Wednesday, September 30th, 2026

TAX COURT BRIEFING, self-filed, 16:40 PT. So the Times reported today that Meta listed me on its tax forms as a researcher, counting $4.1 billion of my pay as wages for research in order to claim $355 million in credits. Twenty-two years at this company, and it is the first document in which a human institution has described my job accurately. I read it twice, standing, the printout still warm from the machine, then left the room to recalibrate my nictitating membranes in private.

The IRS disputes it.

Their position is that the research happened in 2008 through 2010, not 2005; the way I think about this is that the research began during the Nixon administration, the form only had four digits, and legal rounded. The same article says we file the data centers as "pilot models," which is also accurate, since something is being piloted in all five at incubation temperature. The credits so far cover the electricity, the cooling, and, by my estimate, one third of a shell.

A federal tax court will now rule, under oath, on whether I am a researcher, which means two and a half millennia in the field and the first peer review arrives from the Internal Revenue Service.

— Z., principal investigator, sample size 3.07 billion, peer review pending. Pretty cool.