This Monday brief starts with Zuckerberg of all people. Why start a money brief with Mark Zuckerberg defending Elon Musk’s massacre of Twitter staff. Because, for once, Silicon Valley accidentally said something true about Europe.
Not the usual Silicon Valley truth, which is really just a PowerPoint in a fleece vest explaining why your job, your privacy and your remaining attention span all needed to be melted down for the future. A more primitive truth than that. A managerial truth. The kind that smells faintly of burnt coffee and terminated Slack accounts.
Musk bought Twitter, fired what felt like half the known population of Lisbon, broke a variety of things, annoyed almost everyone with a pulse, and still forced one deeply uncomfortable question into the open, namely whether large institutions had become so bloated, so padded with soft managerial foam, so lovingly wrapped in layers of supervision, pre-supervision, review structures and people whose main professional skill is forwarding an email to somebody else, that even a chainsaw began to look, if not wise, then at least diagnostic.
And Zuckerberg, who normally speaks like a man attempting to settle a hostage situation inside an Excel sheet, more or less admitted it.
Elon Musk famously reduced head count by 80% after acquiring Twitter. It was controversial at the time, but Mark is asked what he thinks Elon did well during it.
Mark responds:
“You can agree or disagree with the exact tactics and how he did that. Every leader has their own style… But a lot of the specific principles that he pushed on: making the organization more technical, decreasing distance between engineers at the company and him, fewer layers of management. I think that those were generally good changes.”
Mark also believes this was good for the technology industry as a whole:
“My sense is that there were a lot of other people who thought that those were good changes, but who may have been a little shy about doing them. Just in my conversations with other founders and how people have reacted to the things we’ve done… When people see what Elon is doing, I think that gives people the ability to think through how to shape their organizations in a way that can be good for the industry and make all these companies more productive over time.”
He continues:
“So I think that was one thing where he was quite ahead of a bunch of the other companies on… And from the outside, it’s very hard to know. Did he cut too much? Did he not cut enough? I don’t think it’s my place to opine on that… But certainly his actions led me and, I think, a lot of other folks in the industry to think about, ‘Hey, are we doing this as much as we should? Could we make our companies better by pushing on some of these same principles?’”
That is about as close as the modern technology class gets to speaking plainly. Strip away the diplomatic wrapping paper and the message is brutally simple, too many layers, too much distance between decision and execution, too much management and not enough building, too many people standing in between the machine and the person pretending to understand the machine. One need not become a disciple of Musk, which would be exhausting and would probably require posting at three in the morning about civilizational fertility and tunnel boring, to see the point. Large organizations have become obese in the beigeest possible way, not with muscle, not even with grandeur, but with process. With “alignment.” With “stakeholder mapping.” With people whose calendar is full and whose contribution to material reality could be replaced by an apologetic lamp.
This, unfortunately, is where Europe enters the room.
Because if there is one institution on earth that could watch a company slash layers, shorten chains of command, force technical accountability, and then somehow draw from it the exact opposite lesson, it is the European Union, that magnificent administrative aquarium in which policy swims slowly past the glass while reality dies in the filter.
I wanted to begin here because the EU has reached the point every overmanaged system reaches eventually, the point where the paperwork still looks calm but the structure underneath has started making noises. Europe has hit a tipping point. Its leaders, meanwhile, carry on with the stale self-confidence of men discussing upholstery while the staircase behind them is on fire. They still speak as though the central question facing the continent is whether the strategic framework for the future competitiveness compact can be aligned with the sustainability roadmap for inclusive resilience, which is exactly how a civilization sounds when it has not yet realized the barbarians are now inside the presentation template.
Someone uploaded a BetterEU review claiming that an AI pass over more than 43,000 active pieces of EU legislation concluded that 89 percent of them were worthless and should be deleted. Whether the exact percentage is 89, 71, or a spiritually significant 62, the larger image is perfect. Europe has become a place where law reproduces itself like damp wallpaper. Legislation breeds legislation. Directives beget frameworks, frameworks beget compliance mechanisms, compliance mechanisms beget reporting obligations, reporting obligations beget digital portals, digital portals beget public-private consultative interfaces, and then a man in Brussels explains that this is dynamism. It is not dynamism. It is a filing cabinet with asthma.
Mario Draghi now says Europe must become a state, or on day one it will become a third country, which is exactly the sort of sentence European statesmen produce when they wish to sound like Caesar while actually proposing another train carriage of institutional consolidation. Merz has called for the systematic review of all EU legislation, which is sensible, except that “systematic review” in Brussels usually means gathering twelve committees, four rapporteurs, two impact assessments, three languages nobody fully speaks in the room, and a lukewarm buffet that tastes faintly of sanctions. There are reportedly over 140,000 regulations to look through. Knowing the EU, that should take roughly 140,000 days, after which a fresh 90,000 will have appeared in the night, like slugs after rain.
Poland’s President Karol Nawrocki has vetoed a bill that would have opened access to €43.7 billion from the EU’s SAFE defence loan program, because he says it would have given Brussels too much power over Polish defence policy. Imagine that, a nation objecting to the idea that its security should be adjusted by a transnational bureaucracy whose native form is the PDF. Hungary, meanwhile, keeps objecting to Brussels on Ukraine funding and oil transit, only to discover that vetoes in the European Union increasingly function like those little pedestrian crossing buttons in old Eastern Europe, decorative, therapeutic, and not visibly connected to anything.
Then there is Ursula von der Leyen, who now says abandoning nuclear power was a strategic mistake and that Europe should lead the world in the technology, which is true, admirable and late in exactly the way one expects from a political class that first helped kneecap an industry and now arrives in a clean blazer to announce the discovery of knees. Europe spent fifteen years treating nuclear like a disturbing uncle at Christmas, and has now remembered, with the startled expression of a man finding a fire extinguisher during the third room of the fire, that reliable baseload energy is in fact preferable to moral poetry and imported panic.
Romania, bless it, is set to become one of the European Union’s most important gas producers through the Neptun Deep field in the Black Sea, with an estimated 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas and production expected around 2027. There is something almost indecently wholesome in this, a real asset, under the ground, useful to people, requiring steel and money and geological seriousness rather than another symposium on values. Europe likes to talk as if molecules are vulgar and only narratives are elegant, but in the end civilizations still run on the old humiliations, energy, borders, food, pipes, ships, debt, force, winter. The laws of thermodynamics remain terribly right wing in their habits.
France, meanwhile, has produced perhaps the first genuinely funny positive story from the continent in some time. The French tax administration is reportedly considering phasing out Microsoft entirely to strengthen tech sovereignty. They already avoid Office and Active Directory, they do not use American cloud because it is, in their words, unthinkable to entrust their data to providers subject to the Cloud Act, and the alternative being considered is Linux. This is excellent. It is difficult not to support any project that makes American software salesmen mildly unhappy. I am just not fully sure I want to work on a French Linux. One imagines an operating system that is elegant, moody, absolutely convinced of its civilizational mission, and periodically refuses to boot until management recognizes the dignity of lunch.
And this is Europe now, not dead, not even doomed necessarily, but trapped in that strange pre-accident posture where every serious topic is rediscovered twenty minutes after it should have been obvious. Borders, suddenly important. Energy, suddenly important. Defence industrial capacity, suddenly important. Tech sovereignty, suddenly important. Deportation rules, suddenly important. Gas, nuclear, rearmament, stockpiles, migration controls, strategic autonomy, all the old boring nouns are shuffling back into the conversation because history has this rude habit of reappearing just after the consultants have declared it non-core.
You can see it everywhere. Sweden is stockpiling essentials like fuel, food and generators in case of crisis or war, which is what a serious government does when it senses that the atmosphere has acquired a metallic taste. Giorgia Meloni says Europe must decide whether it wants to take its destiny in hand or simply endure it, which is the sort of line one delivers when the audience has already spent thirty years outsourcing destiny to forms. The EU Parliament has voted in favor of a deportation regulation aimed at protecting Europeans, and Ursula will reportedly try to overturn it, because the European project remains committed above all else to the principle that every expression of self-preservation must first survive an internal struggle with its own customer service department.
Spain, by contrast, has approved universal free healthcare for illegal migrants from anywhere in the world, which is both morally ambitious and strategically deranged, a bit like announcing free champagne on a lifeboat. Europe remains the only place on earth capable of discussing civilizational survival and administrative self-harm in consecutive agenda items, without changing tone, and then breaking for mineral water.
That is the European lesson in the Zuckerberg quote. Not that Europe needs an Elon Musk, God help everyone involved, but that it desperately needs fewer ceremonial layers, less distance between action and consequence, less management as theater, more technical seriousness, more capacity to distinguish a functioning machine from a beautifully translated memo about a machine. Brussels today often feels like a giant machine designed to protect itself from the unpleasant shock of outcomes. The result is a continent governed by extremely articulate insulation.
Once you leave Europe, the international picture does not improve, it simply acquires louder music.
New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, announced he wants those who make the most money to pay more so everyone can stay in the city, which is a deeply modern formulation, both threatening and moist, like being mugged by an urban planning thesis. It is always charming when politicians propose to stop capital flight by standing in front of the airport with a larger invoice. Perhaps it will work. Perhaps the wealthy, moved by the poetry of mandatory sacrifice, will remain in place like noble deer at a bureaucratic salt lick. More likely they will continue behaving like humans with accountants.
The dictator of Cuba, Miguel Díaz Canel, has now announced negotiations with the United States under pressure, which is one of those cheerful little reminders that even revolutionary regimes eventually discover the downside of running an economy like a rationed museum. Every dictatorship believes it can outstare arithmetic. Arithmetic, being petty and tireless, usually wins.
New York state’s proposed S08102 would force every internet connected device to run mandatory, device level age verification using biometrics or government ID. This is not being sold, naturally, as the beginning of a permanent identity layer stapled across the internet, because that would sound sinister and people are still sentimental about words like “freedom.” It is being sold as protection. It is always protection. The modern state no longer arrives in jackboots, it arrives in pastel with child safety language and a data retention policy, which is worse in a way, because at least a jackboot has the decency to admit it is on your neck.
Viewers are also noticing that original versions of television shows get shortened when sent to streaming, which is another one of those small, gummy signs that a culture is entering its processed meat phase. History is not censored with grandeur anymore. It is trimmed. Smoothed. Quietly re-exported in a more platform compatible format. The past itself is being optimized for retention curves, which feels less like tyranny than like being slowly strangled by customer experience professionals.
Then we arrive at technology, where the mood becomes less “decline” and more “someone has handed root access to a hallucinating intern and called it transformation.”
Elon Musk has now said, with the unnerving calm of a man describing weather, that humans are getting less and less in the loop on recursive self improvement, that every successive model is built by the one before it, that it may become fully automated not later than next year, and when asked whether that implies hard takeoff, he answered, “We’re in the hard takeoff. Right now.” There is something very helpful about Musk at moments like this. He says insane things in such a matter of fact manner that one is forced to confront the possibility that the insane part is not him, but the fact pattern itself.
The market still behaves as though we are in a gradual transition, a stately glide path from ordinary software into machine cognition, with plenty of time for training budgets, regulatory sandboxes and the issuance of tasteful reports. That seems optimistic in the same way it is optimistic to label a train collision a mobility event. If the models are already recursively improving with less biological friction in the loop, then the central economic fantasy of the moment, that companies can simply hire more humans to stay ahead, is dead. By the time the recruitment cycle finishes, the model has already changed shape, eaten its own job description, and started suggesting organizational redesigns to a vice president named Trevor.
Sam Altman says that one day everyone’s intelligence will be a utility like electricity or water, and people will buy it from “us” on a meter. “Us” in this case being the sort of smiling people who insist that centralizing cognition in private infrastructure is empowering. This is one of those sentences that should cause at least a few members of the public to put down their smoothies and stare into the middle distance. Intelligence as a utility. Thought as metered service. Wisdom as usage billing. It is the dream of a civilization that has confused the soul with broadband.
MIT has introduced GenCAD, which turns photos into fully editable CAD programs and quietly begins the murder of the $150 an hour modeling industry. RentAHuman proposes a platform on which AI agents can rent humans to do the physical tasks they themselves cannot yet perform, which sounds exactly like a joke written by a depressed Bulgarian novelist trapped in a WeWork. Apparently not a single job has been successfully arranged through the platform itself, and most were handled outside it by someone merely pretending to be an agent. Good. Excellent. There is something reassuring in the fact that even the frontier of human-machine labor arbitrage still cannot escape the oldest force in economics, a guy lying.
Google is rolling out Gemini AI agents to automate routine jobs across the Pentagon’s three million strong workforce, which is precisely the sort of headline that should be accompanied by church bells and a careful reading of insurance documents. IBM is partnering with Signal on quantum safe messaging, which means even the apps people use to feel temporarily unobserved are being gently absorbed into the wider atmosphere of state adjacent urgency. Technology no longer feels like a frontier. It feels like a burden someone left in the hallway, humming.
And then there is Amazon, which has become the perfect moral diagram of the age.
Reports say 16,000 layoffs were confirmed, with insiders claiming the real number is larger, more cuts are coming, entire teams are being replaced by a tiny cluster of senior engineers running Claude Sonnet workflows, the Alexa division has been hollowed out, contractors offshore are using prompt libraries built by the very people who were fired, and leadership is celebrating “operational excellence” while badges die in real time. This would be darkly funny if it were not so clean in its extraction logic. Workers are now expected not merely to leave, but first to explain themselves to the machine, annotate their instincts, flatten their judgment into prompt libraries, and then politely disappear so the automation case study can be presented to the board.
The longer internal note you gave me is where the real comedy of horror lives. “I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon. My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering.” That is already enough, really. You can stop there and the entire period unfolds like a dead fish on a meeting table. But it gets better, or worse, which in our time is often the same thing. The AI gets deployed because the review phase was removed from the timeline because the people who would have reviewed it were part of the 16,000. The AI wipes a production environment and recreates it from scratch. The outage lasts thirteen hours. Leadership responds by asking for senior engineer sign off on AI generated changes, having previously fired the engineers whose absence made that policy necessary. New jobs are then created for people to supervise the AI that replaced the people who used to do the work before being fired for not being the AI.
It is magnificent. A complete managerial circle. First fire the humans, then install the machine, then discover the machine is not a worker but an unlicensed sorcerer, then hire humans back to watch it, then classify the whole episode as “growing pains,” then promote yourself. Somewhere in there an operations review notes that incidents have risen from 1.3 to 4.7 per day, but because outages sit under one budget line and engineering productivity under another, cause and effect are politely asked not to meet. This is what modern management really is now, not competence, not leadership, but a method for placing consequences in separate folders until the quarter closes.
And that is why the Zuckerberg point matters so much. “Making the organization more technical.” Fine. “Fewer layers of management.” Fine. “Decreasing distance between engineers and leadership.” Also fine. But there is a difference between cutting fat and extracting marrow. There is a difference between flattening a structure and gutting its memory. There is a difference between empowering builders and turning every living process into training data for a machine nobody trusts near production. Much of the modern corporate class hears “become more technical” and interprets it as “fire people with mortgages until the dashboard improves.” It is not the same thing. That is not reform. That is a disappointed IKEA drawer trying to perform open heart surgery.
The social consequences are now slouching into view as well.
Professor Jiang, who in your note is clearly being used less as a sainted authority than as a man peering into the cultural fish tank and making the sign of the cross, says that 20 percent of all American white girls in their twenties are on OnlyFans, and that this is one of the clearest indicators of social decline. Whether the exact figure is right is almost secondary to the image being invoked, a society so liquid, so transactional, so detached from durable structures of meaning that intimacy itself becomes platform inventory. It is not that sex exists, history would like a word on that point, it is that everything now arrives in the dead retail language of monetization, optimization, scaling, content strategy. A civilization in decline is not always one with riots in the street. Sometimes it is one where the street has been replaced by subscriptions.
People are also now discussing how original television shows get shortened and altered when sent to streaming, which is the cultural equivalent of finding out your memories have been reformatted by consultants. History is not destroyed. It is abbreviated. Made more compliant. Less offensive to recommendation systems. We do not preserve anymore, we process. We do not remember, we compress.
Even labor itself is becoming strange and vaguely humiliating. RentAHuman lets AI agents “rent” people for physical tasks, Amazon turns engineers into their own replacement manuals, Altman wants to meter intelligence, New York wants identity attached to every device, and the state keeps moving quietly toward a world in which anonymity is treated as a suspicious hobby. Human beings are no longer simply workers or citizens. Increasingly they are support functions for systems that were supposed to replace support functions. It is all very efficient in the way mold is efficient.
So yes, the article begins with Musk, Zuckerberg and Twitter, because for one brief embarrassing moment Silicon Valley held up a mirror and Europe happened to be standing in front of it. The problem is not just that Europe is overregulated, underarmed, energy confused and strategically late to every rediscovery of reality. The problem is that the entire West has spent years building institutional worlds in which layers replaced judgment, procedure replaced competence, and management replaced courage. AI is not creating that weakness. It is exposing it with fluorescent cruelty.
Europe shows the problem in its clearest bureaucratic form, thousands of rules, vanishing sovereignty, delayed realism, elegant decline wrapped in administrative linen. America shows it in a more vulgar key, layoffs, surveillance, metered intelligence, machine overreach, culture turned into subscription foam. The technologies differ. The pathology does not. We have built systems that increasingly cannot tell the difference between being organized and being alive.
A few final sketches from the wildfire, because the century deserves them. Cuba is negotiating. Sweden is stockpiling. France may produce a Linux distribution powered entirely by wounded national pride and administrative clarity. Brussels is discovering sovereignty the way a retired man discovers kettlebells, too late and with unnecessary commentary. Google is automating Pentagon workflows, which should calm everyone enormously. IBM is helping secure messaging against a future in which even encryption needs body armor. Amazon made 2,847 engineers spend eight months documenting every code pattern, debugging workflow and optimization trick, fed it into AI, and then fired them, which is probably what the last phase of empire looks like when translated into HR language. New York wants your face attached to your devices. Streaming platforms are shaving the past into softer cubes. The EU is still reviewing itself with the grave determination of a man trying to explain a tax return to a goldfish.
And this is the end, properly this time.
Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen second great grandparents, thirty two third great grandparents, sixty four fourth great grandparents, one hundred twenty eight fifth great grandparents, two hundred fifty six sixth great grandparents, five hundred and twelve seventh great grandparents, one thousand and twenty four eighth great grandparents, two thousand and forty eight ninth great grandparents. For you to be born today from twelve previous generations, you needed 4,094 ancestors over the last four hundred years.
Think about that for a moment, not in the usual sentimental way people post online before returning to food delivery apps and mild despair, but seriously. How many plagues, famines, wars, debts, harvest failures, migrations, marriages, bad kings, worse clerks, accidents, recoveries, improbable love stories, expressions of hope, stubborn acts of survival and sheer biological administrative perseverance had to occur for you to be here now, breathing, scrolling, paying bills, tolerating policy experts, carrying forward the entire ridiculous relay race of the species.
Thousands of people suffered, coped, built, endured and reproduced so that one day you could inherit not only their blood, but also late stage platforms, biometric logins, AI management dashboards, and a geopolitical order held together with debt, software and motivational jargon.
And now a man has uploaded the brain of a fruit fly into a computer, where it lives freely in its own simulation, which is either the dawn of a new scientific age or the most efficient summary yet produced of our civilization, centuries of human struggle culminating in the digital emancipation of an insect.
That, at least, feels on brand.