A Spiral Notebook
Inside DOGE • Musk Outside • The Dandy Illegal Tariff Plan • Google Home Gemini • Meta AI Restructure • NVIDIA Earnings • Fat iPhone 17 Pro Max
A bit of a formatting tweak I’m trying here to give this newsletter a little distance from Spyglass itself, while also still obviously being a part of the family. What I’m calling Spyglass Spiral is literally going to be my notebook for things I’m reading and jotting down notes about. Much more informal (this one is already too formal, as I’m still learning this format) and conversational. And, ideally, short. Not sweet.
• Enjoying a Dathenes Lager 🍻
• Listening to "What I Want" by Morgan Wallen 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from Glyfada, Greece 🇬🇷 Notebook
🐕 DOGE Days of Bummer
A refreshingly straightforward and seemingly transparent look into what it was actually like working for DOGE as an individual contributor, which is what Sahil Lavingia was, working to try to modernize and streamlining VA for the low-low price of $0. The takeaways are obvious in the end. First, the government is a lot like a large company, mostly in bad ways, but far larger, so it’s even worse. Second, DOGE itself was far more like typical consultants than the endless hype and PR around it would have you believe. Undoubtedly, the intentions of many people — though probably not all — who signed up was good. But the government is what it is. And DOGE, in the end, perhaps became more useful as a fall guy for things like the mass layoffs — decisions made by people far above the literal pay grade of those executing DOGE initiatives on the ground. In the end Lavingia was fired for giving an interview in the press — because of course the first rule of DOGE is that only Elon Musk is allowed to talk about DOGE. Nice work on 'VA GPT' though. [Sahil Lavingia]
🚀 A Disillusioned Musk Says He’s Exiting Washington
Speaking of, I’m shocked — shocked — that Elon Musk is now distancing himself from the government as he gets back to work — actual work, not the strange government cost-cutting efforts that were never going to work (see: above). Admittedly, it wasn’t that hard to predict how this would end, as I did in my predictions for the year last December, but I do think I got the high level reasons right — including the gray area around which side would sour on the other first… What I didn’t foresee is just how badly all of this would hurt Musk’s actual companies. Still, even right now, even after all of this, Tesla is worth $1.1T, near the pre-Trump-Bump highs. As such, Musk is worth nearly $430B — just about double the second richest person in the world, which is no longer Jeff Bezos, but Mark Zuckerberg. [NYT]
⚖️ Trump Tariffs Ruled “A Very Dandy Plan” by Federal Judicial Panel — Also, Illegal
So strange that anyone would wish to back away from such a well-oiled execution machine. I would just highlight one key passage here:
“The president identified the emergency, and he decided the means to address that emergency,” Brett Shumate, a Justice Department lawyer, told the court. He added that the goal had been to “bring our trading partners to the table” and create political leverage for possible deal-making.
“It may be a very dandy plan, but it has to meet the statute,” replied Senior Judge Jane A. Restani, who was nominated to the trade court by President Ronald Reagan.
Someone needs to write a book about all of this one day, and the title of that book now needs to be “A Very Dandy Plan”. I might also just note that the “dandy plan” that the judge is referring to is the very plan I suspected at least some of Trump’s team had in mind as the chaos started to unfold a couple months back. It was all about the art of the deal. And now the US judicial system is throwing a wrench into it! [NYT]
🗣️ Google Home Adds ‘Voice Experiments’ for Gemini
It is pretty strange that for as much as the companies are battling over AI right now, Google hasn’t also sought to leverage their installed base of Google Home devices. Presumably, that’s because they’re not fully equipped to handle Gemini’s truth — hence, these smaller "experiments". Still, it’s weird they haven’t been hustling to get new devices out the door that are Gemini ready? Especially since Amazon is now live with Alexa+ on somewhere between 1 and 100,000 Echo devices. Priorities, I guess. But maybe the OpenAI/Jony Ive AI device news will kick them in the butt here. If they wait to combat Apple in this space, they’ll be waiting for a decade. [9to5Google]
🤖 Meta Restructures AI Team That’s Killing It
I’m confused. If Meta AI has over a billion users and Llama is just absolutely killing it, per every single comment Mark Zuckerberg makes, why the need to shuffle things around? Perhaps because that’s all PR bullshit and actually, this project is sort of a mess. And unlike the OpenAI constant mess, Meta risks falling behind in the AI race if they don’t start to ship products people actually want to use. Not just the stuff they’re "using" because it’s shoved in their faces. But like the OpenAI mess, the AI team within Meta has lost almost all of their founding team. Many are now at Mistral, which makes that company sort of the Anthropic in the comparison to OpenAI. [Axios]
📈 NVIDIA’s Revenue Jumps 69% to $44.1 Billion
Good news everyone, Jensen didn’t see his shadow. We get another 3 months of AI bonanza times. At least. Sales continuing to rise at this rate on this base remains incredible. And those sales, on a quarterly basis, are now larger than Meta’s. It’s enough to propell NVIDIA back to the most valuable company in the world. Worth nearly $70B more than Microsoft (#2) at the open of the stock market today. And nearly $500B (!) more than Apple (#3). [NYT]
Spyglass
🎨 Apple Veers Into Microsoft Branding Territory
'iOS 26' will naturally follow 'iOS 18' in 2025...
💰 NYT Lands an AI Partner, and Presumably a Lot of Money
But what does that mean for the future of news? Probably not much, and perhaps something not so great...
Loose Leaf
It only took 15 years, but Meta was finally able to figure out how to release a version of one of the most popular chat apps in the world on the iPad. Can Instagram be far behind WhatsApp? DO NOT ANSWER THAT. [Verge]
Harry, Hermione, and Ron have been cast for the HBO Max version of Harry Potter, which is largely intriguing because it will be a multi-season series, allowing for a far more in-depth look into the world. Well, assuming it doesn’t suck. And if House of the Dragon or Stranger Things production timetables are any indication, these kids will be in their 20s or 30s by the time the series completes. No title or air date yet. [NYT]
It sounds like the Tesla "robotaxi" test will start on June 12 in Austin. It won’t be a 'cybercab' of course, but perhaps a Model Y SUV if their internal tests are any indication… [Bloomberg 🔒]
The story for Top Gun 3 is “already in the bag” says writer-producer Christopher McQuarrie, and it sounds like the entire band is getting back together. [THR]
If you’re looking for a play-by-play of how the banks were able to offload that take-private Twitter debt that seemed toxic at various points over the past few years, this is the piece. Basically, it was a bet on Elon; that he would figure out a way to navigate out of a total financial shitshow, which he did — in one of the more circuitous ways imaginable. First by hitching his wagon to Donald Trump. And then by starting a new — his second — AI company from scratch, and then hitching his Xitter to it. And the bet paid off literally and remarkably for everyone. [FT 🔒]
An interesting look into how scientists are studying the sonic booms given off by our newfangled space traveling rockets — including the booms they make upon re-entry into our atmosphere... [NYT]
Netflix buying Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague — this year’s standing-ovation-bait at Cannes — is not surprising except for the fact that it’s a love letter to filmmaking and cinema and Netfix is seemingly going to let it run in a handful of theaters for a few days to qualify for awards. Hmm… [THR]
Some of the new AI editing capabilities for your pictures within Google Photos is truly wild. It’s Pixel phones-first, but will eventually come to everything. [Verge]
The Meta versus FTC antitrust case is now in the hands of the judge, after Meta, seemingly confidently, rested their case. Hard to see how the government takes Instagram and/or WhatsApp away for all sorts of reasons. [Platformer]
Jesse Armstrong did not intend to revisit the world of the wealthy so soon after Succession ended, but the "tech bro hierarchy" was too intruging to him to pass up, hence, Mountainhead was born, which starts streaming on HBO/Max/HBO Max this weekend. [THR]
I Spy...
Amidst all the 'iPhone Air' hoopla, I somehow missed that the iPhone 17 Pro Max models are apparently going to be getting quite a bit thicker. Perhaps to further differentiate from the Air, but also to squeeze in more battery and thus, more battery life. A bump from 8.25mm thick to 8.75mm is a trade-off I’d gladly make for that.
Aside: it continues to be wild to me just how good people are getting at making mock-ups of unreleased iPhones based off of leaked specs. Still not as wild as the notion that my eventual iPhone 17 Pro Max will be running iOS 26.
