The ongoing tug of war between remote employees (who are feeling more productive and less burnt out) and their employers (who are feeling bad about paying for an office) could experience a balance shift in 2023. Major companies, aware of fears about a potential recession, are issuing directives to come into the office for more days, sometimes under the threat of termination.

Last week, Disney CEO Bob Iger told hybrid staff that, starting on March 1, they must return to the office four days a week. Two days later, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced a similar three-day RTO requirement, expressing irritation at internal badge swipe data that revealed employees were not “meeting their minimum promise” regarding hybrid work.

Employees at Vanguard, Paycom, and News Corp have also received recent orders to phase out remote work in the new year. A survey from Resume Builder found that 90% of companies will require a return to the office this year, signaling a shift away from the softly enforced hybrid policies that became popular during the pandemic.

A controversial resolution

That doesn’t mean employees are excited to add commute time or “getting asked about weekend plans” back into their lives: According to a recent Gallup poll, 34% of remote-capable workers want to work from home permanently and just 3% want to work in the office full time. A Monster survey in September found that 40% of workers would quit if they had to come into the office even one day a week.

But there’s an issue with that: Remote work is getting hard to find. Between February and October 2022, remote job listings fell from 20% to 14% of all listings on LinkedIn. Now, even more employers seem empowered to demand in-office time.

Remote hope is not lost: On the flip side, Twitter CEO and vocal remote work critic Elon Musk recently ordered Seattle employees to WFH as a cost-cutting measure.—MK

Mafia boss nabbed. Italy’s most wanted man, Matteo Messina Denaro, a Mafia boss who had been on the lam for more than 30 years, was arrested in Sicily yesterday. Messina Denaro, who once bragged that you could “fill a cemetery” with his victims, is allegedly the head of the Cosa Nostra syndicate. Despite dodging authorities since 1993, he has been convicted in absentia and given life sentences for his role in various crimes, including the murder of two anti-Mafia prosecutors; bombings in Florence, Milan, and Rome that killed 10; and the slaying of the young son of a Mafioso who turned state’s witness.

Ukrainian soccer club pledges $25 million for soldiers. Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man and the owner of the Shakhtar Donetsk football club, announced the donation yesterday after agreeing to trade star player Mykhaylo Mudryk to Chelsea FC in a ~$110 million deal. The cash will go to soldiers and their families to cover a variety of needs, including medical treatment and psychological support. Akhmetov said he is confident Ukraine will win the war against Russia and “we will play a friendly against Chelsea at Donbass Arena in a Ukrainian Donetsk.”

Elon Musk heads to court over Tesla tweet. Elon Musk regularly gets into spats over his tweets—he seems to enjoy it so much that he bought the platform, but he’s probably less enthused about the legal trial starting today over one particular tweet from 2018. In it, Musk (who never met a 4/20 reference he didn’t like) said he had secured funding to take Tesla private for $420 per share, and investors are suing Musk and Tesla since the deal never happened. So far, Musk is expected to testify this week, and his odds don’t look great: The judge already determined that the tweet was false and reckless, but now a jury will weigh whether Musk knew it was false and whether it was material to investors.

Art made by AI has won prizes, been displayed in museums, and taken over Twitter profile pics, but not everyone’s happy with how it turns users into elven princesses.

Three artists are suing Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt for their use of an AI art-generating tool called Stable Diffusion. The artists—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz—allege the tool violates millions of artists’ copyrights.

How AI art generators work: Stable Diffusion has been fed billions of images scraped from the web in order to train its AI on how to do things like identify an “avocado.” So when a user types “corgi eats an avocado in space” into an AI art generator that uses Stable Diffusion, it creates new works based on the images it’s analyzed.

But whether it’s derivative or plagiarism is up for debate

The suit claims that Stable Diffusion cobbles together pieces of copyrighted images, but creators of AI art-generating tools argue that their use of existing pictures to train the AI to make new ones is covered by “fair use” doctrine—which allows using copyrighted materials for “transformative” purposes.

Bottom line: This case could set an important precedent on training AI tools that could go way beyond the art world.—JW

Watch out, Zeus: Scientists haven’t completely mastered lightning, but they’ve successfully used a laser to divert its direction. A study published yesterday described an experiment in which a laser was shot at a storm cloud from atop a Swiss mountain to successfully direct lightning toward the ground.

This marks the first time the method worked outside a lab, and that’s a big step forward for public safety.

• Lightning causes billions of dollars in damage and claims over 4,000 lives a year.

It would be much worse had Benjamin Franklin not invented the lightning rod, which to this day remains the go-to for protection from lightning. But the man would have turned 317 today, so it’s about time his invention was updated—especially since the Franklin rod is a godsend for your home, but it’s insufficient for bigger places like airports or wind farms.

So, how did we one-up a founding father?

Scientists unleashed a rapid-fire barrage of laser pulses at thunderclouds, creating a path of charged particles that lightning was more likely to follow. Four lightning bolts were steered toward a rod mounted on top of a telecom tower that is a frequent target of lightning strikes.

Looking forward: It’ll be a while before you’ll be able to catch regular laser-lightning shows in the night sky due to an eye-popping price tag: The system used in the experiment costs $2.17 billion.—SK

Stat: The world has created $42 trillion in new wealth since 2020—but you probably didn’t see a big chunk of that hit your bank account, because 63% of it is in the hands of the richest 1% of the population, per a report released by Oxfam yesterday. Advocating for steeper taxes on the wealthiest as the world’s most influential people arrived in Davos to ski and try to solve all the world’s problems, the charity noted that for every $1 of that new wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%, a billionaire managed to snag another by $1.7 million.

Quote: “We love to quote King in and around the holiday…but then we refuse to live King 365 days of the year.”

Speaking at a commemorative service at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, the civil rights leader’s youngest daughter, Bernice King, delivered a reminder yesterday that we’ve still got a long way to go as a society to realize her father’s dream. Acknowledging that his challenging words are sometimes flattened into platitudes in today’s political discourse, she sought real action instead, saying, “Dr. King, the inconvenient King, puts some demands on us to change our ways.”

Read: Should we bring back the woolly mammoth? Scientists are getting close. (BBC)

Flying high: These drone photographs turn historic high-rises into whimsical structures worthy of Wes Anderson.

Harness your DIY energy: How to make your own board game in five steps.

Take control of your career: The Brew’s Business Essentials Accelerator is a Biz 101 course that gets you up to speed on communication, operation, and innovation, no matter your industry. Apply for our Feb. 6 cohort here.

Loyalty is everything: Julie Bornstein turned that motto into millions with Sephora’s Beauty Insider program. Here’s how she did it.

Brew Mini: “Jason of Aquaman” (five letters) is your sample clue of the day. Play the Mini here.

Parental guidance

We’ll give you two brands, and you have to determine whether they’re owned by the same parent company or not. If you answer “yes,” give yourself a bonus if you can name the corporate overlord.

1. Marvel Entertainment and The Simpsons franchise
2. Gucci and Fendi
3. Chrysler and Maserati
4. Snapple and Canada Dry
5. Pittsburgh Penguins and Liverpool FC

Digital transformation success: IT professionals know achieving it isn’t easy, but IT Brew has five tips to help you get started.

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