new level: using your data to set a “price for you” based on your predicted breaking point. This is, increasingly, everywhere.

(1/13 🧵) Here's my further analysis of the recent journalist arrests, for those not inclined to hunt down my posts elsewhere. While this is a political flash point, I do not believe it is a partisan issue. It is part of a pattern perpetrated by, and that hurts, both parties: (2/13) What one party does to shrink the space for newsgathering is a loaded gun the next party can use. I’ve always covered this as a bipartisan problem—here I am in 2020 reporting on a DOJ whistleblower and noting that going after reporters' sources was a wider trend:

Don Lemon and Georgia Fort have been released.

But the procedural history now emerging is unusual. Before the arrests, a federal magistrate judge found no probable cause to arrest them. The government appealed anyway.

Here’s why that matters—and what it signals more broadly. They’re charged under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Written to protect abortion clinics, it also covers places of worship.

The government says the law applies because the protest took place at Cities Church in St. Paul.

NEW: Cuomo called the Obama White House to attack a federal prosecutor who was investigating him. It concerned officials there enough that they reported it to DOJ. Part of a pattern of Cuomo smearing investigators that continues to this day: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… In April 2014, prosecutor Preet Bharara announced he would scrutinize Cuomo's abrupt shutdown of the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. Cuomo called the White House in a "fit of pique" and "ranting and raving," officials there recalled.

“It was supposed to be temporary.” My investigation into the plan that stripped Britney Spears of her rights, her battle to regain control of her life, and the dilemmas of conservatorship abuse. With @jiatolentino. Read here: newyorker.com/news/american-… Thread below: Last month—the day before Britney Spears called into court to say that she had been isolated, medicated, financially exploited, and emotionally abused—Spears called 911.

State Dept staffers say Mike Pompeo was obsessed with his presidential prospects and showed a disregard for his staff and work—once, he expressed annoyance at having to facilitate the rescue of an American hostage because he wanted to nap. New @newyorker: newyorker.com/books/page-tur… Diplomats told me that Pompeo—who, according to an inspector general report this April, breached ethical guidelines in his use of staff for personal tasks—had left behind a Department with deep wounds.

NEW: Cuomo insiders disclose how they scrambled to leak his first accuser’s personnel files, as she, in her first detailed interview, raises new allegations—from a sexual remark involving a dog to de Blasio’s face on a dartboard: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… Boylan helped trigger a chain reaction that has plunged Cuomo’s political future into uncertainty. She said she began to tweet about her allegation that Cuomo sexually harassed her while she was a NY state official in part because another woman reached out with a similar claim:

NEW: “Bullhorn Lady,” one of the FBI's most wanted after she battered windows and issued orders at the capitol, is Rachel Powell, a mother of eight from rural PA. Her path to radicalization, and what it reveals about extremism in America: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… Powell, whose name is being made public for the first time in this story, spoke to me for two hours from an undisclosed location and expressed concern about the FBI finding her. She confirmed her identity and participation in the riot.

NEW: A former US Marine, Donovan Crowl, stormed the Capitol as part of an organized militia. My latest for @NewYorker, on what he reveals about the role of far-right groups last week and beyond: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… Crowl, whose name and role in last week’s events are being reported for the first time in this story, is fifty years old and served in the Persian Gulf in 1990.

One of the men photographed carrying zip-tie handcuffs on the Senate floor unmasked as a decorated Air Force veteran. My latest for @newyorker: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… The man’s name, disclosed for the first time in this story, is Larry Rendell Brock Jr., a retired Lt Colonel.

In the next @NewYorker, I look at a culture of retribution against whistleblowers under Trump—and a new complaint implicating CIA director Gina Haspel and Donald Trump’s nominee for the top legal job in the intelligence community in a retaliation campaign. newyorker.com/magazine/2020/… In the complaint, a DOJ lawyer claims the retaliation came after he uncovered a secret CIA surveillance program and a practice of lying to prosecutors to conceal its use in criminal cases. The scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of emails, transcripts & other documents.

.@michaelluo has pointed out facts that contradict aspects of @benyt‘s column about my work in The New Yorker. A few additional thoughts: Ben notes a Weinstein script from NBC and a radio interview I gave about it. The book discusses that draft and its account is accurate. In the interview, I misspoke. What I should have said was that there were at least two women named or willing to be named, as the book lays out.

The below cultural artifact is truly bonkers and made me think of the one conversation I’ve ever had with Jessica Simpson. It was brief—perhaps she wouldn’t even recall it—but it’s stayed with me. (1/4)

https://twitter.com/rachel_handler/status/1225486677642272770

It was after a White House Correspondents’ Dinner. She was sitting on the floor, looking forlorn. She was holding up her top after a wardrobe malfunction. A comedian had just made a joke implying she was dumb. It really hurt her feelings. (2/4)

How an elite university research center concealed its relationship with a sex offender—documents show MIT Media Lab accepted donations directed by Jeffrey Epstein far in excess of what the university has admitted to, and worked to cover it up: newyorker.com/news/news-desk… After Epstein was a convicted sex offender, listed as "disqualified" from donating in MIT's database, MIT Media Lab worked closely with Epstein, secretly taking donations from him or labeled as having been secured at his direction, from his contacts, including Bill Gates.