Free for ALL Friday!

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, are scheduled to face off in court next week The bitter legal feud between the two tech titans is prying open the industry’s most powerful circles by spilling the tea of Silicon Valley VIPs. Hundreds of court filings have revealed cringey texts, emails or private diary entries of Musk, Altman, other OpenAI founders and other public figures. They include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg privately offering to use his social platforms to help Musk’s interests, Musk insulting Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos (twice) and a journal in which a big MAGA donor muses about becoming a billionaire, according to the filings. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the company in an acrimonious split in 2018. His lawsuit, originally filed in 2024, alleges that OpenAI broke its founding pledges to share its technology openly with the world as a nonprofit artificial intelligence research lab. Musk argues that Altman and Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder, conspired to enrich themselves at Musk’s expense and asks the court to remove them from their leadership positions and to restore OpenAI to a full nonprofit. Shivon Zilis is a longtime ally of Musk and has worked at several of his companies. She acted as an “Elon whisperer” to OpenAI, Altman said in his deposition, and the company says she served on its board of directors from 2020 to 2023. In 2022, it was revealed publicly that Zilis and Musk had twins together the prior year. The pair started a brief romance around 2016, Zilis said in her deposition in the lawsuit. They now have four children together and are in a romantic relationship, she said. Link: Washington Post (Multiple reporters) Backup: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/the-unflattering-secrets-revealed-so-far-in-elon-musks-latest-legal-feud-174615161.html The agreement governing hundreds of millions in private donations was kept secret until a watchdog group sued and a judge ordered it disclosed The Trump administration’s contract governing hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to build President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom shields donors’ identities, excludes the White House from conflict of interest protections and was disclosed only after a lawsuit and a judge’s order, records obtained by The Washington Post show. The agreement establishing the legal and financial framework for the planned $400 million undertaking — the most significant change to the White House in decades — was signed in early October, less than two weeks before demolition crews started destroying the East Wing. The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public. Dozens of the project’s known donors — which include Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Palantir and Google — collectively have billions of dollars in federal contracts before the administration. “This document reveals that anonymous donations are the heart of this agreement,” said Jon Golinger, a lawyer and public policy advocate with Public Citizen. “Who are these anonymous donors, and what are they hiding?” Charles Tiefer, a retired law professor at the University of Baltimore who spent three years on a congressionally authorized commission scrutinizing wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the anonymity provisions potentially set up the Trump administration to block congressional inquiries into the project’s funding. Link: Washington Post (Dan Diamond) The battered Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees—and more taxpayers appear eager to cheat The Internal Revenue Service has shed thousands of enforcement workers since President Trump returned to office, and his fiscal 2027 budget proposal seeks further cuts amid the administration’s broader pullback of white-collar law enforcement. The IRS enforcement workforce would fall below 30,000, fewer than at the end of Trump’s first term and about a third less than the Biden-era peak. “There’s seemingly this mentality building which is, ‘The IRS isn’t going to catch me,’” said Carolyn Schenck, a former IRS national fraud counsel, now at law firm Caplin and Drysdale in Washington. Audits of people with at least $10 million in income dropped 9% last year, and they are on track to decline another 39% this year. Partnership audits declined, reversing an attempt to scrutinize private-equity firms and other complex entities that have long bedeviled the government. In fiscal 2025, the IRS collected less direct revenue from audits and appeals than in any year since at least 2012, though the money can arrive years after audits start. The IRS started January 2025 with about 103,000 employees. Then Trump returned, determined to undo Biden’s initiatives and shape a pro-taxpayer IRS. The administration fired probationary government employees, those who held the job for less than a year, which disproportionately hit agencies that just hired heavily, including the IRS. Some later returned after a court challenge. The administration also offered buyouts that were attractive to the aging IRS workforce. By May, head count at the IRS had declined by more than 25,000, including about a quarter of auditors. Link: Wall Street Journal (Richard Rubin) The “Alpine divorce,” in which one partner leaves another stranded while hiking, is more serious than the name implies One afternoon in July 2024, Stefanie Peiker, a hiking guide in the Austrian Alps, came across a woman lying on the ground, heavily injured after falling off her electric bike. “Her face was completely destroyed, she was bleeding and crying,” Ms. Peiker said. “The first thing I asked was, ‘Are you alone?’” The woman explained that she’d been cycling with her boyfriend, Ms. Peiker said, but he had left her after an argument. “I called the ambulance, took out my first-aid kit,” said Ms. Peiker, 31, who was on duty as a park ranger in a nature reserve that is part of a network of protected areas called Natura 2000. “Then, the boyfriend came back and screamed how stupid she is and that she destroyed his holiday.” Though this was an extreme case, Ms. Peiker said she often comes across women who are alone on mountain paths because their partners are hiking ahead. So she wasn’t surprised when, during the past weeks, women on Reddit, Instagram and TikTok began sharing stories of being left behind by their partners while hiking, biking and climbing in nature, calling it “Alpine divorce.” Often, the women described risky or uncomfortable circumstances where their partners had more knowledge of the terrain or more experience with the sport. The flurry of social media posts during the last few weeks appeared to have been triggered by a criminal case in Austria focused on a mountaineering expedition that ended in death. In February, Thomas Plamberger, 37, was found guilty of gross negligent manslaughter for leaving his girlfriend, Kerstin Gurtner, 33, to die of hypothermia on Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner. “In the mountains, it can quickly become dangerous,” said Andreas Truegler, 44, a squad leader and deputy head of mountain rescue in the Austrian Alps. Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters) No one knew it at the time, but 2014 — more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment — marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists At the 2014 Oscars, best supporting actor nominee Bradley Cooper took a selfie with host Ellen DeGeneres and a bunch of A-listers, among them Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt,…