Story of the Week (DR):Skydance Adds Bobby Kotick and Laurene Powell Jobs to Board, Taps Tony Blair as AdviserFormer Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Was Once Reviled by Gamers. Now He's Joining Skydance's Board of DirectorsThe crisis began in July 2021 when the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) sued Activision Blizzard, alleging a pervasive "frat boy" culture of rampant sexual harassment, discrimination, and retaliationInitially, Kotick and leadership claimed they were unaware of the severity of the issues or blamed them on a few bad actorsHowever, in November 2021, The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell investigation that squarely implicated Kotick. The report detailed several severe allegations:Concealing Misconduct: The report alleged that Kotick had known about multiple allegations of sexual misconduct and assault across the company for years. He reportedly failed to inform the board of directors about the severity of these claims, including alleged rapes and out-of-court settlements. Protecting Accused Executives: In one specific instance, the HR department recommended firing a co-head of the developer studio Treyarch after an investigation found he had sexually harassed a female employee. Kotick allegedly intervened and overruled HR to keep the executive at the company.Threatening an Assistant's Life: The report surfaced Kotick’s own history of alleged misconduct, including a 2006 incident where he left a voicemail threatening to have his assistant killed. A spokesperson for Kotick later admitted to the voicemail, claiming it was "hyperbolic" and noting that he had apologized and settled the matter out of court.Private Jet Lawsuit: The WSJ also reported on an incident involving a private jet Kotick co-owned, where a flight attendant claimed she was sexually harassed by the pilot. When she complained, Kotick allegedly told her he would ruin her financially.Kotick was never formally fired or removed by the board, instead his exit was orchestrated through a massive corporate buyout.Amid plummeting stock prices and reputational damage, Microsoft swept in to buy Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion in January 2022.Kotick officially stepped down in December 2023.Because he left as part of a successful merger rather than being fired for cause, he walked away with an enormous "golden parachute" payout, cashing out hundreds of millions of dollars in stock and severance packages. Anthropic Has Been Aggressively Lobbying the Vatican to Consider AI ConsciousnessAccording to new reporting from the New York Times, the company has for months been wining and dining religious scholars across the world in secret, NDA-secured meetings to convince them that AI models think and feel, too. Anthropic even reportedly went after the Pope.Christopher Olah, a cofounder and senior researcher at the Claude chatbot maker, aggressively lobbied the Vatican after learning Pope Leo XIV’s official position on AI, per the reporting.Christopher Olah: Canadian; studied mathematics at the University of Toronto for one year before dropping out to "support a friend accused of terrorism;" received a Thiel Fellowship in 2012; previously worked at Google and OpenAI; atheistSam Altman Warns Against 'Religious Force' in AI After Elon Musk's Grok Calls Jesus 'Son of God'OpenAI's Altman: Ascribing religion to models a "safety issue"'SEC Warns Activist Investors After Climate Push at Exxon Mobil, see Matt (1) MM DRStory of the Week (MM):OIL #1: SEC Warns Activist Investors After Climate Push at Exxon MobilReport of Investigation Pursuant to Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934:Climate Action 100+ and the Election of Directors at the May 2021 Annual Meeting ofExxonMobil CorporationIn the context of ExxonMobil’s 2021 director election, the investigation examined whether members of CA100 used the organization as a means of coordinating their votes to influence the outcome of the contested