Ho, ho—oh, hello there! And welcome back to a spirited new tradition at The Information: our annual holiday gift guide. This is a list of our favorite things, and none of these selections came to our attention through a publicist’s pitch. Rather, a few simple guiding principles guided us as we ...

Don Allen Stevenson III is a former trainer for Dreamworks Animation who uses artificial intelligence tools to create videos for his 124,000 followers on Instagram, where he goes by Don Allen III. Stevenson uses the videos to showcase how he uses AI tools. In one recent video, he used 3D ...

About a year ago, Sean Kelly, then 26, decided to launch yet another business. Previously, he’d fooled around running a small drop-shipping company as a Rutgers University undergrad. Later he sold face masks and other personal protective equipment during the pandemic’s early days. Neither ...

Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about technological advancements have intrigued—and unnerved—people for decades. At 76, he’s still quite up to the task and threw out a whopper within minutes of sitting down with me. “When we achieve AGI in the 2030s, we’re going to actually merge this intelligence ...

In September, Instagram unveiled a splashy new feature called Teen Accounts, an effort by Meta Platforms, the app’s owner, to show it’s better protecting young people with stricter privacy and safety settings. Suddenly, everyone on the app who had registered their age as 17 years or younger ...

Ozempic be damned. Silicon Valley is holding on tight to its love of the personal trainer. These are people like Matt Dixon, a San Francisco–based trainer and former professional triathlete whose clients include billionaire Max Levchin. After several decades of whipping folks like Levchin into ...

The other evening, a stranger told Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson that if he ever came across an electric vehicle that would go 500 miles on a charge, he’d buy it. “And I said, ‘That’s Lucid Air!’” Rawlinson recalls, referring to his company’s sleek sedan. “He said, ‘What? How long has that ...

The moderate political wave that crested over San Francisco this election is the culmination of several years of anger, frustration and tech-funded organizing. It was propelled by millions of dollars in campaign money, hundreds of thousands of fed-up voters, several upstart political ...

In 2022, I got a tip about Elon Musk, who even as recently as that was misunderstood—and underestimated—by the media: He had embarked on a mission to singlehandedly try to repopulate the Earth with his children, a source told me, passing along a quiet rumor going around Austin. It led me to a ...

A little more than a year ago, few people in San Francisco could have foreseen Daniel Lurie running away with the mayor’s race: Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir who founded an anti-poverty nonprofit, Tipping Point, had never held elected office. But his outsider status and moderate policy proposals on ...

Shortly after 2 a.m. on a Saturday in a midtown Manhattan sports bar packed with Aussies, Dr. Tom Oxley was feeling stunned. The underdog Brisbane Lions, his longtime favorite Australian rules football club, was up 73 to 27 against the Sydney Swans going into the second half of the championship ...

“I haven’t been hung over in seven years,” said Jahaan Ansari, the bearded, muscled co-founder of Gainful, a New York–based startup. Ansari may be in that fortunate position partly because he has yet to hit his 30s—he’s just 29—but he also credits what Gainful sells: powdered electrolytes. ...

In the final days of the U.S. presidential election, The Information Opinion has been soliciting pieces from supporters of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The first is below. Please email opinion@theinformation.com with any submissions. Many of you are throwing ...

For weeks, Elon Musk has warned voters, as he campaigns for Donald Trump, about the dire consequences of a Kamala Harris administration—for America, civilization and him personally. “If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk joked in an interview last month with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. “ ...

For about 18 months, between mid-2021 and early 2023, I may have been one of Silicon Valley’s youngest—and poorest—angel investors. How? By passing the test to become a licensed investment adviser, then registering my own advisory firm. This allowed me to bypass the longstanding rule that only ...

Children and teens are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence tools for homework help and entertainment, as well as to seek out new information: In fact, a recent survey of more than 1,000 young people (and their parents) by Common Sense Media found that seven in 10 teenagers have ...

Aravind Srinivas didn’t set out to earn a reputation as one of the media’s biggest tech villains. It just kind of happened. Over the summer, Forbes and Wired angrily accused Srinivas’ AI search startup, Perplexity, of plagiarizing their paywalled content. In one case, Perplexity had lifted ...

For years, Harry Stebbings, the hit British podcaster and venture capitalist, fired off emails to Marc Benioff—no fewer than 53 of them—hoping to cajole the billionaire into appearing on his show, “20VC.” “I emailed him every week with no response, and then he finally did reply,” said Stebbings, ...

First thing each weekday, Jessica Alter hits the road and runs three miles through the Marina District near her San Francisco home. On Saturdays, she swaps Golden Gate Bridge views for countryside scenes with longer trail runs close to her second home in Sonoma County. In both instances, the ...

The macro of the moment is protein, and it’s not much of a competition. Everyone is paying attention to their protein intake for one reason or another: The longevity movement’s practitioners are focusing on it for strength training. Anyone on a GLP-1 has likely gotten a doctor’s lecture on ...