Nilay Patel and Hayden Field size up Apple’s trade secret case against OpenAI as both a legal threat and a stress test for a company already juggling executive turnover, IPO pressure and an uncertain hardware strategy. Their conversation widens into a sharper question about AI’s future: whether OpenAI can turn consumer fascination into an actual market before enterprise rivals and courtroom battles define the field for it.

Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues that the privatization of public discourse, from polling and microtargeting to bots and AI platforms, is hollowing out liberal democracy and replacing it with an "artificial state." In conversation with Nilay Patel, she traces how Silicon Valley’s faith in quantification and efficiency has turned citizens into data points while leaving open the question of whether collective political action can still push back.

Proton CTO Bart Butler makes the case that the privacy company is really selling trust, then traces how encryption, Swiss jurisdiction, and a foundation-controlled ownership model are meant to keep that promise intact. The conversation turns from corporate ideals to harder tests: FBI requests routed through Switzerland, looming European surveillance laws, child-safety demands, age verification, and the problem of building AI tools without surrendering user control.

NVIDIA automotive chief Zhinzhou Wu argues that the software-defined car is finally arriving, with central computers, shared data, and AI models reshaping how automakers build vehicles. The conversation traces the industry’s uneven path to autonomy, from China’s EV head start and Tesla’s camera-only bet to the safety case for LiDAR and the economics of putting ever more compute inside a car.

Nilay Patel and Peter Kafka treat Comcast’s breakup as the latest collapse of the old “content plus pipes” fantasy, tracing how a generation of telecom-media mergers failed to turn internet access into cable TV all over again. Their conversation follows the money from NBCUniversal and Versant to Peacock, sports rights, and broadband monopolies, asking what media companies can still own that the internet has not already commodified.

At Cannes, two longtime UTA executives explain how influencer careers became full-scale media companies, built through strategy meetings, product launches, and careful management of platform risk. The conversation treats creators less as internet personalities than as entrepreneurs navigating algorithms, brand deals, physical goods, and the looming pressures of AI.

At Cannes, Digitas North America CEO Amy Lanzi argues that advertising’s AI boom resembles the overhyped promises of programmatic, with platforms selling automation while agencies and brands still need human judgment, strategy, and data fluency. The conversation also traces the rise of creators as full-fledged marketing businesses and the growing fight over who controls the relationship between brands, audiences, and the platforms in between.

Roger Daley returns to discuss how Blackstone’s pandemic-fueled rise led to its merger with Weber, and what it takes to fuse a fast, entrepreneurial upstart with a storied but siloed legacy brand. The conversation ranges from antitrust limbo and tariff pressures to creator marketing, overseas manufacturing, and the culture overhaul required to run one company with two very different identities.

Ford CEO Jim Farley talks with Joanna Stern about the company’s risky effort to rebuild its electric-vehicle strategy around cheaper, simpler cars, while arguing that software, tariffs and Chinese competition are reshaping the entire auto business. The conversation widens into Farley’s view that America’s bigger crisis is not just EV profitability but a hollowed-out culture that undervalues factory, trade and emergency-service work.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte says the company has outgrown its old role as a payments layer and is rebuilding itself as a discovery, hosting and community platform for creators squeezed by algorithmic feeds, Apple’s fees and AI-fueled slop. The conversation ranges from social media’s failures to the payment and moderation pressures of running a creator business that now competes more directly with Instagram, TikTok and Substack.

A weekend scramble over Anthropic’s newly released Claude Fable 5 became a test case for how the Trump administration may regulate AI: through formal safety policy or through panicked, personalized power. Nilay Patel and Verge reporter Hayden Field trace the model’s abrupt shutdown, the export controls that followed, and the industry’s growing fear that political risk now sits alongside technical risk.

Skydio chief executive Adam Bry argues that autonomous drones are moving from camera toys to networked infrastructure, with their most consequential uses in emergency response, utility inspection, and military reconnaissance. The conversation turns on whether the United States can build a domestic drone industry at scale while navigating bans on Chinese rivals, the politics of surveillance, and the moral limits of AI in warfare.

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch argues that legacy media survives by acting less like a magazine publisher than a portfolio of brands built for events, subscriptions, commerce, video, and adaptation. He talks through the company’s restructuring, the collapse of Google-driven traffic, the uneasy bargains of AI licensing, and why authority matters more than raw scale in the creator era.

Mustafa Suleiman argues that Microsoft’s evolving partnership with OpenAI has pushed the company toward model self-sufficiency, even as he insists the alliance remains central to its AI strategy. In a wide-ranging conversation, he defends the coming wave of enterprise automation, rejects claims of machine consciousness, and says the technology will have to prove itself by making people healthier, happier, and more capable.

Nilay Patel and New York Times reporter Ryan Mac sift through SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO filing to ask what Elon Musk’s ownership of X has actually become and why the company’s shrinking social platform may not matter. Their conversation turns into a broader indictment of a market structure that keeps rewarding Musk with more power even as corporate governance, shareholder accountability, and business fundamentals erode.

Recording Academy chief Harvey Mason Jr. sketches an industry already saturated with AI, where songwriters use models for everything from chord progressions to demo vocals even as the Grammys try to preserve a meaningful line around human authorship. The conversation also turns to the academy’s move from CBS to Disney, the politics of platform power, and the scramble to keep music culture visible in the age of TikTok.

Rivian’s top software executive sketches the uneasy marriage of startup speed and Volkswagen scale, as the companies build a shared EV operating system meant to underpin everything from the R2 to future Audis and Lamborghinis. The conversation turns just as quickly to Rivian’s in-car assistant, where voice control, safety limits and the long war over CarPlay reveal how much of the modern vehicle now lives in software.

Nilay Patel presses Sundar Pichai on Google’s AI reorganization, the rapid spread of Gemini and agents across search and software, and what those shifts mean for publishers, creators and the fragile idea of a common web. Pichai argues that Google is building toward more capable systems while insisting the open web remains essential, even as search grows more opinionated, personalized and self-contained.

Nilay Patel and Liz Lopatto sort through the spectacle and legal debris of Musk v. Altman, a trial nominally about OpenAI’s nonprofit origins but really driven by Elon Musk’s bid to punish Sam Altman. Their conversation sketches a courthouse circus, a statute-of-limitations defeat, and an AI industry where dishonesty feels less disqualifying than fully priced in.

As BuzzFeed sells a controlling stake to Byron Allen, outgoing CEO Jonah Peretti argues that digital media’s platform era collapsed into a deals business and bets AI can rebuild both the company and the products people use directly. The conversation turns over old wounds from Facebook’s broken promises to creator economics, then lands on an ambitious, still-fuzzy vision of BuzzFeed as an AI-powered media and social platform.