Business Insider: “I come bearing great news for my kind of people (horrible typists): Typos are the new status symbol. Garbled spelling, a missed space, improper capitalization — those are all the new and best ways to signal to others that you are powerful and elite.. The most notable recent example of how the rich and powerful have abandoned the bourgeois veneration of proper writing is in the Epstein Files, which are full of Jeffrey Epstein’s awful typing in emails. Of course, Epstein isn’t aspirational. Please do not mistake me here. But if you look at just his typing — and some of the replies he got from rich and powerful friends — you can gather my point: It seems that if you’re rich and powerful enough, one of the many things people are willing to overlook is god-awful written communications. I have written before about “emailing like a CEO” — replying to emails immediately, often with just a few words, or sending a message with just a subject line and no body. For the most important person at a company, some of the pleasantries of formal email style aren’t required. I even tried emailing like a CEO myself as an experiment. Hammering through my inbox like Paul Bunyan made me feel invigorated.

Handcrafted emails can show you’re not AI. There’s been a big change in written communication since I last tried emailing like a CEO, back in 2017. That’s AI. AI tools have made super-polished text easy to produce for anyone — either because you used ChatGPT to completely write an email, or a tool like Grammarly to polish up your own writing. In general, giving more people access to well-written emails is a good thing. But in a world of perfect AI-written (or assisted) text, how do you stand out? How do you signal you’re operating on a higher level than the hoi polloi? That’s right — with typos. Typos, sloppy grammar, and downright hostile capitalization: They’re all signs of hand-crafted, AI-free writing. And when AI writing makes text cheap, the value of real writing goes up. A typo-free email is workslop. Send an AI-assisted email with perfect prose, and the recipient feels you made no real effort. Send a bespoke, finger-typed email, and it shows you care enough to send your thoughts directly — without an AI filter. It’s intimate, special, precious. Mistakes and all…”