The Miss USA Organization’s problems seem to be growing so big even a choreographed group number can’t distract onlookers.

This week, both Miss USA 2023 Noelia Voigt and Miss Teen USA 2023 UmaSofia Srivastava renounced their crowns and announced it via Instagram posts. A week earlier, Miss USA’s social media director, Claudia Michelle, publicly resigned from the org, calling it a toxic workplace for her and title holders.

Publicly, Voigt cited her mental health in her renunciation, while Srivastava said that her “personal values no longer fully align with the direction of the organization.” In a resignation letter viewed by NBC, Voigt said Miss USA maintained a toxic environment that “at best, is poor management and, at worst, is bullying and harassment.” The organization did not respond to NBC’s request for comment on the letter.

Michelle said that the group’s leadership would restrict the two women’s social media posts (though eagle-eyed pageant fans noticed the first letters of the sentences of Voigt’s resignation post spelled out “I am silenced”).

Behind the scenes

The last few years at the Miss USA Org have been about as eyebrow-raising as an early episode of Toddlers & Tiaras.

• In 2022, Anne Jakrajutatip, a wealthy Thai businesswoman, bought the brand (including its sister pageant, Miss Universe) with her company JKN Global Group for $20 million and became the first woman to own the organization.
• In 2023, then-Miss USA President Crystle Stewart left her role following allegations that the 2022 competition was rigged. Stewart’s husband, Max Sebrechts, VP of Miss USA, also stepped down after multiple competitors accused him of sexual harassment.
• Stewart was replaced within hours by fashion designer Laylah Rose, who now owns the Miss USA franchise.
• Just over a week before the 2023 Miss Universe pageant, it was revealed that JKN Global Group had filed for bankruptcy.

The rapid resignation of two title holders has now brought new scrutiny to Miss USA and to Rose, whom Voigt accused of mistreatment.

What next? The organization said it supported both former title holders in their decision. Several Miss USA 2023 competitors called on the organization to let Voigt out of her NDA so she can share her experience.—MM

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Looks like Elon Musk wants to make more Superchargers after all. Just over a week after Tesla shocked the electric vehicle world (and probably President Biden) by firing its entire 500-person Supercharger team, CEO Musk said on X yesterday that there are still plans to keep building the charging network. “Just to reiterate: Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year,” Musk wrote. However, Musk’s new post didn’t contradict an X statement from around the time of the layoffs saying the network—which other car companies and even the government are counting on to help spur EV adoption—would grow more slowly.

Two Virginia schools to get Confederate names again. Virginia’s Shenandoah County School Board voted yesterday to rename two schools in the district for Confederate generals, after deciding to change them in 2020 as the country grappled with the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. The board voted 5–1 to reinstate the names Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, which had been changed to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School by a previous iteration of the board. Though the names of Confederate generals have been removed from many public spaces as communities reckon with their racial implications, this appears to be the first time a school has restored them.

Planet Fitness to raise membership price for the first time since 1998. It’s going to take more than $10/month to join a gym once Planet Fitness raises the price of a basic membership for new members to $15 per month this summer. The $10 amount, which has held steady for 26 years, was considered a sweet spot where people were happy to sign up and wouldn’t bother to cancel once they gave up on their fitness goals. But after posting weaker-than-expected Q1 results, the gym chain decided it’s time to change, even though execs acknowledged that customers are looking to save rather than spend.

AI bots awkwardly flirting with each other is the future of human dating, or so Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd would like you to imagine. Speaking at Bloomberg’s tech conference this week, she floated the idea of AI dating “concierges” getting to know each other to spare people the tedium of cringing through convos with strangers they’ll never vibe with.

Aside from helping to narrow the pool of contenders, Wolfe Herd envisions users’ AI chatbots doling out dating advice based on people’s insecurities. The Bloomberg crowd chuckled at her dead-serious comments, which came as Bumble tries to convince singles that its matchmaking services are still worth paying for.

Make algorithms attractive again

Bumble is already adopting features intended to make swiping for love feel less like a full-time job:

• The “Opening Move” function will soon let users preselect DMs to initiate conversations instead of racking their brains for quirky opening lines.
• The app is also updating the options it gives users to describe the type of relationship they want to include more specific options (among them “life partner” and “ethical non-monogamy”) and letting users display those preferences on their profiles.

The revamp arrives as dating apps’ paid user growth slows. Only 21% of Americans think that algorithms can predict who they’ll fall for, per a 2023 Pew survey.

Gen Z is swiping left on apps…a recent Axios/Generation Labs survey revealed that nearly 4 in 5 college and grad students don’t use them.—SK

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The Barack Obama-themed rest stop on Ireland’s M7 highway is no longer the most important Irish–US connection. This week, two giant portals that look like something out of a sci-fi movie appeared in New York City and Dublin, connecting the two cities with a 24/7 video feed.

The portals, placed on Dublin’s famous O’Connell Street and in New York’s Flatiron district, are part of Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys’s vision to unite the world. His organization, Portals.org, first placed sculptures in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Lublin, Poland, in 2021. It also plans to also connect New York and Dublin to those cities in the near future.

You still won’t learn how to correctly pronounce “Moher.” The portals are designed without sound because 1) New Yorkers and Dubliners wouldn’t understand each other anyway and 2) it forces people to use the universally understood communication, body language, according to the Portals.org website.

That hasn’t limited connection…videos on social media show people on both sides waving, dancing, writing their Instagram handle on a sign, and giving out their phone numbers.—CC

Quote: “I did a lot of math. I made a lot of money, and I gave almost all of it away. That’s the story of my life.”

There are longer versions of the life story of Jim Simons, the legendary mathematician, quantitative investing pioneer, and philanthropist who died yesterday at age 86, but we think his summary is pretty good. In 1978, Simons started what would become his wildly successful hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, where he used his mathematical savvy to deliver a performance that outpaced Warren Buffett and George Soros. Its signature fund averaged 66% annual returns. With his wife, Marilyn Simons, he also started the Simons Foundation, which gave billions to causes they cared about—including, most recently, the Dublin–New York portals.

Stat: McDonald’s has heard everyone’s freak-out about that $18 Big Mac meal, and it’s trying to push a cheaper option to get customers to come back like they’re desperate for Grimace shakes again. With Americans ditching fast food as prices rise, the chain is hoping to introduce a $5 meal that could include a McChicken or a McDouble, fries, and a drink, an anonymous insider told Bloomberg. The problem? Franchisees are not lovin’ it. Franchise operators, who run 95% of MickeyD’s locations, refused to endorse the $5 deal earlier in the year, so the burger behemoth has gotten Coca-Cola to chip in cash this time around to help keep it from cutting into franchisees’ profits, per Bloomberg’s source.

Read: The Caitlin Clark Effect is real, and it’s already changing the WNBA. (Businessweek)