• Elon Musk's feud with Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is escalating.
• The two have been trading barbs via posts on X for the last week.
• In a recent post, LeCun slammed Musk for his "dangerous political opinions."

Elon Musk's public feud with Meta's AI chief and award-winning scientist, Yann LeCun, is escalating.

The two have been trading barbs via posts on X for the last week, arguing about Musk's management style and the value of scientific work.

On Sunday, LeCun upped the anti, sharing a lengthy X post about his opinion on the Tesla CEO.

While he praised Musk's Tesla cars, SpaceX satellite communication system, and position on open source AI, he also slammed the billionaire for what he called "dangerous" public positions.

LeCun said: "I think his public positions on many political issues, journalism, the media and the press, and academia, are not just wrong but dangerous for democracy, civilization, and human welfare.

"Say what you want about "traditional media," but you can't really have reliable information without professional journalists working for a free and diverse press. Democracy can't exist without it, which is why only authoritarian ennemies of democracy rail against the media."

LeCun also accused Musk of disseminating "batshit-crazy conspiracy theories as long as they serve his interests."

"One would expect a technological visionary to be a rationalist. Rationalism doesn't work without Truth," LeCun wrote.

The AI pioneer also took aim at Musk's Twitter acquisition and subsequent management of the platform. He said the billionaire had been "naïve" about the difficulties of running a social media platform and complications around content moderation.

LeCun said some of Musk's stances on media and political issues had "become particularly concerning since he bought himself a platform to disseminate his dangerous political opinions, conspiracy theories, and hype."

Musk shared a meme about the AI researcher in an apparent response to some of the criticism.

The billionaire received some support from Emad Mostaque, the founder and former CEO of Stability AI. Mostaque shared a post mimicking LeCun's and praising Musk as "the most holistically intelligent, high agency person I know."

Representatives for Musk and LeCun did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

On a mild Houston day in March 2021, Judge Marvin Isgur prepared to oversee the only case on his docket that morning. It was a motion to recuse his longtime colleague on the bench, David Jones, from a case involving a bankrupt engineering company.

Motions are the bread and butter of the US court system, and litigants use recusal motions to request a new judge if they have concerns about a conflict of interest or bias. An independent judge hears the arguments and decides if there is enough evidence to grant the motion, requiring the assigned judge to step aside.

On this day, the circumstances were anything but usual. The motion, filed months earlier, had just been updated with a shocking allegation: Jones was in a "romantic relationship" with attorney Elizabeth Freeman, his former clerk and then a lawyer at Jackson Walker, a Texas firm that often appeared before Jones and Isgur in the Southern District of Texas bankruptcy court, where the pair of judges handled the most high-profile cases.

Michael Van Deelen, the plaintiff in a shareholder case against executives of the engineering company McDermott International, wrote that he'd received a document in the mail alleging the relationship. The note went further, saying that Freeman was the "strategic link" between Jackson Walker attorneys, including Matthew Cavenaugh, and cases handled by Jones.

Freeman and Cavenaugh were both well known to Isgur. Freeman had clerked for Jones for six years, and later joined a special committee the two judges created as they centralized large bankruptcy cases under their control. Cavenaugh was a former Isgur clerk. And yet Isgur had chosen himself when Jones asked him to assign a judge to decide the recusal.

His choice wasn't all that surprising given their 30-year relationship. As law partners, Isgur and Jones had formed a lifelong bond, and as bankruptcy judges, they had created an ambitious, if controversial, machine for attracting cases to the Southern District.

"It's a very special and close relationship that came from being a mentor to a best friend to a colleague," a member of the Houston bar said at a December 2023 hearing, "and created something very big and special in this district."

Van Deelen's motion threatened to unravel it all, exposing grave conflicts of interest and a tight network of informal communications that allowed lawyers, including Freeman, to leverage their access to bring in more cases, building their firm's clout and revenue. "Judge Jones's secret relationship with Ms. Freeman," the US Trustee wrote in a November filing, "created an unlevel 'playing field' for every party in interest in every case Jackson Walker had before Judge Jones."

Several Houston attorneys said they considered Isgur a brilliant judge whose response to the recusal motion was out of character. Over nearly 20 years on the bench, during which he had overseen thousands of cases, he developed a history for being a stickler on questions of ethics.

In 2014, he issued an order removing an attorney who'd worked at his former firm, W. Steve Smith, from his duties overseeing a bankruptcy estate after Smith had sought reimbursement from the estate for around $3,500 for a three-day personal stay prior to an oral argument in New Orleans.

In 2015, Isgur joined another judge to initiate an investigation into another trustee for what they considered improprieties surrounding a creditor payment plan — even though a former chief judge had described the approach as a longstanding practice. In at least two other cases, Isgur has personally questioned witnesses he called himself — including, once, Jones, while he was appearing before Isgur as an attorney.

Bankruptcy judges have broad discretion, what the author Michael Lewis has called "sensational powers," to decide what evidence to allow in a case. And yet in the Jones recusal case, the aggressive Isgur was nowhere to be seen.

First, he ordered the motion and the anonymously authored document sealed. Then, over the course of the roughly 40-minute long hearing, he refused to admit the anonymous note into evidence. He did not call to the stand either Freeman or Cavenaugh, though he knew them both well. And when Van Deelen asked for time to depose witnesses about the allegations, Isgur shut that down, his tone giving off a sense of frustration.

"No, your motion for a continuance is denied," according to audio of the judge's remarks. "I'm not going to let you take a deposition about the contents of an anonymous letter. That would be totally outrageous." Minutes later, Isgur denied the motion for recusal. A US district court judge later denied Van Deelen's appeal, agreeing that the note had no evidentiary value.

The matter may have been largely forgotten, one of any number of denials handed down every day throughout the United States court system.

But the anonymous note resurfaced two and a half years later when Van Deelen filed a lawsuit against Jones, alleging retaliation, this time relying on evidence that Jones and Freeman owned a home together, as Business Insider was the first to report. (Jones has filed a motion to dismiss in that case, which remains pending.)

Over the next 10 days, Jones admitted he and Freeman were in a romantic relationship, earned a rare public rebuke from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and resigned.

It was as if a meteor had hit one of the country's most influential bankruptcy courts. His resignation led 3,500 cases to be reassigned and sparked the Department of Justice to demand Jackson Walker give back nearly $23 million in fees it had earned in cases that Jones had overseen. The Southern District juggernaut, which had pulled in scores of massive cases and enriched the Houston bankruptcy bar, was over.

But Isgur remained unscathed. In her written rebuke of Jones, the Fifth Circuit chief judge took care to note that "on information and belief, the judge who ruled on the motion to recuse was unaware" that Jones and Freeman were romantic partners. But an extensive document trail, social media posts, and nearly a dozen sources inside Houston's legal community suggest that narrative is implausible.

Freeman's attorney, Tom Kirkendall, declined to comment on her behalf. Isgur did not respond to requests for comment sent through his staff. Jones' attorney, Gary Cruciani, did not respond to requests for comment.

"Typically, best friends know the identities of their friends' long-term romantic partners," Nancy Rapoport, an influential legal ethicist and professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, wrote in a paper about the ethical questions surrounding Jones' relationship. "But only Judge Isgur knows what he knew or didn't know about the relationship."

In fact, the rise of the Southern District was inseparable from the close relationships between Jones and Isgur, Jones and Freeman, and the firm where Freeman was a partner, Jackson Walker. The Fifth Circuit found that "substantial" money was involved.

'I love him like a father'

Isgur and Jones first began working together in 1993, when Isgur and Kirkendall, then his law partner, hired Jones out of the University of Houston law school as an associate, Jones said in a February 2022 interview for an American Bankruptcy Institute podcast. Jones was being pursued by a much larger firm, he told someone at the time, when Isgur and Kirkendall persuaded him to join their small litigation boutique. Both men spoke at Jones' wedding reception at Brennan's, the venerable Houston restaurant, according to someone who attended.

It would prove to be his most influential professional relationship. "They took me in, taught me how to think, how to write, and how to be a lawyer," Jones said of Isgur and Kirkendall in March 2023 when he accepted a lifetime achievement award from Emory Law School. Isgur was chosen to introduce him.

For years, Isgur and Jones lived a short distance away from each other in a wealthy enclave on Houston's west side. Jones would go sailing on Galveston Bay with Isgur on his boat. The two men often ate together at hole-in-the-wall restaurants, according to two people familiar with their habits. One of the sources said they were frequently joined at these dinners by their wives.

By some measures, the two men made an odd pair. The elder judge was a Houston native, a member of the influential Winograd real estate family, and a nondrinker. He wore his receding hair cropped close and wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the authority of a man steeped in the law. Behind the bench, he was always in control. Jones, on the other hand, was voluble and audacious. A North Carolina native estranged from his father, Jones liked sharing a drink with members of the Houston bar. As a judge, he would sometimes berate litigants and attorneys in his court, and he liked to boast about how, as an attorney, he had pushed the boundaries of the law.

Yet over the years, their relationship blossomed into something almost familial. "I love him like a father," Jones once said of Isgur. In introducing Jones at the Emory event, Isgur called him his "stubborn adopted son."

"There is no better feeling than when a parent watches his child surpass him in capability and achievement," Isgur said. "I am so proud."

Isgur's only actual child, Sarah, is a conservative lawyer known for her close relationships with Supreme Court justices and her three years in the Trump administration. Most recently, she's made a name hosting a must-listen legal podcast, Advisory Opinions, in which she has repeatedly explored questions of judicial ethics.

When Jones appeared on the podcast in 2020, their dynamic was warm. Sarah called him a "family friend," and Jones congratulated Isgur on her pregnancy. Several years earlier, when Sarah got married in the federal courthouse, her father officiated and Jones and his then wife were in attendance, according to one wedding guest.

After Isgur became a bankruptcy judge, appointed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2004, Jones joined Porter Hedges, a Houston law firm whose 1981 founding made it a relative newcomer to the city's legal scene. Porter Hedges' scrappy status gave Jones the freedom to further develop into an aggressive litigator, making his name representing trustees charged with selling off assets in Chapter 7 bankruptcies.

Legal records suggest that Jones may have first crossed paths with Freeman in 2002, when he was still in private practice with Isgur; that year, she represented a creditor and Jones a trustee in the same bankruptcy case. Over four days in March 2008, each attorney was assigned to a case the other had already been working on for months. By the following year, Freeman had joined Porter Hedges as a partner to work with Jones in the bankruptcy practice, according to a person who knew them at the time. Her husband had recently joined Porter Hedges, too.

At Porter Hedges, Jones and Freeman worked closely together. In several pleadings from that time, they appear on the same signature block, indicating that they were jointly handling a case.

It's unclear when Jones and Freeman first became romantically involved, but Porter Hedges appeared to take a more liberal stance on interoffice romance than many Big Law firms did at the time. John Higgins, a senior partner, started dating Whitney Ables when they worked together at Porter; they were later married in a ceremony Jones officiated. Josh Wolfshohl also met his wife Amy Lucas while they were working together there; both remain at the firm. And Porter hired Freeman even though her husband was already a partner there.

Isgur, during his time on the bench, had encouraged Jones to consider becoming a bankruptcy judge. When Judge Wesley Steen retired from the Southern District of Texas bankruptcy court in 2011, Jones got his chance, and applied to the Fifth Circuit — whose judges appoint bankruptcy judges in the circuit — to fill Steen's seat. Jones would again become a close colleague of his mentor.

Isgur moved quickly to get Jones hearing cases, swearing him in at a private ceremony in advance of the official investiture, a small gathering he hosted in his courtroom on the fourth floor of Houston's federal courthouse. About two dozen people were there, according to two people who attended, including Freeman. She was tasked with taking pictures, and at one point, her emotions overcame her and she teared up, according to one of the attendees.

By then, Freeman had already decided to leave her job at Porter Hedges, where she was poised to earn handsomely by taking over casework from Jones. That year, partners at Houston's law firms earned on average nearly $800,000, according to one compensation survey. Instead, she took up a position as Jones' permanent clerk, likely making closer to $100,000 in a role she would hold for the next six years. The following year, her husband moved to dissolve their marriage, according to Harris County records.

"When I heard she went and became his law clerk, I thought that's a surprise. I would not have expected that to be a typical career path for Liz," said a former colleague of theirs at Porter Hedges. "When I heard that they were eventually found to be cohabitating, it didn't surprise me."

Just months after Freeman began her clerkship, Jones too got divorced.

"I probably should have talked with, at that time, my wife — now my ex-wife — about that decision, because that's obviously a huge change," Jones told Reuters in 2020. "I just decided that it was something that I was going to do and if I was going to do it, I was going to devote the same energy into being a judge that I did into being a lawyer." He suggested in another interview that the couple experienced tension over the decrease in his pay.

Jones kept the house he had shared with his wife, and sometime later, Freeman moved in with him, according to one person aware of the arrangement. The real estate photos Jones used later to sell the home showed what looked like a boy's bedroom, even though Freeman was the only one in the couple with kids, and a closet that held women's clothing.

In 2017, Jones purchased a house in a gentrifying neighborhood in northwest Houston, not far from his previous home. He and Freeman toured the home together, and Jones ultimately paid $985,000 in cash, Bloomberg reported in April. Real estate records show that they came to jointly own it.

Whether Isgur visited Jones at the homes he shared with Freeman is unclear, but the elder judge would have witnessed the dynamic between the pair over the six years they all worked closely together at the Houston courthouse.

"They set up the special panel because they are great judges, and they are great arbiters of the law, and then to say they don't have the same sensibility with the people they have lunch with beggars disbelief," said Bruce Markell, a former federal bankruptcy judge in Nevada who now teaches law at Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law. "It's not like Isgur didn't know her. Whether he knew about the relationship or not I don't know, but it would be difficult for me to think that Isgur was taken completely by surprise by the allegations."

A plan to grow the Houston court

When Jones joined the bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas, Delaware and New York dominated as the venue of choice for major corporate bankruptcies. But Jones and Isgur came up with a plan to make Houston a magnet.

Corporate bankruptcies are big business. For decades, the process has been used by companies with too much debt and not enough cash to find fresh footing — and over time, it's become one of the most lucrative areas of law. Top attorneys can make up to $2,500 an hour in bankruptcy cases, the kind of money that can warp a system. In recent decades, bankruptcy forum shopping has become rampant, with firms filing in whatever federal district they like, just by showing a local address there. Sometimes a PO Box is enough. So lawyers tend to congregate where they find corporate-friendly judges who have a reputation for quickly moving companies through the process and signing off on lawyers' fees.

While Delaware and New York dominated as the venues of choice for major bankruptcies, millions of dollars flowed into the coffers of local law firms. The judges became their own power centers, with every decision affecting the paychecks of local lawyers and the fortunes of their firms: Decide against the debtor and their law firm might seek a different venue for their next client.

Houston judges had tried to break into the upper ranks before, without success. Judge William Greendyke promised attorneys in 2000 that the judges' "war on fees is over," according to Lynn LoPucki's book Courting Failure. A year later, Houston-based Enron still chose New York for its spectacular bankruptcy.

In 2016, Jones and Isgur began to hatch a more ambitious plan to make Houston welcoming. Success would mean more money for the men and women of the local bankruptcy bar, and more power and prestige for the Southern District of Texas. They created a special panel for complex cases, changing Southern District rules so extremely large or complex Chapter 11 bankruptcies — including, now, those involving at least $200 million in debt — would get an unusual degree of predictability. Even though the Judicial Conference, which sets policy for the federal courts, had long supported the random assignment of federal judges in order to deter judge-shopping, the new Southern District scheme would assign every complex case to just one of two judges: Jones or Isgur.

"Overnight, bankruptcy lawyers that typically worked on large, complex cases before any one of 3 or 4 sitting bankruptcy judges," Jackson Walker wrote in a court filing last month, "now would be practicing almost exclusively (and routinely) before 1 of 2 bankruptcy judges."

It was an effort, the firm said, to "make procedures more transparent and predictable."

In fact, the two men sought to achieve an extraordinary degree of consistency across their two dockets and would often discuss each other's cases, according to someone who heard it directly from Jones. The two men would walk back and forth to each other's chambers on the courthouse's fourth floor. "We talk every day, multiple times, whether he wants to or not," Jones said in his remarks last year at Emory. "I can't imagine him not being right down the hall."

The judges threw open the doors to the bankruptcy bar, creating a committee of bankruptcy attorneys to advise the judges on industry best practices. Among the founding members were Patricia Tomasco, then a partner at Jackson Walker; Christopher Lopez, an attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges who would go on to become a Southern District judge; and Greendyke, who had by then retired as a judge.

Another reform was to promise attorneys for major corporations concierge access to court officials to expedite scheduling and process matters. Jones assigned his case manager, Albert Alonzo, a government-issued cell phone and told him to answer it whenever it rang. Jones would call him in the middle of the night to test his resolve and Alonzo always answered, the judge told Reuters in 2020.

"He is the public's way to talk with me," Jones told the Texas Lawbook in 2020. "He has tremendous scheduling authority. He's great at customer service."

As they worked together, the two men grew close. Jones said he spent time with Alonzo's family during the holidays and at least once he and Freeman attended Alonzo's annual tamale-making party together, according to a social media post.

A close circle of lawyers around Jones

Isgur was known to avoid spending time with Houston's bankruptcy bar outside of the courthouse or official conferences. But just down the hall, Jones routinely blurred the boundaries between his professional and personal lives, becoming friends with a group of attorneys who often appeared before him.

Jones had issued an order in 2016 arguing against "unspoken practices, or disparate treatment" even as he was offering special access, in a variety of ways, for this small network of lawyers.

According to two attorneys close to Jones' circle, a small group of lawyers would often hang around Jones' chambers, which he decorated with framed news articles about him. One, a 2020 Houston Chronicle profile, was headlined: "Meet the judge who saved the Texas bankruptcy practice." (After that article came out, someone taped up a piece of paper outside the fourth floor elevators with the word "savior" and an arrow pointing to Jones' courtroom, a third attorney recalls.)

The locked entrance to his chambers became such a revolving door that when Van Deelen pressed the buzzer in October 2023, intending to hand his retaliation lawsuit to Jones, he was let in with no questions asked, he said. Alonzo once posted that a lawyer close to Jones, Susan Tran Adams, stopped by with coffee and empanadas.

On his frequent visits to Jones' chambers, Isgur likely saw the crowd, which often included Freeman. Two attorneys specifically recall Isgur entering Jones' chambers while other lawyers were present.

Jones said he and some of the lawyers formed a cooking team that would enter local barbecue and chili competitions, and several in the group recently started a nonprofit together. Social media posts over the years of informal gatherings show Jones, Freeman, and Alonzo hamming it up with other lawyers.

The following year, a Houston bankruptcy attorney invited a group of lawyers, including Jackson Walker attorneys Matt Cavenaugh, Veronica Polnick, and Genevieve Graham, as well as Freeman, then running her own practice, to a party for Jones, according to someone who was told about the party.

At the root of many of these friendships was a drop-in evidence class Jones began to lead for Houston lawyers soon after he joined the bench. The free class started small and invite-only, but after several years grew to number 40 or 50 students, according to someone who attended.

Regulars included attorneys who worked at, or would later join, Jackson Walker, according to emails, such as Polnick, Graham, and Cavenaugh. According to a recent Jackson Walker legal filing, "other bankruptcy judges and prominent local practitioners attended the classes" as well.

"They were well attended," said another Houston bankruptcy attorney. "I attended a couple, and you could really see the young attorneys clicking."

Jones clicked with them, too. "There are several young lawyers that are present tonight that I first met in a weekly class that I teach in my courtroom on most Wednesdays," Jones said in his prepared remarks for the Emory event last year. "It also turned out that the class was as much of a learning session for me as it was a teaching session. Not only did we become better professionals together, we became friends."

Jones officiated the marriages of at least two lawyers who attended those classes: Tran and Graham.

The class was effectively yet another Jones strategy for attracting bankruptcy filings to the Southern District — and a way for members of the Houston bar to explore tactics they might later deploy in Jones' court.

The classes were sometimes also a ticket to career advancement. At least one young law graduate, Christina Morrison, used the classes to successfully audition for a clerkship with Jones.

Isgur was well aware of the tight legal community around Jones' evidence class. He told the assembled crowd at Emory how "young lawyers show up weekly — dozens of them — to learn trial tactics and bankruptcy from David."

After I tried and failed to find an opportunity to introduce myself to Isgur at the courthouse, I visited Isgur's home in April, hoping to find out how the judge was currently feeling about his adopted son and to ask when he first became aware of Jones' relationship with Freeman.

A woman who appeared to be his wife answered, keeping the door closed and speaking through a side window of the stately brick home. "Get the hell away from us," she said, after I identified myself as a journalist. When I turned to leave, the woman noticed that my hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She commented on the style, and when I turned back to face her, she began to mock me, moving her hips in a side-to-side dance. "Do you want to wear a skirt or earrings? Are you trans?"

As her voice rose, she hurled an expletive and screamed, "Get off the property!"

Rumors of a romantic relationship

Jones and Isgur's efforts soon began to attract hundreds of filings to the district. Big names showed up: Neiman Marcus and J.C. Penney, then Chesapeake Energy.

Tomasco, the Jackson Walker partner who was a member of the complex cases committee, had already been doing her part to build up the court and drum up business for her firm by flying to New York in a campaign to convince the Big Law bankruptcy attorneys to bring their cases south. But the flow of cases only escalated after Freeman left her clerkship, in May 2018, and joined the firm.

Freeman quickly became known as someone who bristled over complying with protocols and failed to loop her colleagues in on critical communications.

She and Cavenaugh set up a business agreement that, according to two of their professional contacts, appeared to be premised on Freeman's tight relationship with Jones paying off. Though Freeman hadn't worked at a law firm in six years, Cavenaugh and Freeman agreed to split the origination income they got for bringing in new cases, according to the two sources, who were told about the arrangement. Like anyone exiting public service, Freeman hadn't done marketing in years. If she hadn't delivered, it could have meant a substantial compensation loss for Cavenaugh. Instead, according to a November Jackson Walker filing, Freeman enjoyed "quick and substantial success."

"Sharing origination fees is common in the industry, and it is well known that sharing is part of our culture at Jackson Walker," firm spokesperson Jim Wilkinson said by email. "We quite often share origination fees among attorneys irrespective of location and there is nothing out of the ordinary with our compensation practices."

Already, the rumors about Jones and Freeman's romantic relationship were frequent enough that at least one attorney confronted Jones about it; Jones responded by denying the relationship.

"I would see them going to lunch together," said the former colleague from Porter Hedges. "It's not unusual for judges and their clerks to go to lunch together but we typically think of a federal judge's law clerk in bankruptcy or district court as a substantially younger person relatively recently out of school. The optics were different."

Now, Jackson Walker had a partner with a direct line to the leading judge of the Southern District of Texas bankruptcy court. Business boomed. During Jones' career on the bench, two firms, Kirkland & Ellis and Jackson Walker, represented the most debtors with confirmed Chapter 11 plans, according to data provider Lex Machina. And Kirkland & Ellis — whose attorneys were invited to Jones' evidence class as special guests at least twice, according to emails — often relied on Jackson Walker as its local counsel.

Between 2012 and 2017, before Freeman left for Jackson Walker, just 27 companies with liabilities of $100 million or more filed their bankruptcy in the Southern District of Texas, according to BankruptcyData. From 2018 through 2023 that number more than quadrupled to 148. During the three years ending in 2023, Jones and Isgur together handled nearly a third of all bankruptcy cases with liabilities over $1 billion.

Jackson Walker was involved in a large number of them, with Freeman, as the US Trustee said, creating an "unlevel 'playing field.'"

The Trustee Program has filed several motions to force the law firm to disgorge a total of nearly $23 million in what it called "tainted" fees collected in cases involving Jackson Walker that were heard by Jones as far back as 2018. More than $2 million of those fees were personally collected by Freeman.

As a clerk, Freeman was present while Jones and Isgur were concocting the idea of the complex cases committee. As a Jackson Walker attorney, she became a formal member. But Freeman continued to act as if she were an insider. When Tomasco, for example, asked the committee members in a December 27, 2021, email if the court's hybrid hearing schedule would change, Freeman responded, according to correspondence BI obtained through a public records request. "It will continue until further notice," she wrote from her Jackson Walker address.

By this point, Isgur had become one of the busiest bankruptcy judges in the country. Jackson Walker attorneys including Cavenaugh and Freeman were frequently appearing in front of him. 

And companies were now aggressively venue shopping in the Southern District of Texas.

Bankruptcy rules require a company to be based in the district for 180 days. But court filings in the 2023 bankruptcy of the biopharmaceutical company Sorrento show that Jackson Walker attorney Veronica Polnick — another former Jones clerk — visited a UPS Store on the outskirts of Houston to open a mailbox less than 10 hours before the company filed for bankruptcy.

That UPS store soon became the principal place of business for other Jackson Walker clients, according to legal filings: medical technology firm Surgalign Spine Technologies, sweet treat subscription company Candy Club LLC, and industrial food startup AppHarvest Products, all with mailboxes registered by Polnick — in one instance for a case filed by Cavenaugh.

So much bankruptcy business was coming into Houston that attorneys there were getting bold.

In April 2022, the bankruptcy bar met for a conference at the Omni Hotel in Corpus Christi, a chance for attorneys to get continuing education credits — and face time with judges. A panel titled "Judges Panel — Ask Anything You Want!" at the end of the three-day event gave attorneys an open forum to ask questions of Jones, Isgur, and the other bankruptcy judges of the Southern District of Texas.

As Cavenaugh roamed the room with the mic, one attorney spoke up, saying clients had reported that other attorneys were suggesting they had a special connection with the judges of the Southern District. The attorney asked the judges how lawyers should respond the next time they heard something about these attorneys' special status, according to someone in attendance.

Jones, in prefacing a noncommittal answer, suggested that the question was likely directed at him, the source recalled.

By then, Cavenaugh and Jackson Walker were aware of the allegations of a Jones-Freeman relationship, according to documents the firm later filed in court. Van Deelen had received the explosive anonymous note 13 months before, and an email he sent to Cavenaugh right after receiving it had sparked an apparently cursory internal Jackson Walker investigation.

Freeman admitted that she and Jones had been in a relationship, but said it had ended, according to a draft letter the firm's then-general counsel wrote in August 2021 to an outside ethics consultant. "Elizabeth has confirmed that there is no current romantic relationship between herself and Judge Jones and that none is expected going forward. According to Elizabeth, there has been no romantic relationship since prior to the time in March 2020 when COVID caused so many of us to shift to remote work and virtual-only meetings. Judge Jones and Elizabeth each own their own homes; they do not and have not lived together."

The letter also described Freeman's critical role bringing in new business to the firm since she had joined in 2018. "Jackson Walker's debtor practice grew very substantially during this time, including cases in which we took an expansive local counsel role, with Kirkland Ellis acting as lead counsel, and cases in which we were lead debtor's counsel. Much of this work was in cases before either Judge Isgur or Judge Jones. This success was a team effort, involving other bankruptcy partners as well, but Elizabeth's leadership and contribution were recognized as integral."

The letter said Jackson Walker had requested that Freeman stop working on cases once they'd been filed with Jones for a two-year cooling off period from the date Freeman claimed their romance had ended. While the firm understood "that a close personal relationship remains" between Freeman and Jones, the letter said, "no further details were sought at that time."

Jackson Walker later learned Freeman hadn't been truthful. The firm's counsel at Norton Rose Fulbright — Greendyke, the former bankruptcy judge — said in a November pleading that in 2022 Jackson Walker had "learned, quite by accident, that Ms. Freeman's denial was possibly false or at least no longer true. When confronted again she initially denied the relationship but later on admitted to a current romantic relationship."

When Freeman retained counsel, she chose someone with close ties to her romantic partner: Tom Kirkendall, Jones' first boss in the legal profession and someone who described Isgur to Business Insider as "a wonderful law partner of mine for over 10 years" and "a dear friend." (Kirkendall declined to comment on other aspects of this story.)

Later that year, Jones called Cavenaugh to his chambers after a hearing and "insinuated" that he was "unhappy" with the firm's push to disclose the relationship, the firm said in another filing. Instead, Jackson Walker said, Jones handed Cavenaugh a piece of paper with a proposed disclosure that listed a "close personal relationship" with Freeman sandwiched between references to a "social friendship" with Polnick and with Graham. Jackson Walker, Jones insisted, "needs to make this happen," instructing the firm to file the disclosure in all future cases before him, according to the filing.

Finding the language "potentially misleading or untruthful," Jackson Walker said it negotiated Freeman's departure instead; she left the firm in December 2022 to set up her own practice.

But Jackson Walker appeared to keep knowledge of the relationship to itself. The firm's attorneys continued to recommend Freeman for legal work on cases before the Southern District.

"Jackson Walker has a strong and proven culture of ethics and integrity, and when we learned about this issue, we acted responsibly," Wilkinson, a spokesperson for the firm, said by email. "Our firm has been transparent, and our fulsome public filings speak for themselves."

Conflicts of interest appeared immediately. Within weeks, Freeman, serving as contract attorney to bond issuer GWG Holdings Inc., whose bankruptcy case was being handled by Jackson Walker, told Judge Isgur she took "some comfort" knowing that Jones was serving as mediator in the case, according to a December 16, 2022, transcript. During the mediation, in which Freeman participated, Jones suggested naming an independent trustee, according to public remarks by Mike Warner, a lawyer involved in the case.

Freeman was ultimately chosen by the creditors to oversee the wind-down trust in that case, a role expected to earn her $100,000 a month. Neither Jones, nor Jackson Walker, nor Freeman disclosed the relationship.

Containing the fallout

After the romantic relationship became public last October and Jones resigned, Isgur found himself once again at the center of a recusal matter. The estate of a creditor in 4E Brands, a manufacturer of hand sanitizer, whose bankruptcy case was transferred from Jones to Isgur, argued in October that Isgur was too close to Jones to rule on the case independently. The US Trustee, which oversees federal bankruptcy cases, supported the motion, arguing the case should never have been heard by Jones in the first place.

Yet in an apparent attempt to contain the fallout from Jones' ethics implosion, the Southern District's chief bankruptcy judge, Eduardo Rodriguez, ruled against the creditor. Isgur can continue to hear the case, he ruled, writing in the December 2023 opinion that lawyers for the creditor "failed to demonstrate much other than that former Judge Jones and Judge Isgur are close friends." (The creditor has filed an appeal.)

Rodriguez wrote that the estate had provided no evidence Isgur had "extrajudicial knowledge" of Jones' relationship or showed a "high degree of antagonism" in denying Van Deelen's March 2021 recusal motion — despite the magnitude of Isgur's missed opportunity.

In the Sorrento case, a litigant filed in February to remove the case from the Southern District of Texas. Again, the US Trustee lent its support, calling Sorrento's PO Box maneuver "a case of forum shopping and venue manipulation taken to a new and unprecedented extreme." Again, a Southern District judge shut it down. This time, Judge Lopez — a member of the complex cases committee turned judge — denied the motion. (Lopez had replaced Isgur when Isgur stepped down from the complex cases panel at the end of 2022; Isgur returned to the panel as Lopez's partner after Jones resigned in disgrace.)

The Southern District has stuck to the model Jones created, of sending every complex case to a panel of two judges, flouting new guidance issued by the Judicial Conference of the US in March that further promotes random case assignment to limit "the ability of litigants to effectively choose judges in certain cases by where they file a lawsuit."

Effectively choosing judges, and knowing with a high degree of clarity how those judges would rule, was the very essence of the Jones machine.

Meanwhile, the US Trustee's motions seeking to disgorge nearly $23 million in fees Jackson Walker collected in 33 cases in front of Jones has been bottled up. Those cases have been combined into a single proceeding, overseen at this stage by Rodriguez. That consolidation delays or even prevents what many would like: an impartial judge from outside the district hearing the cases and putting key players in the machine under oath.

The US Trustee began taking discovery on May 15, according to a scheduling order, but a settlement could halt that process and eliminate the risk that Cavenaugh, Freeman, Jones, or even Isgur would have to testify.

That might be fine with the Fifth Circuit.

Earlier this year, the circuit judges chose Alfredo Perez, a retired Weil, Gotshal & Manges bankruptcy attorney, to replace Jones. The pick was widely interpreted as a sign that the Fifth Circuit had come to enjoy Houston's recent success and didn't want it to end with Jones' career. Isgur told Bloomberg recently that he plans to give up handling complex cases, which would clear the way for Perez to take over. Former chief Southern District judge Richard Schmidt told Bloomberg that Perez's experience handling large cases would be a "godsend" for the district. "I can't imagine a better selection given the circumstances," he said.

Meanwhile, according to Debtwire, the Southern District of Texas' popularity has plunged. Through May 4, only 10% of the large Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings this year tracked by the data provider have been filed in the district, less than half what it was last year.

That's well short of Delaware's current share — 39%.

Additional reporting: Jack Newsham.

• MrBeast has become YouTube's most subscribed channel.
• The YouTube superstar beat out Indian music channel T-Series to take the crown.
• He posted on X that he had "finally avenged Pewdiepie," who was overtaken by T-Series in 2019. 

Mr Beast has finally taken the crown of YouTube's most subscribed channel.

Jimmy Donaldson, who runs the channel famous for its elaborate challenges and extravagant giveaways, posted on X that MrBeast had reached over 266 million subscribers, passing the popular Indian music channel T-Series. At the time of writing, his subscriber count had soared to 269 million. T-Series currently has around 266 million.

Business Insider contacted YouTube for comment but didn't immediately hear back.

"After 6 years we have finally avenged Pewdiepie," wrote the content creator on Sunday — a reference to YouTuber Felix Kjellberg, also known as PewDiePie, who held YouTube's number-one spot until he was overtaken by T-Series in 2019.

Overtaking T-Series marks an extraordinary rise for Donaldson, who has avoided the cycle of decline suffered by many other internet personalities.

MrBeast is known for his opulent videos, in which his followers compete for huge cash prizes.

He's been uploading videos to YouTube since 2012, and has since expanded into the food business with his range of Feastables chocolates and burger brand MrBeast Burger.

Donaldson later sued the company behind the MrBeast Burger chain, claiming that their "terrible quality" burgers were damaging his brand.

Donaldson also recently announced that he had struck a deal with Amazon to create a game show for Amazon Prime called "Beast Games" that will see 1,000 people compete for a prize of $5 million.

The YouTuber told Time Magazine in February that he earns $600 to $700 million a year — but that he doesn't think of himself as rich, as he reinvests everything he earns into his videos.

For the better part of a year in 2017, I could barely will myself to leave my house. I was experiencing a prolonged depressive episode with daily, sometimes hourly, panic attacks, and I couldn't see the point in continuing on.

Many things helped me survive. Talking it through in therapy several times a week was like opening a pressure valve in my brain — it kept me functioning just enough to get by. Medication had mixed results — I felt less panicky, but also less joy, excitement, and other essential emotions. Crying to friends provided temporary catharsis. But it wasn't until I discovered Muay Thai, a form of kickboxing, that it felt as if day-to-day life might provide something other than hopelessness.

Every other form of healing I'd tried had focused my mind — its disordered thoughts and supposed chemical imbalances. What I hadn't tried was getting out of it altogether. When firm but well-meaning coaches yelled at me to fix my form, do five more pushups, and kick the bag until my shins were red and nearly bleeding, it jump-started my nervous system. It made me feel human again.

It's a trope to say you should not tell a depressed person to go outside, take a walk, or go for a run. Doing so would dismiss the severity and reality of their illness, like telling someone with a broken arm to go play catch. To some extent, this is true: It's probably not the best idea to tell someone struggling deeply with mental illness to simply suck it up and walk it off. But it's also true that when someone encouraged me to get out there and use my body, it was precisely what I needed at my lowest moment. I ended up at the gym only because my friends repeatedly encouraged me to come with them to a class until one day I finally did. It wasn't a cure-all, but it made me believe that a solution might exist.

Many of our collective crises — depression, anxiety, unhealthiness, and loneliness — are made worse by the same thing: our tendency toward a sedentary, shut-in lifestyle. We live in a society that makes it extremely difficult to find the time and space to be active. An abundance of research shows that exercise is good for depression, and yet most of the time when I hear people talk about the mental-health crisis — on TikTok, on X, and in real life — it is rarely mentioned. In my experience, it's much more common to hear people talk about finding the right diagnosis, the right medication, and the right kind of therapy than it is to see people encouraging their loved ones to get the heck outside.

Many of us know exercise is good for us. All that's left is getting up off our asses.

---

The evidence is overwhelming that physical activity is good for both our bodies and our brains. A meta-review of studies that included 128,000 participants found that exercise of any kind significantly reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression. There are several theories as to why this is — exercise could increase the availability of neurotransmitters like dopamine in the brain, or it could help the brain form new neural pathways that are helpful to escaping cycles of depression. Either way, moving is good for our brains.

And the physical consequences of not moving enough are well-documented: heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and a host of other maladies are linked to low physical activity. It is also bad for our mental health: A 2014 meta-analysis of more than 100,000 people found that increased sedentary time was positively correlated with rates of depression. A study from the beginning of COVID found that it was harder for people to stop being depressed if they spent too much time sitting.

Depression is a vicious cycle; it pits your brain against itself.

Despite the research, Americans have become less active over time. By one estimate, we're getting 27 fewer minutes of physical activity on average each day than we did 200 years ago. And for the past several decades, only about a quarter of American adults have met the recommended guidance of at least 20 minutes of exercise a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One 2019 study found that we spent 82% of our time sedentary.

For kids, who need even more physical activity, the decline is stark. A 2022 Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth gave the US a D- score, concluding that America, while never sufficiently supportive of physical activity, had become even worse at making the space and time for it. In 2007, an estimated 30% of adolescents completed the recommended 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity every day. By 2020 that number had fallen below 9%. Far fewer kids participate in team sports or walk or bike to school than did in the past, the report found. In Canada, as one study put it, pediatricians are so concerned about the decline in physical activity that they are encouraging parents to let kids engage in "thrilling and exciting forms of free play that involve uncertainty of outcome and a possibility of physical injury."

Instead of getting enough exercise, we're stuck lounging around on our phones. We've replaced real-world, bodily stimulation with mental stimulation from our screens. Meanwhile, our brains are rotting. In one study, nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 29 reported experiencing depression or anxiety in 2023. And over the past few decades, mental illness for teens and children has been on the rise.

Instead of looking at the situation and concluding that we all need to exercise more, some people are doing the opposite. Certain trends circulating social media emphasize not using your body: "hurkle-durkle," aka "bed rotting," involves wrapping yourself in comfy clothes and bed linens and staying in bed way past the time you should be waking up. But while there is a time and place for doing nothing and relaxing, Americans aren't actually getting more rest. Much of the country is chronically underslept.

In this trend, I see the logic of depression — the sense that nothing can or will change so there's no point in trying. Much of America, it seems, has given up on trying to be active.

---

Over time, my year from hell faded from my mind. But eventually, my exercise routine went with it. I didn't need to work out to stay sane, I thought, and so I stopped committing to it. Then I moved away from the Muay Thai gym and completely fell out of the routine. After a few years, the depression caught up to me. It wasn't as catastrophic as before, more of a persistent ennui that was hard to shake. I tried to figure it out in therapy. I tried to intellectualize it. I tried to excuse it: There was no point in trying anything, life was just inherently bad, the political state of the world was scary, the outside world was too expensive. It wasn't working.

I've gotten to the point where exercise — being in my body, sweating — is more important to me than more mind-oriented forms of therapy.

Then one day, early in the pandemic when I was prone to languishing in my room for hours on end, a roommate suggested I come to the tennis court with them for an hour. I was immediately hooked. Playing tennis with friends several times a week wasn't just fun, and it didn't just help get me into shape — it became a main focal point of my life. It provided me with a new relationship to my body and mind. I'd forgotten that exercise, while not a cure for my mental illness, was a necessary precursor to my mental wellness. After years of intellectualizing my sadness and discomfort, I once again had something that got me into my body, got my endorphins going, and, most important, got me to stop thinking about anything other than where to place the ball on the other side of the court.

Depression is a vicious cycle; it pits your brain against itself. When I was at my worst, the usual advice of "don't tell a depressed person what to do" wasn't helpful to me because I needed someone to help me break that cycle by telling me to stop repeating the same patterns. What saved me was friends who helped me get out of the house, suggested I join the gym with them, or encouraged me to do anything to get me out of my head.

I still sometimes get depressed. I still struggle with mental health. But I now feel as if I have a reliable way to help myself out of it. I've gotten to the point where exercise — being in my body, sweating — is more important to me than more mind-oriented forms of therapy. It's not a magic cure, but I now see it as a fundamental baseline. If I'm not moving, nothing will help my sad state.

SSRI prescriptions continue to rise and more people are seeking therapy, but depression and anxiety rates remain sky-high. If you've tried nearly everything else, why not simply get moving?

---

P.E. Moskowitz runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter on psychology, psychiatry, and modern society. They are also the author of the forthcoming book Rabbit Hole, a combination of memoir and reportage about the role drugs play in our happiness.

• Richard Grove is the 79-year-old CEO of Ink Inc. Public Relations and has no plans to retire soon.
• Grove founded his company 30 years ago and enjoys the competitive nature of public relations.
• He stays active with exercise, family visits, and long-distance motorcycle riding adventures.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Richard Grove, the 79-year-old CEO of Ink Inc. Public Relations in Kansas City, Missouri. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I'm the founder, chairman, and CEO of Ink Inc. Public Relations, and I'm 79 years old. I live on a 27-acre property in Kansas and am fortunate enough to be surrounded by friends and family who support my desire to continue to work.

My career began at Burson-Marsteller in New York City in 1968 and progressed through several other large PR firms and C-level stints on the corporate side. Thirty years ago, I founded Ink Inc. to go off on my own.

I still work every day and have no immediate plans to retire.

I'm still working because I still love my career

One of the things that keeps me going is having a competitive nature. Securing media can be a chase, and the chase never gets old. There's a lot of "no" in PR, and if you don't embrace the chase, you're lessening the chances to feel and earn on your client's behalf the satisfaction of succeeding.

I never really considered retiring in my 60s when many people typically do. However, when it becomes drudgery, or I find myself bored beyond recovery, which hasn't happened yet, I may.

I do look forward to turning over the reins of CEO management, which I've been doing gradually for the last year, so I might spend more time on the creative side of the business, including writing and pursuing prospective clients on a personal level. I don't have a set age when I plan to stop working entirely.

I'm not planning on retiring in the classic sense to some golf course

Most people experience fatigue, but I've never felt burned out. PR is a pressure-filled profession, a little more so at the top. Sometimes, clients, the media, or your employees can drive you a little nuts. I've been doing it for so long that I know these trials come in cycles and have a way of working themselves out with a little skill and patience.

I'm extremely fortunate that I continue to be in excellent health. I've lost close friends and family to various ailments and remain conscious of my fortuity. I'm committed to exercising and watching my diet. I still work out several times a week. I also keep my mind sharp and am always learning.

My kids and grandkids are extremely important in my life. Family is the real legacy we leave behind, not some business, successful or not. They live in California and Vietnam, but we share our lives with personal visits several times a year and weekly Zoom calls.

My age sometimes surprises people

I notice that people underestimate my age due to my demeanor and gait. Maintaining a sense of wonder and humor and literally walking fast so the young ones don't overtake me has been a valuable combination.

I often get comments about how fast I walk "for my age." This is a term I personally loathe, as if it's predetermined how one is supposed to act, or walk, at a certain point in life.

I have a passion for everyday life, even its ugly negative sides, and a sense of integrity, where I strive to do the right thing even though it might not always work out. My sense of humor about the absurdities around us is a big part of who I am.

I'm not typically asked how old I am, but on the rare occasion I'm asked, my response usually surprises the inquirer, which isn't a bad feeling. I believe it has less to do with my physical looks and more with how I present myself. Being active, interested, and having a sense of humor conveys a sense of youth.

I begin my workweek and day with exercise and watching the network morning shows

When I step away, I will miss the camaraderie and energy of the office the most.

Once I'm in the office, which I go to five days a week when I'm home, I scour The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today, looking for news that might be relevant to our clients or prospective clients.

I then review my emails and texts before starting my own correspondence and phone calls based on a yellow-pad schedule I've created. I then have internal meetings and Zoom calls with prospects.

I try to shut the office door no later than 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m. because work-life balance is important to me. I often travel to meet with clients or prospects, as I believe the personal touch is far more effective than Zoom.

In my free time, I'm a passionate follower of my alma mater, the Kansas Jayhawks. Another true passion of mine is long-distance motorcycle riding. I've had memorable trips throughout Cuba, Vietnam, Mexico, and almost every corner of the US. Just like my career, as long as I have the ability, I'll continue exploring the open road.

• Boeing needs a hands-on CEO, says Tim Clark, the president of Emirates.
• "I've always said it should be an aerospace engineer. It would help a lot," Clark told Bloomberg.
• Clark is an aviation veteran whose airline is the largest buyer of Boeing's widebody jets.

Boeing needs a hands-on leader who understands the business if it wants to get out of the rut it is in, says Tim Clark, the president of Emirates.

"You need a true leader, a strong person, a great communicator who understands the business," Clark, whose company is the largest buyer of Boeing's widebody jets, told Bloomberg's Guy Johnson on Sunday. The aviation veteran was speaking at the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association's annual meeting in Dubai.

"I've always said it should be an aerospace engineer. It would help a lot. I've often used Alan Mulally as the example of that," Clark said, referencing the former CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Ford.

Mulally served as the chief executive of Boeing's commercial airplane programs from 2001 to 2006. The aerospace engineer and MIT graduate was lauded for his turnaround of Ford when he ran the automaker from 2006 to 2014.

Boeing's CEO needs to take an active interest in its manufacturing operations, Clark said, adding that the company's leader needs to start "going into factories and understanding the processes."

"The way we run Emirates is that we have fingerprints on everything. There's not a thing that goes on, on a day to day basis without us knowing something about it," Clark told Bloomberg.

"So they need somebody who's hands-on, is a great communicator, great leader, and people will respect and follow because that person understands the issues," he continued.

'Finance is not difficult. Engineering is.'

Clark believes Boeing's pursuit of saving costs by outsourcing manufacturing landed it in its predicament today.

"If you spend 10 or 15 years trying to strip out from your supply chain it's likely things will start to happen in terms of quality issues," Clark told The Telegraph in an interview on Sunday.

"You cannot take your eye off the ball in our business. Certainly manufacturers cannot do that," he said. "Finance is not difficult. Engineering is."

Representatives for Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Boeing has come under the spotlight following repeated quality-assurance lapses.

In January, a door plug flew off a two-month-old Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft during an Alaskan Airlines flight from Oregon to California. The company's CEO, Dave Calhoun, said in March he would be stepping down at the end of this year.

Stephanie Pope, a third-generation Boeing employee who was put in charge of Boeing's commercial airplanes division in March, is widely seen as one of the frontrunners for Calhoun's position.

During its earnings call in April, Boeing said it had burned through $3.9 billion in cash in the first quarter of this year. The company posted a net loss of $355 million for the same quarter.

Clark said it will take years for Boeing to sort out its quality and safety issues, per Bloomberg.

"If you ask me, this will be a five-year hiatus starting from now. So I don't think they will recapture their production lines on all aircraft types," he said.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted robots — again — at a Taiwan tech conference Sunday.
• He predicted mass production of self-driving cars and humanoid robots in the coming years.
• Nvidia makes software and hardware for robots.

Jensen Huang really loves robots.

The Nvidia CEO paraded nine human-like robots on stage earlier this year. He highlighted them again in a Sunday speech at a Taiwan tech conference, saying that two kinds of robots in particular will be "very high volume." These are self-driving cars and humanoid robots, he said.

"The next wave of AI is physical AI. AI that understands the laws of physics. AI that can work among us," a black jacket-clad Huang said. "Everything is going to be robotic. All of the factories will be robotic. The factories will orchestrate robots and those robots will be building products that are robotic."

Chip giant Nvidia has much to gain from wide robot adoption: Its software and hardware can be used in production, training, and ongoing use of the robots.

The company built an operating system for self-driving cars and will start producing cars in a partnership with Mercedes next year, Huang said Sunday.

Nvidia also created an operating system for robots to learn in virtual environments. Before robots work in the physical world, their systems can be refined in a "robot gym," Huang said, where they fine-tune everything from motor skills, like grasping objects, to navigating environments, like moving around warehouses.

"The easiest robot to adapt into the world are human or robots because we built the world for us. We also have the most amount of data to train these robots than other types of robots because we have the same physique," Huang said.

In March, he called building models for robots "one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today."

The company is also investing in robot startups, such as $50 million to Figure AI, which is building robots for dangerous warehouse jobs.

"This isn't the future. This is happening now," Huang said on Sunday.

Nvidia's stock is up 180% in the last year.

GameStop shares surged ahead of Monday's opening bell after trader Keith Gill, who posts on social media under the aliases "Roaring Kitty" and "DeepFuckingValue," revealed he holds a $116 million stake in the struggling retailer.

The stock was up 84% in premarket trading shortly before 5 a.m. Eastern Time after an account snapshot posted on Reddit's r/SuperStonk forum revealed that Gill holds five million GameStop shares.

Late on Sunday the trader also posted a picture of a reverse "Uno" card on X, which had 56,000 likes at last check.

More follows …

• Tyson Garvin waited nearly 5 years to get his Cybertruck.
• He told BI that he knew he wanted to polish it the moment he ordered the truck.
• Garvin argued that polishing the truck makes vehicle maintenance much easier.

A Cybertruck owner had his stainless steel truck polished to a mirrored finish, which he claims solved the vehicle's oft-reported dust and fingerprint issues.

Tyson Garvin, a boating enthusiast from Joplin, Missouri, knew he wanted to polish his Cybertruck from the moment he pre-ordered it nearly five years ago.

"When we ordered it on Tesla's announcement day, I knew I was going to polish it that day," Garvin told Business Insider in an interview.

Finally, after years of patiently waiting, Garvin got his truck in April. But, after seeing it in person, he told BI there was much left to be desired.

"I didn't like it when I first got it," he said. "It was actually very dirty when I picked it up. It was a very bad delivery experience. And just the look of it — the dull stainless steel isn't evenly brushed."

That's when Garvin tapped Brylee Waits over in Neosho, Missouri, just south of Joplin.

Waits began a polishing business about three years ago. He named his company after what his former coworker used to refer to him as at his old job: The Polishing Guy.

"It just kind of grew from there," Waits told BI. "It's something that I could pass down to my kids and we could live a lifestyle where I don't have to struggle everyday."

Waits's business mainly specializes in semi-trucks — not stainless steel EVs.

But Waits said he hates saying no, so when Garvin approached him in early May at a local lifted-truck show requesting to chrome out his Cybertruck, The Polishing Guy took the challenge.

"I wouldn't say it was the hardest project," Waits said. "I guess it was a tough project just because it's never been done."

Overall, Waits estimated that the job took about a week and 120 man-hours with three other employees.

Garvin told BI that the outcome was a vast improvement to his truck — not just aesthetically but also practically.

"It doesn't have all the porous stainless steel that holds all the oil from your fingerprints," he said, adding that the bugs and dirt also make the truck hard to clean.

But with the polishing job, Garvin said the vehicle is much easier to maintain.

"The more you clean it, the shinier it gets," Garvin claimed.

A Tesla spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent over the weekend.

After Garvin shared the finished product on social media on May 27, Waits told BI that he received more than 60 inquiries about Cybertruck polishing jobs. He now has four trucks waiting to be polished.

A disco ball on wheels

Some skeptical commenters wondered if the mirror-finished would pose a road hazard. So far, Garvin said he hasn't run into any issues.

One of his concerns was if the headlights from a car behind him would reflect off the truck's tailgate while driving at night, giving the appearance of another car facing the driver.

Garvin told BI that, thankfully, the Cybertruck's tailgate slightly faces downward toward the road. When his wife followed him while driving, Garvin said that all she could see was the reflection of the ground.

"There's been a lot of talk on the internet from people saying whether someone could polish the Cybertruck or not," Garvin said. "Most people said you couldn't because of certain kinds of stainless steel used in the manufacturing process, but none of that mattered."

"They just didn't know any better," he said.