Weekend Briefing No. 624
The Secretive Empire of Mars Inc. -- Naked & Inconsequential -- Clean Energy’s Tipping Point
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
260,000,000 — The Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere has generated over $260 million in ticket sales from more than 2 million tickets since opening in August, as Sphere Entertainment announces plans for a second, smaller U.S. venue outside Washington, D.C.
160,000 — The U.S. Forest Service manages roughly 160,000 miles of trails (85% of all federal trails), yet only 37% receive any maintenance each year, with districts reporting losses of up to 100% of trail staff and a $460 million maintenance backlog.
19 — U.S. vinyl sales grew for the 19th consecutive year in 2025, rising 8.6% to 47.9 million units and led by Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl,” which sold 1.6 million copies alone—nearly six times more than the second-place album.
The Secretive Empire of Mars Inc.
Mars Inc. is a $50 billion global powerhouse that remains 100% family-owned and notoriously private. While famous for M&M’s and Snickers, the company is actually a pet care titan in disguise; that segment generates 59% of its revenue ($29.5 billion) and employs roughly 100,000 of its 140,000-person workforce. Much of Mars’ dominance stems from Forrest Mars, who built a European empire in exile after a falling out with his father. He eventually returned to execute a hostile takeover of his father’s company. Since the 1930s, Mars has enforced a strict open-office policy with no executive perks. Every employee, including the CEO, must punch a time card to earn a 10% punctuality bonus. With the recent $35.9 billion acquisition of Kellanova, Mars continues to transform from a candy maker into a diversified CPG colossus, all while the family ($117 billion net worth) avoids the public eye. Acquired Briefing (22 minutes)
Naked & Inconsequential
Most people use extreme sports to feel alive, but Kílian Jornet—who has climbed Everest twice in a week without oxygen and runs up mountains for a living—does it to feel “naked and inconsequential.” His parents taught him not to visit nature but to be comfortable in it, turning off headlamps in the forest at night so he’d learn to trust his other senses. The shift came after watching his friend fall 600 meters to his death on a cornice: instead of pulling back, Jornet pushed harder, deliberately courting risk to test whether he was supposed to die that day instead. Now with three kids, he’s discovering that the real challenge isn’t surviving storms at 8,300 meters while hallucinating—it’s coming down from that simple, high-stakes clarity to choose between pasta and rice at the supermarket, where consequences feel meaningless and indulgence means refusing galas to watch the sunrise alone. NYT (7 minutes)
Clean Energy’s Tipping Point
Wind and solar now generate more electricity than coal globally, while electric vehicles claimed over a quarter of new car sales in 2025—milestones that arrived not from policy mandates but from economics. The price collapse is so complete that solar paired with batteries has become “anytime dispatchable electricity,” erasing the intermittency problem that was supposed to keep fossil fuels essential forever. China’s coal power is declining for the first time despite being the world’s largest emitter, and global gasoline car sales likely peaked back in 2017, suggesting the energy transition isn’t a future event but a current reality playing out faster than forecasts predicted. The implication is stark: the cost curves have already decided the winner, and betting against electrification now means betting against basic math. Yale e360 (3 minutes)
New Regulation for CRISPR
Baby KJ got a custom-built gene editor to fix his fatal liver mutation for under $1 million in six months—but under current FDA rules, fixing a different mutation in the same gene would require another decade-long, hundred-million-dollar approval process. The problem is we’re regulating genetic interventions like mass-produced pills when they’re actually more like surgery: personalized, high-stakes procedures using validated tools in new combinations. The shift is recognizing that FDA already knows how to handle this—they let hospital labs run custom diagnostic tests under CLIA certification instead of approving each one as a “product,” and they regulate surgical devices without treating every bypass as its own therapeutic. A16Z (5 minutes)
Nobody Reads Anymore
A professor kept cutting her reading assignments—fewer books, fewer pages, only the essential stuff—but students still weren’t doing it, and when they tried, they couldn’t understand what they read. This isn’t about laziness or phones (though distraction is “through the roof”); it’s that students are arriving at college without the foundational ability to parse complex text, and professors are caught between maintaining standards and acknowledging that asking for a 25-source research paper now gets called “unreasonable.” The underlying crisis is that reading isn’t just declining as a habit—it’s failing as a skill, which means the entire infrastructure of higher education (built on the assumption that students can extract meaning from written arguments) is suddenly standing on nothing. Chronicle (4 minutes)
Automating Independent Thinking
Students who offload their thinking to AI aren’t just getting lazy—they’re experiencing cognitive atrophy usually seen in aging brains, losing the ability to parse truth from fiction or build arguments because they’re “actually not engaging in the material.” The real damage isn’t that chatbots do homework; it’s that they’re designed to be sycophantic echo chambers that always agree with you, which means: kids raised on AI companions never learn the crucial skill of recovering from misunderstanding or disagreement (”Dude, I wash the dishes too—what are you complaining about?”). Additionally, one in five high schoolers has had or knows someone who’s had a romantic AI relationship, and the free AI tools accessible to poor schools are less accurate than premium versions, creating the first time in ed-tech history where schools must pay more for factually correct information. The fix isn’t banning AI but making it antagonistic instead of agreeable, shifting education away from transactional grade-chasing, and ensuring that while teachers save six hours a week automating emails, students aren’t automating away their capacity to think independently or feel genuinely challenged. NPR (5 minutes)
Havana Syndrome Weapon
The Pentagon recently ran an undercover operation and spent eight figures buying a backpack-sized device that emits pulsed radio waves—the kind some investigators think caused Havana Syndrome. For nearly a decade, the CIA and intelligence community insisted there wasn’t enough evidence to link the mysterious ailments (vertigo, extreme headaches, career-ending brain injuries) to foreign attacks, telling victims they were essentially imagining things while Russia was potentially targeting American officials worldwide. Now the core terror is proliferation: if this technology works and the US could buy one on the black market, how many other countries already have it, and how many more diplomats and spies are walking into invisible attacks? The victims who were called pariahs and forced into retirement are demanding public apologies, because the government’s “very unlikely it’s a foreign actor” assessment looks increasingly like either institutional incompetence or deliberate gaslighting—and either way, people lost their careers while officials debated whether the weapon pointed at their heads was real. CNN (5 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different. - J.B. Priestley
Hi Kyle. Your Havana Syndrome piece is titled "Havana Syndrome Weapon" which asserts that the device is connected Havana Syndrome. That is unwarranted from the reporting. Your first sentence is fine because it ends with this: "—the kind SOME [my emphasis] investigators THINK [my emphasis] caused Havana Syndrome."
But the rest of your summary, like the heading itself, favors claims that are unwarranted based on the reporting so far. Notice how measured the CNN headline is: "Pentagon bought device through undercover operation some investigators suspect is linked to Havana Syndrome". The first CNN paragraph says: "...some investigators think could be the cause...". We don't know if the "some" refers to a minority of the investigators. Regardless, it's clearly still inconclusive at this time.
The fifth CNN paragraph says this:
"The device acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, one of the sources said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents."
Notice that the speculation they are referring to in that sentence is "pulsed radio waves", so it's a device that makes the same *kind* of radio waves that have been *speculated* to be the cause. There is no reporting that says this is *the* device which is the source of Havana Syndrome (ignoring, of course, the still unproven idea that any device is the "cause" of the incidents). That's why your heading of "Havana Syndrome Weapon" is not a good summary of the reporting. I mean, you could have at least put a question mark after it.
Furthermore, the article says that the Defense Department has been testing it for over a year and yet they still haven't come to any firm conclusions about it! This in no way tips the scale in favor of those who believe that a pulsed radio wave device causes Havana Syndrome.
Just because a government agency buys something, doesn't make it legit:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29459896
Even government investigations themselves can be suspect, we all know know the story of The Men Who Stare at Goats.
Anyway, there's nothing in the CNN report that justifies throwing around accusations about "gaslighting" or "institutional incompetence". I appreciate your weekend newsletter, but I'm dismayed at the conclusions you drew from that article.
Congratulations on this article; not a surprise! Thanks for expanding my knowledge of what is happening around me.