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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.

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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.

Deadly attack comes as the fallout from Wagner mutiny continued with its leader Yevgeny Prigozhin arriving in Belarus.

At least two people were killed and 22 wounded in a Russian rocket strike that hit a restaurant in Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine, Interior Minister Igor Klymenko announced on Tuesday.

A UN monitoring mission in Ukraine finds both Russia and Ukraine guilty of breaching international law.

There is no freude like schadenfreude. Friends and admirers of Ukraine and enemies of Russian despotism and brutality have been chuckling this week, even as they scratch their heads about the opéra bouffe that was the Prigozhin putsch. I learned of these events on my way back from Kyiv with some senior Polish foreign-policy experts and practitioners. We shared ingenious theories about what was unfolding, most of which had to be revised drastically the next time we got internet access. I have to confess that it was entertaining.

Many shrewd guesses about what happened are floating about, most of them contradictory: Prigozhin acted alone in a fit of pique about the Wagner Group losing its valuable contracts; Prigozhin acted under the sponsorship of “men in the shadows”; Prigozhin thought he had backers and got out ahead of himself; Prigozhin was staging a bit of theater at Putin’s behest (that one evaporated quickly). Who knows? What is important is what the drama of the weekend means for the war in Ukraine and for the security of Europe and the rest of the world.

Parsing shreds of evidence—The minister of defense is in the newspapers, which means his position is safe! Charges again Prigozhin are still pending!—can only get us so far. Focusing on the three logics that will drive the war long after we figure out what just happened is more productive.

The first and deepest logic remains Russian imperialism, which requires the subjugation of Ukraine not simply as a matter of national ambition, but as a matter of self-understanding. Vladimir Putin is a thug seeking power and wealth, but that does not mean that he and his cronies are insincere in their belief that Ukraine is, in fact, a subordinate element of Russia. The summer before the war, Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article pervaded with the falsehoods and myths that inspired his attack. Authors like Ivan Ilyin, the reactionary anti-Communist, laid the groundwork for even wilder Russian fantasies. (Timothy Snyder’s essay “Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism” provides a useful overview of his thought.)

But imperial fever and fascism only take one so far. The second logic of this war is the logic of any war, and for that we must turn to Carl von Clausewitz, whose depiction of the intangible elements of war—the connection between politics and strategy, the nature and effect of clashing wills, the culmination of offensives in exhaustion, the intrinsic power of the defense—has never been bettered. In many respects, the war in Ukraine is a war like any other, in which tactical competence, training and morale, operational-level design, and above all logistics play key roles in shaping results  on the battlefields of southern and eastern Ukraine.

The third logic, which is now dominant, is that of mafia politics. And here the best guide is unquestionably Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Indeed, one can imagine Putin pondering the scene in which the aging Don Corleone warns his son and successor, Michael, that one of his trusted lieutenants will offer to broker a peace deal, in order to betray him: "Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don't forget that." Is President Lukashenko of Belarus, who negotiated the stand-down with Prigozhin, still Putin’s loyal subordinate? What about anyone who recommended that the Russian president take the deal that let Prigozhin go free? Why are some in Russia suggesting replacing faithful if dull military leaders like Valery Gerasimov with people like Sergey Surovikin who were once close to Prigozhin?

One of the common phrases in The Godfather is “It’s not personal, its business”—a sentiment usually expressed just before another gangster gets rubbed out. Of course, it’s all personal, and that is the point. What is now going on in the Kremlin is a murky and potentially lethal game of guessing who the traitors are, eliminating them before they eliminate you, forming unlikely and unpredicted alliances, and plotting to get in the first blow before your car explodes with you in it, or you take a tumble from a tenth-story window or down a cocktail laced with Novichok.

Putin is probably as uncertain as the rest of us about what just happened, but he has to be fearful, furious, and vengeful. He has to decide whether to get rid of his mediocre defense minister and chief of the general staff to appease the men in the shadows, or whether that would weaken him further. He has to be looking for the traitors in the military, the FSB, and other security services who seemed unable or unwilling to stop Wagner’s march on Moscow. Because he looks weak, he will be desperate to look strong, while others, perhaps tired of this war, will seek to weaken him further. Or maybe they’ll just kill him. Or maybe Putin is no longer really in charge, and there is already an opaque struggle among the men in the shadows to succeed him, because mafias are run by dons, not committees.

For the moment, the mafia logic dominates all others. If forced to choose between survival and either ideology or sound strategy, Putin and the rest of the political and military leadership will unquestionably choose the former. Prigozhin had the nerve to throw a gut punch at the ideas behind the war—even if, perhaps, he did his erstwhile boss a bit of a disservice in saying that the invasion of Ukraine was about loot and nothing else. But now that he has broached the forbidden subject, there will be others, in private and maybe in public, who will take up the refrain.

The impact on the battlefield will be the most interesting. A bloody and extensive Russian civil war would have been good for Ukraine, diverting troops as well as attention from the front lines opposite them. But the pervasiveness of mafia logic will still do Ukraine considerable good. Senior generals in the Russian military cannot be apolitical professionals: They have patrons, and they have clients. They know that there will be witch hunts for traitors, particularly in the special-forces units that did not fight Wagner. Defending against the mounting Ukrainian offensive will be considerably more difficult for officers looking over their shoulders at Moscow. And Putin may still see a need to shift units to the country’s center to forestall another putsch.

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

It may not be ever thus. The Russian superhawks who want a still more violent war remain in the grip of the first, fascistic logic—and they may resurface after a time. The second logic will still hold as well: Breaching in-depth defenses will remain a difficult and bloody business for Ukraine, and political chaos in Moscow will not deliver 155-mm rounds, HIMARS, or deep-strike munitions to General Zaluzhny’s men and women in their dugouts and bunkers.

The Prigozhin putsch will reverberate for some time to come; it has already shattered illusions about Putin’s grip and even his physical courage. But it should also shatter the illusion that the West can forge a kind of Goldilocks solution to this war, in which Ukraine does well but not too well while Russia is humbled but not shattered. We are spectators to a play in which the actors have decided to rip up their scripts, and are instead improvising an anarchic tragedy, but one that is not without its comic moments.

South Africa's foreign minister made the comments during a meeting with her German counterpart on Tuesday in Pretoria.

China's EU envoy, Fu Cong, says Beijing respects the territorial integrity of all countries and stands for peace.

It comes as Ukraine's president says the country's counter-offensive is making advances on all fronts.

Find all the latest news from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine for Tuesday 27 June 2023.

President Zelenskyy toured front line positions in the south and east of country, saying after: 'This is a happy day.'