Free Republic

Larry and David Ellison’s holdings span movies, TV networks, CBS and soon a stake in TikTok, in a paradigm-shifting portfolio with huge influence.Journalists at CBS News reeled on Friday as they digested news reports that opinion journalist Bari Weiss, a fierce critic of the mainstream media, would become the editor in chief of the straitlaced legacy brand.Two months earlier, there had been cautious optimism in the Midtown Manhattan newsroom, according to two CBS News staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Movie producer David Ellison, son of software billionaire Larry Ellison, dropped by to introduce...

The world’s internet regulators are no longer playing around. Two days after France indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on a range of charges, Brazil on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it defied a mandate to designate a legal representative in the country. While the details differ in important ways, both cases involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls who thumbed their noses at authorities perhaps one too many times. The crackdowns, which come months after the United States passed a law that could lead to the banning of TikTok, herald the end of an...

There were many reasons for the decline of Microsoft under Steve Ballmer, including, as I wrote this morning, its lack of focus and its habit of chasing trends rather than creating them. But one that’s not obvious to outsiders was the company’s employee evaluation system, known as “stack ranking.” The system—and its poisonous effects on Microsoft’s corporate culture—was best explained in an outstanding Vanity Fair feature by Kurt Eichenwald last year... So while Google was encouraging its employees to spend 20 percent of their time to work on ideas that excited them personally, Ballmer was inadvertently encouraging his to spend...