49. Congratulations on your indictment!
On the people who were told, very early, that the rules were for other people.
Today's letter includes: Pasta at Nike, hottest March ever, how Gruns brought CPG back, and why I won’t be trying peptides.
There’s a story in one of my friend groups that we tell at parties whenever someone brings up the Fyre Festival.
Years ago, before Billy McFarland was a federal convict and a Netflix documentary, he was just a guy with a table at a club. A friend, we’ll call her Jane, knew him from around. The kind of “around” that makes sense when you’re young and living in New York and you just want to cut lines and not pay for drinks. Another friend was on her way to meet up with Jane and texted to ask whose name she should give at the door.
Jane's reply was a single word: Ja Rule.
Not a name-drop. Not a bluff. Ja Rule's actual table. We thought it was charming. We thought it was New York.
Forbes, at least, had the sense to pass on McFarland. When the magazine published its "Hall of Shame" in 2023, he appeared among the candidates they had correctly weeded out, which is to say that someone, at some point, looked at Billy McFarland and thought: not him. The fact that they considered him at all is, perhaps, the more instructive detail. Others, of course, got through.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 criminal alumni roster now reads less like a listicle than a federal docket.
Sam Bankman-Fried, class of 2021, is serving twenty-five years. Martin Shkreli, class of 2013, served seven. Caroline Ellison, class of 2022 and the ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, received two years in exchange for becoming the government's star witness against him. Charlie Javice, class of 2019, was sentenced last September to more than seven years for lying to JPMorgan Chase about how many users her startup actually had. Nate Paul, class of 2016, was convicted of fabricating documents to secure a hundred and seventy-two million dollars in loans. Gökçe Güven, class of 2025, was indicted in January on securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fraud, and identity theft, then hit with a superseding indictment in March adding another identity theft charge; she faces more than fifty-two years. The 2025 list came out last January.
One investor has estimated that the total fraud committed by Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees exceeds the total capital they raised. The credential has become, by this measure, a more reliable predictor of federal charges than of market returns.
The easy explanation is that Forbes has a vetting problem. But that framing lets the institution off too lightly, and misses the more unsettling possibility: that these lists don't merely identify ambitious young people, they instruct them, at a dangerously early age, that they are exceptional in some categorical sense. That the conventional path exists for conventional people. That their instincts are worth more than any process designed to check them. Some take that to heart more than others, and the distance between visionary and criminal turns out to be shorter than the press releases suggest.
The Thiel Fellowship takes this premise and runs it off a cliff on purpose.
Peter Thiel — PayPal co-founder, Palantir founder, man who compared modern universities to the corrupt Catholic Church of 1514 — launched the fellowship in 2011. The offer was straightforward: two hundred thousand dollars to drop out of college, on the theory that college is a corrupt institution and that you are simply too talented for it. Around fifteen fellows are selected each year, typically twenty-two or younger; some have been as young as sixteen.
The program has produced genuine, significant success. Vitalik Buterin co-founded Ethereum. Dylan Field built Figma into a ten-billion-dollar company. Lucy Guo became the youngest self-made female billionaire in American history. By one count, Thiel Fellows have founded companies worth more than a hundred billion dollars combined.
A colleague of mine is a Thiel Fellow. She mentioned a joke that circulates among them: you're just as likely to become a billionaire as you are to go to jail. It is funny, she acknowledged. It is also, as it turns out, roughly accurate.
Per Thiel’s own biographer Max Chafkin, early cohorts were frequently left adrift. Teenagers who had never managed their own finances, suddenly cut loose from every stabilizing institution with a check and a philosophy. Mental health crises. Substance abuse. The fellows who don’t make it rarely end up in federal prison; they tend to burn out and disappear from the TechCrunch cycle, which is its own kind of consequence. The ones at the very top of the distribution ended up somewhere else entirely. In early 2025, a Thiel Fellow named Luke Farritor arrived inside the Energy Department as part of DOGE, having reportedly used the Thiel Fellow WhatsApp group to recruit others. They didn’t end up in jail. They ended up in government.
Which is not, finally, a different outcome so much as a different zip code. The current administration is the largest and most powerful expression of the same thesis: that the sufficiently visionary, sufficiently certain-of-themselves person is exempt from the constraints that govern everyone else. In practice, that looked like a small cohort of Thiel-connected engineers in their twenties gaining access to Treasury payment systems handling trillions in federal spending, over the explicit objections of career officials and, eventually, a federal judge.
The courts pushed back. Musk departed DOGE by May 2025. The operation was wound down, its changes absorbed into existing agencies. Nobody was charged. Nobody faced consequences of any kind. They left the way you leave any job, updated their LinkedIn and moved on.
Forbes hands out the credential. Thiel hands out the philosophy. The market hands out the capital. And every so often, a grand jury hands out the indictment.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 list that came out this past January includes Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, two MIT dropouts who raised thirty-two million dollars at a three-hundred-million-dollar valuation for a compliance automation startup called Delve. In March, an anonymous Substack investigation accused them of selling fake compliance certifications and stealing code from a fellow Y Combinator company.
Whether this ends in a federal indictment or a successful Series B remains, at the moment, an open question. The list, after all, only came out in January.
Rumor has it that Substack is suppressing free content. If you’d like to resist the algorithm pushing paid content only, then liking, sharing, quoting and restacking this newsletter will help! <3
Torrisi pasta at Nike today! New Nike store at 611 Broadway started this morning with La Cabra coffee and caradmom buns, transitions in to pasta at 3PM and has tote bag and dj activations.
SantaCon is, fittingly, a con. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged the event’s organizer, Stefan Pildes, with wire fraud on Wednesday, accusing him of diverting the majority of roughly $2.7 million raised since 2019 (money attendees were told went to local neighborhood charities) to fund luxury vacations in Hawaii and Vail, extravagant meals, and $365,000 in renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey.
Clay, the GTM AI darling whose ads you've certainly seen in the subway and a tool I am actually in the process of procuring at work, is hiring a Chief of Staff, Marketing in NYC. No comp listed. But their open Product Marketing role is listed at $180-230K.
Figma, a success story listed in the opening monologue, is hiring for “Launch Strategy, Brand & Comms” which is a weird job title that seems to just mean you have to be the comms person for product announcements at $153,000—$269,000 USD if based in NYC or SF.
Hot, hot, hot! It wasn’t just the warmest March on record; it was the warmest any month has ever run above average, by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten states set all-time March heat records, nearly 60% of the contiguous U.S. is now in drought, and Phoenix had nine days above 100 degrees.
K-beauty and Japan’s best are expanding. Nonfiction, a Seoul-based line of elegantly packaged perfumes, lotions, and candles, is opening at 38 Orchard Street on the Lower East Side; Skin1004, the cult Korean skin-care brand behind the Centella Light Cleansing Oil, lands at 470 Broadway in SoHo.
And if you need socks on the way, Uniqlo has opened three new locations: Bryant Park (510 Fifth Ave.), Union Square (860 Broadway), and Williamsburg (187 Kent Ave.). Is congestion pricing to thank? Somewhere, a landlord is having a very good spring.
Zendaya collab with On is cute. Kinda like Challengers meets grandpa core.
Together, they took their country back. Hope is not dead. Péter Magyar and his Tisza party won a supermajority in Hungary’s parliament last Sunday, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule in a historic landslide with nearly 80% voter turnout. JD Vance had flown to Budapest days before the vote to praise Orbán and try to boost his campaign.
The New Yorker would like a word before you order that vial. The magazine’s recent investigation into the peptide craze features two figures worth knowing: the scientist who actually discovered mitochondrial-derived peptides, who calls them “a revolution in science” but insists people should not be self-injecting until fully tested, and the naturopathic doctors enthusiastically prescribing them anyway.
Nearly 30% of gray-market peptides tested were mislabeled, underdosed, or contaminated with bacteria. I myself was curious about all this peptide buzz, but after reading this article, it is as Randy Jackson says, “a no for me dawg.”
QVC is filing for bankruptcy. The home shopping network's parent company is planning to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as soon as next week, weighed down by more than $5 billion in debt.
Justice, 30 years late. Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann, the Long Island architect pleaded guilty last week to murdering eight women in killings that span from 1993 to 2010. He is scheduled to be sentenced to life without parole in June.
CPG is so back. Gummy supplement brand Grüns, founded in 2023, sold to Unilever last week for $1.2 billion, just 32 months from launch. The fuel IMO: an influencer seeding operation so thorough it made its way to my feed in several forms from bachelor nation Rachel Kirkpatrick to actual celebs like Nicole Richie, Shaun White, Tiffany Haddish, Reese Witherspoon, and Drew Barrymore, netting $300 million in annual revenue and 10 million gummies shipped daily before the brand was old enough to have a Super Bowl ad. More on the founder’s background, which definitely gave him a leg up, in this video.
If you’ve got a strong stomach for florals and love the Cotswolds… GreenRow, the English-country-cottage-inspired new brand from Williams Sonoma, has opened its first store at 47 Howard Street, a few doors down from the old Opening Ceremony space.
Thanks for reading!
How dismal and dismaying the degree of selfishness 😓