Two years after he was found guilty of fraud, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is pursuing a legal appeal--and firing up his X account. On September 23, for the first time in more than six months, an X account belonging to disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried published a post . It simply read, "gm"--internet slang for "good morning." The account has been posting consistently since. Bankman-Fried--known widely as SBF--is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in California.

Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans. Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis' Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance's Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes--the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on--and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones.

Keeping a poker face had never struck me as much of a feat--until I had to keep one. My pulse quickened, my cheeks felt flushed, and my eyes were desperate to dart and size up the pot. What had been a mediocre hand was transformed, after the flop came down, into something spectacular: every card from seven to jack--a straight. All that remained was to play it cool and build up my cash prize. The bets started small, and then grew. The next two cards looked innocuous enough.

Nothing is more interesting to poker players and less interesting to everyone else than a breathless recounting of who bet how much with a jack and six of clubs in some game years ago. There's an awful lot of that kind of thing in this book, which celebrates poker players as paradigmatic citizens of a global intellectual community it calls "the River", which also counts among its inhabitants venture capitalists, crypto traders, fashionable philosophers and mild-mannered statisticians. One such statistician, Nate Silver himself, came to public prominence as a data-driven analyst of political polls at his website FiveThirtyEight, which predicted the results of US elections in 2008 and 2012 with seemingly uncanny accuracy. But before that he was a poker player, making money especially in the nascent internet-casino business, until Congress banned online poker in 2006. That, he has said, was his political awakening.

Multiple events hosted at a historic former hotel in Berkeley, California, have brought together people from intellectual movements popular at the highest levels in Silicon Valley while platforming prominent people linked to scientific racism, the Guardian reveals. But because of alleged financial ties between the non-profit that owns the building – Lightcone Infrastructure (Lightcone) – and jailed crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried, the administrators of FTX, Bankman-Fried's failed crypto exchange, are demanding the return of almost 5m that new court filings allege were used to bankroll the purchase of the property. During the last year, Lightcone and its director, Oliver Habryka, have made the 20m Lighthaven Campus available for conferences and workshops associated with the "longtermism", "rationalism" and "effective altruism" (EA) communities, all of which often see empowering the tech sector, its elites and its beliefs as crucial to human survival in the far future. At these events, movement influencers rub shoulders with startup founders and tech-funded San Francisco politicians – as well as people linked to eugenics and scientific racism. Since acquiring the Lighthaven property – formerly the Rose Garden Inn – in late 2022, Lightcone has transformed it into a walled, surveilled compound without attracting much notice outside the subculture it exists to promote.

Two weeks ago it was quietly announced that the Future of Humanity Institute, the renowned multidisciplinary research centre in Oxford, no longer had a future. It shut down without warning on 16 April. Initially there was just a brief statement on its website stating it had closed and that its research may continue elsewhere within and outside the university. The institute, which was dedicated to studying existential risks to humanity, was founded in 2005 by the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom and quickly made a name for itself beyond academic circles – particularly in Silicon Valley, where a number of tech billionaires sang its praises and provided financial support. Bostrom is perhaps best known for his bestselling 2014 book Superintelligence, which warned of the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, but he also gained widespread recognition for his 2003 academic paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?".

Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk's favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated 1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter. The center was run by Nick Bostrom, a Swedish-born philosopher whose writings about the long-term threat of AI replacing humanity turned him into a celebrity figure among the tech elite and routinely landed him on lists of top global thinkers. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tesla chief Musk all wrote blurbs for his 2014 bestselling book Superintelligence.

"It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians," an excitable Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, told Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times in 2015. While interest rates remained close to zero, venture capital funds raised more money than ever and exited their investments at some of the highest valuations ever witnessed. The glory days of VC are over, and if history is any guide, the tech bust should last through 2024 and beyond. In other words, the venture capital bust has only just started. Ultralow interest rates benefited venture capital in a number of ways.

It's hard to find something pithy to say about 2023, a year of dissonant extremes, when wildfires devoured Canadian forests, Twitter withered into X, the Titan submersible imploded into infamy, Silicon Valley's power players rejoiced over the rise of generative AI, scientists cheered Crispr treatment breakthroughs, peace activists became terrorist-attack victims, and the world despaired over the thousands of children killed in Gaza. It is, frequently, a painful one. Appropriate, then, that this was a year for unwieldy, searching, big-swing books. Doorstoppers and sagas rose to the moment, providing insight into an increasingly inscrutable world even when they couldn't provide comfort. As always, this is an idiosyncratic, incomplete, and subjective list, the result of one person's avid but disorganized reading schedule.

On Thursday, jurors convicted former crypto mogul Sam Bankman-Fried of defrauding his customers out of as much as $10 billion. He will likely spend the rest of his 30s--and possibly his 40s, 50s, and 60s--in prison. The judge is expected to sentence him in March. As former confidants and close friends testified against him during his monthlong trial, Bankman-Fried's parents, Joseph and Barbara, showed up day after day to support their son, whose crypto exchange FTX imploded late last year. The Stanford Law professors' hand gestures and facial expressions played prominently into journalists' recounts of the proceedings, offering the real-life version of the cutaway shot integral to any courtroom TV show.