Department of the Interior employees are preparing their exterior pants. Just hours into his second term, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders designed to overhaul the federal workforce, including one mandating workers return to in-person work.

The move was paired with a hiring freeze on civilian positions and a reclassification of senior-level career workers that would make them easier to fire and replace. The goal is to thin out government agencies by forcing resignations:

• “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” former co-heads of the advisory Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in November. (Ramaswamy has since left DOGE to run for governor of Ohio.)
• About 10% of all federal civilian employees (~228,000 people) had fully remote roles, with nearly half of federal workers eligible for some form of remote work, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
• Trump has also promised to move nearly 100,000 government jobs out of DC, a tactic that led 287 Bureau of Land Management employees to leave the department during his first term.

Private companies are back on the RTO train, too

For a long time post-lockdown, execs would send a strongly worded email to “get on back here,” but employees often resisted. Lately, though, big companies like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T have been demanding workers return in-person, five days a week.

It could turn into a game of chicken: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 75% of US adults are working remotely at least some of the time, and 46% of those workers said they would be unlikely to stay at their jobs if they couldn’t work from home.

Government workers still have a little time…the federal RTO mandate will likely be hit with legal and union hurdles before it can be enforced.—MM

24 states sue to block Trump’s birthright citizenship order. A day after President Trump issued a sweeping executive order to end birthright citizenship, 24 Democratic state attorneys general, along with the cities of San Francisco and Washington, DC, filed a suit in federal court challenging the order. Legal experts say Trump’s bid will likely fail, as the US Constitution grants citizenship to all children born on US soil, and the Supreme Court has upheld that law twice before. Trump is seeking to bar future children born in the US to undocumented immigrants from becoming US citizens.

Trump announced a $100+ billion AI investment. A day after signing dozens of executive orders, the president revealed a joint venture with OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to invest hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure in the US. Dubbed “Stargate,” the venture could inflate to as much as $500 billion over the next four years, CBS News reported. Stargate will reportedly start with a data center in Texas before expanding to other states. Tech companies are racing to build more data centers to power the increase in AI-related computing.

Netflix passed 300 million subscribers in record quarter. The entertainment giant and undisputed streaming wars winner reported 19 million new subscribers in Q4—the biggest addition in company history. That helped Netflix generate $10.25 billion in revenue for the quarter, above analysts’ expectations. Much of the smash quarter was owed to the platform going all-in on live sports: Netflix streamed NFL games for the first time and featured the much-hyped Tyson-Paul boxing match, which Netflix boasted was the most-streamed sporting event ever. This will be the last time the company publicly divulges subscriber figures as it pivots toward emphasizing profits instead.—AE

If one person is pleased with the new Oscars controversy, it’s probably Timothée Chalamet. His biggest competition for the Academy Award for best actor, Adrien Brody, has found himself embroiled in a new drama over the use of AI editing for his lead role in the period drama The Brutalist.

How much AI? The Brutalist director Brady Corbet and editor Dávid Jancsó used a voice-editing tool from the company Respeecher to improve the main characters’ accents for Hungarian dialogue.

• Brody (who is American) and his costar Felicity Jones (who’s British) play Hungarian immigrants in the film, speaking in both English and Hungarian. Corbet said the technology was used for “Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.”
• Jancsó, who is Hungarian, said the edits would have been made manually anyway, and Respeecher simply sped up the process.

There’s more…in an interview from last summer that’s now resurfaced, the director of Emilia Pérez, another prominent Oscar front-runner, admitted to using Respeecher to increase the vocal range of the film’s main character.

Zoom out: While many cinephiles are reproachful about the use of AI in film, others point out that AI is speeding up standard industry processes. Rami Malek, for instance, won the best actor award in 2019 for his performance as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a role that used extensive automatic dialogue replacement.—CC

The Paris Olympics medals are no match for the everlasting participation trophies proudly displayed by your parents.

LVMH, the French luxury juggernaut behind brands like Hennessy and Louis Vuitton, is answering for the shoddy quality of the medals its jewelry subsidiary Chaumet designed for the games. In recent weeks, Olympic medalists have posted pictures on social media of rusted-over medallions looking like bikes that wintered outdoors.

More than 100 athletes asked for replacements, according to the New York Times. The International Olympic Committee apologized and promised to honor the replacement requests.

LVMH says “Not I”

The medal debacle is a headache for LVMH, which poured $163 million into the Summer Games as part of its foray into high-profile sports sponsorships. But the status symbol purveyor washed its hands of the faux pas, claiming this week that Chaumet merely designed the medals.

The centuries-old mint that manufactured the medals, Monnaie de Paris, attributed their deterioration to a change in its varnish formula—a step it took to comply with a recent European Union regulation banning the anti-rust chemical chromium trioxide.

Big picture: The rusty taste in the mouths of Olympians who bit into LVMH’s medals hasn’t stopped it from reclaiming its spot as Europe’s largest company this week, overtaking the Danish pharma giant that makes Ozempic, Novo Nordisk.—SK

Harvard dropout and gold chain enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg is on the path to becoming a literal trillionaire. According to a report by Oxfam, Zuck is one of five current billionaires—including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—who will each amass $1+ trillion in wealth within the next decade. A salute goes out to Musk, the world’s richest person, who could reach that milestone in just five years.

Per the report, the combined wealth of the world’s 2,770 billionaires ballooned three times faster last year than the year before, to a staggering $15 trillion. They’ve parlayed those riches into political power, especially in the US, where four of the five soon-to-be trillionaires were in attendance at President Trump’s inauguration this week.—AE