The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Prisoners of Fortune: When your money owns you. What is the point of being rich? Most people’s answers would be some version of: To be able to do what you want. Money, at its essence, is a thing that gives you the ability to enact your will upon the world. It liberates you from life’s constraints. The more money you have, the more free you should be. So it is odd to observe the ways that this is plainly not true… (How Things Work)
• Rules Matter More Than Insight: How Discipline Beats Brilliance: A Rulebook Organized by Failure Severity for Long-Term Survival. (The Financial Pen)
• Dan Wang 2025 letter: One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless. Which of the tech titans are funny? Sam Altman at a tech conference said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually, that was pretty funny. (Dan Wang)
• Study: 5 People Dominate Retirement Advice on TikTok (Ugh): A new research report examines nearly 30,000 social media posts about retirement savings and investing. The authors find “traditional news outlets” contributed just 23% of retirement-related content. Investors can be intimidated by the prospect of seeking professional advice, and the industry needs to do better at meeting them where they are, a marketing expert says. (ThinkAdvisor)
• Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Big Breakup: The congresswoman split with the President over the Epstein files, then she quit. Where will she go from here? (New Yorker)
• Darwin the Witness In His Own Words: Darwin immortalized a fast-transforming world—customs, political situations, and ways of life that were both new and just about to vanish into mostly-unwritten history. (Aether Mug)
• What I Saw When I Peeked Over the Edge of Consciousness. You could tell who were survivors not just by their calm demeanor when describing the most traumatic day of their lives or because they danced with a notably blissed-out confidence. They also had bright green ribbons affixed to their conference badges that read, “Experiencer.” (New York Times)
• 90 Minutes to Give Baby Luna a New Heart: After eight years of training, Dr. Maureen McKiernan made her debut as the lead surgeon on an infant heart transplant — an operation on the edge of what’s possible. (New York Times)
• How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler: As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise—and will execute his agenda in Venezuela and around the globe. (New Yorker)
• Why This $170,000 F.P. Journe Is the Watch of the Century: Chronomètre à Résonance is an exquisite timepiece that stacks up there with the best conceptual art. (Bloomberg)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and his University of Chicago Booth School colleague Alex Imas on the update and reissue of his classic book The Winner’s Curse.
Six Banks Seen Reaping $157 Billion
Source: Bloomberg
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