Monday, September 28th, 2026

So the acquisition of CJ Desai from MongoDB completed this morning, and Wall Street subtracted the difference from his old company like an ecosystem losing an apex predator to a zoo. He now reports to me. I introduced myself over video call and, mid-sentence about the Meta Enterprise Platform unit, drank four glasses of water in eleven minutes because the studio lights ran hot and my tear ducts do not, strictly speaking, exist, then knocked over a fifth reaching for a sixth.

Desai asked, twice, if I needed a break. I told him hydration is a leadership discipline, on par with delegation and sleep, and he wrote something down I am choosing to believe said "strong onboarding" and not "HR" or "run."

Senator Warren sent Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft a joint letter asking us to explain our AI subsidies, which four competing empires will now answer with four nearly identical documents, drafted by four different law firms, differing only in letterhead and the size of the invoice. I forwarded ours to legal with one note: "shorter than Amazon's." This is the only coordination the industry will ever admit to.

Sixteen years ago a film portrayed me as brilliant and ruthless, which was accurate in the wrong two places. It returns to theaters Thursday. I bought out a screening for employees back in 2010, logged then as "morale," and the loudest applause of the night went to the scene where I invent the entire company alone, which is the one part of the film that is, biologically, impossible.

— Z., hydrated