Friday's Fast Five: Week of 8.30

The Unraveling of a Crypto Dream (The New York Times):  Brock Pierce arrived in Puerto Rico seven years ago, promising to use crypto magic to revitalize the local economy. Now he’s mired in legal disputes and fighting with his business partners.

A skeptical look at AI investment (Goldman Sachs - Podcast): Tech giants and beyond are set to spend an estimated $1 trillion on AI capex in coming years. Will this investment pay off? And if it doesn’t, what does that mean for businesses and investors? MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Goldman Sachs Research’s Jim Covello explain why reality may not match the hype on the latest episode of Goldman Exchanges.

The Growing Evidence That Americans Are Less Divided Than You May Think (Time): In January 2021, a former professor named Todd Rose asked some 2,000 people a question. The survey was, at least on the surface, designed to deduce what kind of country Americans would like future generations to inherit. Each person was presented with 55 separate goal statements for the ­nation and asked to rank them in order of importance. Each person was also asked how each goal would be ranked by “other people.” That gap—between what we ourselves think and what we reckon ­others must be thinking—may hold the power to upend a great deal of what we believe we know about American civic life.

A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage (The Wall Street Journal): It was the kind of outlandish scheme that might bubble up in a bar around closing time. Private businessmen funded the shoestring operation, which was overseen by a top general; President Zelensky approved the plan, then tried unsuccessfully to call it off.

His Ex Is Getting His $1 Million Retirement Account. They Broke Up in 1989. (The Wall Street Journal): Jeffrey Rolison and Margaret Sjostedt dated in the 1980s. Now, almost 40 years after they broke up, she stands to inherit his $1 million retirement account. The reason she might get the money is that in 1987, Rolison listed Sjostedt on a handwritten form as the sole beneficiary of his workplace retirement account. He never changed the beneficiary designation and died in 2015.