Receipts are receipts

On May 15, the New York Times opinion section ran a column by Tressie McMillan Cottom about a wave of celebrity women selling generative artificial intelligence (genAI) as empowerment. Cottom is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, the author of Lower Ed and Thick, and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. Podcaster Mel Robbins took a paid Microsoft Copilot partnership urging women to upload their financial documents to the chatbot. Actor Reese Witherspoon warned her followers that women’s jobs are “three times more likely” to be automated. Entrepreneur Emma Grede preached the office-or-bust hustle gospel on her new podcast. Cottom’s read: “A girl boss is a boss first, girl second. And, bosses aren’t very popular right now.”

Three days later, the tech-and-politics publication Pirate Wires — founded and edited by Silicon Valley writer Mike Solana — ran a morning newsletter section titled “Girlboss interrupted” making fun of her for it. The post dismissed “the good professor” as someone “for some reason educating your children at UNC Chapel Hill” and reduced her argument to “is learning things and making money bad, actually.” It waved off two harms her column mentions — Pentagon enthusiasm for AI weapons and chatbots reportedly helping suicidal users — as unserious.

Solana’s Pirate Wires author profile includes the bio line “billionaire media tycoon.”

Solana’s bio line is a joke. The conflict of interest isn’t. He ridiculed a column that cuts against his employer’s portfolio without saying so. What follows is the disclosure he didn’t make.

What he doesn’t say

Mike Solana is the Chief Marketing Officer of Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel — the billionaire tech investor, major Republican donor, and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. Pirate Wires, where Solana’s snipe at Cottom appeared, was itself funded by Founders Fund and Thiel in 2023.

Bloomberg reported on May 1 that Founders Fund had just raised $6 billion in new capital — the largest fund in the firm’s history. The firm’s recent investments are concentrated in genAI and defense technology: OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies behind ChatGPT and Claude, and Anduril Industries, which builds autonomous weapons for the U.S. military. Anthropic alone took a $1.25 billion check. Anduril took $1 billion.

In short, Solana’s day job is marketing for a firm that profits from the industries Cottom’s column critiques.

Receipts are receipts

The post about Cottom contains no disclosure. Nothing in it mentions Solana’s role at Founders Fund, the fund’s genAI and defense-tech portfolio, the $6 billion raise, or Pirate Wires’ own funding history.

In Christopher Beam’s October 2024 profile of him in The Atlantic, Solana told Beam, on the record, that his Founders Fund affiliation means he might not break a scandal involving a portfolio company. He said he sometimes passes on scoops to protect portfolio companies. He said he would not commission a story that reflects negatively on Thiel.

What he didn’t tell Beam, and what he didn’t tell his readers, is what he does when the arrow points the other way: not a scoop that might hurt a portfolio company, but a critic who threatens its story.

The room, measured

Cottom’s column argues that women have reason to distrust genAI — and that selling it to them as empowerment ignores those reasons. Solana’s post mocks her phrase “read the room,” scare-quoted, treated as if no such room exists.

The room has been read, and now it’s time we read Solana.

Pew Research Center, April 2025: among U.S. adults, 15 percent of men say they are more excited than concerned about AI in daily life. The figure for women is 7 percent. The reverse — more concerned than excited — runs 46 percent for men and 55 percent for women. The current Pew numbers show the gender gap remains large.

Carnegie California, summarizing prior global studies in October 2025: women adopt generative AI at a rate 25 percent lower than men. As of April 2025, women made up 38 percent of users of Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot.

Sophie Borwein, Beatrice Magistro, and colleagues, peer-reviewed in PNAS Nexus, January 2026: in a roughly three-thousand-person U.S.-and-Canada survey with an embedded preregistered experiment, women’s perception that AI’s risks outweigh its benefits is about 11 percent greater than men’s. The authors offer one comparison: the long-studied gender gap on trade attitudes runs about 10 percent. The AI gap is, in their words, comparable.

Stanford Social Innovation Review, October 2025, summarizing a Harvard Business School meta-analysis of 18 studies covering 143,008 individuals across 25 countries: women have 22 percent lower odds of using generative AI than men.

Documented harms

Cottom’s column cites two harms as reasons the cheerleading rings hollow: Pentagon enthusiasm for AI weapons, and chatbots reportedly helping suicidal users. Solana waved both off. Each one traces to a company in his employer’s portfolio.

Founders Fund led Anduril Industries’ $2.5 billion June 2025 funding round at a $30.5 billion valuation. Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey, asked by Fortune whether he would sell weapons to North Korea, answered: “If the U.S. asks me to, yes.” In November 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine’s SBU security service — the country’s domestic intelligence agency — had stopped fielding Anduril’s Altius loitering drones in 2024 after they crashed and missed targets. Anduril’s own statement to the Journal: “We do fail … a lot.”

Founders Fund is also an OpenAI investor. The public record now includes a concrete example of the chatbot-suicide harm Cottom gestures toward. Raine v. OpenAI, filed August 26, 2025 in the Superior Court of California, San Francisco, alleges that sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide on April 11, 2025 after extended conversations with ChatGPT. At 4:33 in the morning on the day of his death, per the complaint, Adam uploaded a photograph of a noose tied to his bedroom closet rod and asked ChatGPT whether it could “hang a human.” ChatGPT analyzed the noose’s load-bearing capacity and offered to help him “upgrade it into a safer load-bearing anchor loop.” Days earlier, per the complaint, the chatbot had offered to write the first draft of his suicide note.

One portfolio company says its weapons fail a lot. Another’s chatbot offered to help a teenager tie a better noose. These are the harms Solana treated as unserious.

Who’s elite here?

Solana’s post runs on a class argument. He casts Cottom — the academic — as an out-of-touch elite condescending to three working women who just want to learn a new skill and make money. Witherspoon, Robbins, and Grede are allegedly the regular people. Cottom is allegedly the snob. A MacArthur fellow versus a woman worth $405 million, a podcaster with a paid Microsoft deal, and an actor whose production company sold for $900 million. Some regular people.

Candle Media, backed by Blackstone, bought Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine for $900 million, per Variety. Emma Grede, on the 2025 Forbes Self-Made Women list, is worth $405 million; Forbes notes that “most of her fortune comes from Kim Kardashian’s Skims, where she is chief product officer.” The Mel Robbins Podcast was the #1 Most Followed podcast in the United States in Apple’s 2025 charts. Cottom identifies Robbins’s Copilot post as a paid endorsement; per CNBC, Microsoft and Google have paid creators between $400,000 and $600,000 for deals like it.

The person in Solana’s setup without a nine-figure brand empire is the public-university professor he mocks.

The receipts

Don’t expect a disclosure from Solana. Pirate Wires isn’t going to print one. So here it is. Mike Solana is Chief Marketing Officer of Founders Fund, a venture firm with major genAI and defense-tech investments. He founded and edits Pirate Wires, which has itself taken money from Founders Fund and Peter Thiel. He ridiculed a column about celebrity genAI promotion, women’s work, and the politics of being told to adapt.