🤭Sam Altman is bad at olive oil🤭
The Financial Times says he uses it recklessly
Welcome to the lunch box edition of The Black Cat, where I give rapid-fire thoughts on some top headlines. Follow me on Instagram. P.S. The Black Cat now has a tip line. You can request a story or submit a tip anonymously here!
☀️Scratch Post☀️
Let’s scratch the surface of a few things…
I received yet another wonderful email from Edward Blum, the conservative activist who helped overturn affirmative action. The man is relentless in his passion for supporting, teaming up, and/or forming organizations to sue any program, any company, anyone, or anything that even thinks about having race-based criteria. He’s been dedicated to this for decades, and he so kindly emailed me his latest suit against UCLA Medical School for, you guessed it, allegedly having race-based admissions. Now, remember, affirmative action was banned in California in 1996. The trio suing UCLA includes Blum’s Students for Fair Admissions, another activist group called Do No Harm, and someone named Kelly Mahoney, who was rejected from UCLA’s medical school. The suit alleges that applications to the school have responses that let the committee “glean the applicant’s race, which the medical school later confirms via interviews.” I’m intrigued to see how this case goes. Blum has been pretty successful in shaking down a lot of places to adjust any language that might signal a preference in race. His argument is usually the same — that these types of programs discriminate against white women and Asian people. The saddest part about all of this, though, is not just the evaporation of progress from the past few years, but that it is still so easy to pit minorities against each other, most often just at the expense of themselves.
I promised I was not going to talk about Elon Musk, but… I have loosely followed this whole drama in President Trump bringing over “refugees” from South Africa. I remember he said he would do something like this a while ago, so seeing the headlines that he did it brought me no shock. But perhaps disturbing is the word I am looking for. I find Elon Musk’s obsession with this so-called “white genocide” in South Africa to be very disturbing. The Financial Times just had a story that Grok, that AI bot on X, will unprompted start talking to a user about “white genocide” in South Africa. For me, I see a business angle. It seems like typical Musk behavior to try and find a way to bully his way into a space where he was denied. Like a toddler throwing some type of tantrum. You see, Musk has been trying to obtain operating licenses for his Starlink to operate in South Africa. To receive them, he would have to abide by the nation’s Black Economic Empowerment law and sell 30% of his business to a historically disadvantaged group, mainly referring to the majority Black population that lives in South Africa but who were economically disenfranchised during apartheid. Obviously, Musk doesn’t want to do this. “Starlink is not allowed to operate in South Africa, because I’m not black,” he posted on X. And so a tussle ensues. Actually, the FT had a good piece last year about “Musk, [Peter] Thiel, and the shadow of apartheid South Africa,” about how growing up there impacted these broligarchs. The article then compared it to the rhetoric Musk shares today, which “evoke the atmosphere” of his childhood.
On the note of broligarchs, did you hear? Sam Altman is bad at olive oil. Not to conduct a jarring transition from the last paragraph, but tech’s burgeoning broligarch hung out with the FT, where he spoke about AI while making the reporter a nice home-cooked meal. Sam had the same spiel: There is hope in AI, and it can change the world. Blah, Blah, Blah. The good part came when the FT did a breakdown of what it learned from watching Sam cook, and as someone who just got into cooking, I am all here for kitchen snark. Yes! Let’s judge Sam Altman for his strange cooking habits. Are you ready? Come close, reader: apparently, Sam buys expensive olive oil and use it “recklessly.” The FT said he uses this very boujie olive oil to cook when it’s only supposed to be used as a drizzle. Also, he has either a very cheap or a very expensive kitchen knife. The FT couldn’t decide.
Meanwhile, crypto people are being weird again. Did you hear about the crypto founder who faked his death? No, not that one, the other one. This one had an obituary and everything. The San Francisco Standard has the thrilling tale that ties it all together, and I won’t give any spoilers, but just know that the founder was found at his dad’s house and, of course, refused to talk to the reporter about his fake death. “You can see the PTSD in my eyes, right?” he said before shooing the reporter away. In something that may or may not be related, the reporter also noted that accounts linked to this founder started increasing in value after the alleged death hoax. And then, a bunch of teenagers allegedly kidnapped a man and robbed him of $4 million in crypto and NFTs. Years ago, all I heard about digital assets was their potential to be life-changing, and now all I’m hearing about is Suge Knight-behavior. Even as I was writing this, a new dispatch came from Paris. "Gang tries to kidnap crypto tycoon’s daughter in central Paris.” I was chatting to a Wall Street guy about all of this, and he told me that shady people are using more crypto in the underworld because it’s much harder to trace than money. I need a New York Times Magazine deep dive — and a Dev Patel-led thriller — about a day in the crypto underworld.
Time for niche tennis drama — Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic have parted ways. This means a lot to me as a tennis fan because Andy and Novak coming together is like Beyoncé and Rihanna doing a duet, it’s like Taylor Swift and Madonna coming together for a sold-out spectacular. Andy was fresh into retirement, and Novak, despite the rising crop of new tennis talent, was holding on, retaining himself as a major name in the game. But alas, after six months, the partnership did not last. Now I’m a bit worried. The Times reported that the Serb was “frustrated by recent lack of consistency.” I hate to say it, but I wonder if it has to do with age. He’s 37 years old, which is quite old in the tennis world. Roger, Serena, Rafael, all the greats of the last era had to listen to their bodies to know when it was time to prepare for that last trip around the sun. At Novak’s age, and with players like Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz haunting the courts, maybe Andy’s coaching isn’t the problem… maybe Novak’s time is just coming to an end.
And before I go, I want to rant about something else very quick. Bridgerton is coming back in 2026 and has already been renewed for Seasons 5 and 6. Are you trying to tell me that we have to spend almost ten years with this show? The show premiered in 2020, and it’s been five years with only three seasons, maybe 24 episodes total. Do you remember the days when TV shows dropped like 20 episodes per season, once a year? I’m tired of these two-year gaps between shows that only give us 10 episodes max per season, and I don’t believe the quality is higher when this happens either, as we all saw with Season 3 of Bridgerton. The actors are going to be well-aged out of their characters, too. I remember the shock I had when I realized that we all waited three years in between this latest season of White Lotus and the last, and this new season also wasn’t that good. What is going on? I guess I’m thinking about this because I have started my biennial rewatch of Gossip Girl and the majority of the seasons indulge us with at least 20 episodes. And often, the show is just as excellent, just as scintillating as anything happening in the writer’s room of these quick hit shows — it even stays the night, too.
🌕Purrs around town🌕
Rumors or conversation starters, however you want to look at it…
Yes, the new pope has Black ancestry, but his brother confirmed that the family doesn’t identify as Black. Someone joked that “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” will be sung at the Vatican anyway.
I’ve been waiting two months for about five books I put on hold at the New York Public Library. One of those books is now missing! If you checked out “Monet: The Restless Vision” by Jackie Wullschläger and lost it, please go FIND IT so I can have it next. Thank you!
“Salmon would run away from Black people if it had legs.” I think about this quote daily.