TO KEEP Mark Zuckerberg safe, Meta has spent at least $23m annually on bodyguards, home security and other support during the last three years. To protect Warren Buffett, another high-profile billionaire, but a famously frugal one, Berkshire Hathaway laid out just over $300,000 in 2023. In between those budgets, boards at America’s large public companies make diverse investments to protect bosses, according to filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The range of spending indicates a lack of C-suite consensus about what is necessary.

On December 23rd a congressional committee released a lurid 37-page report alleging ethical misconduct by Matt Gaetz, the former maverick member of the House of Representatives who briefly stood as Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney-general. In a different time the investigation’s details about illicit sex and drug use would definitively end Mr Gaetz’s political career, and perhaps it will now. Yet he could soon test how far deviance has been defined down in America’s norm-smashing political era.

On December 23rd a congressional committee released a lurid 37-page report alleging ethical misconduct by Matt Gaetz, the former maverick member of the House of Representatives who briefly stood as Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney-general. In a different time the investigation’s details about illicit sex and drug use would definitively end Mr Gaetz’s political career, and perhaps it will now. Yet he could soon test how far deviance has been defined down in America’s norm-smashing political era.