Stella Lefty, born Stella Lefkofsky, became one of 2026's breakout stars when her country-pop single 'Boston' spread across TikTok over the summer and climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Knox News; The New Yorker). Her rise came quickly, and so did the backlash.
Her father is Eric Lefkofsky, the Groupon co-founder and Tempus AI CEO, whose fortune Forbes estimates at about $4.8 billion. Critics soon labeled her a 'nepo baby' and an 'industry plant'. Noah Kahan received a songwriting credit on 'Boston' because it borrows from his song 'Stick Season.' Other songs of hers became implicated in accusations of 'interpolation.'
Some critics also questioned whether a singer from Chicago belongs in country music. The backlash reached a peak after her Grand Ole Opry debut, when Kelsea Ballerini publicly came to her defense. So what happened? Well, someone with more money than common sense decided to go straight to the finish line.
On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that an unreleased internal model had solved the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize Problems, each worth $1 million. OpenAI said about 10,000 AI agents worked on the problem and solved it within 88 hours by showing that the equations can break down under extreme conditions. The night before, NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster posted a statement saying that OpenAI had raced to the finish line after learning of unpublished research he had been doing with Levent Alpöge, a mathematician employed by rival lab Anthropic. What made the claim more serious is that the pair had been using OpenAI's own Codex tool to help with their work. Buckmaster suggested that OpenAI may have accessed their sessions, on purpose or by accident. He also said OpenAI mathematician Sébastien Bubeck offered to share credit with him only if Alpöge's name was removed.
Oh look, someone with more money than common sense decided to go straight to the finish line.
I'm seeing a bit of a pattern here.
The Access to Resources
In a certain way, the whole system of modern capitalism can be thought of as a way of managing access to resources. We talk about the invisible hand of the market that takes in things like supply and demand, the local manufacturing process, and the adaptability of businesses, and in theory, leads to pricing optimizations and something like a fair market distribution. But the argument I'm making right now is that all of this has come to a turning point. We've had a few decades now of private equity making a mockery of the free market, in the sense that traditional moats and a defensible list of capital expenditures has now become a liability by inviting outside players to leverage market uncertainties into 'disaster capitalism.' The simple idea of asymmetry is now being used against what's left of the middle class. And what are we left with? Rising inequality: a small group of highly wealthy individuals 'lording' over a much larger group of hand-to-mouth professionals with no family ties to personal wealth and no ivy league pedigree. Which really isn't a problem unto itself: a completely flat social hierarchy is not what we are looking for either. What matters is balance. What matters is the continued support and nurturing of a common set of moralistic red lines. This far ye shall not go.
And this is precisely what is missing. Nothing is beyond the pale when politicians routinely run afoul of explicit and implicit guidelines; when an acting president can have more than 30 felonies with absolutely no repercussions, & when highly respected and important positions in government are being given to sycophants with little or no expertise. This is a problem that affect everyone. It is as if shortsightedness was itself a disease that is spreading among the general populace like the early days of Covid.
Everyone is Crazy
And, speaking of Covid, I feel like those years where the kids got pulled out of school, and we all worked from home and all of our social connections disappeared overnight, in some ways I feel like we're still recovering from that. For the children that were affected that is a very obvious statement, but for the rest of us, I think what happened was that it sort of opened up this Pandora's box of self-accommodation. It kind of showed us all that we could push harder and comply less. It's like a huge percentage of us had been lulled into a certain sense of acceptable behavior, which got blown away by Covid and never came back. And in that sense, it's basically a new version of the Tragedy of the Commons. It goes like this: on the one hand, like the freshman at Stanford, many of whom profess to suffer from learning disabilities as a way to qualify for better housing, it's tempting as an individual to demand extra resources. Unfortunately, as a collective, we all suffer from such decisions. This is not a new dilemma, but it's being exacerbated by the truly astronomical differences in wealth that have emerged from the last few decades.
You're Supposed to Know how you got There
So one thing that emerges from this for me is just that when these processes get shortened everyone suffers. To the extent that more artists will go the path of Stella Lefty and shoot straight to the billboard Top 5, with nothing between that and her covering pop songs from the family living room, it no longer popularizes music as a safe space and an equalizer. A lack of working class popstars will quickly lead to a lack of working class fans. It exposes the lack of honesty. How can we still make the case for this country as a melting pot and a place where anyone can make their fortune when the class of pop artist and movie stars is absolutely dominated by people like Dakota Johnson, Stacey Abrams, Taylor Swift, and the four sons of Stellan Skarsgård?
We expect the story. We want to hear about people who started out down on their luck, turned it around, and found the other side. That's what we want. We want Amy Winehouse. We want Jeff Buckley. We want to know what the ingredients are. And we certainly don't want 'aggressive centrists' trying to keep from rocking the boat. Because something is changing right now. It's like a large part of humanity has found itself in the long tail of content that is getting cut off.
Keeping us happy has always been pretty deep in the priority list for modern capitalists. it always fell in priority behind the preservation of power, short-term profits, and the acquisition of new markets. but it feels like now it's not even on the list. They're not even trying to give us what we want anymore. They're trying to tell us what we should settle for.
How do I know this? Because in both of these examples, despite having more resources than perhaps anyone else in the universe, both Stella Lefty and Open AI resorted to some form of appropriation to get an 'edge'. Which brings me back to the idea of a tragedy of the Commons.
The ... problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality. -- Garrett Hardin
The Last Piece
The last important detail, the one that is perhaps still missing here, has to do with the nature of collective effort in the human space (this same point reminds me a little bit of the antidote from Kurt Vonnegut that we are all meant to be 'futzing' around). It's a quote from Terence Tao.
He recently weighed in on the Open AI controversy mentioned above, with a lot of technical details, explaining how the Open AI approach of sniffing for good ideas and sort of industrially getting them to the finish line is a very bad fit for what, up until recently, was the general tenor of scientific research in general. it's all on his mastodon account which I encourage you to follow. One small point stood out to me and feels like a connecting point between all artistic pursuits, in general.
But, perhaps in order to impress the other adults observing (and, through public funding agencies and the like, financially supporting), we often downplay the "childish" aspects of the craft, in favor of the more tangible "serious" outcomes --- including the hard, objective target of solving some designated open problem.
Until recently, this polite fiction has worked, because human mathematicians knew, possibly subconsciously, to use both childlike and adult skills when solving these problems, even if they might only publicly admit to the latter. But modern AI tools, when directed without such expert supervision, can now be aimed all too easily at the ostensible goals of the field, without any incentive to take the slow, whimsical path. The flag is captured, the goal scored, and the problem is solved; but at the cost of lessons learned, insights gained, collaborations formed, and new targets located.
In this modern era of heavy AI use, it is important to remember what it is like to be a child.
What is the Value of Art?
The nature of creativity and inspiration is impossibly fluid: art is different for everyone. Every creative has a different process. Every fan or art lover has a unique perspective.
Shortcuts always feel like a difficult proposition. Imagine an artist an the gallery, selling their painting. "This one only took me five minutes," they might say. How much would you pay?
I don't think that there is a hard minimum that is universally appropriate, in terms of time spent, as much as it just has to feel like some form of natural magic of the moment, some spark of inspiration, was nurtured into a work of art through the combined application of work ethic, experience, and personal talent. Because that's part of the story. That's part of the appeal. You can't just go to the finish line. We want to hear about the journey. And to Terence Tao's point, the world actually needs that story, far more than it needs the so-called victory.
We need to fight for a world that allows working class people to also rise through the ranks and make the system better. We need balance. And most of all, we need the next Amy Winehouse to actually have a chance against the next Stella Lefty.