The over 300 quality assurance workers of the ZeniMax Workers United-CWA union have reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft. It is the first contract agreement at Microsoft since the concerted effort to unionize the video game industry began roughly four years ago.

“This is a monumental victory for all current video game workers and for those that come after,” said Page Branson, a Senior QA Tester at ZeniMax in the press release announcing the agreement. A ratification vote for the contract will take place in late June.

The union, organized by the Communication Workers of America (CWA), was formed in 2023 and was voluntarily recognized by Microsoft as a part of the company’s labor neutrality agreement with the CWA. In the two years since, the union and Microsoft engaged in contract negotiations that precipitated a one day strike to protest return to office and outsourcing policies and, in April, a strike authorization vote.

The contract details offer up a glimpse of what workers across the industry are fighting for and what they can win. According to CWA’s press release, the contract guarantees wage increases – a big deal considering QA are some of the lowest paid workers in the industry. The contract will also include protections against arbitrary dismissal, as well as crediting guidelines – another big deal as there are numerous ways a person who worked on a video game can get left off its credits. 

While the industry’s organization efforts are ongoing, there’s been a surge in activity over the last four years. Workers at Raven Software, which was then a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard before its acquisition by Microsoft, organized the first video game union at a AAA publisher in 2022. That win kicked off a series of other high profile unionization efforts across the industry but concentrated primarily within Microsoft – ostensibly to take advantage of the labor neutrality agreement that states that Microsoft will voluntarily recognize union efforts within the company. With ZeniMax workers finally winning a contract agreement at Microsoft, the industry has another first – one that will set a precedent for other, future negotiations.

Taylor Swift now owns “all of the music I’ve ever made,” she says in a letter posted on her website on Friday. Swift has purchased the masters of her first six albums back from Shamrock Capital, which owned them after entertainment executive Scooter Braun sold them to the company.

“All I’ve ever wanted was the opportunity to work hard enough to be able to one day purchase my music outright with no strings attached, no partnership, with full autonomy,” Swift says. “I will be forever grateful to everyone at Shamrock Capital for being the first people to ever offer this to me.”

Swift says she was able to buy back the music because of the support for her re-recorded Taylor’s Versions albums and for The Eras Tour concerts. She also now owns her music videos, concert films, album art and photography, and unreleased songs. “I can’t thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,” Swift says.

Braun took ownership of the masters when he acquired The Big Machine Label Group in 2019, which Swift at the time called her “worst case scenario.” Swift said that “for years” she had “asked” and “pleaded” for “a chance to own my work,” but Big Machine said that she could “earn” one album back for each new one she completed.

Braun sold the masters to Shamrock Capital in 2020 for around $360 million, which is “relatively close” to what Swift paid to buy them back, Billboard reports.

“I am happy for her,” Braun says in a statement.

Update, May 30th: Added statement from Scooter Braun.

A lot of Polygon’s staff was laid off following Vox Media’s sale of the publication to Valnet, but two of its former guides writers are launching their own guides-focused website: Big Friendly Guide, which you can find at bigfriendly.guide. Ryan Gilliam and Jeffrey Parkin founded and are co-owners of the site.

Guides make Gilliam “feel like I’m helping someone enjoy something that’s very important to me and I know is important to them,” he tells The Verge. “And so when I lost the opportunity to do that at my usual 9-to-5, I wanted to continue it.”

“I hate sounding immodest or bragging, but what Ryan and I got really good at was helping people play video games,” Parkin says. Their work on guides helps people have fun with games, he adds — and assists with things like getting a giant horse in Zelda.

Big Friendly Guide will make most of its content available for free, and the guides themselves won’t be paywalled. But Gilliam and Parkin will also be opening a Patreon for the site as a way for people to support the work, which will also give people access to a Discord. There will be a weekly podcast that’s free for everyone and a monthly subscriber-only podcast where Gilliam and Parkin will discuss their coverage plans.

There will be ads on the site to start. “For now, at least, we’ll run ads to keep the lights on,” according to the site’s About Us page.) But the focus is more on building a community that trusts Gilliam and Parkin’s work and pays to support it. In addition to working on guides for games that interest them, Gilliam and Parkin want the community to make suggestions for guides that they can consider and respond to.

The release of Big Friendly Guide is just the latest outlet from Polygon staffers: former editor-in-chief Chris Plante launched the Post Games podcast and former curation editor Pete Volk launched the PV Guide newsletter. The new outlets follow the rise of other indie gaming publications like Aftermath and Game File.

With Big Friendly Guide, Gilliam and Parkin have modest expectations. “We’re not looking to build a brand and sell it or anything,” Parkin says. “I don’t think either of us want to get particularly rich. We want to keep doing this. That’s really what it comes down to.”

Elon Musk may have understated the “small amount” of ketamine that he said he was using in a Don Lemon interview last year, according to sources for The New York Times. The publication reports that around the time Musk endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential run last year, the Tesla CEO told people that he was taking so much ketamine that it was affecting his bladder, a side effect associated with chronic use. “It is unclear” whether this extended to his four-month stint running DOGE, according to the Times.

The Times reports that, based on interviews with more than a dozen people who’ve known or worked with Musk and private messages seen by the publication, “…some people who knew him worried about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children.”

The Times cites sources familiar with Musk’s consumption who said he was sometimes using ketamine daily and mixing it with a cocktail of other unspecified drugs. Daily consumption would greatly surpass the prescribed treatments that Musk told Lemon he was taking once every two weeks to treat depression. While government contractors like SpaceX are obligated to administer random drug tests to employees, including Elon, people close to this process told The Times that Musk received advanced warning about when they would occur.

A January 2024 report in The Wall Street Journal cited sources saying Musk “used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter.” Sources cited by the Journal also said that “some Tesla board members over the years have talked among themselves about their concerns over Musk’s alleged drug use,” and that drugs have “been a thorny topic for directors at Musk’s companies because some of them are his close friends, and attend parties and travel with him.”

Riot Games is planning to switch Valorant, its popular first-person tactical hero shooter, over to Unreal Engine 5 in July. The engine upgrade from Unreal Engine 4 is part of a number of new changes coming to the shooter over the coming months, including a replay system in September.

Valorant has been running on Unreal Engine 4 since a beta of the game originally released in 2020, and Riot Games has been using Unreal 4 for more than 10 years to build the game. The upgrade to Unreal 5 will arrive with patch 11.02 at the end of July, and Riot is promising it shouldn’t disrupt gameplay.

The game’s overall look and feel should be similar, and Riot says the engine upgrade will improve framerate performance and make patch downloads faster in the future. It’ll be interesting to see what else this engine upgrade unlocks, particularly whether Riot will improve character models and animations in the future. Valorant players that log in while patch 11.02 is live will get a special gun buddy to commemorate the upgrade.

The second big upgrade coming to Valorant later this year is the long-requested replay system. It will arrive on PC first with patch 11.06 in September, followed by a release on console later this year. The replay system will let you analyze recently played competitive games at launch, and Riot is looking at adding more modes later.

The replay system should help players report cheating or bad player behavior in Valorant, and Riot is also adding multi-factor authentication to the game to help with smurfing in the competitive modes — where higher ranked players log into accounts to boost them. You’ll also soon be able to report accounts that are abusing rank or matchmaking.

Valorant’s upcoming 11.0 patch later this month will also add a new map to the game, and it will be available in the competitive mode on day one. During the initial patch cycle of two weeks, rank rating (RR) losses on this new map will be cut by 50 percent while Valorant players get used to playing this new map.

The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, "universal basic compute," and how humanity is a "biological bootloader" for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class.

Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead's lead performances is i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

All microSD cards look pretty much the same, but when it comes to buying the right one for your Nintendo Switch 2, only microSD Express cards will work for storing and playing games. The microSD card you used in your original Switch or Switch Lite will offer limited functionality with Nintendo's new handheld, as it will only let you view screenshots or video clips you captured previously - that's it.

That's because Nintendo opted for a significantly faster spec in its new handheld console, which boasts an advertised 4.4x improvement in terms of transfer speeds over the microSD cards you might already have lying around. That improvement is signified by a small, easy-to-miss "EX" emblem etched onto the front of the card.

What's harder to miss is how much more expensive Express cards are, with some costing more than $50 for just 256GB of storage. The Switch 2 supports microSD Express cards up to 2TB in size, although 1TB is the largest capacity widely available (that's an overstatement, as many are sold out currently), with some cards selling for up to $200 a pop. Phew. I suppose it makes sense that they're pricier since they're classified as bonafide PCIe NVMe SSDs by the SD Assoc …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Elden Ring Nightreign just launched, delivering a multiplayer-focused, roguelike-meets-Soulslike experience, and it’s already discounted. Grab it for Steam or Xbox from Newegg at 15 percent off by entering the offer code XVSAVE at checkout. This lets you get it on either platform for $33.99. We previously saw the game discounted by an additional $2 pre-launch, but this is currently the best price available.

Nightreign seems like more of everything that was already great about Elden Ring, plus the ability to squad up with up to three players to cooperatively take on treacherous enemies and bosses. The game utilizes procedural generation to alter some of the base game’s locales. So, don’t let familiarity get to your head to the point that you’re trying to take this adventure on alone (I’m talking to you, let me solo her); both its difficulty and tuning weren’t exactly made with solo players in mind. That said, our Ash Parrish is having a blast playing it that way.

Other great deals for your Friday

• Since there’s now a newer Blink Video Doorbell, Amazon is slashing the cost of the last-gen Blink Video Doorbell to just $29.99 (from $59.99). Sure, it doesn’t have some of the new models’ most appealing features, like person detection, higher video resolution (1440p versus 1080p), or a wider field-of-view, but it’s still worth considering if you’re trying to save money. It uses two AA batteries instead of three in the new model. And, if you want longer battery life, plus the ability to sync extra Blink devices at home, you can opt for the $34.99 Blink Video Doorbell bundle that includes the Sync Module 2. Not bad for a measly $5 extra.

• For avid fans of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 who can’t get enough backstory, the latest Humble bundle goes deep into both worlds with a slate of Dark Horse Comics titles. For $24, you can get 25 comics and graphic novels, including nine volumes of The Witcher, The Witcher: Ronin manga, eight volumes of Cyberpunk 2077, plus multiple art books. One of the most fascinating inclusions is a 1993 comic of The Witcher, which has the first-ever visual representation of Geralt of Rivia. Proceeds from your purchase will go to Special Effect, a UK-based charity that gives to gamers with disabilities.

• If you plan to buy a bunch of Switch 2 games and accessories, welcome to the club. Also, consider getting a paid My Best Buy Plus membership beforehand (it costs $49.99 per year), as you’ll get $20 back for every $150 you spend. You can get up to five $20 promotional certificates on games and accessories. In other words, the membership will pay for itself pretty quickly.

There's a running theory in tech circles that says, basically, AI is the new UI. Not long from now, some people argue, you simply won't need a homescreen full of app icons or a traditional web browser or really anything other than an interface to an AI assistant and agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. Is that the actual future, absurd AI boosterism, or something in between? Who knows! But the ranks of the AI believers seem to grow every day.

Apple, however, appears poised to go… a different way. On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David discuss some of the rumors surrounding WWDC, including the possibility of a huge redesign and a new naming scheme for all of Apple's software. It's all eminently reasonable, if slightly confusing. But is it a coat of paint on an old idea, when what Apple actually needs to do is ship the better Siri it has promised for so long? We have many thoughts. (Oh, and a party speaker update.)

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After the Apple talk, we turn to some of the other tech news of the week, including Nilay's Decoder interview with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Couple that with some new …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in March, we brought you an exclusive look into how Chevrolet's engineers tuned and tweaked, sculpted and simulated to turn the eighth-generation Corvette into a 233-mph missile, the 1,064-horsepower ZR1. But while I'm a racing simulator fan through and through, there's nothing like driving a real car on a real track, and this past week it was time to do exactly that.

That track, the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, is as real as it gets. Host of the Formula One United States Grand Prix since 2012, it's three and a half miles of sinuous asphalt with enough turns to see just how well those engineers sorted the car's handling, plus a long back straight just perfect for letting that big motor really sing.

Staying stuck

COTA is also the perfect place to test out the ZR1's downforce, something that wasn't so much of a factor leading up to the car's record-breaking 233-mph run. More downforce means more grip, which is always nice, but it usually comes with the penalty of aerodynamic drag.

That's one reason why there's actually two different ZR1s. First is the base model, with just the (relatively) petite spoiler on the back of the trunk l …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Imagine playing Fortnite, but instead of fighting other players, all you want to do is break into houses to look for caches of slurp juice. Yes, the storm is closing in on you, and there's a bunch of enemies waiting to kill you, but all you want to do is take a walking tour of Tilted Towers. Then when the match is over, instead of queueing again, you start reading the in-game lore for Peely and Sabrina Carpenter. You can count your number of player kills on one hand meanwhile your number of deaths is in the hundreds. You've never achieved a victory royale, but you've never had more fun.

That's how I play Elden Ring Nightreign.

Nightreign is FromSoftware's first Elden Ring spinoff, and it's unlike any Souls game that the developer has done before. Nightreign has the conceit of so many battle royale games - multiplayer combat focused on acquiring resources across a large map that slowly shrinks over time - wrapped in the narrative, visual aesthetics, and combat of Elden Ring. Instead of the Tarnished, you are a Nightfarer. Instead of the expansive Lands Between, you are sent to Limveld, an island with an ever-shifting landscape. And instead of becoming the Elden Lord, your goal is …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app has been updated ahead of the Switch 2’s release on June 5th. In addition to adding support for the new console, the app includes new options for managing and limiting a child’s access to the Switch 2’s GameChat feature, and provides more details on what games they have been playing.

With parental control limits activated, “It’s only possible for players under 16 to use GameChat with friends who have been approved by their parent or guardian,” according to a support page on Nintendo’s website. Parents or guardians will also be able to add notes in the app for each of their child’s friends if they need a reminder about who those contacts are. The app will also provide a detailed history of who children use GameChat with and for how long.

Nintendo is being especially restrictive when it comes to kids using GameChat’s video capabilities and a camera. “Permission is required from a parent or guardian every time younger players want to use video chat to ensure family rules about use of video sharing are followed.” When a player under 16 starts a video chat, a request will be sent to the parental controls app that needs to be approved before the chat can begin.

Earlier this week, Nintendo also updated its Nintendo Switch App ahead of the new console’s arrival with new features that make it much easier to upload screenshots and videos to a mobile device, as well as expanded functionality for the Switch 2 editions of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

Though the first Nintendo Switch era of Pokémon games was undeniably rocky at times, it brought the series' trading and organization systems into a new level of maturity. It wasn't always easy to complete Pokédexes in remakes like Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl and new entries like Sword and Shield. But those games helped The Pokémon Company create a more seamless way to move your monsters from one title to another, or swap them with friends. And with the Pokémon franchise about to make its big debut on the Switch 2 with the cross-generation game Pokémon Legends: Z-A, it feels like The Pokémon Company is getting ready to take the trading system to the next level.

In the Pokémon games, filling up your Pokédex has always been an exercise in patience, planning, and understanding that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company want you trading with other players rather than trying to catch 'em all on your own. The games' trading mechanics evolved as the series jumped from the Game Boy to new hardware. By Generation IV (the DS games), players could swap monsters remotely over the internet without needing to use wired link cables. And after years of many legendary and mythical pokémon only …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Two years after legal proceedings began, the SEC has formally dropped its lawsuit against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. It was one of the US government’s final ongoing actions against crypto companies.

Lawyers for the SEC and Binance jointly moved to dismiss the case in a filing on Thursday. It follows a 60-day pause requested by both parties in February. The case has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning the SEC can’t pursue it again. “We’re deeply grateful to [SEC] Chairman Paul Atkins and the Trump administration for recognizing that innovation can’t thrive under regulation by enforcement,” Binance told Reuters in a statement, calling the dismissal “a landmark moment.”

The SEC sued Binance in 2023, accusing it, and founder Changpeng Zhao, of operating an illegal exchange in the US and defrauding investors, along with a string of other offenses. Binance settled a separate case with the Department of Justice in 2023, which saw the company agree to pay $4.3 billion in fines. Zhao himself stepped down from the company and pled guilty to breaking anti-money-laundering laws, paying $50 million in personal fines and serving a four-month prison sentence.

The SEC dismissal is the latest sign of the Trump administration’s embrace of the cryptocurrency industry. In April it disbanded a DOJ unit dedicated to enforcing cryptocurrency fraud, and already this year the SEC has dropped investigations into both Coinbase and Robinhood. Meanwhile Trump has bolstered the crypto industry by launching a Crypto Strategic Reserve and hosting a private dinner for those willing to back (or short) his own $TRUMP meme coin.

There are some questionable sources underpinning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial “Make America Healthy Again” commission report. Signs point to AI tomfoolery, and the use of ChatGPT specifically, which calls into question the veracity of the White House report meant to address reasons for the decline in US life expectancy.

An investigation by NOTUS found dozens of errors in the MAHA report, including broken links, wrong issue numbers, and missing or incorrect authors. Some studies were misstated to back up the report’s conclusions, or more damningly, didn’t exist at all. At least seven of the cited sources were entirely fictitious, according to NOTUS.

Another investigation by The Washington Post found that at least 37 of the 522 citations appeared multiple times throughout the report. Notably, the URLs of several references included “oaicite,” a marker that OpenAI applies to responses provided by artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, which strongly suggests its use to develop the report

Generative AI tools have a tendency to spit out false or incorrect information, known as “hallucinations.” That would certainly explain the various errors throughout the report — chatbots have been found responsible for similar citation issues in legal filings submitted by AI experts and even the companies building the models. Nevertheless, RFK Jr has long advocated for the “AI Revolution,” and announced during a House Committee meeting in May that “we are already using these new technologies to manage health care data more efficiently and securely.”

In a briefing on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to concerns about the accuracy of the citations while evading any mention of AI tools. Leavitt described the errors as “formatting issues” and defended the health report for being “backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.” 

The Washington Post notes that the MAHA report file was updated on Thursday to remove some of the oaicite markers and replace some of the non-existent sources with alternative citations. In a statement given to the publication, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said “minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”

Disney Plus and Hulu are both launching new Perks programs that offer subscribers discounts, digital freebies, and sweepstakes in an effort to stand out from the streaming competition.

The Disney Plus Perks program is available now in the US, with an international rollout planned later this year. Offers include a six-month DashPass membership from DoorDash, discounted stays at Walt Disney World, and savings when you shop from Adidas or Funko, along with rotating contests. Hulu is launching its own loyalty scheme on June 2nd. Details on that are still to come, but it will include offers from companies including Microsoft, Pure Green, and LG, with new perks dropping weekly over the summer.

To take advantage of the perks you simply have to be a subscriber to either streaming service, and you’ll get access to both programs if you subscribe to one of the company’s Disney Plus and Hulu bundle plans.

Disney Plus first introduced Perks last year with a handful of contests and early access ticket offers, but the new program has been expanded substantially to what Disney calls an “always-on” array of bonuses.

Google Workspace users are going to see a lot more of Gemini’s efforts to summarize their emails. Gmail now creates summaries automatically for complex threads, and they’ll appear above the emails themselves.

AI-powered summaries of emails have been found in Google Workspace accounts since last year, but until now you’ve had to manually trigger them. Instead, Google’s AI will now decide for itself when a summary might be helpful, generating them without asking for “longer email threads or messages with several replies.” Summaries of email threads will be kept up-to-date with new replies as they come in.

The automatic summaries will now appear above English-language emails, but only on mobile, and may take up to two weeks to appear for your account. Google hasn’t announced if or when the feature will expand to Gmail on desktop, or to Gmail users without paid Workspace accounts.

If Gmail doesn’t generate an AI summary automatically you’ll still be able to ask it to create one, much as you’ve been able to so far. And if you’d rather not see them at all, you can deactivate all of Gmail’s AI features by turning off “Smart features” in the app’s settings.

Scuf is adding drift-resistant Hall effect sticks to updated versions of its wireless Envision and Reflex controllers. The revised models include the $149.99 Envision and $199.99 Envision Pro for PC as well as the $249.99 Reflex Pro and $279.99 Reflex FPS for PlayStation 5 and PC. Those are all starting prices, of course, as the Corsair-owned brand offers a wide variety of customization options that can take each model to even higher prices.

The Hall effect upgrade brings Scuf’s wireless offerings in line with its wired-only Valor Pro and Nomad mobile controllers, replacing the original Reflex and Envision pads that first debuted in 2021 and 2023, respectively.

Scuf is getting with the program on Hall effect sticks at a time when the magnetic, drift-resistant sensing option has become commonplace in other brands like 8BitDo, Razer, and GameSir, but hasn’t appeared in controllers from Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft yet. But some controller makers are already moving on to a more power-efficient drift-resistant technology: TMR sticks.

Scuf controllers may be even pricier than premium controller options from Microsoft and Sony like the Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 and DualSense Edge, but in my experience they’re nice for those willing to spend the money. They’re some of the few native wireless options for Xbox Series X / S and PS5, and Scuf’s rear paddles and clicky hair-trigger options are some of the best feeling “pro” upgrades around. The lack of drift resistant sticks has made it a little more challenging to recommend them, though. Take, for example, our Xbox controller buying guide where the Razer Wolverine Pro V3 knocked off the Scuf Instinct Pro I used to personally love.

Better late than never, Scuf.

For the past several months, it seemed like President Donald Trump and Elon Musk were inseparable. The tech billionaire and "First Buddy" championed Trump on his reelection campaign trail, slept at the White House, attended deal-making dinners at Mar-a-Lago, and chainsawed a giant hole in the government with firings and spending cuts through DOGE.

Now, Musk is saying he's had a change of heart. On May 28th, Musk announced that he's officially stepping away from DOGE as his "scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end." And in the days leading up to this update, Musk has held a flurry of interviews in which he's tried to convince his audience that he's done with politics.

"I think I probably did spend a bit too much time on politics," Musk said during an interview with Ars Technica. "It was just relative time allocation that probably was a little too high on the government side, and I've reduced that significantly in recent weeks." For reasons we've explained, the idea he's leaving politics is suspect - but he's got good reasons to say he is.

Musk's time as a special government employee always had a legal 130-day deadline that was up at the end of May. He isn …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Like Amazon and Apple, Netflix is also looking to cash in on the story of how Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison managed to steal billions from the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

Variety reports that Anthony Boyle (Tetris, Manhunt) and Julia Garner (Ozark, The Fantastic Four: First Steps) have been cast in Netflix’s upcoming drama series The Altruists as Bankman-Fried and Ellison. Executive produced by Graham Moore and Jacqueline Hoyt (who will also showrun the series), The Altruists will recount how Bankman-Fried, FTX’s former CEO, and Ellison, the former head of FTX’s sister cryptocurrency trading firm, Alameda Research, enriched themselves by defrauding FTX’s investors. Netflix has ordered eight episodes for the series, and James Ponsoldt (Shrinking, Running Point) is attached to direct the premiere.

Netflix describes the series as being about “two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists who tried to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye — and then seduced, coaxed, and teased each other into stealing $8 billion,” which sounds accurate, if a bit aggrandizing. Presumably, the show will cover how both Bankman-Fried and Ellison ultimately wound up being sentenced to 25 and two years in prison, respectively. And if The Altruists really wants to be seen as a serious, thoughtful piece of storytelling that isn’t just mythologizing its central felons, it should probably touch on how hard Bankman-Fried is now pushing for Donald Trump to give him a pardon. 

(Disclosure: The Altruists is a coproduction by Higher Ground Productions and New York Magazine/Vox Media Studios.)

Correction, May 29th: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Bankman-Fried pleaded guilty to the charges against him. He pleaded not guilty before he was subsequently sentenced to 25 years.