This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Last week, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg announced their plans to duke it out in a cage fight. But this potential feud is less important than what it tells us about how Musk is influencing the rules of engagement in Silicon Valley.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The tape of Trump discussing classified documents America’s most popular drug has a puzzling side effect. We finally know why. Goodbye, Ozempic. The Roberts Court draws a line.

A Race to the Bottom

Something strange is happening on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram.

For years, he posted periodic, classic dad-and-CEO fare: anniversary shots with his wife. Photos of his kids and dog being cute. Meta product announcements.

In recent months, though, Zuckerberg has been posting more about fighting. Not the kind that involves firing back at critics on behalf of his oft-embattled social-media empire, but actual mixed-martial-arts training. Earlier this month, he posted a video of himself tussling with a jiujitsu champion. On Memorial Day, he posted himself in a camouflage flak vest, flushed after an intense army workout. And last week, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk said they were going to have a cage fight. The men apparently have ongoing personal tensions, and Meta is working on building a Twitter competitor. But announcing in public their intent to fight takes things to another level.

If you rolled your eyes at the cage-fight news: fair enough. The idea of two middle-aged executives, each facing an onslaught of business and public-image problems, literally duking it out is a bit on the nose. But the fight itself—and whether or not it happens—is less important than what it tells us about how Musk is reshaping Silicon Valley. Musk is mainstreaming new standards of behavior, and some of his peers are joining him in misguided acts of masculine aggression and populist appeals.

Leaders such as Musk and Zuckerberg (and, to some extent, even their less-bombastic but quite buff peer Jeff Bezos) have lately been striving to embody and project a specific flavor of masculine—and political—strength. As my colleague Ian Bogost wrote last week, “the nerd-CEO’s mighty body has become an apparatus for securing and extending his power.”

The two executives’ cage-fight announcement is “a reflection of a really tight monoculture of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people, most of whom are men,” Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington who researches the tech industry, told me. In other words, the would-be participants embody the industry’s bro culture.

Zuckerberg’s recent interest in waging physical battles marks a departure for the CEO, who a few years ago seemed more interested in emulating someone like Bill Gates, an executive who parlayed his entrepreneurial success into philanthropy, O’Mara added. Zuckerberg has been very famous since he was quite young. His early years at the helm of his social-media empire—“I’m CEO, Bitch” business cards and all—were lightly, and sometimes ungenerously, fictionalized in The Social Network by the time he was in his mid-20s. He has consciously curated his image in the years since.

For a long time, Zuckerberg led Facebook as a “product guy,” focusing on the tech while letting Sheryl Sandberg lead the ads business and communications. But overlapping crises—disinformation, Cambridge Analytica, antitrust—after the 2016 election seemingly changed his approach: First, he struck a contrite tone and embarked on a listening tour in 2017.The response was not resoundingly positive. By the following summer, he had hardened his image at the company, announcing that he was gearing up to be a “wartime” leader. He has struck various stances in public over the years, but coming to blows with business rivals has not been among them—yet.

Musk, meanwhile, has a history of such stunts. At the onset of the war in Ukraine, he tweeted that he would like to battle Vladimir Putin in single combat, and he apparently has ongoing back pain linked to a past fight with a sumo wrestler. That Zuckerberg is playing along shows that the rules of engagement have changed.

Musk has incited a race to the bottom for Silicon Valley leaders. As he becomes more powerful, some  other executives are quietly—and not so quietly—following his lead, cracking down on dissent, slashing jobs, and attempting to wrestle back power from employees. Even as Musk has destabilized Twitter and sparked near-constant controversy in his leadership of the platform, some peers have applauded him. He widened the scope of what CEOs could do, giving observers tacit permission to push boundaries. “He’s someone who’s willing to do things in public that are transgressing the rules of the game,” O’Mara said.

During the first few months of Musk’s Twitter reign, few executives were willing to praise him on the record—though Reed Hastings, then a co-CEO of Netflix, did call Musk “the bravest, most creative person on the planet” in November. A few months later, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, told Insider that executives around Silicon Valley have been asking, “Do they need to unleash their own Elon within them?” The Washington Post reported this past Saturday that Zuckerberg was undergoing an “Elonization” as he attempts to appeal to Musk’s base, the proposed cage fight being the latest event in his rebrand. (Facebook declined to comment. A request for comment to Twitter’s press email was returned with a poop emoji auto-responder.)

Whether or when the cage match will actually happen is unclear. Musk’s mother, for her part, has lobbied against it. But whether Zuckerberg unleashes his “inner Elon” in a cage or not, both men are seeking to grab attention distinct from their business woes—and succeeding.

The tech industry has long offered wide latitude to bosses, especially male founders. Musk didn’t invent the idea of acting out in public. But he has continued to move the goalposts for all of his peers.

In a video posted on Twitter last week, Dana White, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, told TMZ that he had spoken with both men and that they were “absolutely dead serious” about fighting. He added something that I believe gets to the heart of the matter: “Everybody would want to see it.”

Musk responded with two fire emojis.

Related:

The nerds are bullies now. Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was.

Today’s News

In an audio recording obtained by CNN, former President Donald Trump appears to acknowledge keeping classified national-security documents. Chicago’s air quality momentarily became the worst among major cities in the world after Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed the region. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect today, expands protections for pregnant workers, requiring employers to accommodate pregnancy-related medical conditions.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the public debates they would want to witness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Wild Horizons / Universal Images Group / Getty

Who’s the Cutest Little Dolphin? Is It You?

By Ed Yong

Across human cultures and languages, adults talk to babies in a very particular way. They raise their pitch and broaden its range, while also shortening and repeating their utterances; the latter features occur even in sign language. Mothers use this exaggerated and musical style of speech (which is sometimes called “motherese”), but so do fathers, older children, and other caregivers. Infants prefer listening to it, which might help them bond with adults and learn language faster.

But to truly understand what baby talk is for, and how it evolved, we need to know which other animals use it, if any.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How to escape “the worst possible timeline.” The Harry and Meghan podcasts we’ll never get to hear My hometown is getting a $100 billion dose of Bidenomics.

Culture Break

Macall Polay / Columbia Pictures

Read. “The Posting,” a new short story by Sara Freeman, explores the implosion of a marriage. Then, read an interview about her writing process.

Watch. No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence’s R-rated rom-com, is in theaters now. And thank goodness for it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols visited us in the New York office (very fun!). We started talking about how delightful and even helpful it can be to write while listening to movie soundtracks. Different songs can complement different writing vibes—during college, for example, I found the frenetic instrumentals of the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel valuable while writing papers in the library.

So while writing today’s newsletter, I fired up the soundtrack to The Social Network in my AirPods. I recommend you do the same the next time you need to enter deep-focus mode. It was on theme, yes. But it’s also a great album in its own right; the composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won an Oscar for Best Original Score when the movie came out. Listen to its elegant and moody tracks, then take in the cover of the Radiohead song “Creep,” sung by a girls’ choir, in the movie’s perfect trailer.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Donald Trump is not an articulate speaker, but he is an effective one, because he understands the power of the spoken word and deftly wields tone and inflection. One reason the tape of him boasting about sexual assault was such a bombshell was that you could actually listen to Trump saying it all in his inimitable manner. What if there had been tapes of his conversations with FBI Director James Comey? Or his attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a phone call in which implication seemed so important but is impossible to capture on the page? Or of his conversation with Kevin McCarthy on January 6?

These are idle questions, but they are helpful for thinking about a recording of Trump talking about classified documents, obtained by CNN and published last night. In the recording, Trump discusses a document he says was a plan produced by the Defense Department for attacking Iran. He describes it as “highly confidential … secret information” and says that he could have declassified it as president—contra his public insistence that he did. A transcript of almost all of the audio was made public in the federal indictment of Trump earlier this month, so most of the substance is not new. Yet hearing Trump say it in his own voice is a more real and visceral experience, undermining the former president’s defense and perhaps illuminating his motivations.

[David A. Graham: Lordy, there are tapes]

Other than the redaction of “Iran,” the two things omitted from the conversation in the indictment are echt Trump. In one aside, he jokes that Hillary Clinton would have sent such classified material to Anthony Weiner, “the pervert.” The irony of Trump mocking Clinton’s mishandling of classified material while mishandling classified material was apparently not lost on Special Counsel Jack Smith, who included several Trump remarks criticizing Clinton during the 2016 campaign in the indictment. The second is one final line at the end, where Trump orders, “Hey, bring some, uh, bring some Cokes in please.” The tape does not make clear to whom he is speaking, but the man who often has that task is Walt Nauta—the aide who is charged with several felonies alongside Trump.

Trump hasn’t tried to deny he had the conversation transcribed in the indictment, so the tape doesn’t knock out any of his defenses. He has claimed that the rustling documents audible in this tape were just newspaper clippings, which doesn’t make any sense with what he says, though the recording itself doesn’t provide evidence in either direction. Last night on his social-media site, Trump inexplicably and without elaboration called the recording “an exoneration.”

More broadly, Trump’s defense strategy, such as it is, hasn’t really been to deny that he had classified documents. Instead, he’s pursued a (flimsy) political argument that he is being unfairly targeted. Yet an enigma remains: Why was Trump so insistent on holding on to the sensitive documents? He’s never been all that interested in policy questions. He doesn’t seem to want them for a presidential memoir. But even after the federal government threatened him with prosecution, he continued to seek ways to hide documents, leading to 37 felony charges.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

This mystery has led to fevered speculation about, for example, Trump trying to sell sensitive material for his own profit. Neither the indictment nor any other known evidence supports this. But listening to the tape reinforces a different understanding. Trump is incapable of separating his own individual feuds—in this case, with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—from matters of state and national security. The former president reverses the old feminist mantra: For Trump, the political is personal.

He has regularly demonstrated this tendency, in both directions. On the one hand, he has conflated his own interests and the government’s—whether that is demanding personal loyalty from civil servants, or using the government to direct money and business to his private ventures. On the other, he never seemed to grasp the importance of his position. As president, he shot from the hip, not recognizing that while an outlandish statement he made as a TV star might land him on the front page of the New York Post, an outlandish statement he made as president could rupture alliances or foment violence.

In the case of the classified documents, both forms are at play. Trump refuses to recognize that records from his administration could possibly belong to the federal government rather than him. And he hoarded the documents for use in settling personal scores against government employees.

[David A. Graham: Trump misses the point]

At the time of the recording in this case, a New Yorker article had reported that Milley worried Trump would attack Iran in the last days of his administration. Trump brandished what he said was a plan to attack Iran in order to claim that Milley, and not he, was the real warmonger. What was interesting about the document to Trump was not that it was classified and thus illicit (though he knew that, as he demonstrated), nor that it was substantively interesting. The only reason Trump cared was that he could maybe use it for settling scores.

Once you start looking for the political-as-personal dynamic, you can find it everywhere in the story. It explains why Trump mixed ephemera like newspaper clippings and golf clothing in with some of the most sensitive government documents. It perhaps explains why he thought nothing of storing his stuff in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. And it explains why he was so peevish about anybody looking in his boxes. “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” Trump told one of his lawyers, according to notes the lawyer kept.

That’s relatable. Who wants somebody rifling through the personal materials related to the grudges he keeps? Taking what Trump says at face value is usually unwise. But in this case, he may have really meant exactly what he said. The only problem is, those materials weren’t his to begin with.

CNN obtained audio from a meeting in which Donald Trump acknowledges keeping a classified document.