Time: “Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s World”

The experience illustrated how much Zelensky has changed since we first met three years ago, backstage at his comedy show in Kyiv, when he was still an actor running for President. His sense of humor is still intact. It’s a means of survival, he says. But two months of war have made him harder, quicker to anger, and a lot more comfortable with risk. Russian troops came within minutes of finding him and his family in the first hours of the war, their gunfire once audible inside his office walls. Images of dead civilians haunt him. So do the daily appeals from his troops, hundreds of whom are trapped belowground, running out of food, water, and ammunition.

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Friends and allies rushed to Zelensky’s side, sometimes in violation of security protocols. Several brought their families to the compound. If the President were to be killed, the chain of succession in Ukraine calls for the Speaker of parliament to take command. But Ruslan Stefanchuk, who holds that post, drove straight to Bankova Street on the morning of the invasion rather than taking shelter at a distance.

Stefanchuk was among the first to see the President in his office that day. It wasn’t fear on his face, he told me. It was a question: How could this be? For months Zelensky had downplayed warnings from Washington that Russia was about to invade. Now he registered the fact that an all-out war had broken out, but could not yet grasp the totality of what it meant. Maybe these words sound vague or pompous, says Stefanchuk. But we sensed the order of the world collapsing. Soon the Speaker rushed down the street to the parliament and presided over a vote to impose martial law across the country. Zelensky signed the decree that afternoon.

Simon Shuster

As the imminent danger of Russian troops capturing the capital subsided, reporters started getting access to Ukraine’s now-wartime President, Volodymyr Zelensky. I found it a bit ironic how much this article emphasizes his former job as comedian, including ending on this exact note (that is the role he intends to play) – not the most reassuring way to portray a leader during such a consequential conflict.

The Atlantic: “Absolute Power”

Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police. He has explored relations with Israel.

He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.

Graeme Wood

Fascinating and comprehensive profile of Saudi Arabia’s future king who could shape politics in the Middle East – and beyond – for the coming decades, maybe even half a century. He strikes me as a dangerous mix of Vladimir Putin (MBS’ seven-years-long invasion of Yemen has caused numerous deaths and destruction – supported with weapons deliveries by the United States – and only now there are tentative signs of a cessation of hostilities), Xi Jinping (promoting economic prosperity for the masses while relentlessly cracking down on dissent and criticism) and Louis XIV (L’état, c’est moi!). As for his forced modernization of the country, we will have to wait and see if this becomes a permanent cultural shift, or if it will cause a violent backlash and sudden return towards conservative Islam – as it happened in Iran in 1979.

Protocol: “Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet?”

Users inevitably begin to feel hemmed in and controlled by the closed platforms, and yearn for open pastures. Then they go build something better. Something open. People’s natural desire for freedom starts to get more and more of the best and brightest in the world working on open, distributed, decentralized systems.

The seeds of this change are already everywhere, he said. Tesla has open-sourced its patents in an effort to speed up innovation in electric vehicles, because as Elon Musk said, the company’s goal is not just to sell cars but to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. There’s also the whole decentralized, Web3, blockchain community, which excites Mullenweg every time it comes up. There’s an inevitable gravitational pull towards open source affecting literally every field: finance, health, politics, he said. All the things that currently happen in closed ways, what if they were open? What if they were transparent? What if you could copy and paste it? Do your own version? Remix it?

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At this point, few companies have more influence over the way the internet works than Automattic. And few people not named Zuckerberg have more influence than Mullenweg. Beyond the whole “43% of the internet” thing, there’s the fact that both WordPress and Automattic basically belong to him. When Automattic sells shares to new investors, all the voting power goes back to Mullenweg. When he wants to push Automattic or WordPress in a new direction, he tries to do it as gently and collaboratively as possible, but one way or another he usually gets his way. Mullenweg generally tends to downplay this authority, noting that users can always fork WordPress and do their own thing, but there’s no question that where Mullenweg goes, the community — and the internet — follows.

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Even as the tech industry swirls around him, with regulatory fights and social media backlashes and the seemingly hourly shift in priorities, Mullenweg remains steadily on course. We aspire to create the layer that every other application on the web can run on, he said. Hopefully one day, 85% or 90% of all websites have WordPress as their base layer. Right now, the web operates largely on top of closed platforms owned by companies like Amazon and Facebook. But to truly be a platform, Mullenweg said, it has to be open. Otherwise it’s more like a trap.

David Pierce

This article strikes an awkward tone between asserting how much influence Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg have over the web and stressing how open WordPress is and how Matt strives to promote open platforms. It’s a bit of a logical fallacy – how can one man or company have so much influence over an open, distributed system? The more distributed the system, the less influence any individual party should have – and an obvious falsehood given the rather tangible power of closed platforms on the web. Despite the reporter’s framing, Matt also betrays centralizing tendencies when he talks about acquiring various internet services and even a web browser. And I can’t take anyone seriously who gets excited about web3 (nor anyone preaching open platforms, yet ostensibly using the most closed-off platform of all, Apple)…

Foreign Affairs: “The Singular Chancellor”

Yet outwardly, the most striking thing about the chancellor remains her determined normalcy. Merkel’s clear, light voice carries the unhurried intonation of the pine-forested, sandy-soiled Brandenburg countryside northwest of Berlin, where her father was a Lutheran parson. Her working uniform consists of sensible flats, black pants, and an endless supply of hip-length jackets in every color. The chancellor and her husband, a retired chemistry professor, live in their old Berlin apartment rather than the official residence; the only visible security is a police officer in front of the building. To the approval of Berliners, Merkel is sometimes seen walking in the city center or shopping in a supermarket, trailed by her bodyguards.

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Merkel’s interpreters have labored heroically to reconcile these paradoxes. The simple truth is that Merkel the level-headed empiricist has little patience for visions when there are problems to be solved. She has whipsawed on her principles for the sake of power, but she has also been willing to pay a price for standing up for her deepest convictions. Few of her peers have been able to accumulate so much political capital. Yet even her admirers concede that although she has been exquisitely adroit at riding out the currents of politics, she has been far too reluctant to shape them.

Constanze Stelzenmüller

As Angela Merkel prepares to end her final mandate as German Chancellor, an interesting overview of her most consequential decisions during this long tenure. Naturally, a newspaper article, however long, can hardly grasp everything that happened during the past 16 years, nor map out all the repercussions of these decisions – in fact, we may not recognize them in full for years.

Nikkei Asian Review: “Sony CEO Yoshida navigates coronavirus and activist attacks”

Its emphasis on recurring revenues has pleased many investors. Sony is the only Japanese electronics company to have surpassed its profit levels [from] before the Lehman crisis. Yoshida knew the company had to become sustainable and continuity in growth was valuable. That is why he made ‘recurring’ a keyword, said Masahiro Ono, an analyst at Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities. I believe this makes him a successful CEO.

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Such diversity is more characteristic of a Japanese conglomerate than a Western company, and Yoshida emphasizes the financial value of having a broad portfolio of products with differing life cycles. As well as entertainment, we have businesses to support people, like medical or life insurance. The time scale is long in medical equipment, quite opposite from smartphones. This diversity stabilizes the company.

John Gapper & Jada Nagumo

I was quite surprised to learn a couple of years ago that Sony had a sizeable business in financial services and life insurance – it represented two thirds of Sony’s profits in 2013 at the low point of its post-Lehman crisis. While the company may not be recognized as a global player compared to US tech giants, their long-term strategies of diversity and recurring revenues are increasingly being adopted in Silicon Valley:

The Atlantic: “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan”

Bezos is unabashed in his fanaticism for Star Trek and its many spin-offs. He has a holding company called Zefram, which honors the character who invented warp drive. He persuaded the makers of the film Star Trek Beyond to give him a cameo as a Starfleet official. He named his dog Kamala, after a woman who appears in an episode as Picard’s “perfect” but unattainable mate. As time has passed, Bezos and Picard have physically converged. Like the interstellar explorer, portrayed by Patrick Stewart, Bezos shaved the remnant strands on his high-gloss pate and acquired a cast-iron physique. A friend once said that Bezos adopted his strenuous fitness regimen in anticipation of the day that he, too, would journey to the heavens.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space. This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.

Franklin Foer

Speaking of Jeff Bezos, I’ve read this fascinating profile on him a while back, covering many of his passions and projects, from the early start with book selling to the juggernaut e-commerce business of Amazon, from the Clock of the Long Now to his ultimate plan, conquering the final frontier. While there are many concerns about his business practices, I cannot help but admire him for his ultimate goals and long-term vision. At the same time I wonder, as a man with foresight, has he ever considered who will replace him at the top of Amazon – or, more importantly, who will carry out his vision of space exploration after his passing?

by the way, that story about his phone being hacked by the Saudi crown prince hasn’t aged well, as other news sources claim it was Bezos’ girlfriend Lauren Sanchez who shared his text messages with her brother, who then leaked their contents to the National Enquirer.

Bloomberg: “The Eurocrat who makes Corporate America tremble”

A tall man rose and introduced himself as a banker. The EU has had trouble inspiring much affection among its citizens, he said. But here in Denmark, since Margrethe Vestager took over, the competition commission has become very close to people’s hearts. Shouldn’t the EU reach out more, to become similarly beloved?

It’s not in explaining the details or showing the process that you find acceptance, Vestager said. It’s in showing results, showing that it works. You don’t want to follow the baker in every step he’s taking. You just want to eat the pastry. We’re not asking people to love everything—just to love the big thing.

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The EU’s best response to all this instability, particularly across the Atlantic, Vestager says, is to double down on its core values. I don’t think Europe should be defined by the U.S. administration. We have so much going for us. This is a great place. It’s a wonderful place to do business. In the choppy new world order, if the U.S. abandons its post at the tiller and retreats into itself, Vestager says, Europe can step forward to fill whatever vacuum might appear. There is no room for worry, no time to fret. I think it’s more an obligation to be an optimist. Pessimism will never get anything done.

Samanth Subramanian

Another old article, but this seems a good time to share it, since Margrethe Vestager just delivered another verdict against Google, fining the company over the bundling of Google services on Android devices. In a world where American tech giants are causing all sorts of havoc with their ‘disruption’ mindset – or simply evading tax bills on a scale rarely seen before – it feels good to have a clear, level head with the power to investigate their practices and hold them accountable, even if the process is long and complicated. I particularly like her quote in the closing of the article, even as my own views are more pessimistic.