TheChek News Flow

For what one might expect to be a sleepy week in mid-July, this turned out to be a fairly active period for venture dealmaking. Top fundraisers included Hadrian, a developer of AI-enabled factories for aerospace and defense, and OpenEvidence, a medical AI tool. This week also brought us official confirmation of the previously reported record-setting $2 billion seed round for Thinking Machines Lab.

1. Hadrian, $260M, manufacturing: Hadrian, a Hawthorne, California-based developer of AI-enabled factories for aerospace and defense manufacturing, announced that it raised $260 million in a Series C round led by existing investors Founders Fund and Lux Capital. The financing also includes a factory expansion loan facility arranged by Morgan Stanley.

2. OpenEvidence, $210M, medical information: OpenEvidence, a medical search and AI application for U.S. clinical healthcare providers, closed on $210 million in Series B funding. Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins led the financing for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company.

3. (tied) Substack, $100M, publishing: Substack, the subscription-based publishing platform for independent writers, said it raised $100 million in Series C funding, led by Bond and TCG. Founded in 2017, the San Francisco-based company has raised over $200 million to date, per Crunchbase data.

3. (tied) Perplexity, $100M, artificial intelligence: AI search startup Perplexity has raised another $100 million at an $18 billion-plus valuation, according to the Financial Times and Bloomberg. The new round for San Francisco-based Perplexity is an extension of its previous raise just two months ago at a $14 billion valuation, per Bloomberg, and seems to highlight the traction that the 3-year-old startup has had in challenging massive incumbents like Google in the search space. Perplexity recently launched a web browser to complement its AI search engine. The company has now raised $1.3 billion total, per Crunchbase data.

5. (tied) Boulevard, $80M, appointments platform: Boulevard, a business management software platform for self-care businesses, including salons and spas, raised $80 million in a Series D funding led by JMI Equity. The round values Los Angeles-based Boulevard at about $800 million post-money.

5. (tied) Bedrock Robotics, $80M, robotics: San Francisco-based Bedrock Robotics, a provider of hardware and software to enable heavy equipment for the construction industry to operate autonomously, announced it has emerged from stealth with $80 million in seed and Series A backing. 8VC led the Series A, and Eclipse Ventures led the seed financing.

7. CertifID, $47.5M, fraud protection: Austin-based CertifID, a wire fraud protection platform for the real estate industry, announced it secured $47.5 million in a Series C round led by Centana Growth Partners. The financing brings reported equity funding to date to $84 million.

8. Firestorm, $47M, defense tech: Firestorm, a San Diego-based developer of manufacturing technology for unmanned aircraft systems, raised $47 million in a Series A round led by New Enterprise Associates.

9. Unify, $40M, business software: Unify, a developer of AI-enabled tools for companies and sales teams to grow their businesses, raised $40 million in a Series B round led by Battery Ventures. Founded in 2023, San Francisco-based Unify has raised around $70 million to date, per Crunchbase data.

10. Panacea Financial, $37M, healthcare fintech: Panacea Financial, a financial services provider for doctors and their practices, raised $37 million from Valar Ventures in a Series B extension financing. Little Rock, Arkansas-based Panacea said it has processed more than $2 billion in loan applications since launching in late 2020.

The cutthroat recruitment efforts to land the smartest minds in Silicon Valley have hit a feverish new peak in recent days

Hundreds of employees at one of Silicon Valley’s hottest AI startups gathered in their offices last Friday expecting a celebratory announcement.

For months, OpenAI had been talking to Windsurf about buying it for $3 billion, and now it seemed like the rank-and-file were finally getting confirmation that the deal was about to become official. Windsurf’s marketing team even began filming the all-hands meeting for promotional material.

Instead, they learned that Windsurf’s chief executive, Varun Mohan, had left the company to join Google, taking with him a small group of artificial-intelligence researchers and engineers. After hearing the news, some of the staff began to cry.

By Monday morning, another twist in the saga would bring those Windsurf employees back to the same room for a second announcement: The rest of their company would be acquired by a rival AI startup.

In other words, it was just a typical weekend in Silicon Valley.

The war among some of the richest companies on the planet for talent is playing out in an unprecedented frenzy of talent raids, secret deals and betrayals, leading brainy AI researchers whose minds have never been so highly valued to become as rich as NBA players and Hollywood stars.

The most powerful CEOs in tech are dangling pay packages worth more than $300 million to their most prized recruits—and even that kind of money isn’t always enough to win them over.

Every feverish new development in the all-out brawl for talent has captivated Silicon Valley. The company at the center of the action is Meta, which is in the midst of one of the most astonishing recruiting blitzes of all time. Led by Mark Zuckerberg, who is personally assembling his AI dream team, the company has poached the leaders of promising startups, stunning their investors and employees. It has also given so-called exploding offers that expire within days to potential hires so it’s harder for Meta’s rivals to negotiate effective counters.

The playbook has left the industry to wonder whether the social, mission-first contract that once united founders and employees is unraveling. Meanwhile, some executives are bemoaning the erosion of what was once a bedrock principle of Silicon Valley: Be a missionary, not a mercenary.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the battle in those terms in a Slack message he sent to researchers in late June when Zuckerberg was attempting to raid his company.

“I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole,” Altman wrote in a message seen by The Wall Street Journal. “Of course there will always be some mercenaries. Missionaries will beat mercenaries.”

That idea is widely credited to John Doerr, one of the titanic figures in venture capital. He is now the chairman of the famed VC firm Kleiner Perkins, which was on the board of Windsurf. For decades, he told generations of entrepreneurs who came to Silicon Valley with dreams of starting a company to embrace their inner missionaries. In mercenary cultures, “the central goal is a lust for making money,” Doerr once said. But at missionary companies, “there’s a lust not only for making money, but for making meaning.”

Meta rejects the characterization that its newly hired employees were simply chasing money. Zuckerberg has said that his company’s allure isn’t the compensation packages but its access to the massive amounts of computing power that researchers need to make breakthroughs.

“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” he wrote in a Threads post this past week.

But the market for talent has been turned upside down by his willingness to throw colossal sums of money at wonky AI researchers—a decision partly inspired by a conversation with an influential figure at the company he’s targeted the most in his recruitment spree.

In the spring, Zuckerberg approached OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, for a casual catch-up and ended up asking him for advice on how to improve his company’s generative-AI organization. Given how much money Meta was already spending on hardware and computing power to train AI—more than 100 times what it was spending on humans—Chen suggested that Zuckerberg might want to invest more in talent, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Zuckerberg asked Chen if he would consider joining Meta—and what it would take to bring him aboard.

A couple hundred million dollars? A billion?

Chen demurred, saying he was happy at OpenAI. But the conversation helped plant the seeds of an idea.

Zuckerberg got to work creating a list of the world’s best AI researchers. He fired off emails, texts and WhatsApp messages to potential hires, gauging their interest and inviting some to meet him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, Calif.

Zuckerberg settled on Alexandr Wang to lead the new lab. To get him, Meta paid $14 billion for a stake in Scale AI, the data-labeling startup founded by the 28-year-old entrepreneur.

Wang was an idol to many young startup founders, who saw him as a model for how to take risks and win big. He dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a freshman and moved to California to build Scale, becoming one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires once the startup’s valuation skyrocketed. Scale began to grow even faster as the AI boom took off, when it hired contractors from all over the world to tag data for tech companies training AI models.

On a Friday morning in mid-June, Wang told employees gathered in the plant-filled atrium of Scale’s cavernous San Francisco headquarters that he was leaving the company. He walked down the building’s staircase to thunderous applause from his staff.

Wang teared up when he recounted how he started the company at age 19. Some employees also cried and stayed afterward to take pictures with their former CEO. “It was like the end of a Disney movie,” one of them said.

In the days after Wang’s departure, OpenAI and Google ended their contracts with Scale, a blow to its revenue. This week, Scale cut 14% of its remaining staff. A spokesman for the company said it remains strong and well-funded.

For his new AI division focused on superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, Zuckerberg has poached from Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Apple, and pulled at least a dozen employees from OpenAI.

But many have turned him down. He’s offered more than 10 of OpenAI’s researchers eye-watering pay packages of $300 million over four years, including $100 million the first year, according to people familiar with the matter. And after months of recruiting, Meta still doesn’t have a chief scientist for its lab.

“I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get,” Altman told his staff in a Slack message.

Still, the pressure has rattled OpenAI. Chen, whose conversation with Zuckerberg had helped spur Meta’s recruiting push, reassured OpenAI employees in late June that the company’s leadership was responding to the aggressive recruitment by adjusting compensation packages and “scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward our top talent,” he wrote in a Slack message seen by the Journal.

He also equated Meta’s talent raid to a burglary.

“i feel a visceral feeling right now—as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote. “please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”

Chen shared another OpenAI research leader’s message to employees: “if they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers just tell them to back off, its not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision.”

OpenAI employees reacted to Chen’s note with heart emojis—and emojis of Chen’s face.

Zuckerberg and Altman hadn’t spoken since the battle for talent began until the CEOs met last week at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Among the Meta Superintelligence Lab’s buzziest hires are Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, AI investors who became popular among startup founders after they secured a cache of Nvidia chips for their portfolio companies during the chip shortage two years ago.

Friedman, the former CEO of the coding platform GitHub, was hired to be one of the AI lab’s leaders alongside Wang.

Gross was the CEO of AI company Safe Superintelligence, or SSI for short, which he founded last year with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, a luminary in the field who left OpenAI last year after voting with other board members to fire Altman in November 2023.

Zuckerberg received an introduction to Sutskever from Gross. The two had known each other ever since Zuckerberg considered buying Gross’s search-engine startup more than a decade ago. In late January, the three of them got together for lunch at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto. Shortly afterward, the Meta CEO said he was interested in buying SSI.

Sutskever immediately rebuffed the offer and told him that SSI was not for sale, according to people familiar with the matter. A few weeks later, Meta invested in an SSI funding round that valued the startup at $32 billion.

Gross told close associates he disagreed with Sutskever’s decision not to sell SSI. In May, he received his own offer to join Meta alongside Friedman. Sutskever was blindsided when he learned that his CEO and co-founder was defecting to a rival.

When the news of Gross’s likely move began to leak out in the middle of June, waves of surprise rippled through the text chains of founders, investors and prominent tech CEOs. They were stunned that he would abandon his startup so quickly for a competitor.

“I have incredible empathy for Daniel. This was an unimaginably hard decision,” said Shaun Maguire, a Sequoia partner who helped lead the firm’s investment in SSI.

Earlier this month, in a post on X announcing Gross’s departure, Sutskever made it clear that his company is not for sale, no matter how many billions of dollars might be on the table.

To hire Gross and Friedman, Meta had to do more than cut large checks. It also had to help unwind NFDG, their venture firm, and offered to buy out up to 49% of the shares owned by investors in its funds.

Until recently, the firm’s website offered a simple description of its mission: Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross invest in startups together.

Then the language on the website was tweaked: Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross invested in startups together.

Many of the most lucrative offers have been extended to researchers who were already working for leading AI labs, but the latest battlegrounds in the talent wars are the industry’s most promising startups—like Windsurf.

The most recent drama in Silicon Valley began months ago, when OpenAI agreed to buy Windsurf for $3 billion. But the deal process dragged on and eventually broke down when Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, objected to some of the terms. After the exclusivity window for negotiations with OpenAI expired, Windsurf turned to a backup plan.

Mohan, the Windsurf CEO, quickly struck a $2.4 billion deal with Google. Google got access to the startup’s technology and hired away some of its key employees.

These so-called acquihire deals have become a common strategy for Silicon Valley giants to evade antitrust scrutiny, but they leave the remaining employees working for companies that are shells of their former selves. In the case of Windsurf, hundreds of recent hires were left empty-handed and feeling abandoned by their leaders. When they walked out of the meeting last Friday afternoon, their futures were as uncertain as the company’s.

“I want to acknowledge that this is extremely shocking news and it will take at least 24 hours to digest it,” Windsurf’s new CEO, Jeff Wang, said during the emotional all-hands. “It might take all weekend.”

But before the weekend began, Wang received an email at 5:30 p.m. from Scott Wu, the CEO of coding startup Cognition, with the subject line: “chat?”

Wu, a competitive programmer who once won three gold medals at a global coding Olympics for teenagers, had launched a viral AI coding tool called Devin last year.

Wu and Wang chatted and struck a deal on Saturday afternoon for Cognition to buy the rest of Windsurf.

The two spent the rest of the weekend hunkered down with their colleagues in Windsurf’s offices hammering out the deal. Wang told employees on Monday morning that all of them would get paid out as part of the deal, regardless of whether their equity had vested.

This time, he received a standing ovation.

Defamation lawsuit was filed in a Florida federal court

President Trump on Friday filed a lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, alleging the newspaper defamed him in an article about a birthday letter sent to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida, includes as defendants Dow Jones & Co. and its parent company, News Corp. It also names News Corp Chair Emeritus Rupert Murdoch, its chief executive, Robert Thomson, and two Journal reporters.

The suit alleges that the article in question falsely claimed that Trump in 2003 wrote and signed a letter that included a drawing of a naked woman for Epstein. No authentic letter or drawing exists, according to the suit.

“Defendants concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light,” the lawsuit says.

A Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.” News Corp didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Thursday, the Journal reported that the British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell collected letters from Trump and other Epstein associates for a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday. The Journal reported that the book contained a bawdy letter bearing Trump’s name. The letter, which the Journal reported it had reviewed, included several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman. It ends: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Pages from the leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.

Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.” He had threatened legal action.

Questions around the release of Epstein-related documents, and the president’s relationship with the financier, have engulfed Trump’s administration. After the Journal article was published, Trump said on social media that he had directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony, subject to Court approval!” On Friday, the Justice Department sought court approval for that public release.

Federal prosecutors in 2019 charged Epstein with sex-trafficking underage girls in Florida and New York. He died in a Manhattan federal jail while awaiting trial. The medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.

Trump for years has been a frequent litigant against media outlets, filing suits against a range of leading newspapers and networks. A number of his cases have been dismissed at early stages. Public figures face a high legal bar in defamation litigation. Supreme Court precedent requires them to prove a defendant knowingly published a false statement or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

Trump did secure a pair of notable recent settlements. In one, Walt Disney’s ABC News agreed to pay $15 million plus attorney’s fees to settle his suit against the network and its star anchor George Stephanopoulos. And in July, Paramount Global, which owns CBS, agreed to pay a similar sum to settle Trump’s suit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris that he claimed was misleading and intended to help his rival’s presidential election campaign.

Trump is seeking $10 billion in monetary damages from Friday’s lawsuit.

Trump said he had directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to make the request

The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal court to publicly release grand-jury transcripts from the sex-trafficking cases of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

“This Court should conclude that the Epstein and Maxwell cases qualify as a matter of public interest, release the associated grand jury transcripts, and lift any pre-existing protective orders,” the department said in a filing signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The Justice Department said in the filing that it would work with the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which brought the charges against both, to appropriately redact the documents to protect victims.

Grand-jury testimony is subject to strong secrecy protections, with only narrow exceptions. The department noted the tradition of keeping such material out of the public domain but said this case was a rare special circumstance in which the public release of the records is appropriate.

In a social-media post Thursday, President Trump said that he had directed Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval!” Bondi then said on X that she was ready to ask a court to unseal the transcripts related to Epstein.

The president’s statement came after the publication of a Wall Street Journal article about a letter bearing Trump’s name that was included in a 2003 birthday album for Epstein. The letter contained several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. It ends with “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump has denied writing the letter and drawing the picture. He filed a lawsuit against the publisher of The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Pages from the book—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It is unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.

Questions around the grand-jury materials have swirled around Bondi since she took office. Some Trump allies, including right-wing influencers, began calling for the attorney general’s resignation after the Justice Department backtracked on a promise to release what Bondi once called a “truckload” of documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Epstein investigation.

The broad release of Epstein files in the government’s possession became a rallying cry among some of Trump’s top allies during the Biden administration and 2024 campaign. Some Democrats have joined the calls for more transparency in recent days.

It is unclear how a judge might respond to the Justice Department request. Lawyers for witnesses who testified in the grand-jury proceedings could also make their own bids to the court to keep the materials secret, arguing that the release could expose sensitive or personal information about Epstein’s accusers.

During grand-jury proceedings, prosecutors present evidence and witness testimony to a panel, which then votes on whether to hand up an indictment. Unlike a trial, the proceedings aren’t public.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan in 2019 charged Epstein with sex-trafficking minors in New York and Florida. Epstein died in a federal jail in 2019 while awaiting trial, and the medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

In a case stemming from a Freedom of Information Act request for Epstein-related materials, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan and the FBI asked a judge to keep Epstein-related documents private. They argued the release of the materials could negatively impact any potential retrial of Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 of sex-trafficking offenses, the declarations said. The judge in 2024 declined to make the materials public.

The leather-bound book was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell. The president says the letter ‘is a fake thing.’

It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the occasion. She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.

Maxwell collected letters from Trump and dozens of Epstein’s other associates for a 2003 birthday album, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Pages from the leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.

The president’s past relationship with Epstein is at a sensitive moment. The Justice Department documents, the so-called Epstein files, and who or what is in them are at the center of a storm consuming the Trump administration. On Wednesday, after angry comments about how the files are a hoax created by Democrats, President Trump lashed out at his own supporters for refusing to let the matter go.

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

In an interview with the Journal on Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” he said.

“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

He told the Journal he was preparing to file a lawsuit if it published an article. “I’m gonna sue The Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else,” he said.

Allegations that Epstein had been sexually abusing girls became public in 2006 and he was arrested that year. Epstein died in 2019 in jail after he was arrested a second time and charged with sex trafficking conspiracy.

Justice Department officials didn’t respond to requests for comment or address questions about whether the Trump page and other pages of the birthday album were part of the agency’s recent documents review. The FBI declined to comment.

The existence of the album and the contents of the birthday letters haven’t previously been reported. The album had poems, photos and greetings from businesspeople, academics, Epstein’s former girlfriends and childhood pals, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal and people familiar with them.

Among those who submitted letters were billionaire Leslie Wexner and attorney Alan Dershowitz. The album also contained a letter from a now-deceased Harvard economist, one of Epstein’s report cards from Mark Twain junior high school in Brooklyn and a note from a former assistant that included an acrostic with Epstein’s name: “Jeffrey, oh Jeffrey!/ Everyone loves you!/ Fun in the sun!/ Fun just for fun!/ Remember…don’t forget me soon!/ Epstein…you rock!/ You are the best!”

Epstein was Wexner’s money manager at the time. The longtime leader of Victoria’s Secret wrote a short message that said: “I wanted to get you what you want… so here it is….” After the text was a line drawing of what appeared to be a woman’s breasts. Wexner declined to comment through a spokesman. Wexner’s spokesman previously told the Journal that the retail mogul “severed all ties with Epstein in 2007 and never spoke with him again.”

Dershowitz’s letter included a mock-up of a “Vanity Unfair” magazine cover with mock headlines such as “Who was Jack the Ripper? Was it Jeffrey Epstein?” He joked that he had convinced the magazine to change the focus of an article from Epstein to Bill Clinton. Dershowitz, who represented Epstein after his first arrest, said, “It’s been a long time and I don’t recall the content of what I may have written.”

The book was put together by a New York City bookbinder, Herbert Weitz, according to people who were involved in the process. Weitz, who died in 2020, listed Epstein as a client on his website in 2003.

It isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared. Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

‘Jeffrey enjoys his social life’

When he turned 50, Epstein was already wealthy from managing Wexner’s fortune and was socializing with Trump, Clinton and other powerful people. He often entertained at his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach, Fla., home and private Caribbean island.

A spokesman for Clinton referred to a 2019 statement that former President Clinton had cut off ties more than a decade before Epstein’s second arrest and didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes.

Epstein and Trump spent time together in the 1990s and early 2000s and were photographed at social events, including with Maxwell and Melania Trump. A 1992 tape from the NBC archives shows Trump partying with Epstein at his Mar-a-Lago estate; Trump is seen pulling a woman toward him and patting her behind.

Trump, along with others including Clinton, also appeared several times on flight logs for Epstein’s private jet.

A 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein quoted Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Both men said that they subsequently had a falling-out. Trump has said their friendship ended before Epstein pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution in 2008, served time in a Florida jail and registered as a sex offender.

When Epstein was arrested again in 2019, Trump said he hadn’t talked to Epstein for about 15 years. “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump said in the Oval Office at that time. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”

Trump’s spokeswoman told the Journal in 2023 that Trump had banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club at some point in the past, without elaborating.

Maxwell, a British socialite, was convicted in 2021 of helping Epstein’s sex-trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Maxwell didn’t respond to a letter requesting an interview sent to her in prison. Arthur Aidala, an attorney who represented Maxwell, said, “At this point, she is focused on her case before the Supreme Court of the United States.”

The FBI’s Epstein files

Epstein’s associations with Trump and many powerful people have been well documented. There remain questions about what the FBI possesses about Epstein and his well-connected friends. In 2019, the FBI confiscated evidence from Epstein’s properties in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York.

Earlier this week, after the Journal sought comment from the president about the letter, Trump told reporters at the White House that he believed some Epstein files were “made up” by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and former FBI Director James Comey.

He said that releasing any more Epstein files would be up to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release,” Trump said.

Allegations that bureaucrats covered up Epstein’s connections with participants in his trafficking scheme were fanned by people now in top roles in the Trump administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino.

In June 2024, Trump was asked in a Fox News interview whether he would release the Epstein case files. The Republican presidential candidate initially responded, “Yeah, I would.” But he also expressed some reservations. “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”

Soon after she was confirmed as attorney general, Bondi said she was preparing to release new Epstein files. In late February, Bondi announced the release of “Phase 1” of the documents. But the material contained few new revelations, drawing criticism from right-wing influencers.

Bondi initially blamed the FBI’s New York office for withholding information and promised to release the remaining documents after redacting the victim’s names. Patel also said, “There will be no coverups, no missing documents and no stone left unturned.” They tasked hundreds of FBI employees to review the materials and prepare them for release.

The issue took on new life in June when Elon Musk, amid a public feud with Trump, alleged that the FBI was withholding documents from the Epstein case because Trump was in the files.

“The truth will come out,” Musk wrote on X on June 5. He later deleted the message and said he regretted some of his comments.

On July 7, the Justice Department backtracked on Bondi’s pledge to release more Epstein files. The Justice Department said that after an “exhaustive review” it had found no “incriminating client list” or additional documents that warrant public disclosure.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded this week that Republican Chairman Jim Jordan hold hearings on the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files and, if necessary, subpoena Bondi, Patel and Bongino.

At a cabinet meeting on July 8, Trump criticized a reporter for asking about Epstein. “Are people still talking about this guy, this creep?” Trump said. “That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time?”

That same day, Musk wrote on X: “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”

The U.K. Closed a Tax Loophole for the Global Rich. Now They’re Fleeing.

Instead of paying up, wealthy expats are getting out—sparking questions about whether the move will raise any money at all

Beset by high public debt and crumbling infrastructure, the U.K. hoped eliminating non-doms would bring in about $45 billion by 2030. But instead of paying up, wealthy expats are rushing for the exits, sparking questions about whether the effort will raise any money at all.

The British experiment has laid bare the difficult politics of taxing the rich. Taxing high earners has become a rallying cry on the left as a solution to income inequality and fraying social-safety nets. Low-tax advocates say taxes on the wealthy are counterproductive, driving away job creators and big spenders.

In the U.S., New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has proposed a “millionaires tax” on New Yorkers making more than $1 million a year, prompting vocal rich people to say they will leave for lower-tax jurisdictions such as Florida or Texas.

One challenge of taxing the wealthy is that they are highly mobile, with houses around the world, private jets and an army of advisers who can sort out visas and bureaucratic paperwork quickly. Jurisdictions such as Dubai, Italy and Monaco have rolled out the red carpet, offering no taxation or structures similar to the U.K.’s old non-dom status.

Portrait photograph of Bassim Haidar.

Bassim Haidar plans to leave the U.K. this summer. Photo: Laura Pannack for WSJ

Haidar earns most of his money from businesses he started overseas. He estimates the tax overhaul will increase his U.K. tax bill by five to seven times. A father of five, he also worries about the U.K.’s 40% inheritance tax, which now would apply on his global assets.

Haidar is selling his U.K. properties and plans to leave this summer. He’ll split his time between Dubai and Greece.

Nassef Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire and co-owner of the English soccer team Aston Villa, has relocated from the U.K. to Italy, according to regulatory filings. German crypto billionaire Christian Angermayer moved to Switzerland last year from London. The U.K. has introduced a new tax benefit for foreign income, but it is limited to four years and many former non-doms don’t qualify.

“The government was maybe overconfident that the international wealthy loved London so much…that they wouldn’t go,” said Charlie Sosna, a partner in law firm Mishcon de Reya’s private-wealth division.

Like most countries, the U.K. taxes people who live there on their global income. That is different from the U.S.’s citizenship-based system, under which all Americans are subject to U.S. taxes no matter where they live.

Wealthy Britons have been trying to escape the U.K.’s high tax rates for decades. In the 1970s, the Rolling Stones moved to France to avoid taxes, while David Bowie went to Switzerland.

The lucrative non-dom loophole had the opposite effect, drawing rich foreigners to London. The system dates back to 1799, when the country’s first income tax was imposed to fund the war against Napoleon.

Only income earned in the U.K. was subject to the tax, allowing investments in the empire’s colonies to avoid taxation. The exemption was restricted over time to largely benefit foreigners who don’t expect to live in the U.K. permanently.

In the 1970s, Middle Easterners rich off oil and shipping came to London, buying mansions, hotels and department stores. That was followed by a wave of Russian oligarchs in the 1990s, earning the capital city the nickname Londongrad. In recent years, Chinese and Indian nationals have become a bigger force.

The U.K. always knew that some rich residents would leave because of the tax changes and built that into its forecasts. The U.K.’s independent budget watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, estimated that among a large subset of non-doms, around 12% will move. But it warned this month that departures could be higher and said the U.K.’s “growing reliance on this small and mobile group of taxpayers therefore represents a fiscal risk.”

Campaign groups that back lower taxes paint a gloomier picture. A report from the Centre for Economics and Business Research, commissioned by the Land of Opportunity campaign, forecast that a higher share of non-doms would leave and suggested the government could lose money if the migration rate tops 25%.

Academic studies of tax systems in the U.K., Switzerland and the U.S. show a divide among the wealthy. The superrich and elderly are more likely to move if their tax or estate bill rises. Families with school-age children, or people who work in salaried jobs, such as lawyers, are less likely to leave.

Andy Summers, an associate professor of law at the London School of Economics, studied a previous overhaul of the U.K.’s non-dom program in 2017 and found that about 5% affected by the reform left. Those who stayed paid 50% more in U.K. tax.

“It’s not the first time wealth advisers have said the sky is falling in,” he said. “But the noise is much louder this time.”

Summers thinks ending the non-dom status, which has been criticized as unfair for decades, will raise money.

“It is hard to make any fairness argument that one group of people who are living in the U.K. should be paying lower tax rates than others,” he said.

Businesses that cater to the rich are being affected by the departures. Sales of London residential properties worth more than $10 million dropped by 37% in the first quarter, according to real-estate firm Knight Frank. Prices are at a 10-year low, and deals that used to take a few days to negotiate now take weeks, said Stuart Bailey, the agency’s head of super-prime sales in London.

“There’s no question that people are leaving London,” he said. “But it’s definitely not doomsday.”

Many wealthy expats argue that their contribution to the U.K. goes beyond taxes.

Canadian Ann Kaplan Mulholland moved to the U.K. in 2022 after selling her medical-loan business and her youngest child started college. She bought a rundown 13th-century castle and spent £15 million, equivalent to $20 million, to make renovations and build restaurants and a wedding business on site.

Mulholland hired a staff of roughly 100, joined her local church and started doing her grocery shopping at the retailer Marks & Spencer. But she is now on her way out. She and her husband, a plastic surgeon, applied to move to Italy, which charges a flat fee of about $230,000 a year for expats in lieu of tax on foreign income.

“It’s very difficult to go because we’re settled,” she said. “I would be the happiest person ever if all this gets reversed.”

Is it still worth owning a property abroad?

British owners of holiday homes in the EU face a growing amount of red tape if they want to rent them out 

From villas overlooking the rolling hills of Tuscany to coastal retreats on the Côte d’Azur, thousands of Britons own property in the EU — for many, buying a home there is the culmination of a long-held dream.

However, recent demonstrations in Spain, Italy, France and Portugal against “overtourism” and the rise of second home ownership have caused some to question that dream.

Protesters blame short-term holiday rentals from platforms such as Airbnb for driving up rents and property prices, forcing locals out of cities such as Barcelona and Madrid. In Brittany, campaigners insist the high numbers of second homes are making some towns and villages feel dormant in the winter months.

The response has been for authorities across the continent to implement a growing array of local and national regulations that have made it more costly and complicated for owners to let their properties to holidaymakers.

Originally from Wiltshire, Rupert Springfield runs two holiday rentals in the Dordogne with his husband Franck. “Ten years ago when people bought property [in France] to let them out they could pretty much do so without doing anything,” he says. “There were mostly only rules around swimming pools or smoke alarms and fire extinguishers. That has changed. But the main difference,” he adds, is that these days “it’s impossible to fly under the radar.”

In the past, some owners of occasional holiday lets in France did not even bother declaring rental income or registering their homes with the local mairie (town hall). This is no longer possible. Mayors can now impose fines of up to €10,000 on owners who do not register furnished tourist accommodation, and failure to declare rental income can result in fines and back taxes.  

I have been affected by the tougher regulations myself. More than a decade ago, I moved from the UK to the south of France, buying a property and running it as a chambres d’hōtes (essentially a B&B) and occasionally also offering the whole house as a holiday let. 

But even “casual” holiday letters — whose owners might rent them out for only a few weeks a year — are impacted by these rule changes. And the number of these are growing, according to specialist mortgage broker Simon Conn, particularly from UK owners.

Since Brexit, UK nationals can only spend a maximum of 90 days in the EU in any 180-day period unless they have a visa. As a result, Conn says more choose to rent out their properties during periods when they can’t be there — and these owners need to follow local and national rules as closely as professionals like me and Springfield.

So what do you need to look out for if you plan to buy a holiday home in the EU?

FT Money examines the growing tangle of red tape that buyers from outside the bloc need to consider before making a purchase.

The first thing to check is whether a property you are interested in buying needs a licence to be rented out. In Spain, for example, homes require a licence even if they are going to be rented for just short periods annually.

“If the property already has a licence, that’s OK [as it can be transferred],” says Peter Esders, legal director at Judicare Law, which specialises in international property and probate matters. “But if it doesn’t have a licence that can be a problem, as in some areas they are not issuing new ones.” 

Barcelona is a case in point, having ceased to issue new licences in 2014. Last year, the city authorities went a step further, announcing they would revoke all tourist licences by 2028, potentially affecting around 10,000 properties. This move is being closely watched in other European capitals. 

And Spain is by no means the only country requiring licences. Portugal has the Alojamento Local, issued by local councils, which covers short-term holiday lets while Italy requires a Codice Identificativo Nazionale (CIN), a unique identifier issued by the Ministry of Tourism, for all holiday lets. And EU-wide rules, which will require hosts to list their property details on a digital registry, are on the way. The aim is to increase transparency of the sector and make it easier to spot illegal operators, although full details for implementation are yet to be finalised. 

Annual limits on the number of nights that homes can be let can also apply, particularly in larger cities. In 2019, among other restrictions, Amsterdam introduced a 30 nights per year cap on owners of short-term rentals, with fines for non-compliance starting at €1,500. In cities such as Barcelona and Paris, the number of days for short-term rentals is limited to 90 days a year. In some cities, owners of second homes are also barred from renting out their properties, with short-term Airbnb-style lets restricted to individuals’ primary homes only. 

Even some smaller towns and departments are introducing their own rules. Some villages in Provence have imposed caps on the total number of properties available as holiday lets in order to restrict supply, and in Chamonix, a popular ski resort in the French Alps, short-term lets are restricted to one property per owner.

Italy has taken a different tack by banning key boxes popular with many Airbnb-style listings, reacting to public disquiet over often high concentrations of unsightly key safes in tourist hotspots. Failure to remove a key lockbox in Florence can result in a fine of up to €400.  

Owners should also be aware of rules surrounding energy performance certificates, which rate the energy efficiency of properties. In France, these are now applied to short-stay accommodation and, by 2034, holiday let properties will need a rating of D (denoting average) or higher.  

Fail to comply with the rules and the results can be costly: Spanish authorities recently removed almost 66,000 listings from Airbnb, mostly because the properties did not have the required licences or breached other rules. In June, Booking.com was forced to remove more than 4,000 tourist rental adverts in Spain.  

Also beware of additional rules or higher taxes on rental income from holiday lets. In Spain and Portugal there are tax advantages to renting out your property as a long-term let as opposed to a short-term rental, for example. In Portugal, if you’re a non-EU resident, you also need a fiscal representative in the country to ensure you comply with your tax obligations. Taxes on rental income can also be higher for non-EU residents in some jurisdictions.

There can be additional costs on second homes too. France has removed the taxe d’habitation (similar to the UK’s council tax) on primary homes. But it is still applied on second homes, and local authorities have the freedom to increase the rate by up to 60 per cent. France also imposes a wealth tax on French property assets, payable by residents and non- residents alike. For non-residents, taxes are due where the net assets (the value of property less any mortgage loans) of property owned in France surpass €1.3mn.

Spain, too, has a wealth tax and charges a tax on second homes based on the property’s notional rental value. The latter tax is calculated based on an assumed rental income of 1.1 per cent of the official value of the property (if this has been updated within the past 10 years, otherwise it is 2 per cent). Non-residents who live outside the EU pay tax on this sum at an increased rate of 24 per cent. 

And more stringent rules may be on their way. Spain is considering a draft law to impose a 100 per cent tax on second home purchases by non-EU buyers. David Morley, head of wealth structuring at tax and wealth advisers Blevins Franks, is sceptical whether this law will ever see the light of day, but he and his colleagues do expect the rules around second home ownership and holiday lets to become even stricter in Europe, particularly Spain.   

There are still positives to owning a holiday home on the continent — and not just the food, climate and the culture.

Mortgage rates across the Eurozone, although much higher than they were even just a few years ago are currently lower than in the UK, according to Conn, typically falling within the 3 to 4 per cent range.

And even though there are often large numbers of holiday lets vying for tourist dollars, the returns can still be lucrative. This attracts more overseas owners of prime property to rent them out for at least part of the year, according to Alex Balkin, executive director for the French Riviera and French Alps at estate agent Savills. “One week of rent as a holiday let can often be the equivalent of one month’s rental on an annual basis,” he says.  

For Britons choosing to retire or move to the continent, there can also be significant tax advantages, particularly when it comes to inheritance tax — an attraction that will only become more compelling from 2027, when pensions are due to become subject to UK inheritance tax. 

While moving abroad purely to benefit from advantageous inheritance tax rules will be too big a step for many, this more favourable environment across much of the continent is an added bonus for the many Britons who choose to spend their twilight years overseas. 

In the UK, inheritance tax is payable at 40 per cent on estates in excess of £325,000, or over £500,000 if the residential nil rate band, an additional allowance which covers the main home, is included.

In Italy, by contrast, inheritance tax is paid by the recipient and the country has generous personal allowances of €1mn each for relatives such as children, parents and grandparents, below which inheritance tax is not payable. Above this, tax rates are low, starting at just 4 per cent.

Portugal does not impose inheritance tax as such, applying instead a 10 per cent “stamp duty” on assets passed on at death, paid by the recipient. It has a notable perk in that assets passed to both spouses and children at death are exempt from the tax. 

A further boon is that, in Portugal, overseas assets are exempt from the tax. Similarly, if you are resident in Spain, your non-Spanish assets, such as UK property, are not subject to inheritance tax in Spain, once inherited by a non-Spanish beneficiary.

This latter point is of particular interest following changes to the taxation of non-domiciled individuals introduced in the UK in April. Under these new rules, if you live for more than 10 tax years outside the UK, your worldwide assets — such as property owned abroad — escape the UK inheritance tax net. So, if you have lived for more than 10 years in Portugal, for example, UK inheritance tax should only be applied to your UK assets, with just your assets in Portugal subject to that country’s stamp duty rules. 

In all cases, however, it is advisable to get expert advice to ensure you fully comply with the tax residence rules.  

You should also watch out for “forced heirship” rules in countries such as France and Portugal, which can require you to pass on some of your assets to children on death, though you can elect for the “Brussels IV” regulation to apply, giving you freedom to bequeath your assets to whoever you like.

Again, you should take advice on how this could impact your tax affairs, particularly in France, where legislation introduced in 2021 gives protected heirs the right to make a claim against assets located in France, though this has yet to be tested in the courts. 

Tax advisers also recommend having a will in the country where you own a property, as well as one at home, with both wills cross referencing each other.

“It’s important to review your will when you buy a property in the EU,” says Angharad Lynn, a private client partner at solicitors Russell-Cooke. “Don’t assume that it can pass under your English will without any issues. English wills usually provide for assets to be left on trust and, as trusts are not recognised in many civil law jurisdictions, this can cause problems when the estate comes to be administered and can mean unforeseen tax consequences.”

Yet despite such complexities, Mark Harvey, head of the international network at estate agent Knight Frank, says countries such as Portugal and Italy are proving attractive relocation and retirement destinations as “they are all much cheaper than Switzerland, which is the traditional go to fiscal destination”.

For many others, however, the allure of owning a property abroad has never changed. It’s always been about savouring that glass of rosé at sunset, buying your seasonal vegetables at the local market, and immersing yourself in a foreign culture that you call home. 

Wolfgang Tillmans at the Pompidou is the best show of his career

Long before iPhones, the photographer captured a world of image overload — now his oeuvre feels moving and elegiac

It’s the last fling: the furniture has gone, bare rooms echo, you notice how filthy the carpets are, and the party is wild but mournful. So it is at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, shutting this summer for five years’ refurbishment, its collection already relocated. Host for the closing bash is Wolfgang Tillmans, the German photographer who made his name taking pictures of 1990s rave culture and gay nightclubs, and won the Turner Prize in 2000. Entitled Nothing could have prepared us — Everything could have prepared us, his exhibition dovetails highlights from those heady days with images seen through the darkening glass of recent years. It is the best show of his career. 

Invited to occupy the Pompidou’s library, the Bibliothèque publique d’information, Tillmans curates an immense emptiness. Only a handful of books, shelves, computer terminals remain, dotted across 6,000 sq metres of grubby grey carpet. Disconsolate signage — “Politique”, “Education”, “Philosophie” — dangles over nothing. On the walls, Tillmans answers the silence with hundreds of his globe-trotting, sewer-to-sky images, spanning four decades: “rat disappearing”, “Tongues and Ears”, “tree filling window”, “Lagos Night Drive”, “Playing Cards, Hong Kong”, “Rock from Cameroon on Bread”, the flat rectangle “Himmelblau”. 

The earliest, “Zeitungsjacket” (1985), a garment constructed from newsprint, made when he was 16, stands mockingly in a bookcase labelled “probabilities and statistics”. The latest, “Pompidou CLC photocopies” (2024-25), depicts the Pompidou’s facade and interior pipes, images enlarged and moved during scanning so that the solid forms become fluid, melting. They contrast with the library’s actual heavy blue tubes, vents and girders, and further destabilise the setting.

It’s insouciant and disturbing to see Tillmans’ banal, full-saturated-colour, jumbled photographs in this end-of-history, end-of-humanities mise en scène. Libraries embody the thirst for learning, knowledge ordered in discipline-by-discipline sections. Tillmans instead beams an endless Instagram-style feed of lush inkjet prints. 

Long before iPhones snapped billions of photos daily, Tillmans staked his art on capturing, by sheer accumulation and apparently random display, a world of image overload. His seemingly casual photographs, in fact meticulously choreographed, were launched in fashion and music magazines such as i-D and Spex. Mementoes of what the Pompidou calls the “transformative spirit” of the 1990s, these give the show a nostalgic, sexualised charge: sweat-drenched, ecstatic Damon Albarn of Blur; Tillmans’ androgynous-looking friends “Suzanne & Lutz, white dress, army skirt” and “Alex and Lutz sitting in the trees”, nude save loosely draped raincoats, dangling among foliage like updated versions of Albrecht Dürer’s “Adam and Eve” in a German forest.

Depicting people at ease, relaxing, partying, Tillmans wanted to convey “a kind of freedom that was not being expressed honestly elsewhere”. Actually, such pictures in their contrived spontaneity are perfected versions of the informal pictures we were all already taking. What was new was that Tillmans put them in museums, and in fresh, breezy scenarios: frameless, pinned or taped to the wall, from postcard to epic scale, subjects, people, places mixed up, hierarchies abandoned.

At the Pompidou, “Lagos Still Life II” — mangos and a dragonfly — hangs next to a portrait of Zaur Abduraimov, Toronto hairdresser and migrant of Crimean Tatar ancestry. The military parade “Army (Moscow 2005)” marches alongside the languid domestic scene “Anders Stretching on the Carpet”. “Data Center Warm Air Outlets, Santa Clara”, a shot of air vents in Silicon Valley, faces “End of Broadcast IV”, flickering static from a pre-digital TV station in St Petersburg.

As with the ostensibly arbitrary images, Tillmans’ juxtapositions look haphazard but aren’t. Global connectivity is the theme, liberal agendas the message. Everywhere, intimacy and individuality (Anders and Abduraimov, free to express themselves) confront repression (the Russian army, media control). References to borders — “Empire (US/Mexico border)”, “JFK Security”, Gatwick’s “Immigration” signs, a pile of red “Passports” — are interwoven with Tillmans’ “Freischwimmer” photo-drawings, made with a handheld flashlight, tinted pale green or pink. Their floaty surfaces and tremulous lines, conjuring close-ups of skin or underwater scenes, symbolise free movement, metamorphosis, unfixed identities. 

The images themselves, even the abstractions, are rarely striking. Tillmans doesn’t aspire to the formal grandeur of fellow German photographers Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth or Candida Höfer. But he is as ambitious: his monumentality comes from his vast, sprawling installations, the conceit that the varied, scattergun entirety — signifying democratisation, tolerance, openness — is greater than the sum of the parts. “Whatever I do is about picking examples, because you can’t show the whole world,” he says. “You always have to find the whole in extreme detail.” He called his 2003 Tate Britain retrospective if one thing matters, everything matters. 

But if everything matters, nothing matters — and banality is boring. “Office Paper For Food Wrapping Recycling, Addis Ababa”? “Library shelves with an unusual amount of space around them”? Tedium is always a problem with Tillmans’ all-over exhibitions. What saves this one is time itself: history has caught up with the photographer, now 56. Nothing could have prepared us charts, regretfully, sociopolitical change, freedoms won and lost, during his lifetime. 

Although he disdains chronological display, Tillmans will be remembered for that narrative. His opening shots at the Pompidou are “Markt” (1989), showing Polish traders arriving in Berlin, and “Money Exchange, Bahnhof Zoo” (1990), the end of the cold war. Tillmans was in his early twenties, and had come out at 16. His restless, optimistic, youthful spirit met the moment of opening borders, political hope, gay culture becoming mainstream — Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Madonna’s book Sex.   

Tillmans always had an activist edge — “Nice here, but ever been to Kyrgyzstan? Free Gender Expression Worldwide” reads a 2008 banner — but in the 21st century it has intensified, becoming hectoring. The ongoing “Truth Study Centre” incorporates table-top journalistic displays about fake news: weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, false proclamations about Aids in South Africa. The geopolitical liberal order was breaking down. “What is lost is lost forever”, his anti-Brexit posters warned. 

Those proclamations look forlorn at the Pompidou, and one senses that lost forever, too, is something else: the distinctiveness of Tillmans’ medium itself. Today everyone posts images, no one pays attention. Diversity segues into sameness. Digital manipulation and AI have smashed the camera’s claim to truth.

Tillmans’ art is doubly embattled, by technology — “the idea that photography might never again be proof of what was or what is — but become something else entirely” — and politics: “culture is always the first thing autocrats seek to control.” Today he says of his nightclub scenes: “I would like to document for the future that it existed, that it cannot be taken for granted, and that there are only very few places in the world where such an intense way of being together so fluidly and freely is possible.” His oeuvre has never felt more moving or elegiac than here in the Pompidou’s hollowed-out library.

To September 22, centrepompidou.fr

How DJ AG’s streamed street gigs became a summer sensation

By sharing his free performances online, the Londoner is attracting big audiences — and now megastars

DJ AG wheels his sound system to the pavement outside King’s Cross St Pancras Station just before 5pm. As commuters and tourists flock past, a crowd is already forming in anticipation. Two children are star-struck when the 40-year-old DJ appears. “You’re lying!” exclaims one of them, too nervous to approach and ask him for a picture. 

The audience gathers to watch AG (otherwise known as Ashley Gordon), as he is joined by local musicians who take the microphone while he lays the beat. No tickets are necessary — the performance is free, and people love its unpredictable nature. AG is joined by soul singers, drill rappers and everything in between. But this is no ordinary type of London street performance.

That becomes apparent as a blacked-out Mercedes Maybach pulls up outside the adjacent McDonald’s. A ripple of excitement runs through the crowd as Grammy-nominated singer and rapper Ty Dolla $ign emerges. Escorted by his posse, the Californian heads straight to AG and picks out high-energy crowd members to join him behind the decks. Once he has established his dance crew, he launches into his 2013 hit single, “Paranoid”. 

Ty Dolla $ign is not the only artist drawn to AG’s impromptu street corner gigs. In recent months multi-platinum stars such as Ed Sheeran, Will Smith and Jessie J have joined him in such locations across the UK.

What attracts them is not the physical crowds — though these are fast growing — but another audience they cannot see: online and international. DJ AG streams his performances across social media, with clips uploaded afterwards regularly receiving hundreds of thousands of views. A snippet of Sheeran and grime rapper JME’s appearance in Sheffield has accumulated more than 10mn views on TikTok alone. 

This is a significant increase on the audience the Tottenham-born DJ had when he began performing on streets at the beginning of 2023, initially struggling to reach more than 30,000 views. But at that time, increasing his online presence was the least of his worries. Early on, he received an antisocial behaviour order from Hackney council for accumulating a larger physical crowd than expected. He also received a warning letter from Haringey council for his performances in Wood Green, on the basis that they were unsafe — an accusation AG denies.

He was not to be silenced, though. He looked for boroughs where he could perform without a permit, turning his attention to Brixton, in the south London borough of Lambeth, and King’s Cross, in the Boroughs of Camden and Islington. AG was also invited to stream in Camden Town without a permit, although buskers there are typically required to have one. Far from being arrested for his work, he is now assisted by local security teams provided by the borough and performs behind a barrier, separated from the crowd.

He has even taken to uploading a weekly schedule and set list to his social media. Artists from across the globe regularly feature on these set lists. Before Ty Dolla $ign’s appearance, AG was joined by singers from South Africa, Ireland and Canada.

With its international appeal, streaming from the streets is not just a London phenomenon. Across the Atlantic in New York, ARIatHOME (Ari Miller) is also utilising the power of social media, and streaming platform Twitch, to supercharge and monetise his live performances. His approach is even more impromptu. Walking the streets of Manhattan, Ari uses a portable set-up resembling one once fashioned by AG. He has amassed about 3mn followers across Instagram and TikTok, creating improvised beats for members of the public to freestyle over.

Both AG and Ari strike a delicate balance between appealing to a global fan base and providing an intimate experience for the live crowd. But these two audiences do not always mould easily with each other. Due to TikTok regulations, AG’s live stream is suspended when participants swear, and he pauses to “evict” artists for not following the rules — social media guidelines affecting the live experience.

Nevertheless, performers enthuse about the format’s distinctive charm. Irish singer Lyra says: “It gives you that very authentic connection with people . . . We are literally just standing on the street and everyone is at eye level. It’s a real human feeling.” 

Shining a light on local talent also enhances the authenticity of AG’s streams. Lyra is preceded by Jasper, a nine-year-old singer from Brixton. Up-and-coming London-based rapper Jesi highlights the accessibility of the format, celebrating it for levelling “the playing field with people who have connections”. AG also cherishes this aspect and rejects the idea of ever paying artists to appear on his platform, or accepting a fee from those who want to feature. Rather, he earns an income through streaming revenue from subscriptions and donations. Last year, his 300,000 TikTok followers were reportedly generating him between £14,000 to £15,000 a month. Since then, his TikTok following has increased fivefold.

Despite such growth, AG insists he is staying true to his roots and that his platform is for everyone. After performing at Afro Nation festival in Portugal, followed by three days at London’s Wireless Festival, he returned to King’s Cross last Monday evening. “That isn’t going to change, regardless of where this goes,” he says. “Because I want to champion people that cannot be seen and are not being heard.”

Establishing a single, standard take-off point for bag charges would be a clear win

Travelling light is a loaded term — for Europe’s flyers at least. Unlike US passengers who lug whatever they can through security to avoid a checked-bag charge, Europeans are used to measuring every centimetre and kilogramme of carry-on. Get it wrong, and risk additional fees of up to £60 at the gate. Now policymakers in Brussels want to help more travel without hand luggage charges, US-style. Well-meaning, maybe, but foolish.

European carriers have been charting a shaky path through various proposals designed to make flying less troublesome. Last month, EU member states agreed that one small bag — roughly the size of a commuter backpack or tote bag — should fly free, with airlines able to charge for extra ones. Yet soon after, the European parliament’s transport committee proposed a second free item weighing up to 7kg and sized, rather vaguely, up to 100cm. Both plans require parliamentary votes. Separately, five airlines, including Ryanair and easyJet, face potential fines of €179mn imposed by the Spanish government related to ancillary charges including for bags, currently pending an appeal. 

Establishing a single, standard take-off point for bag charges would be a clear win. One industry group, representing most of Europe’s airlines, has already adopted the proposed free bag minimum — 40cm by 30cm by 15cm for those with a measuring tape to hand. As a result, notoriously miserly Ryanair, Europe’s biggest carrier by market value, is increasing its free bag size by 20 per cent. 

Go further, though, and the benefits to passengers become less clear. Airlines calculate fuel needs to the nearest few kilos per flight. Multiply 7kg by the 235 passengers on a full easyJet A321 neo, and that’s an extra 1.6 tonnes to carry. It may only be 2 per cent of the aircraft’s total permitted take-off weight, but unless politicians believe an industry with a forecast worldwide net margin of about 4 per cent is going to absorb the costs, it’s safe to assume passengers will pay, somehow.  

Everyone has a cabin baggage story, from the outrage felt when a fellow passenger gets away with flaunting the rules to the altercations and delays when the flaunters don’t succeed. Small wonder that one of the UK’s largest trade unions, Unite, this week called for standards to be applied to baggage rules and enforcement policies. Unite says its members bear the brunt when angry passengers are asked to pay up or miss their flight.

Investors in airlines are better placed to take this kind of hit than they have been for a while, since carriers’ shares are mostly flying high. Still, easyJet stock dropped 5 per cent on Thursday as rising fuel costs ate into its quarterly profit. Adding extra “free” bags — inevitably paid for by flyers indirectly — will only weigh the industry, and passengers, down.