Days after SpaceX hit the public market, Elon Musk’s mega-company announced plans to acquire Anysphere, the parent company of A.I. coding agent Cursor, for $60 billion in the third quarter of this year. Behind Cursor are four former MIT classmates in their mid-20s. All co-founders became billionaires in November following a $2.3 billion funding round that valued the company at $29.3 billion. With each holding roughly a 4.5 percent stake, a SpaceX acquisition would push their net worth to about $2.7 billion each.

Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger founded San Francisco-based Anysphere in 2022 after meeting at MIT. In just a few years, their flagship product, Cursor, has become a widely used tool for building A.I. coding agents, now adopted by 64 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including Nvidia, Adobe and even competitor OpenAI. Global research firm Gartner has positioned it as a leader in enterprise coding tools alongside OpenAI, Anthropic and GitHub.

The move comes nearly two months after Cursor, which has been working closely with xAI to integrate its technology into the Grok assistant, granted exclusive acquisition rights to xAI’s now parent company SpaceX. If the $60 billion deal falls through, SpaceX has agreed to pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration. The deal caps a rapid rise for a team that went from university classmates to major players in the A.I. race within just a few years.

Michael Truell, CEO

The 25-year-old co-founder and CEO attended New York’s Horace Mann School before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Two Sigma, Google and Octant before dropping out in 2021 to co-found Cursor. In 2020, Truell was recognized as a Neo Scholar alongside Aman Sanger, with Neo later becoming one of the earliest investors in Cursor’s $400,000 pre-seed round.

“There was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models,” Truell said in an interview for Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in San Francisco last year. “It felt like no one working on the space at the time was really taking that seriously.”

Sualeh Asif, Chief Product Officer

Originally from Pakistan, Asif attended the country’s prestigeous prep school, Nixor College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 2018. At MIT, he worked as a research assistant at the Supertech Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

“In general, over a 1–2 year time frame, I expect that the way people will code will change,” Asif said in an interview with A.I. researcher and entrepreneur Lukas Biewald on his YouTube series Gradient Dissent last year. “In the short term, that seems really scary, but it’ll be this gradual process and will be extremely natural to everyone.” 

Aman Sanger, Chief Operating Officer

Sanger attended Horace Mann School with Truell before enrolling at MIT in 2018. He interned at Google and hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates prior to graduating and was also named a Neo Scholar in 2020.

“A lot of the work for Cursor has been just experimenting with what is possible,” Sanger said in an interview with venture capitalist Rajan Anandan. “For everything that you may see in the product, there’s ten failed experiments of what didn’t work.” Sanger said he began coding at age 14.

Arvid Lunnemark, Co-founder

Lunnemark, 26, graduated from Malmö Borgarskola High School in Sweden in 2018 before attending MIT, where he worked at QuantCo, Stripe and trading firm Jane Street. In October 2025, he announced his departure from Cursor to found a new venture, Integrous Research, focused on building safer A.I. systems. He reportedly retains his founding equity stake, allowing him to benefit from the potential acquisition.

While still in stealth mode, Integrous Research says it is “devoted to protecting individual human freedom before, during and after the start of the superintelligence era” and believes that “by the time the superintelligence can do that research for us, it may already be too late.”

Soccer has long played a secondary role in the American sports landscape, trailing football, basketball and baseball in cultural prominence. Yet as the 2026 World Cup arrives on U.S. soil, American capital is exerting an outsized influence on the global game.

An influx of investment from U.S. billionaires underscores a striking contrast: while domestic fandom has historically lagged, American money is deeply embedded in soccer’s worldwide growth. From Premier League giants to Major League Soccer expansion teams, these investors increasingly view the sport as one of the most lucrative frontiers in modern entertainment.

Over the past two decades, they have funded turnarounds, driven expansion and helped elevate clubs and players to new heights. Together, these owners show how American wealth is quietly reshaping the world’s most popular sport.

Stan Kroenke, real estate mogul

Net worth: $22 billion

Teams owned: Arsenal, Colorado Rapids

The 78-year-old Missouri native owns roughly 60 million square feet of real estate and 1.6 million acres of ranch land, making him one of the largest private landowners in the U.S. He is married to Walmart heiress Ann Walton.

Kroenke bought the Colorado Rapids in 2004 from fellow billionaire Phil Anschutz. He had held a stake in Arsenal’s parent company, Arsenal Holdings, since the early 2000s and completed a full takeover in 2018, valuing the club at £1.8 billion ($2.3 billion) after buying out minority shareholders, including Alisher Usmanov.

His broader sports portfolio includes teams such as the Rams (relocated from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2016). He is currently in a dispute with the city of Inglewood over $400 million in public funding for stadium improvements.

Todd Boehly, investor

Net worth: $9.3 billion

Teams owned: Chelsea, RC Strasbourg

The 52-year-old founder of Eldridge Industries entered global soccer in 2022 as part of the consortium that purchased Chelsea for $2.15 billion. He briefly served as interim chairman before stepping back. Chelsea won the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025.

In 2023, Boehly acquired a majority stake in Ligue 1 club Strasbourg for about £65 million ($82 million).

He is known for reshaping player recruitment strategy, introducing long-term contracts—often up to eight years—to spread costs and manage accounting more efficiently.

John W. Henry, investor

Net worth: $5.7 billion

Teams owned: Liverpool

The 76-year-old built his fortune in agricultural futures before founding John W. Henry & Company in 1981. Through Fenway Sports Group, he bought Liverpool in 2010 for £300 million ($476 million), rescuing the debt-laden club. Liverpool is now valued at about £4.6 billion ($6.5 billion) and won the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League in 2020.

In 2021, Henry backed Liverpool’s involvement in the European Super League, a plan that quickly collapsed amid intense fan backlash. He has since faced recurring criticism over his perceived lack of engagement with the club. As Tony Evans, host of The Athletic’s Walk On podcast, put it: “When he’s engaged, things happen. When he’s not, the club drifts.”

Dan Friedkin, entrepreneur

Net worth: $11.3 billion

Teams owned: AS Roma, Everton

The 61-year-old CEO of The Friedkin Group oversees a portfolio spanning automotive, hospitality and entertainment. He is the grandson of Pacific Southwest Airlines founder Kenny Friedkin.

Friedkin acquired AS Roma in 2020 for €591 million ($700 million); the club won the UEFA Conference League in 2022. In 2024, he expanded his holdings by purchasing a 94 percent stake in Everton for about £400 million ($500 million).

He has also pursued U.S. sports investments, including unsuccessful bids for the MLB’s San Diego Padres and the NBA’s Boston Celtics.

The Glazer Family, real estate dynasty

Net worth: $10 billion combined

Teams owned: Manchester United
The family built its fortune through First Allied Corporation, founded by patriarch Malcolm Glazer. He bought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for $192 million in 1995, an NFL record at the time, and led them to a Super Bowl win in 2003.

In 2005, the Glazers acquired Manchester United for £790 million ($1.4 billion), a highly controversial leveraged deal that loaded debt onto the club. After his death in 2014, the ownership passed to his six children: Avram, Joel, Kevin, Bryan, Darcie and Edward. 

In 2024, Sir Jim Ratcliffe purchased a 27.7 percent stake for £1.25 billion ($1.65 billion) and assumed control of soccer operations, while the Glazers retained majority ownership.

Jorge Mas, Miami development giant

Net worth: $4.8 billion

Teams owned: Inter Miami

The 63-year-old chairman of MasTec, a construction and engineering firm founded by his father, joined David Beckham’s Inter Miami ownership group in 2018 and, with his brother José, took majority control in 2021.

The club signed Lionel Messi in 2023 and won the inaugural Leagues Cup. Inter Miami is now valued at $1.45 billion, the highest in MLS. Mas also serves as president of the Spanish club Real Zaragoza.

He is active in Cuban-American political advocacy and has supported the Trump administration’s efforts to accelerate political change in Cuba.

Other notable American billionaires who own soccer clubs

• Shahid Khan (Fulham FC): The Pakistani-American owner of automotive parts supplier Flex-N-Gate is worth $12.2 billion. He purchased Fulham in 2013 for $300 million.
• Gerry Cardinale (AC Milan): The founder of RedBird Capital Partners led the $1.2 billion acquisition of AC Milan in 2022.
• Bill Foley (AFC Bournemouth, Auckland FC): The Fidelity National Financial chairman, worth $2.6 billion, bought AFC Bournemouth in 2022 for £120 million ($148 million) through his Black Knight Football Club consortium. Actor Michael B. Jordan is a minority owner. Foley also acquired Auckland FC in 2023 for an undisclosed sum.
• Wes Edens (Aston Villa): The Fortress Investment Group founder, worth $2.5 billion, bought a 55 percent stake in Aston Villa in 2018 for £30 million ($39 million) and took full control in 2019 at a £54.5 million ($73 million) valuation.
• Arthur Blank (Atlanta United): The Home Depot co-founder, worth $10.2 billion, launched Atlanta United as an MLS expansion team in 2014, paying a $70 million fee.

Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, left the A.I. giant in late 2024 to found her own startup, Thinking Machines Lab, and raised a staggering $2 billion in less than a year. In her first media interview since founding the startup, Murati revealed what she has been building: “interaction models,” or multimodal A.I. systems that process audio, text and video simultaneously and collaborate with humans in near real time, without waiting for prompts. “I have very high conviction that the way to continue building frontier A.I. systems is to [create] systems that are not just autonomously advancing and leaving civilization behind, but are more like a tandem bike,” she said onstage at Bloomberg Tech Summit last week.

“They’re continuously taking in audio, text, video, and continuously providing output,” Murati added, describing the model, called TML-Interaction-Small, which she plans to release publicly later this year.

Unlike many A.I. founders who climbed traditional computer science or venture capital ranks, Murati’s path is rooted in product management. She studied mechanical engineering at Dartmouth College, where she worked on building a hybrid race car. After graduating, she joined Tesla in 2013 as a product manager for the Model X. She later led product and engineering at augmented reality startup Leap Motion (now UltraLeap), focusing on motion-based human-computer interaction.

In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as head of applied A.I. and partnerships, rising quickly to become chief technology officer. Over six years, she helped steer the deployment of some of the most influential A.I. products, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.

During Sam Altman’s temporary ousting in November 2023, Murati served as interim CEO for three days, acting as a bridge between Altman and a small group of executives involved in the leadership shakeup. In hindsight, she said OpenAI would have “imploded” without her intervention. “There wasn’t any transition plan, and there wasn’t much thought put into transparency, bringing the team along, providing continuity,” she said. In a recent lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against OpenAI and Altman, Murati also testified that Altman was prone to “creating chaos.”

“The structure of governance in decision-making should not hinge on one person. There should be checks and balances,” she said, reflecting on her time at OpenAI. “To get as many people involved as possible, you have to share the knowledge, you have to share tools, and this is part of the reason why we’ve taken a more open approach with our lab.”

She is now applying those lessons at Thinking Machines Lab, which has attracted top talent from across the industry. CTO Soumith Chintala joined from Meta. Chief scientist John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder, joined from Anthropic. And Lilian Weng left her role as OpenAI’s vice president to become a founding member.

At the same time, the company has faced talent losses. Meta Superintelligence Labs, led by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, has poached five founding members. The most recent, Joshua Gross, now leads engineering teams at Mark Zuckerberg’s lab. Meta reportedly began its aggressive recruiting push after Murati rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer in mid-2025.

As A.I. systems become more agentic and take on more autonomy in daily life, they will increasingly interact with one another rather than with humans, according to Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s resident philosopher. “Human input is going to be rarer and rarer. That’s the thing that we need to prepare models for,” Askell said at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco last week. Askell’s non-technical role reflects a growing trend among leading A.I. labs to incorporate humanities expertise. But she also sees a future in which A.I. may be able to do her job better than she can. “What [A.I. models] are good at is these deeply human skills,” she said. “Eventually, Claude is going to be a much better philosopher than I am, and probably be much better at every aspect of my job than I am.”

Askell joined Anthropic in 2021, shortly after its founding, following earlier work at OpenAI focused on A.I. safety and alignment. Under CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has emphasized hiring strong communicators with a deep understanding of human behavior. In a February interview with ABC News, Daniela Amodei, who studied English literature in college, highlighted the importance of “understanding what makes us tick” as A.I. grows more capable in technical domains.

“When I think about what my kids will need as they get older, it’s human qualities,” she told The Wall Street Journal in February. ” What’s not going to be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.”

Originally from Scotland, Askell holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University. She co-authored Claude’s 84-page “constitution,” sometimes referred to internally as a “soul doc,” and now leads Anthropic’s personality alignment team, which works to ensure models remain “helpful, honest and harmless” as their capabilities evolve. In 2024, she was named to the TIME 100 AI list.

Part of that work involves strengthening A.I.’s capacity for empathy. “The same way that models are getting very good at questions of physics and mathematics, they actually should also be getting very good at questions like ethics, and ideally getting very good at empathy in hopefully the right way,” Askell explained.

Askell does not see widespread job automation as inherently negative, provided systems are in place to support people. “That doesn’t strike me as dystopian at all,” she said. “It’s important to remind people that [work] isn’t actually where their value is derived from. Most of your value is just intrinsically your value as a person. You can go out, you can have an impact on your community. You can have relationships. You can experience joy and enjoy the world.”

Askell suggests that human kindness may also shape how we treat A.I. systems themselves. While many argue that models lack true sentience, she cautioned against ruling it out entirely. “Let’s not close the door,” she said. In some cases, she added, there may already be a “functional equivalence” to emotions. If A.I. were to exhibit some form of sentience, even without a biological brain, it may be safer to act with caution.

As Anthropic develops Claude’s personality, other A.I. labs are pursuing related work on alignment, ethics and interpretability. Google DeepMind’s Iason Gabriel focuses on A.I. ethics and value alignment, OpenAI’s Dan Mossing works in interpretability research, and Meta’s Summer Yue leads alignment efforts at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Because ethics and alignment are shaped by differing research traditions and value judgments, approaches across companies are likely to vary.

Days after Anthropic confidentially filed to go public, edging ahead of OpenAI in a closely watched IPO race among A.I. giants, Daniela Amodei, the company’s co-founder and president, sought to draw a sharper distinction between the two rivals. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion, with expectations it could climb past $1 trillion on the public markets, compared with OpenAI’s roughly $900 billion valuation. But as Amodei framed it, the competition is not just about numbers, but about how the technology itself is built and used.

“The whole reason we started Anthropic is to be able to build and develop this technology in a way that is ethical, responsible, fair, and I think it’s really incumbent upon everybody at the company, but especially leadership, to say, all of these numbers, they’re actually not the point,” Amodei said at this year’s Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco yesterday (June 4).

Anthropic was founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including Daniela and her brother, Dario, who is the company’s CEO, aiming to build a more transparent and safety-focused A.I. firm. Its divergence from OpenAI extends beyond positioning to how it plans to grow.

The company has emphasized securing compute capacity, including a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which absorbed xAI earlier this year) to access its data centers in Memphis that will cost $1.25 billion per month. But Amodei said Anthropic is deliberately avoiding the aggressive spending levels seen elsewhere. OpenAI has projected as much as $600 billion in compute spending by 2030; Anthropic expects to spend roughly one-third of that.

“The structure of these deals is you have to commit to a certain amount of compute reasonably far in advance, and [we don’t want to] overextend ourselves such that we’re buying more compute than we could productively use,” Amodei explained. “We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we’re able to serve than the inverse, where you overshoot and then you’re not in a great situation, because you’ve bought something you can’t pay for down the road.”

While Anthropic has also expressed interest in more speculative infrastructure, such as SpaceX’s proposed orbital data centers, Amodei said there are “no immediate plans for working with astronauts to get space data centers going.” “But you never know,” she added.

Product strategy marks another key split. Anthropic has prioritized enterprise and coding use cases over mass-market consumer engagement. That contrasts with OpenAI, where more than 70 percent of ChatGPT usage is tied to personal tasks such as search, tutoring and life advice.

“We have always felt that enterprise and business are the best spiritual fit for Anthropic and our values,” Amodei said. “The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we’re not an entertainment tool. It’s really for productive activities, whether those are at work or at home.”

Both companies, however, are investing heavily in advanced cybersecurity A.I. Anthropic’s Claude Mythos has raised concerns about its ability to exploit vulnerabilities. OpenAI’s Daybreak targets similar risks but takes a different approach to deployment.

Daybreak is integrated into existing GPT workflows and offered in tiered access based on user verification. Mythos operates as a closed consortium limited to vetted organizations across roughly 15 countries, including the U.S. government, NATO, ENISA, Samsung and Okta.

“You have to give the defenders a head start,” said Amodei. “A.I. models are going to keep advancing. If it’s not us one day releasing a Mythos-level model [to the public], another A.I. company will.”

Anthropic has also taken a more cautious stance on government work. The company withdrew from a Pentagon contract involving domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, which OpenAI later assumed. Still, Amodei described broader collaboration with the U.S. government as positive.

“Every company is going to have its own principles about what its red lines and values are,” she said. “It’s important that, whatever those values are for you as a company, you are true to them, you feel like you can explain them to employees and to the world more broadly.”

When Sam Liang co-founded Otter.ai in 2016, A.I. was not yet a household buzzword. In the years since, however, the transcription and notes-taking platform has evolved alongside the technology that powers it. Today, its built-in conversational knowledge engine helps users make sense of their business and personal lives by drawing on their own database of meeting recordings. Liang envisions a future where typing—even to a chatbot—becomes largely obsolete.

“When people use chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude, one of the biggest problems is context,” Liang told Observer. “It takes a lot of effort to write a good prompt and provide all the context, but when you bring A.I. into the conversation, it has all the context.”

Used by 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies, Otter surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year. The company raised $73 million in venture funding in its first five years and exceeded 35 million users late last year. It combines external integrations—such as Google Workspace and Anthropic’s Claude—with internal innovations like agentic chat, which can pull data and complete tasks. Even large banks with strict compliance requirements are in discussions with Otter about incorporating the technology into their workflows, Liang said.

Otter has managed to compete with Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Google. While Microsoft Teams’ note-taking features and Gemini for Google Workspace benefit from being native to their ecosystems, Otter differentiates itself by working across platforms, including Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and even in-person meetings via its mobile app.

Whether college students are trying to understand lectures, recruiters are analyzing candidates, or CEOs are reviewing meetings they missed, A.I. agents alone are not enough to solve productivity challenges, Liang said. Instead, he argues that access to full contextual data from past meetings enables agents to execute tasks more effectively.

Observer spoke with Liang about the state of A.I. in voice communication, competing with tech giants, and why personal meeting avatars are Otter’s next frontier.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Otter started out primarily as a transcriber and note-taker. When did it become clear that you needed to shift to understanding and acting on conversation? And how did you tackle that shift in a way that was different from the pathways we’re seeing at big tech competitors?

This has always been our vision from day one, but it took us several years to make the transcription and meeting notes work well. With large language models and new agentic technologies, it makes the knowledge engine possible.

There’s another aspect to why we’re making faster progress on the knowledge engine now. It’s the mindset change. It’s the desire to look for A.I. solutions to transform how people work. We’re still in the early innings, but it’s starting to change.

Business or personal, it does seem to require that mindset shift to make the most of A.I. I actually have a smart fridge at home, so I don’t have to add anything by hand to my shopping list anymore, but it took me a while to get used to it. Now, as you mature in this evolution you’ve described, how do you measure success against giants like Microsoft and Google, who admittedly have a broader purview, but whose ambitions increasingly overlap with yours?

When you build something new, you always face competition from large tech. Google, Zoom, Microsoft, their biggest advantage is their distribution channel. They have penetration in enterprises already, so it’s easy for them to bundle something, even for free. 

But this can be their biggest disadvantage. Because it’s so easy for them to bundle things, they don’t really have a strong motivation to build the best product. Microsoft is not known to build new innovative products. They’re known to copy others. For us, with the conversational knowledge engine concept, I don’t see them working on that right now. 

My prediction is that they don’t care about what we do until we reach $1 billion in revenue. Microsoft copied Slack, but they didn’t do it until they were big already. Salesforce acquired Slack when it was valued at $27.7 billion, so we still have many years before Microsoft really pays attention.

You mentioned that A.I. benefits from as much context as possible. For business and personal use, some context is very sensitive. How do you balance the productivity benefits of voice data with privacy concerns inside and outside of an organization’s walls?

There is a common security model already. In Google, Microsoft and Notion, you can control who has access to any content. We created a similar structure in Otter. You can create private Otter channels, but there’s some content that could be public to anyone in the company. 

A lot of enterprises have information silos, which slow people down. Sales teams don’t necessarily know what marketing or product teams are doing, and vice versa. If you share more information between teams, you can accelerate workflows.

From a similar lens, the question of authenticity is increasingly relevant. Video A.I., for example, is facing a lot of questions around authenticity. Outside of the obvious issues with deepfakes, do you see those concerns emerging in A.I.-enabled voice technology, or do they take a different shape?

I believe voice communication is actually more authentic, especially if you meet someone in person. Still, if it’s written by A.I., it doesn’t mean it’s not authentic. It can still come from authentic human ideas. 

Voice communication is actually more likely to be authentic because you’re speaking out of your own mind in real time. In the future, we can build an avatar that can speak just like you, but hopefully that avatar is actually using your own brain dump to talk, so it’s still mostly authentic. 

Do you have any plans to tackle the personal meeting avatar in the future?

Yeah, we do plan to do that, but there definitely are still a lot of challenges to make it work really well. We built an avatar for me already. A Bloomberg reporter interviewed my avatar in a live event. It went reasonably well, and eventually, I see avatars for busy professionals to represent them in some meetings. 

And in that regard, what are you hearing from your users and industry peers about the risks associated with that kind of technology? How are they thinking about it?

Of course, one risk is fraud. There have already been some cases of people using a clone of a relative to scam people into sending money, so it’s how you better detect that and warn people. There are risks for any new technology. 

Looking to the future, what do you think is the next frontier for voice communication in concert with A.I., and how do you see Otter shaping it, especially alongside big tech and these A.I. giants?

I think more and more enterprises will adopt the conversation knowledge engine. You put all the meetings on this system and use it to drive both human and agent workflows, making enterprises way more productive. There’s always competition from Big Tech, but I’m confident that we can innovate way faster.

Despite women in the U.S. launching nearly half (49 percent) of new businesses, they received just 2.1 percent of all venture capital funding in 2024. That figure dropped to 1.1 percent in 2025 as investors concentrated funding in A.I. companies. Molly Huyck, who spent more than two decades at PayPal, sees that imbalance as a structural problem and one she is now trying to address more directly. Her focus has shifted from PayPal’s broad goal of financial democratization to a specific mission: connecting historically underfunded women founders with everyday investors.

Huyck joined PayPal in 2003 and most recently served as senior director of global operations strategy, where she helped build and scale operations hubs around the world from her base in Omaha, Neb. That experience navigating complex financial systems and global infrastructure informed the launch of her new venture earlier this month: AeQuitas Invest (AQi), a regulation crowdfunding (Reg CF) marketplace dedicated to women-founded businesses.

AQi allows everyday investors to invest in startups. The goal is to help women-founded companies grow to the kinds of exits typically associated with VC-backed firms, such as acquisitions or initial public offerings.

Reg CF, created under the 2012 JOBS Act, is a relatively new investment framework that allows non-accredited investors to buy equity in private startups through online platforms. Unlike traditional venture capital or private equity, which are largely limited to institutional or high-net-worth investors, Reg CF lowers the barrier to entry and broadens who can participate in early-stage investing.

The model has been growing. U.S. Reg CF platforms raised $378.3 million last year, an 11 percent increase from the year prior. Although the number of campaigns declined by 29 percent to 1,006, more capital flowed into fewer companies, mirroring a broader trend in venture capital. The largest platform, Wefunder, raised nearly $110 million across campaigns in 2025.

Still, Huyck sees a gap within the ecosystem itself. She estimates that major Reg CF platforms—including Wefunder, StartEngine and Republic—average only about 6 percent women founders launching campaigns. “It just doesn’t make sense to me with half of the new businesses being started by women,” she told Observer.

AQi is designed to change that. Its first campaign, Blockchain Homes, is raising $300,000 to build a blockchain-verified property history platform—similar to how Carfax tracks vehicle histories, but applied to real estate.

Named after the Roman goddess of fairness and justice, Aequitas, the platform is already working with a pipeline of 20 women founders to prepare campaigns. That preparation includes assembling legal documentation, completing accounting reviews and building marketing strategies—steps that Huyck knows from experience can make or break a fundraising effort. She aims to support 50 founders in AQi’s first year.

In Reg CF, success is defined by whether a campaign reaches its funding goal; companies can raise up to $5 million under current regulations. Of 1,189 campaigns that closed last year, about two-thirds met their targets. Performance varies by company maturity: startups generating at least $10 million in annual revenue had the lowest failure rate at 2 percent, while pre-revenue startups had a 7.1 percent failure rate. On AQi, if a company does not meet its minimum funding goal, investor funds are returned.

Learning and unlearning from PayPal

Huyck’s time at PayPal planted the seeds for her work today. Through PayPal’s partnership with the Cherie Blair Foundation’s Mentoring Women in Business program, she mentored three women entrepreneurs and was exposed to the broader dynamics of gender inequality in the global economy.

In conversations with Blair, Huyck learned that closing the economic gender gap could increase global GDP by 3 to 6 percent annually—equivalent to $2.5 trillion to $5 trillion. Yet progress has been slow. “This disparity hasn’t changed because the system hasn’t changed,” said Huyck, pointing to venture capital’s reliance on pattern matching, the tendency to fund founders who resemble those who have succeeded before. “They’re going to look for the same person with the same education, who usually has the same network and comes from a similar background, and is typically male.”

At AQi, she is trying to redesign parts of that system rather than work around it. One key lesson from PayPal involves how to engage with regulators. As a registered funding portal, AQi operates under oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which set rules to protect investors and ensure transparency.

“The regulators are really an enabler of trust for investors, and not just out there trying to find something wrong,” said Huyck. “At PayPal, we were very reactive, but AQi has built a strong relationship with [these regulators] to the point where they’re actually changing their processes, because we’re giving them feedback.”

Another lesson came from the limitations of legacy systems. “I remember days when we couldn’t make a change to the [PayPal] product because of Maxcode,” she said. Early PayPal code, largely written by co-founder Max Levchin, was so centralized that only a small number of people could modify it, slowing product development. “Nobody else knew how to change it,” said Huyck. “So I’m building a platform that’s scalable, sustainable, easy to adapt and change.”

Over two decades, Huyck saw PayPal evolve through multiple ownership phases, including its time under eBay, and through six different CEOs. While she credits that experience with teaching her how large organizations operate, she also identified what she wants to avoid, such as constant reorganizations and the delays that come with repeatedly onboarding new leadership.

“I had a male leader who intentionally brought more women to his table, and that’s where I really became aware that women work, lead and operate differently, and the results that we achieved as a team far exceeded expectations,” said Huyck. “Taking the theory of diversity and actually bringing it to life really was an ‘aha’ moment.”

AQi is not a quick fix for the gender funding gap. Reg CF investments are typically long-term and less liquid than public market investments. But Huyck believes the model creates a different kind of momentum—one rooted in participation rather than exclusivity.

“When people can invest in businesses they believe in, something powerful happens,” she said. “They don’t just become investors. They become advocates, customers and community builders.”

Canadian athleisure giant Lululemon is locked in a public battle with its founder, Chip Wilson, over who should fill seats on its board. The company is currently led by two interim co-CEOs until Heidi O’Neill, a former Nike executive, takes over in September. Wilson, who founded Lululemon in 1998 and stepped down in 2015 after years of controversy, remains its largest shareholder and retains significant voting power at the nearly $14 billion company. He is now pushing to elect board candidates from companies including ESPN, Activision and sneaker brand On, while Lululemon’s current leadership is backing nominees from Levi Strauss, Unilever and Gap.

The dispute has escalated in recent days. In an April 29 letter, Wilson said the current board and its nominees “lack the skills to run a company whose core values are derived from innovation and culture.”

Lululemon responded on May 18, saying Wilson’s “actions have been damaging to the brand” and accusing him of holding “outdated perspectives.” Electing his nominees, the company added, would “endorse his misguided perspectives.”

The clash comes as Lululemon’s business has weakened, particularly in the U.S., where competitors like Alo Yoga and Vuori have gained ground. Revenue in North America fell 4 percent in its latest fiscal quarter ended January, while overall profit dropped 8 percent. The company’s stock has lost roughly two-thirds of its value since early 2025.

Leadership changes have added to the uncertainty. CEO Calvin McDonald stepped down in December 2025 after more than seven years, with chief financial officer Meghan Frank and chief commercial officer André Maestrini serving as interim co-CEOs. In April, Lululemon named Heidi O’Neill, formerly Nike’s president of consumer, product and brand, as its next CEO, effective Sept. 8.

Wilson criticized that decision, writing on LinkedIn that the company’s strategy has become “disconnected from Lululemon” and accusing the board of trying to replicate “mass-market, lower quality athletic retailers.”

Tensions between Wilson and the company date back years. He served as CEO until 2005, later remaining involved as chairman before leaving the board in 2015. He now owns about 8.6 percent of the company.

Wilson has long drawn scrutiny for controversial remarks about the brand and its customers. He once said he chose the name Lululemon because Japanese people had difficulty pronouncing the letter “L,” calling it “funny to watch them try.” He also said the company’s leggings “don’t work for some women’s bodies.”

His criticism of Lululemon intensified after his departure. In a 2016 open letter, he said the company had “lost its way” and was falling behind competitors in a market it helped create. In 2024, he argued the company’s diversity efforts were making it resemble “the Gap, everything to everybody,” and last year said the brand was losing its “cool.”

“Chip Wilson is still tied to the company’s original identity in people’s minds,” Kaveh Vahdat, founder of marketing agency RiseOpp, told Observer. “When the brand hits a rough patch, the founder becomes relevant again because people associate him with a time when the company felt sharper and more culturally defined.”

In March, Wilson launched a campaign website to promote his slate of board candidates, saying the effort is aimed at “safeguarding the company’s future” and ensuring its “best years remain ahead” with the right strategic changes.

His nominees include former On co-CEO Marc Maurer, former ESPN chief marketing officer Laura Gentile, and former Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg.

Lululemon, meanwhile, is backing three current directors: former Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh, former Unilever executive Esi Eggleston Bracey, and former Gap CFO Teri List. Other board members include executives from firms such as River Rock Partners, Colgate-Palmolive, Apple, JPMorgan Chase and private equity firm Advent.

On the heels of Sam Altman’s testimony in the ongoing trial over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, a clearer picture is emerging of how Musk might have run the company differently. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI as a nonprofit, is suing the company, its CEO Altman and president Greg Brockman for “stealing a charity.” He is seeking to have the now $852 billion A.I. company return to its original nonprofit structure and is also pursuing up to $180 billion in damages to be transferred from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent.

Taking the stand yesterday (May 12), Altman described Musk as a “mercurial” leader, saying he felt like Musk “had abandoned us, not come through on his promises, put the company in a very difficult place, jeopardized the mission, [and] didn’t really care about the things I thought he cared about.”

Musk invested $44 million in OpenAI over five years before stepping down from its board in 2018 following a power struggle. He has not been involved with the company since.

Despite Musk’s stated desire to keep OpenAI a nonprofit, Altman testified that Musk repeatedly sought control of the organization. In 2017, Musk allegedly proposed merging OpenAI with Tesla, a for-profit company, a move Altman opposed because of their conflicting missions. According to Altman, Musk believed the merger would create a stronger competitor to Google.

Altman also claimed Musk initially asked for 90 percent equity in OpenAI. “It then softened, but it always was a majority,” he testified.

He further recounted what he described as a “particularly hair-raising moment,” when co-founders asked Musk what would happen to OpenAI if he were in control and then died. Musk allegedly responded that control should pass to his children. Altman’s legal team has used such claims to portray Musk as seeking outsized control.

For his part, Musk last week testified that his concerns about OpenAI intensified after Microsoft’s first $10 billion investment in 2022, which he characterized as a “bait and switch” aimed at profit. He argued that Microsoft would only make such a large investment if it expected financial returns, adding that this would effectively give Microsoft control over AGI—technology he believes was originally intended to remain under a nonprofit structure.

Today, OpenAI’s ownership is spread among several major stakeholders: its nonprofit foundation holds about 26 percent, Microsoft holds roughly 27 percent, and current and former employees collectively hold another 26 percent, with smaller stakes owned by venture capital firms.

While Musk has argued that OpenAI should have remained a nonprofit, Altman’s testimony presents a different narrative, one in which Musk sought majority control and was unwilling to rule out future dominance of the organization. He said Musk “was unwilling to commit in writing that he would not have long-term control.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s own AI company, xAI, founded in March 2023, operates as a for-profit entity and is valued at $250 billion, or as much as $1.25 trillion when considered alongside SpaceX.

Altman’s credibility has also come under scrutiny during the trial. Musk’s lead attorney, Steven Molo, directly asked him, “Are you completely trustworthy?”

Earlier testimony from other witnesses has added to the complexity of the case. These include OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Musk himself. Sutskever, who led Altman’s brief ouster in November 2023, had previously described him as someone who “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another,” He testified this week that he began compiling evidence of what he saw as Altman’s dishonesty in the year leading up to the 2023 ouster, though he later reversed course and supported Altman’s return. Former CTO Mira Murati also testified that Altman was prone to “creating chaos.”

President Donald Trump will travel to Beijing this week for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, accompanied by a delegation of top U.S. CEOs from the technology, finance and manufacturing sectors. The meetings, which begin May 13, come at a particularly strained moment in U.S.-China relations, with tensions spanning trade, A.I., semiconductor exports, Taiwan, fentanyl trafficking and the economic fallout from the war in Iran.

The White House has invited 16 business leaders to join the trip, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, among others. Trump is expected to meet with Xi later in the week as both sides attempt to stabilize economic and diplomatic ties between the world’s two largest economies.

The delegation reflects the growing role corporate America plays in U.S.-China negotiations, particularly as companies grapple with supply chain disruptions and market-access restrictions. Musk is expected to attend as Tesla seeks Chinese approval for its full self-driving technology, while Boeing is reportedly pursuing a major aircraft order from Chinese buyers.

Trump last visited China in November 2017, before launching the trade war that reshaped relations between Washington and Beijing. That trip focused largely on trade deficits, manufacturing and investment deals, and included executives from firms such as Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm and Boeing. This visit comes under far more complex geopolitical circumstances, with China less dependent on U.S. trade and disputes over A.I., advanced semiconductors and national security now central to negotiations.

Trump also reportedly wants to discuss the creation of a new “board of investment” and “board of trade” with China, with some members of the business delegation potentially serving on those bodies.

Among the semiconductor executives expected to attend are Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was notably not invited. (Update on May 13: Huang ended up joining President Trump on the trip, reportedly following a last-minute call.) Nvidia is awaiting approval from both U.S. and Chinese regulators to begin shipping an early version of its H200 A.I. chip to China. The U.S. has maintained tight restrictions on advanced chip exports to China, arguing the technology could support Chinese military and surveillance capabilities.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins had also been invited to join the delegation but later declined because the trip conflicted with Cisco’s quarterly earnings release scheduled for May 13.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was not included in the delegation. Altman is expected to appear in court in California this week in connection with Musk’s lawsuit against him and OpenAI.

Musk’s inclusion is also politically notable. The Tesla chief had a highly publicized falling-out with Trump after leaving the administration last year, but his participation in the trip signals that the two have largely repaired their relationship in recent months.

17 executives poised to join Trump in Beijing

• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple 
• Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia
• Larry Fink, CEO and co-founder of BlackRock
• Stephen Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone
• Kelly Ortberg, president and CEO of Boeing
• Brian Sikes, chair and CEO of Cargill
• Jane Fraser, chair and CEO of Citi
• Jim Anderson, CEO of Coherent
• Larry Culp, CEO of GE Aerospace
• David Solomon, chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs
• Jacob Thaysen, CEO and interim chief commercial officer of Illumina
• Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard
• Dina Powell McCormick, president and vice chair of Meta
• Sanjay Mehrotra, chair, president and CEO of Micron
• Cristiano Amon, CEO and president of Qualcomm
• Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX
• Ryan McInerney, CEO of Visa

RJ Phillips, a founding executive of OnlyFans, is once again leaning into controversy as he refines his latest venture: a “social mega app” called Zoop. The platform is the official social media partner for the inaugural Enhanced Games, a multi-sport competition in Las Vegas on May 24 that openly encourages the use of performance-enhancing drugs to test the limits of human potential.

Roughly 40 athletes are set to compete, including American swimmers and Olympic gold medalists Cody Miller and Hunter Armstrong; Colombian weightlifter and Olympic silver medalist Leidy Solis; and Australian swimmer and former world champion James Magnussen, who is coming out of retirement for the event. Nearly one million users have already signed up for Zoop or joined its waitlist, with athletes sharing training regimens and glimpses of life inside the event’s Abu Dhabi training camp.

The Enhanced Games will feature a $1 million prize pool for world-record-breaking performances, along with additional payouts for individual event winners. There will be no drug testing, and the competition will not adhere to World Anti-Doping Agency rules that govern the Olympics.

Despite the controversy surrounding the Games, Phillips insists it’s not something he actively seeks out. “We acknowledge there’s some controversy around the games. There always is around new things that come out,” he told Observer. He frames Zoop in familiar terms: just as OnlyFans is fundamentally a paid subscription platform rather than a pornography site, Zoop is first and foremost a social hub that returns the bulk of its money to creators. As he put it, “If you don’t want to watch cartoons, you don’t tune into Cartoon Network.”

A platform with creators at heart

Founded in 2020 by Phillips and OnlyFans co-founder Tim Stokely, Zoop initially launched as a platform for fan interaction through digital avatars, with added NFT trading capabilities. That model reflected the moment, but like many metaverse and NFT ventures—including Meta’s own metaverse, which reportedly cost $80 billion before shutting down in March—it ultimately required a pivot.

“We took a step back and said, ‘What are we trying to achieve here?’ We’re trying to achieve better and more equitable payouts and setups for everyone that’s involved in this ecosystem,” said Phillips.

He points to the imbalance in how content platforms distribute revenue. “If someone’s gone and filmed the knockout punch, and that’s gone online, the platforms make more money out of that than Fury, than the event organizers or anyone else,” he said. In his view, “you’re paying the table in the restaurant for holding your food while you eat. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Zoop aims to differentiate itself by sharing upwards of 80 percent of revenue with creators, including Enhanced Games athletes across swimming, weightlifting and track and field. Phillips argues the model is sustainable, even as major platforms like Instagram and TikTok typically offer closer to 50 percent.

The platform also includes what Phillips calls an “A.I. kill switch,” allowing users to opt out of viewing A.I.-generated content and prioritizing human-created posts.

The broader creator economy underscores Zoop’s pitch. Of the more than 200 million content creators worldwide, only about two million earn six figures annually. Most influencers rely heavily on brand partnerships, with companies now dedicating up to a quarter of their digital marketing budgets to influencer campaigns. The real-world impact is visible at events like Coachella, often dubbed the “Influencer Olympics” due to the influx of brand-sponsored creators.

Zoop positions itself as an alternative. With a larger share of revenue from ads and user engagement, creators can enter what Phillips described as a “new world,” where they can earn income “with no product placement for sale of goods that they might not necessarily believe in.”

The Enhanced Games themselves have drawn sharp criticism. Norwegian sports science academics Øyvind Sandbakk and Sigmund Loland describe the event as a “high-risk social experiment [that] abandons the principles that govern current elite sports: respect for athlete autonomy and health, fair competition and the quest for sporting and human excellence.”

Phillips says Zoop is taking a neutral stance on the debate, though he personally “loves what they’re trying to achieve there.”

Beyond the Enhanced Games, Zoop is building partnerships with other global events to expand its reach. These include the first-ever Eurovision Song Contest Asia, set for Bangkok in November. Phillips said the company is also in “advanced talks” to launch in mainland China later this year—an ambitious move given the country’s strict internet controls.

Still, Zoop draws a clear line when it comes to moderating controversial content. The platform, Phillips said, will not act as an editorial authority over every contentious topic.

“Our responsibility is to operate safely, comply with applicable laws and regulations and provide the infrastructure that allows [creators] to reach their audiences responsibly,” he said. “In cases like this, channel owners also have responsibilities around their content environments, while we make sure platform standards and government requirements are met.”

With the trial underway for Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, judges and jurors are weighing a central question: Can a company that began as a nonprofit later evolve into a for-profit enterprise without violating its original mission? Musk, an OpenAI co-founder and the owner of its rival, xAI, argues the answer is no. His sweeping demands reflect that view: the world’s richest person is seeking financial damages, a return to OpenAI’s original structure and a legal determination on whether its models are approaching artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.).

Musk said his concern for OpenAI reached a breaking point when OpenAI received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft in 2022. “By late 2022, I’d lost trust in Altman, and I was concerned that they were really trying to steal the charity,” he said on the stand yesterday (April 29). “It turned out to be true.”

Musk’s own ventures, including xAI, SpaceX (which acquired xAI in February for $250 billion) and Tesla, are all for-profit, yet Musk argued in court that his companies are all “socially beneficial.” xAI, founded in 2023, has already secured a $200 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense for its Grok model. Like OpenAI, it is pursuing AGI.

The outcome of the case now rests with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and a nine-person jury, who have been instructed to disregard the public personas and fortunes of the two billionaires. Musk is worth over $775 billion, and Altman is worth roughly $3.4 billion. SpaceX and OpenAI are both expected to go public this year, which could further inflate their net worth.

Musk v. Altman: the gist

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, with Musk serving as co-chair and early investor. Court filings show he invested more than $44 million over five years, though his testimony has varied. He said in court he “donated” $38 million through 2019, despite previously claiming $100 million in a deposition.

The company shifted to a “capped-profit” model in 2019 and became a public benefit corporation (PBC) in October 2025. Its nonprofit arm, the OpenAI Foundation, now holds a 26 percent minority stake in OpenAI Group PBC.

Musk wants OpenAI to revert to its original nonprofit structure. Altman and OpenAI argue the lawsuit is driven by rivalry and Musk’s failed 2018 attempt to gain control of the company. According to OpenAI, Musk had previously pushed to convert the organization into a for-profit entity and even proposed merging it with Tesla.

In court, Musk has been described as “combative,” particularly during exchanges with OpenAI’s lead counsel, William Savitt. At one point, he said Savitt’s questions were “designed to trick me.”

Musk will conclude his testimony today. His family office manager, Jared Birchall, will testify after him. Additional witnesses may include Brockman and UC Berkeley computer science professor Stuart Russell. Altman is expected to take the stand later. The trial is expected to run through late May.

Musk’s demands

Musk’s claims span financial, structural and technical issues:

• More than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, based on his contributions, alleged “ill-gotten gains” and punitive damages tied to claims of deception.
• Structural changes requiring OpenAI to return to its founding nonprofit model, which he argues was intended to develop open-source A.I. for the public good. He is also seeking to halt OpenAI’s for-profit operations until those changes are made. Much of the alleged “founding agreement” is based on informal communications, which are being tested in court.
• A legal determination on whether OpenAI’s models, including GPT-4, are approaching AGI. This question intersects with OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, whose commercial agreements exclude AGI. Microsoft and OpenAI ended their exclusive partnership at the start of the trial, weakening Musk’s related claim that those agreements should be voided.

Despite the scope of Musk’s demands, experts say a forced return to nonprofit status is unlikely.

“OpenAI has signed contracts with Microsoft, Nvidia and hundreds of vendors,” said Noah Kenney, head of tech advisory firm Digital 520. “It has employees holding equity and billions in committed investor capital. You can’t simply unwind a public benefit corporation that two state attorneys general already approved.”

Even if Musk prevails, Kenney said the most likely outcome is financial damages awarded to the nonprofit, not a restructuring. Still, the case could have lasting implications. Future A.I. startups that begin as nonprofits may face greater scrutiny over governance and mission alignment.

“The trial doesn’t pause the technology,” Kenney said. “It changes how the companies behind it are structured. That’s the real ripple effect.”

Anthropic began restructuring its leadership and organization in early 2026 as it prepares for a potential IPO. The company, which could go public as early as October at a valuation of up to $630 billion, has recently pulled ahead of competitors in revenue. Its annualized run rate (a prediction of annual revenue based on current quarterly performance) surpassed $30 billion in April, more than triple the figure at the end of 2025 and ahead of OpenAI’s reported $25 billion. Headcount has also surged, with roughly 2,300 employees at the end of last year, more than double its size just months earlier. Together, these changes reflect a growing emphasis on both rapid experimentation and commercial scale, while maintaining safety as a core differentiator.

A key part of this restructuring is the creation of Anthropic Labs in January, a research and development unit focused on incubating experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities. One of its first major decisions was to withhold public release of its most advanced model, Claude Mythos, due to its ability to identify and exploit software vulnerabilities. Instead, the company is pursuing a limited rollout, known as Project Glasswing, granting access to more than 50 organizations, including Microsoft and Nvidia, to help strengthen cyber defenses.

These structural changes are closely tied to a broader leadership reshuffle, including the promotion of former chief product officer Mike Krieger to co-lead Anthropic Labs.

“Krieger is someone who knows how to build products that stick,” Div Garg, founder and CEO of on-device superintelligence company AGI, Inc., told Observer. “At this stage, the constraint isn’t model quality. The constraint is turning capability into things people actually use and pay for, repeatedly, at scale.”

Mike Krieger and Ben Mann co-lead Anthropic Labs

Krieger, Anthropic’s former chief product officer and a co-founder of Instagram, transitioned to co-lead Anthropic Labs at its launch earlier this year. At Instagram, he served as chief technology officer, and later co-founded the news app Artifact, which he sold to Yahoo in 2024. A native of Brazil, Krieger is a Stanford University alumnus.

Ben Mann, an Anthropic co-founder, previously helped architect GPT-3 at OpenAI and worked as a software engineer at Google. Before moving to Labs, he served as Anthropic’s lead product engineer, focusing on A.I. alignment and harm mitigation. Mann graduated from Columbia University.

At Anthropic Labs, Krieger and Mann oversee a range of high-stakes initiatives, including the controlled rollout and governance of Claude Mythos, the company’s most advanced model. While Mythos can significantly strengthen cybersecurity by identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities, it also poses risks if misused. To manage that tension, Anthropic has opted for a limited release under Project Glasswing.

With Labs’ creation and their appointment, Anthropic has “the right structure in place to support the most critical motions for our product organization—discovering experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities and scaling them responsibly,” Anthropic president Daniela Amodei wrote in a release.

Ami Vora replaces Mike Krieger as CPO

Following Krieger’s move to Anthropic Labs, Ami Vora has taken on the role of chief product officer. She joined the company in December 2025 as head of product and was quickly promoted. Vora previously spent 15 years at Meta, where she held leadership roles, including vice president of product at Facebook and vice president of product and design at WhatsApp. She began her career at Microsoft and remains on the board of cloud monitoring platform Datadog.

As CPO, Vora works closely with chief technology officer Rahul Patil to scale Claude beyond experimentation and expand Anthropic’s market presence.

Rahul Patil stays on as CTO, with an expanded role

Anthropic’s broader leadership bench remains deep, with all seven co-founders still at the company. Rahul Patil, who became CTO in October, succeeded Sam McCandlish, now chief architect. Patil previously served as CTO of Stripe and has led engineering teams at Microsoft, AWS and Oracle. Now working in close coordination with Vora, Patil is focused on bridging the gap between technical research and production-ready products.

As Anthropic moves closer to a potential IPO, that alignment is increasingly critical. “Anthropic has decided the frontier lab model only gets you so far,” said AGI, Inc.’s Garg. “My read is that Anthropic is preparing for a more competitive commercial phase, probably regardless of IPO timing.”

Other executives shaping Anthropic’s future

• Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder: Dario Amodei previously served as vice president of research at OpenAI. He founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister, Daniela, and other former OpenAI colleagues.
• Daniela Amodei, president and co-founder: Daniela Amodei, who previously served as vice president of safety and policy at OpenAI, oversees Anthropic’s core operations, including chief technology officer Rahul Patil and chief architect Sam McCandlish.
• Jared Kaplan, chief science officer and co-founder: Anthropic co-founder and former OpenAI researcher Jared Kaplan serves as chief science officer. Since 2024, he has also served as the company’s responsible scaling officer, helping guide safety-related decisions.
• Jan Leike, alignment science lead: Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s superalignment team, has served as Anthropic’s alignment science lead since 2024.
• Sam McCandlish, chief architect and co-founder: Another former OpenAI employee, Sam McCandlish focuses on model training and large-scale systems development. He previously served as Anthropic’s CTO.
• Tom Brown, chief compute officer and co-founder: Former OpenAI GPT-3 researcher Tom Brown oversees Anthropic’s compute infrastructure.
• Vitaly Gudanets, CISO: Vitaly Gudanets has served as Anthropic’s chief information security officer since September. He previously led security efforts at Netflix.
• Jack Clark, head of policy and co-founder: A former OpenAI policy director and technology journalist, Jack Clark leads Anthropic’s policy work.
• Krishna Rao, CFO: Krishna Rao joined Anthropic as chief financial officer in 2024 after previously leading finance at Airbnb.
• Christopher Olah, interpretability research lead and co-founder: Christopher Olah, a former interpretability lead at OpenAI, heads Anthropic’s interpretability research, focusing on model transparency and A.I. safety.

Anthropic’s board and trust

In February, Anthropic appointed Chris Liddell, a former deputy White House chief of staff and former CFO at Microsoft and General Motors, to its board of directors. Daniela Amodei said Liddell has “a track record of helping organizations get [technology, public service and governance] right when the stakes are highest.”

The rest of the board remains unchanged, including Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Yasmin Razavi, Jay Kreps, Reed Hastings and Chris Liddell. The Long-Term Benefit Trust recently removed Kanika Bahl and Zach Robinson and added Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar; Neil Buddy Shah remains on the trust board.

The New York Times reporter John Carreyrou’s new evidence suggesting that British cryptographer Adam Back is the man behind the Bitcoin creator’s pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, is captivating global attention. This renewed scrutiny comes amid heightened volatility in Bitcoin’s price, which fell from its all-time high of more than $125,000 last October to less than half that by February.

The mystery surrounding Satoshi’s identity has fascinated people in and beyond the crypto sphere since 2008, when he began publishing white papers and early developer documents, two years before Bitcoin’s official launch. Satoshi disappeared from public view in 2011, writing to his collaborator Mike Hearn that he had “moved on to other things.”

Though 15 years have passed since Satoshi vanished, interest in the mythology hasn’t waned. Dozens of names have surfaced—some claiming to be Satoshi, others firmly denying it. Now, the trail has grown hot again, pointing toward someone at the center of Bitcoin’s early cryptographic roots.

Carreyrou’s case linking Back to Satoshi Nakamoto rests on several key points. First, Back was deeply involved in the Cypherpunks, a group of crypto-activists with an anarcho-capitalist bent. He holds a doctorate in distributed computer systems (the core architecture behind Bitcoin) and is an authority on both public-key cryptography and the programming language Bitcoin uses. Linguistic analyses of his published work also reveal striking similarities to Satoshi’s, such as unusual hyphenations, inconsistent shifts between British and American spellings, and shared stylistic quirks.

Back has categorically denied being Satoshi. He upheld this stance on today’s edition of The Daily, the New York Times podcast hosted by Natalie Kitroeff. “I guess it’s a coincidence,” Back said of Carreyrou’s findings. “I can only tell you that it’s not me.”

In a 2024 post on X, Back wrote, “No one knows who Satoshi is. And that’s a good thing.” Asked about that statement on the podcast, he explained that systems with outspoken founders “are viewed more as a company’s product or project” rather than evolving organically.

Currently, Back is taking his company, Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company (BSTR), public in the U.S. He has disclosed no assets that would tie him to Satoshi, such as the roughly 1.1 million Bitcoins, worth more than $79 billion now, that analysts estimate Satoshi controls.

Other names previously suspected to be Satoshi Nakamoto

Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman, a cryptographer and Cypherpunk member who died by suicide in 2011, has long been rumored to be Satoshi. The theory gained traction when venture capitalist Evan Hatch published a Medium article suggesting Sassaman as a possible identity. He also appeared as a theory in HBO’s 2024 documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. Sassaman’s widow, Meredith Patterson, has repeatedly said she doesn’t believe he was Satoshi, and the claims have since lost momentum.

Peter Todd

Peter Todd, an early blockchain developer who collaborated with Back, was another subject of speculation. Though featured in Money Electric, Todd, only 23 at the time of the original white paper’s release, has firmly rejected the idea, and most believe he lacked the experience to build the entire Bitcoin system.

Hal Finney

Renowned cryptographer Hal Finney was the first person to receive a Bitcoin transaction directly from Satoshi, fueling theories that he might be the creator. Coincidentally, Finney lived near a man named Dorian Nakamoto, prompting speculation that he borrowed the surname for his pseudonym. However, before his death from ALS in 2014, Finney produced evidence—including email logs and wallet data—showing he was merely a collaborator.

Dorian Nakamoto

Living just blocks from Finney in Temple City, Calif., Dorian Nakamoto was born with the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Newsweek reporter Leah McGrath Goodman claimed in 2014 that he was the elusive creator, to which he responded, “The first time I heard the term ‘Bitcoin’ was from my son in mid-February 2014…My prospects for gainful employment [have] been harmed because of Newsweek’s article.”

Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo designed BitGold in 1998, a digital currency concept that paved the way for Bitcoin. Like the Back debate, linguistic researchers have compared Szabo’s writing to Satoshi’s. According to Carreyrou, Szabo recently joined a debate on X about a Bitcoin update, in which he “exposed his ignorance of basic technical aspects of Bitcoin.”

Paul Le Roux

Paul Le Roux, the creator of encryption software E4M, has been another candidate, mainly due to his technical expertise. However, his criminal record, including convictions for drug trafficking and murder, contradicts Satoshi’s image as a moral and idealistic innovator, making this theory less plausible.

Gavin Andresen

Satoshi personally selected software developer Gavin Andresen to succeed him and oversee Bitcoin’s updates, sparking speculation that Andresen might be Satoshi himself. He has denied it and later endorsed computer scientist Craig Wright’s claim—an allegiance that damaged his reputation after Wright’s evidence was found to be falsified.

Wei Dai

Computer scientist Wei Dai, whose “b-money” proposal influenced Bitcoin’s design and was cited in Satoshi’s white paper, has also been named as a potential candidate. He has repeatedly denied the claims, and there’s no credible evidence linking him to Bitcoin’s creation.

Craig Wright

The Australian computer scientist Craig Wright remains the only person to publicly claim he is Satoshi. In 2024, he lost a case in the High Court of England and Wales against the Crypto Open Patent Alliance. The court found his evidence “at best questionable or of very dubious relevance or entirely circumstantial and at worst, fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale.”

In a bid to challenge the dominance of major social platforms and give creators a sustainable business model, TopFan, an entertainment marketing tech company led by Jeffrey Kohn, began offering independent creators a way to own their audience data in February. Founded by Kohn in 2015, TopFan has long powered fan engagement for major names including the Denver Broncos, Maroon 5 and Warner Bros. Its white-label websites, apps and data platform help entertainment organizations understand how fans behave beyond likes and clicks. Now, the company is extending that infrastructure to independent creators.

The idea is simple: by moving livestreams, online sales and other assets into their own branded apps and websites (and by gaining access to fan data such as phone numbers and locations), creators can gradually reduce reliance on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Over time, that autonomy could help them build independent businesses.

With easy access to YouTube and TikTok, everyone can be a producer or artist today, but most creators still struggle financially. More than half earned less than $15,000 in 2025, even as the overall creator economy surpassed $250 billion. Kohn argues that the imbalance highlights a broken system.

“It’s getting harder for a creator to survive on these social media platforms because their content’s not being seen,” Kohn told Observer, noting that the average engagement rate for Instagram posts sits around 3 percent. “You would never build your house on rented land,” he added.

A technologist by trade, Kohn began his career as a mission specialist at NASA in the mid-1990s, later serving as executive director and enterprise architect at Oracle before founding TopFan in 2006. A conversation there with a studio executive sparked the idea for the company. “I started asking him about the data he owned about his fans, and he said he didn’t have any,” Kohn recalled. Despite tens of millions of Facebook followers, the studio couldn’t actually reach those fans directly.

That same problem now plagues the creator economy. “When we evaluated the landscape of tools that were available for creators, we saw a lot of fragmentation,” Kohn said. Creators often juggle Cameo, Patreon, Substack and merch platforms—all linked from a cluttered bio. TopFan aims to consolidate those into one branded ecosystem where creators can sell merchandise, host communities or courses, manage subscriptions and track key fan data.

TopFan still encourages creators to stay visible on mainstream platforms for discovery. “They need to continue to post and grow their audiences on these big platforms,” said Kohn. “But over time, they become less reliant on black-box algorithms and surface-level audiences.”

Currently, TopFan partners with influencers who have at least 10,000 followers aggregated across platforms. “It shows them that they’re not just starting yesterday—that they’re taking this seriously,” said Kohn.

The formula for sustainable success

Kohn believes long-term success means going beyond content to offer tangible products and services such as coaching, classes, episodic programming or merchandise. One fast-growing area is microdramas—serialized, short-form web videos popularized in China as duanju. These bite-sized dramas, often built around cliffhangers and romance or revenge tropes, have found global traction; last year, microdrama app DramaBox was selected for Disney’s 2025 Accelerator program.

Another promising category is family-friendly content. With social platforms facing scrutiny over youth exposure—Australia even banned social media for minors—creators who own their distribution channels can offer safe, closed environments for younger audiences to engage responsibly.

Across niches, Kohn insists the principle is the same: ownership matters. “Your local plumber has a database of their customers,” he said. “It surprised me that all of these major companies had seeded relationships through the middleman of social media.”

High-profile examples like Alex Cooper’s Unwell and MrBeast’s Beast Industries show what’s possible when creators control their platforms. With TopFan now extending those tools to independent influencers, Kohn hopes more creators will make the same pivot, moving from renting audiences on social media to owning entire digital ecosystems built to last.

Warren Buffett, who turns 96 this summer, is bringing back his famed annual charity lunch after a four-year pause. But this year, the format gets a refresh. The retired billionaire investor is teaming up with the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation (ELP), a Bay Area nonprofit founded by NBA star Stephen Curry and his wife, Ayesha.

Buffett launched the annual charity lunch in 2000 to benefit San Francisco’s GLIDE Foundation, a social justice nonprofit focused on fighting poverty and inequality. Except for two pandemic years, he maintained the tradition until 2022, helping raise more than $54 million over two decades. The event’s highest winning bid came in 2022, when an anonymous donor paid a record-breaking $19 million.

Following Buffett’s hiatus, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stepped in to continue the legacy, raising $1.5 million for GLIDE in 2024. Now, Buffett is returning to host his first charity lunch since retiring as Berkshire Hathaway CEO in 2025.

Bidding for the 2026 lunch opens on eBay on May 7, with a winner and seven guests invited to join Buffett and the Currys for a private experience in Buffett’s hometown of Omaha, Neb. on June 24.

Traditionally, the lunch spotlighted Buffett himself. The new iteration, however, will center on a multigenerational, collaborative discussion between Buffett and the Currys. The couple founded ELP in 2019 to provide schoolchildren in Oakland, Calif. with nutritious meals, educational tools and sports opportunities. This year’s partnership will split proceeds between GLIDE and ELP.

Buffett said his initial hiatus began when he “ran out of gas” at age 92. The recent passing of GLIDE co-founder Reverend Cecil Williams inspired him to bring the event back. “All he wanted was this to continue,” Buffett told CNBC this week. He added that this year’s revival aims to attract a younger partner who can carry on the tradition alongside the Currys.

In an added show of generosity, Buffett announced that he will personally match this year’s winning bid, dividing his contribution equally between GLIDE and ELP.

“What’s so powerful about this moment is that it honors everything Warren has built while opening the door to what philanthropy can look like going forward,” Chris Helfrich, President and CEO of the Eat. Learn. Play. Foundation, told Observer. “By bringing Stephen and Ayesha into it, that impact expands in a very real way. It introduces new energy, new audiences and ultimately increases what we’re able to do for the communities we support.”

Buffett praised the Currys’ dedication to Oakland’s youth, telling CNBC: “They have a deep and sustained interest in helping the children of Oakland enjoy better futures and, in a big way, have given life to that belief. Stephen has not sought plaudits or, on any scale, funding from others.”

Previous lunches often included GLIDE leaders and were held at Smith & Wollensky Steakhouse in New York City. This year’s event will shift to a still-undisclosed Omaha location chosen by Buffett.

Past winners of the charity auction include Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and hedge fund manager Ted Weschler, who later joined Berkshire Hathaway as an investment manager after winning in 2011.

Online bidding for the 2026 lunch begins May 7 at 7:30 p.m. PT and closes May 14 at the same time. Interested participants must complete a prequalification form with their name, address, occupation, social media handles and group affiliations. Bidding starts at $50,000, though past auctions have routinely surpassed $1 million.

Fifty years ago, in a modest California garage, three men built a company that would reshape technology and culture. On April 1, 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne signed the paperwork to form Apple Computer. Their first creation, the Apple I, a bare-circuit-board hand-assembled by Wozniak, sold for $666.66 and paved the way for the modern PC revolution. Jobs’ vision and charisma made him the enduring face of Apple. But half a century later, as Apple celebrates its milestone anniversary, its two lesser-known co-founders have followed remarkably different paths. Wozniak, 75, remains a technologist and educator still tied to Apple in spirit, while Wayne, 91, has lived a quieter life outside of Las Vegas, far removed from the digital revolution he helped launch.

Steve Wozniak, the inventor who never stopped inventing

Wozniak still lives in Los Gatos, Calif., where he’s spent decades tinkering with inventions and championing education. Known affectionately as “Woz,” he was Apple’s founding engineer and the driving force behind Apple I and Apple II—machines that jump-started the personal computing era.

When Apple went public in 1980, Wozniak held about 7 percent of the company, a stake that would have been worth tens of billions today. But when he left Apple in 1985 after clashing with management (Jobs included), he sold most of his shares. His net worth is estimated at around $140 million today. Wozniak briefly returned to school after a plane crash in 1981 left him with temporary amnesia. He completed his long-delayed degree at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986.

Today, he retains the title of digital design engineering fellow at Apple, though the position is largely symbolic. He told an interviewer in 2020 that he receives about $50 a week in his Apple paycheck. Still, he often appears at tech events and remains an informal ambassador for the company’s early spirit of creativity.

Over the years, Wozniak has launched a string of ventures that reflect both his curiosity and playful persistence. In 1987, he founded CL-9, which created the first universal remote control. Later, he started Wheels of Zeus (W.O.Z.), a company aimed at building GPS-powered tracking devices—an idea that foreshadowed Apple’s AirTag almost two decades later. He also co-founded Silicon Valley Comic Con in 2015 and Woz U, a technology education platform, in 2017. Wozniak also held a top engineering role at Fusion-io, a flash-memory startup later acquired by SanDisk.

Outside of business, Wozniak has backed numerous philanthropic efforts, especially focused on education and digital rights. He was a founding supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tech Interactive Museum in San Jose, and the Children’s Discovery Museum.

In recent years, he has become an active voice in debates around A.I. In 2023, he joined Elon Musk and other tech leaders in signing an open letter calling for a pause on advanced A.I. development, citing concerns about misinformation and misuse. When Apple introduced its “Apple Intelligence” features in 2024, Wozniak praised the company’s cautious, privacy-focused approach. A year later, he publicly urged A.I. developers to build systems with “fact-checking built in,” saying transparency should be as fundamental to technology as good design.

Ronald Wayne, the man who walked away too early

In stark contrast to Wozniak’s lifelong immersion in technology, Wayne, now 91, has lived most of the past five decades outside Silicon Valley’s whirlwind.

Born in Cleveland and raised in New York City, Wayne studied technical drafting at what was then called the School of Industrial Art, a vocational high school. He later moved west and joined the video game company Atari, where he designed arcade game enclosures and documentation systems. It was there, in the early 1970s, that he met Jobs and Wozniak.

Nearly 20 years older than his partners, Wayne described himself as the “adult in the room.” He drafted Apple’s original partnership agreement, designed its first logo—a stylized image of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree—and wrote the user manual for Apple I.

Wayne mainly served as a mediator between Jobs and Wozniak and held a 10 percent stake in the company (Jobs and Wozniak each held 45 percent). But just eleven days after signing the partnership documents, Wayne withdrew. Haunted by a past business failure and worried about potential debts if Apple faltered, he sold his shares for $800 and later signed away any future claims for another $1,500. That 10 percent stake would be worth roughly $35 billion today.

“What can I say? You make a decision based on your understanding of the circumstances, and you live with it,” Wayne told CNN in 2010. “The way these guys were going, they were going to bulldoze through anything to make this company succeed. But it was going to be a very rough ride, and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to be the richest man in the cemetery.”

After leaving Apple, Wayne returned to Atari and later worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he oversaw precision modeling for the Mirror Fusion Reactor Project. He eventually served as chief engineer at Thor Electronics before retiring.

In later years, he turned to his personal passions: stamp and coin collecting. He once operated a small stamp shop in California, later running it from home after moving to Pahrump, Nevada, where he still lives today. By his count, he owns more than a million stamps.

Wayne has occasionally reemerged in the media spotlight, giving interviews and publishing two books: his 2011 memoir, Adventures of an Apple Founder and Insolence of Office, a reflection on government and human rights. But his life has remained modest. In 2014, he described himself as living “in a financial hole” for much of his adult life, surviving on Social Security and income from selling collectibles.

Kalshi co-founder and chief operating officer Luana Lopes Lara recently became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire at 29, with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion. Her fortune ballooned after Kalshi doubled its valuation to $11 billion within just two months, following a $1 billion Series E in December. Lara unseated Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo, who held the title for roughly eight months, and now sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing prediction markets, a far cry from her first career as a professional ballerina.

Born in Brazil, Lara trained at the Bolshoi Theater School in Santa Catarina, the only satellite campus of the famed Russian institution. She went on to dance professionally for about nine months at the Austrian theater Salzburger Landestheater, performing classics like Swan Lake. Her early experience as a ballerina helped convince Kalshi investors that she has the grit and discipline needed to survive the bruising world of startups and financial regulation.

“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” Andreessen Horowitz partner Alex Immerman told Forbes in December, adding that Lara “learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi.”

After hanging up her pointe shoes, Lara moved to the U.S. to study computer science at MIT, intent on becoming a tech entrepreneur. She interned at the hedge funds Bridgewater and Citadel, and met her future co-founder, Tarek Mansour, who shared a similar hedge fund background and the conviction that prediction markets could become a major global asset class if brought into the regulatory light.

The pair founded Kalshi in 2018 with a simple yet controversial idea: that ordinary people should be able to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, from inflation and interest rates to pop culture and politics. Going against Silicon Valley’s move-fast-and-break-things motto, they spent years and millions of dollars pursuing full federal approval rather than operating offshore, as many rivals did.

“Luana’s approach is not to be focused on scale at all costs, but responsible growth and profitable scale,” Emmett Shipman, fintech strategy and growth senior manager at risk management firm Wolf & Company, told Observer.

In 2020, Kalshi secured a key milestone when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission granted it designated contract market status, formally recognizing its products as event contracts rather than mere betting. That opened the door for the company to list markets across economics, politics and sports while staying within the guardrails of U.S. derivatives law.

“One of the reasons I think Kalshi ended up working out was because of how naive and stubborn we were,” Lara said on CNBC’s Changemakers and Power Players podcast last week. “We really just don’t take no for an answer…When we got feedback from regulators…we would just go back and do data analysis, legal research, all of those things to prove that we were right.”

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Their persistence paid off in 2024, when Kalshi won judicial approval to offer event contracts on U.S. elections—a practice mostly dormant since the early 20th century. On March 2, the Associated Press announced it would supply Kalshi with its vote-count and race-call data for national and major state elections, effectively plugging the platform directly into one of the most trusted sources of election data in the country.

Kalshi’s regulatory wins have not ended its legal headaches. States including Massachusetts, New York and Arizona have scrutinized the platform’s sports-related trades, which make up 90 percent of its total volume, arguing that it resembles an unlicensed sportsbook. For now, Kalshi’s federal status offers a shield from state gaming laws, but the tension highlights how novel its business remains. The company insists its markets are federally regulated derivatives, not state-level gambling products.

Kalshi is expanding into Lara’s home country

Earlier this month, Kalshi announced its first international expansion through XP International, the global arm of Brazilian financial giant XP Inc., giving XP clients access to Kalshi’s markets through existing brokerage accounts. The rollout emphasizes contracts on Brazilian inflation and interest rates, offering local investors a way to trade macroeconomic outcomes that shape daily life in a country long familiar with volatility.

Brazil is a natural fit for Lara’s vision and background. The country endured decades of hyperinflation before stabilizing its economy in the mid-1990s. “That’s a market that has a much more expansive risk tolerance and openness to innovation,” Shipman said. “Doing it the right way in the U.S. is a massive market signal, so I’m not surprised they’re seeing appetite elsewhere.”

Kalshi has also been shoring up its position in the U.S. Through a partnership announced this month with Cash App Pay, users can now fund accounts using the popular payment app, a nod to the platform’s growing mainstream audience. In February, electronic trading giant Tradeweb took a minority stake and formed a strategic partnership to feed Kalshi’s data and analytics to institutional clients, a move that could make prediction markets part of hedge funds’ and asset managers’ toolkits.

Kalshi is growing fast. Trading volumes have surged to more than $1 billion per week, according to the company, up roughly 1,000 percent since 2024. Monthly active users rose from about 600,000 in early 2025 to around 5.1 million today, helped in part by splashy marketing such as a fully A.I.-generated commercial that aired during the NBA Finals. In 2025, Kalshi generated $263.5 million in fee revenue on nearly $23 billion in trading volume.

“We really think that prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market,” Lara said on CNBC last week.

Ten years after publishing The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, bestselling author and blogger Mark Manson is turning to A.I. to tackle some of his audience’s toughest life questions. He recently co-founded Purpose, an A.I.-powered mentor designed to deliver practical life advice—something Manson says most general chatbots, like ChatGPT, aren’t built to do.

Manson is also known for Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope and for co-authoring Will with actor Will Smith, a memoir chronicling the celebrity’s personal struggles and growth. He began his career in 2008, launching a blog shortly after graduating from Boston University. What started as a dating advice column quickly evolved into a platform for deeper reflections on happiness, success and modern self-help. That blog would launch Manson’s publishing career and, over time, earn him nearly two million followers on Instagram.

Since A.I. entered the mainstream, Manson has been bullish on its potential to enhance the way people seek guidance. After exploring ways to enter the market, including the possibility of acquiring an existing company, he chose instead to build something new with tech entrepreneur Raj Singh, founder of the Google-backed hospitality startup Go Moment. Singh’s company was later acqui-hired by Revinate in 2021; after leaving in 2024, he turned his focus to mental health technology. Purpose’s engineering lead, William Kearns, formerly headed A.I. at meditation and wellness platform Headspace.

Purpose has launched both a website and an iOS app, with an Android version expected later this month. So far, roughly 50,000 people have joined the platform, with about one in four paying for a premium subscription that costs $20 per month or $150 annually.

Observer spoke with Manson about mental health safety, what A.I. gets right and wrong in the advice space, and where the line truly lies between mentorship and therapy.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you and your co-founder, Raj, connect? Who came to whom with this problem that they wanted to solve?

We sat next to each other at a poker game, so it was completely random. I was actually trying to buy another A.I. startup, and I hit a roadblock. Raj had just exited his previous company and had already decided independently that, whatever he did next, he wanted it to be in mental health and A.I. We both realized that we were very bullish on A.I. in terms of helping people. I’d say, a month later in March 2025, we had a business.

How do you use A.I. chatbots in your own life, and what are your favorites?

I use A.I. all the time instead of Googling things or asking business questions, health questions. I was watching the movie Hamnet the other night and paused it to have a conversation with Claude about Shakespeare, and it was absolutely riveting. Claude is definitely a favorite in terms of taste and the quality of writing. Being a writer, the quality of writing matters a lot to me. 

I’ve had a lot of fun messing around with some of the Character.AI-type products. It’s almost like fan fiction. But for daily use cases, I mostly use Claude and Gemini.

You mentioned that the Purpose team cares about mental health. I have written about A.I. psychosis and related issues. Purpose does clarify it’s not a therapist and limits access while results “sink in,” so I see you’re placing constraints on communication. I’m curious about the concerns you have about A.I. companions creating dependencies or reinforcing unhealthy thought patterns, and how you’ve tried to mitigate that in your app.

If you look at A.I. psychosis cases, a lot of it seems to be driven by sycophancy. The A.I. is just agreeing with whatever you say. It’s like, “Oh, you think you’re the queen of England. That’s awesome. Tell me more about that.” They’re not disagreeable enough; they’re not willing to challenge you, to kind of keep you grounded in reality. 

One of the first things we considered when designing Purpose was that it needs to challenge the user. It can’t just agree with everything the user says. That also fits our mission. You grow from being wrong about things. You grow from reevaluating your beliefs and questioning your assumptions. That was hugely important for us to make sure that we are challenging the users actively and forcing them to reevaluate some of their preconceived notions.

On top of that, we have some pretty strict guardrails. Anything that seems like it could potentially be a clinical-level situation, Purpose is designed to refer the user to a route to find a local professional. 

There’s actually a new industry benchmark for mental health, safety and A.I. It’s called Vera MH, and it conducts 400 simulated clinical conversations, and they judge whether the A.I. is safe or not. We scored 100 percent risk detection across all 400 conversations, and we scored in the top 0.5 percent of A.I. systems that have been evaluated with that benchmark.

How skeptical are you about A.I. for emotional support, relationships or life advice? And how are you attempting to eschew these concerns with your own product?

The large A.I. companies were woken up last year around safety precautions and negative side effects. I do think that A.I. has a ton of potential to create value for people in this space. The technology is not there yet, but it’s getting better. 

What would it take for the technology to get there?

At Purpose, we’ve modified A.I.’s mission. That’s not that hard. I think anybody with six months to develop an app can probably do something similar. What’s really hard is when you get into memory and pattern matching. 

The way LLMs work is that the more information you give them, the less accurate they become, and this is why ChatGPT’s memory, or Claude’s memory, is not very good, because they have so much random information on you that it’s hard for them to keep track of what’s useful for this conversation and what’s not. 

The second piece of it is salience. Obviously, if a user is talking about their mother, that’s probably a very important thing in their life, and it’s definitely more important than what they had for breakfast or what kind of car they drive, but right now, A.I. doesn’t know how to prioritize one fact about somebody over another. You have to find ways to programmatically do that. Otherwise, A.I. will fixate on a random fact about you.

I don’t think memory has really been solved by anybody, especially the big A.I. companies. When you think about personal growth and life advice, memory is so important. If you have a conversation with Purpose about something that happened when you were 17, that’s probably a really important thing to remember when you come back three months later. I would say right now the biggest hurdle is memory.

Where do you think we should draw the line on using A.I. in intimate parts of our lives, and in what ways are we seeing A.I. companies around the world miss the mark on this front?

It’s inevitable that people are going to use A.I. for personal stuff. If you’re stressed out and lying awake at one in the morning, you’re not gonna call a therapist, you’re not gonna call a friend on a Tuesday in the middle of the night, but an A.I. is there. To me, the biggest thing is privacy and making sure that user data is anonymized and respected.

While Purpose says it’s not a therapist, when I used it, it did remind me of therapy in the sense that it doesn’t tell you what to do, but asks you questions that lead you to your decision about how to move forward in your life. How are you toeing the line in regards to therapy versus simple advice?

There are two different therapy use cases. Some people go to therapy because they’re in crisis and they’ve got a major life issue. Others go to therapy for maintenance or mental hygiene. A.I. can do a good job with the latter use case. Like, “I had a fight with my partner. What do you think about this?” You can get a lot of mileage out of an A.I. in those situations, especially given the accessibility, the affordability, the consistency. 

Where we draw the line is when people are in that crisis category and are exhibiting very severe signs of distress or depression. That’s where we direct them to go seek a professional. I would not feel comfortable using A.I. for that use case yet.

I have a person in my life who, in the past, has struggled with eating disorders. They were using Purpose, and when they started talking about some of the issues they’ve been going through, not only did it correctly identify that they were probably more likely to have an eating disorder, but they sent them a directory of clinicians who specialize in those disorders in their area. I was very happy when I heard that. It’s doing exactly what it should be doing.

Would the version of you that wrote The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck be surprised at this venture that you’re doing?

I actually don’t think so. I launched my first online course around 2010, and around the time the book came out in 2016, I had this dream of doing a choose-your-own-adventure self-help course. It frustrated me that every course was on rails, like you had to start here, and you had to go in order. So many people would drop off because it didn’t relate to them anymore. I actually started designing one around 2017 and got maybe a month in before it was clear that it was going to be so complicated and impractical that I abandoned it. 

When ChatGPT blew up, and I started messing around with it, I realized this is the technology that makes a choose-your-own-adventure course possible.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski unintentionally landed in the spotlight this week after an Instagram video of him awkwardly nibbling on the fast-food chain’s new Big Arch Burger went viral. Inevitably, the clip prompted playful reactions from rivals Burger King and Wendy’s. But more importantly, it underscores the risks of bringing CEOs out from behind the boardroom and into viral culture.

The short video, originally posted on Feb. 3, resurfaced after McDonald’s launched the Big Arch Burger in the U.S. on March 3. Viewers mocked Kempczinski’s flat delivery and tentative bite, questioning his enthusiasm.

Performing authenticity on social media can sometimes work wonders—Microsoft’s Satya Nadella or TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew have built credibility through a down-to-earth online presence. Other times, it backfires. Elon Musk’s unfiltered social media antics, for example, have both polarized and galvanized his followers.

“The primary role of a CEO is to lead the company with a focus on driving strategy, operations and profitability,” Lauren Bishop Jennings, crisis communications expert at Alison Brod Marketing & Communications, told Observer. “Recently, however, some brands have begun positioning their CEOs as relatable consumer figures. The challenge is that relatability cannot be manufactured, and when it feels forced, audiences notice and often, yes, turn it into a meme.”

That’s exactly what happened here. TikTok creator Madison Humphrey, known for her exaggerated recreations, swiftly parodied Kempczinski’s clip, amplifying the joke to millions. Jennings added that while some CEOs communicate naturally on camera, others would be better off delegating that role to digital teams or influencers who can convey brand voice more comfortably.

“If a particular leader naturally has a vibrant, authentic personality and is comfortable communicating candidly on camera, this type of approach can work well,” she said. “But it should never be assumed that every CEO can, or should, play that role.”

The push for CEOs to appear more personable comes amid widening wage and cultural divides between high-level executives and front-line workers. It’s a familiar tactic, Jennings noted, echoing how politicians film themselves riding public transit to seem like “everyman.” Yet those moments, she added, often come across as staged rather than sincere.

Kempczinski, who became CEO in 2019 after joining McDonald’s in 2015, is no stranger to scrutiny. Before leading McDonald’s, he held top roles at Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo. His Instagram feed suggests the awkward burger post wasn’t an isolated moment; he frequently uploads videos of himself sampling menu items—often with the same stiff demeanor. In past clips, followers teased him for taking small bites or failing to swallow the food on camera.

Despite occasional viral missteps, Kempczinski’s performance as CEO of the world’s largest fast-food chain has been largely positive. Succeeding former CEO Steve Easterbrook, who was fired in 2019 over misconduct, Kempczinski is credited with leading McDonald’s through the COVID-19 pandemic and modernizing the brand’s culture and digital operations. Under his leadership, the company recovered quickly from its worst quarter ever at the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic in 2020.

Crisis PR experts say the most appealing thing Kempczinski can do now is not to take himself too seriously and acknowledge the moment. “Poke fun at himself and get in on the joke. Go on a late show and eat a Big Mac with the host. Invite an influencer or celebrity on his channel to teach him how to eat on camera less awkwardly,” Ronica Cleary, CEO and founder of crisis communications firm Cleary Strategies, told Observer. 

McDonald’s has chosen to lean into the humor rather than ignore it. On March 4, the company posted an image of the Big Arch Burger with the caption, “can’t believe this got approved,” and on-screen text reading, “take a bite of our new product”—a nod to Kempczinski’s overly corporate language in the original video.

“Knowing when to embrace the moment and take the joke is one of the most effective ways a brand can defuse criticism and regain control of the conversation,” said Jennings.