The Epstein files have technical names in bold-faced. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Reid Hoffman, Steven Sinofsky, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more. These people (and they are almost all men) had very different degrees of interaction with Epstein, and the details matter a lot. But that’s also the whole point of it: You spend a lot of time in these files, and you start to understand how the world works for a certain type of extremely rich and extremely powerful businessman. And starts feeling very bad.
on this issue of The VergecastDavid and Nilay start the show by talking about the latest tranche of emails from the Epstein files, what we’ve learned and the strange way in which they’re being disseminated. There are interesting business stories here; There are shocking conspiracies to change the world. We’re still not sure how to talk about it, except to keep showing what we find.
After that, it’s time for the second thing occupying tech minds this week: Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad, which is obviously not a shot at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads into ChatGPIT, but it’s also exactly the same. The ads sparked debate about how we use AI and how we pay for it, and also made it a little clearer how uncertain the status of OpenAI is right now. They are also very good advertisements.
If you want to learn more about everything discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on the Epstein files:
And in the era of electricity:
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