Meritocracy = boys, DOGE fraud, Zuck’s publicity stunt, simple minded governance
Story of the Week (DR):
Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’
An aggressive defense strategy is being used in response to an avalanche of litigation, with over 4,000 lawsuits filed by passengers accusing Uber of failing to protect them from sexual assault
While Uber publicly champions itself as a "survivor-centric" ally and trains support staff against victim-blaming, its defense lawyers ruthlessly contradict this to protect the $145 billion company.
Uber’s attorneys aggressively interrogate survivors about their clothing (e.g., asking if they wore underwear or heels), drug and alcohol consumption, and sexual history.
The legal team weaponizes past trauma by scouring private medical records and therapy notes, even petitioning courts to force survivors to undergo psychiatric exams or reveal details of childhood abuse to paint them as "unreliable narrators".
Legal experts warn these scorched-earth tactics are deliberately designed to re-traumatize victims, discouraging lawsuits and intimidating survivors into settling.
Chief Legal Officer Tony West: “Why safety is personal to me”
Cites his public service career to cover for ruthless corporate tactics, like drafting Prop 22 to strip driver protections.
Frames survivor trauma as a flaw of the "adversarial legal system," deflecting from Uber’s own attorneys using aggressive, victim-blaming tactics to minimize payouts.
Uses a single favorable quote from one trial judge to dismiss widespread litigation abuse.
Touts ending forced arbitration while continuing to block class-action lawsuits, trapping survivors in isolated 1-on-1 fights.
Brags about transparent reporting despite Uber burying 400,000+ assault complaints (2017–2022) under labels like "unaudited."
TikTok Withheld a Safety Feature From Millions. One Died by Suicide
When TikTok tweaked its algorithm in 2021 to stop users from being overwhelmed with harmful content, the company didn’t roll out the safer version to everyone, a confidential internal document shows.
Instead, to see if the change might reduce the app’s stickiness, the company conducted an experiment. It created a control group of 10% of US users — at the time, that would have been about 15 million people — who kept the old version of the app.
This group, according to the document, included 16-year-old Chase Nasca. TikTok’s algorithm pushed him thousands of videos about suicide, sadness, hopelessness and loneliness, right up until he killed himself.
TikTok says moderator error delayed removal of Perez Hilton's livestream showing acts of self-harm
GAO finds Elon Musk’s DOGE inflated claims of $110 billion in savings for federal government
The GAO found that 96% of the savings DOGE claimed from grant cancellations lacked supporting evidence or methodology to verify.
DOGE claimed $27.4 billion in savings across 2,503 contracts—including a $1.7 billion Pentagon IT deal—that were never actually terminated or reduced.
Over 40% of the lease cancellations listed on DOGE’s "Wall of Receipts" were already in progress before the agency was created.
GAO uncovered widespread data errors, such as overstating total lease savings by nearly $60 million and failing to report baseline limitations.
DOGE failed to disclose how it calculated its metrics and completely ignored GAO requests for interviews and supporting data.
Where are Elon Musk’s former DOGE staffers now?
Edward “Big Balls” Coristine: a whistleblower alleged that Coristine planned to upload sensitive Social Security Administration data to an unsecured server. He also helped dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.
Coristine now appears to work at the National Design Studio, an office created to overhaul federal websites and other public-facing services, making them more usable, visually consistent and less expensive to build.
Jeremy Lewin: helped oversee the dismantling of USAID
Lewin later became the State Department’s senior official for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom, giving a former DOGE operative authority over the programs his old team had helped slash.
He was subsequently reported to be moving to the White House National Security Council.
Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox
Founded a holding company called Special, which promises to do for private businesses what DOGE did for the federal government.
“To achieve this, Special is building an operating system to transform critical American industries with AI. We call it SpecialOS.”
Gavin Kliger, Luke Farritor, Marko Elez and Jack Stein
Founded Cathedral, a startup that plans to use AI to expand U.S. military cyber capabilities, including defenses against adversaries such as China.
Reuters reported that the company raised $160 million at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Ethan Shaotran: helped move thousands of immigrants into the government’s “Master Death File,” effectively deactivating their Social Security numbers.
Founded Blitz Industries, which he described to Wired as “a defense company backed by big names.”
Elon Musk: SpaceX Achieves Its First Moon Landing by Accidentally Crashing Into It at 5,400 Miles Per Hour, Causing Huge Explosion and 60-Foot Crater
Why companies that call themselves meritocracies don't always pay equally AND Meritocracy claims make managers pay men more than equally qualified women MM
Explicitly branding an organization a "meritocracy" lowers managers' vigilance against bias, ironically making them more likely to discriminate.
Given identical job titles and performance ratings, managers in self-proclaimed meritocracies systematically award higher bonuses and raises to men over equally qualified women.
The meritocracy illusion compounds wage gaps across demographics, yielding lower financial rewards for women, racial minorities, and immigrants with identical output.
Vague definitions of "merit" allow supervisors to act on personal favorability and affinity bias while genuinely believing their choices are purely objective.
Trusting the "meritocracy" label creates false complacency, leading companies to eliminate or skip active pay-equity audits that would otherwise catch these disparities.
Goodliest of the Week (MM/DR):
DR: Google Scraps AI Satellite Images Within 24 Hours: Why 'Deepfakes in the Sky' Alarmed Researchers
This happened after facing fierce backlash from journalists, researchers, and open-source intelligence experts who warned that it could accelerate the spread of misinformation.
The feature allowed users to generate AI-created satellite images by zooming into any location in Google Earth and entering a text prompt.
MM: Courts: MM DR
Court rules against Trump EPA’s freeze of $20B in ‘green bank’ funds
UBS fined record $125 million for money laundering violations
Meta fined $567m in largest child safety ruling against social media giant
Judge says Nexstar can’t appoint its executives to TEGNA’s Board of Directors
Assholiest of the Week (MM):
Everything’s a publicity stunt:
Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too
Zuckerberg conveys ‘apologies’ for child sex abuse material, errors in operating the platform, government sources say
‘Pure insanity’—Elon Musk details SpaceX’s plan to turn the moon into its newest manufacturing site
Anthropic's Mythos created fake identities to fool humans in new cyber incident
GAO finds Elon Musk's DOGE inflated claims of $110 billion in savings for federal government
Everything’s a vanity project
Jeff Bezos Says He’s Selling $1 Billion In Amazon Stock Every Year to Fund Blue Origin — ‘It’s The Most Important Work I’m Doing’
SpaceX Achieves Its First Moon Landing by Accidentally Crashing Into It at 5,400 Miles Per Hour, Causing Huge Explosion and 60-Foot Crater
Judge Sets Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Trial for March
Everyone’s a victim
Palantir CEO Alex Karp Says Frontier AI Labs Will Steal Your IP, Your Know-How, and Your Expertise — ‘You Deserve To Be Colonized’
‘Socialism is a disaster’: Bill Ackman says Zohran Mamdani’s bad left-wing housing policy is worsening New York’s affordability crisis
No one is accountable DR
Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision, may join Paramount's board of directors
Jefferies analyst calls out ‘simple-minded’ criticism of SpaceX’s governance
ABC, CBS, and NBC aired nearly 200 segments about three U.S. heat events without mentioning climate change
Disney (Iger, still), Ellison family, and Roberts family - one cowed exec, two dictators!
Headliniest of the Week
DR: Pepsi is launching soda-scented body wash and scrub in a beauty collaboration
PwC U.S. CEO [Paul Griggs] advises young workers to say yes a lot, even if it means working on the weekends—‘That person climbs into the next role’
Top Consulting Group PwC Caught Using AI on “Thought Leadership” Report About AI, Resulting in Corporate Document Filled With Bizarre Hallucinations
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu once thought his $87 billion company would only make $100 million. He tells founders to be ‘greedy’ and dream bigger
Class A = 1 vote; Class B = 20 votes; CEO Tony Xu personally owns roughly 3% of actual shares but controls 55% of voting power via a “binding agreement” with the other co-founders
Misleading proxy shows he got paid $432k (they cited a 12:1 pay ratio) but he actually made $343M from shares and stocks
DoorDash excludes Dashers from SEC disclosures by classifying them as 1099 independent contractors.
Factoring drivers into the worker pool expands the headcount from 20,000 to over 7 million, moving the median worker from corporate offices directly onto the delivery platform.
Dasher: while gross pay averages ~$15–$22/hour, net driver earnings sink further after deducting out-of-pocket expenses like fuel, vehicle wear, and self-employment taxes, pulling true net median compensation closer to $400–$900 annually
Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money: reportedly expressed concern about new talent coming to the company for the money rather than the mission
MM: Stripe CEO says his ‘urgency’ to drop out of MIT ‘was a bit unnecessary’
Who Won the Week?
DR: Harvard Business School graduates TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and TikTok US CEO Adam Presser, because nobody ever talks about you or knows who you are
MM: Meat. After seeing Salad and Go files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after cyclospora fears worsened its challenges, you can’t help but wonder if RFK Jr orchestrated a parasite to get people to buy more meat.
Predictions
DR: Tony Xu introduces Class F stock where shareholders’ children enter indentured servitude and must deliver 1000 Cheesy Gordita Crunches from Taco Bell before they are set free ; they will then get 0.0002 shares per vote
MM: Boards are calling retired CEOs back as succession pipelines run dry: Boards run out of ex-CEOs to re-king and begin looking for different, egalitarian, integrated professionals to fill new roles. They call it DEI.
