Inside Sam Altman’s Shock Ouster From OpenAI | Inside King Charles III’s $25 Billion Real Estate Empire | When the World’s Most Famous Writer Visits a Hotbed of Amorous Intrigue | A Mother’s Grief in New Haven

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� � � � � � Inside Sam Altman's Shock Ouster From OpenAI - TIME    Healthy companies led by competent, commercially successful and globally beloved founders generally don’t tend to fire them. And, as Sam Altman walked on stage in San Francisco on Nov. 6, all those things could have described his role at OpenAI. The co-founder and chief executive officer had kicked off a global race for artificial intelligence supremacy, helped OpenAI surpass much larger competitors, and was, by this point, regularly compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Eleven days later he would be fired — kicking off a chaotic weekend during which executives and investors loyal to Altman were agitating for his return. The board ignored them, and hired Emmett Shear, the former Twitch CEO, instead. On Nov. 6, at the company’s first developer conference, the acclaim for Altman seemed universal. Attendees applauded rapturously as he ticked off the company’s accomplishments: 2 million customers, including “over 92% of Fortune 500 companies.” A big reason for that was Microsoft Corp., which invested $13 billion into the company and put Altman at the center of a corporate overhaul that has caused it to leapfrog rivals like Google and Amazon in certain categories of cloud computing, reinvigorated its Bing search engine, and put the company in the leading position in the hottest software category. Now, Altman invited CEO Satya Nadella onto the stage and asked him how Microsoft felt about the partnership. Nadella started to respond, and then broke into laughter, as if the answer to the question was absurdly obvious. “We love you guys,” he finally said after he’d calmed down. He thanked Altman for “building something magical.” Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Inside King Charles III's $25 Billion Real Estate Empire - Forbes    Charles III's official coronation may not occur until May 6, but the new British monarch has already inherited a $25 billion real estate portfolio fit for a king. When he acceded the throne in September 2022, the 73-year-old sovereign assumed control of a $46 billion empire, much of it in real estate. Forbes scoured property records, annual reports, audits, archives and legislative documents to find all of the king's new possessions. His holdings span from Buckingham Palace—the official headquarters of the monarchy, which Forbes estimates is worth $4.9 billion—to Highgrove House, a country residence in Gloucestershire that Charles first purchased in 1980 for £865,000 ($3.7 million today,) now valued at $39 million. Charles is expected to break with seven generations of tradition and reject Buckingham Palace as his London residence to remain in his current home at Clarence House (estimated value: $72 million.) But he will also reportedly continue to spend some time at Highgrove. That means he'll have to pay about $740,000 in annual rent to his son William, who succeeded him as Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall and now holds Highgrove under the Duchy of Cornwall. Continued here � � � � � � When the World's Most Famous Writer Visits a Hotbed of Amorous Intrigue - The New Yorker    In 1926, Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about an innocent young art form: the silent cinema. Woolf argued that the movies were too literary. They would have to find their own artistic language, since they were currently imprisoned in a system of dead convention and mechanical semaphore: "A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse." Once in a while, she had found herself in a darkened cinema with an apprehension of what film might achieve. "Through the thick counterpane of immense dexterity and enormous efficiency one has glimpses of something vital within," she wrote. "But the kick of life is instantly concealed by more dexterity, further efficiency." Maugham's worldwide renown could probably have existed only when it did, between the twenties and the fifties. Literary prestige was still culturally central. An audience hungry for literary storytelling overlapped with the audience for cinematic storytelling, and English was the lucky lingua franca of these two mass art forms. The British Empire might have been receding, but Maugham, like his friend Winston Churchill, moved through the world as if the sun were hardly setting on its sins. In the twenties and thirties, the writer made well-publicized journeys to India, Burma, the West Indies, Singapore, and Malaysia. A Maugham "tale" was a smoothly machined artifact—psychologically astute, coolly satirical, mildly subversive, and a bit sexy. Malarial British colonies provided excellent conditions for humid, erotic undercurrents. "The Letter," set in Singapore, and based on an actual criminal trial, concerns Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a well-off British planter, who has been accused of murdering her neighbor Geoffrey Hammond. It seems a straightforward case: rape narrowly averted. Geoffrey had visited her in the evening, when her husband was away. He made sexual advances, and she shot him in self-defense. Leslie's lawyer assumes that his client will be acquitted. Maugham's story turns on the sudden discovery of a passionate letter, a lover's note, in which Leslie appears to beg Geoffrey to visit her that evening. So was the murder a necessary act of self-protection or an avoidable crime of passion? Was Geoffrey there to assault Leslie, or to break off the affair? "The Letter" lunges toward its narrative bait. Maugham is a comfily unsurprising storyteller: the surprises are all procedural. Woolf's desired kick of life can be felt now and again, but is efficiently muffled by the great dexterity of the plotting and style. A familiar realist grammar dulls all interrogation, and the reader is happily brought along. Characters are primitively blocked in: "Hutchinson was a tall, stout man with a red face." "His blue eyes, behind large gold-rimmed spectacles, were shrewd and vivacious, and there was a great deal of determination in his face." "Crosbie was a big fellow well over six feet high, with broad shoulders, and muscular." A robust core of cliché and formula keeps the stories sturdy and shipshape. Woolf's orchestra of gestures—a kiss is love, a grin is happiness—does its idle signalling: "She frowned as she thought of the reason which was taking her back to England." (A frown is puzzlement.) There are also many twinkling eyes, sinking hearts, and ruthless stares. When Maugham attempts a simile, it's often an odd combination of the exaggerated and the secondhand: "His fist, with its ring of steel, caught him fair and square on the jaw. He fell like a bull under the pole-axe." Or: "'Where's the cream, you fool?' she roared like a lioness at bay." It was a saving insight of another world-famous, commercially successful, and utterly professionalized writer of the era, P.G. Wodehouse, that a wild comic poetry could be made from such automatic realist filler. Why have a character just walk into a room (and a tale) if she can enter "with a slow and dragging step like a Volga boatman"? Why have someone roaring like a lioness at bay if instead you can make your readers laugh with "She looked like an aunt who has just bitten into a bad oyster"? Wodehouse, an instinctive anti-realist anarchist, is not only more experimental than Maugham but invariably the more precise stylist. Continued here � � � � � � A Mother's Grief in New Haven - The New Yorker    In August, at the start of the school year, Yale's incoming freshmen were welcomed with daily parties, sunny counsel from deans and advisers, colorful flyers describing clubs and activities, and a more ominous handout: a leaflet decorated with an image of the Grim Reaper. "The incidence of crime and violence in New Haven is shockingly high, and it is getting worse," the sheet read. A New Haven "survival guide" followed, warning students to "stay off the streets" after dusk, never "walk alone," and "remain on campus." The flyer had been designed by the union representing those charged with insuring the students' safety—the Yale police. New Haven is a compact city of a hundred and thirty-eight thousand people. But its tensions recall those in Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other community where a wealthy college is situated near neighborhoods beset by poverty and crime. The flyers swiftly prompted debates about whether students were actually endangered, or if the union was exaggerating to gain favorable new terms in its next contract. (The flyer closely resembled a pamphlet titled "Welcome to Fear City" that New York police distributed, in 1975, during budget negotiations.) National media canvassed Yale students, faculty members, and officials for their opinions. Many were at pains to insist that they weren't in serious peril. "I don't know where this is coming from," a 2021 graduate told me. "If you're from New York, New Haven feels like the suburbs." What the coverage lacked, generally, was voices from the communities surrounding Yale, where many young people live in daily dread of being shot. In New Haven, where I grew up, post-industrial struggle exists mere blocks away from a world of wealth and opportunity. When I heard about the flyer, I thought about young men I knew who could tally the multitudes of friends and family members they'd lost, over the years, to "the violence." At first, the numbers had seemed surreal; I couldn't fathom them. That changed when some of the young men I knew began to die themselves, shot down on clear afternoons. Continued here

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