Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei.

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Jim VandeHei is taking Axios’ obsession with smart brevity and applying it to a new audience: CEOs, and their inner circle.

The Axios co-founder has been testing a new weekly email newsletter aimed at chief executives. Built as a gated product that subscribers apply to receive – and refined over recent weeks with a handpicked group of executives – this effort does two things: It reflects VandeHei’s unique vantage point as a two-time media industry founder, and it also underscores the potential in offering what VandeHei described to me as job-specific intelligence to readers.

With a broader rollout now set to begin, Vandehei’s Axios C-Suite is positioning itself as something distinct in an ever-expanding glut of email newsletters. It’s a CEO-to-CEO dispatch focused on topics like AI, leadership, and geopolitics, and it draws on VandeHei’s access to top figures across business and government.

It’s also another reminder that the media era of chasing ever-larger scale is over, and that the future lies more in cultivating a deeply engaged specific audience.

Referring to the idea of experimenting with products like this newsletter, Vandehei told me in an email: “To us, it’s vital. The world changes more in a month than it once did in literally years. Status quo is death. And boring as shit.”

He continued: “I am blessed with being in a very unique place. I am a CEO (who also happens to be a journalist) lucky enough to talk to the most powerful people in government, AI and business on a regular basis. I am also Claude-pilled and GPT-pilled — a brutal realist who sees the awesome power of AI because I use it a lot personally and Axios corporately.”

The Axios C-Suite newsletter, then, is “my stab at helping other CEOs and leaders learn what I am learning in real-time.”

One of those first editions of VandeHei’s newsletter, sent out back at the end of March, delivered an insidery CEO briefing focused on how AI is reshaping things like cybersecurity risks and job dynamics. As an example of the kind of insights his newsletters contain: Early readers were also treated to a simple yet frighteningly effective way of thinking about Anthropic’s new unreleased AI model Claude Mythos.

That model is a focus of worldwide attention for the way it can exploit vulnerabilities in software code at a speed and scale humans can’t possibly keep up with. Essentially, turning the act of hacking into an automated process that’s always running. If that still makes your eyes glaze over, here’s the new Axios newsletter making it a bit more understandable: “Think of a warehouse full of the most sophisticated criminals who never sleep, learn on the fly and persist until successful — except the warehouse is infinite.”

In terms of what else to know about the C-Suite newsletter, meanwhile, a broader rollout was announced on Monday that followed a beta launch over the last few weeks. That early content also included tips from figures like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recommended tips for CEOs like: “Measure whether your people actually use AI, not just how much” and “Start AI-ing your own job.”

Continued Vandehei in his email to me (which, by the way, was written in the Axios style of bullet points, featuring bolded takeaways followed by a punchy sentence or two):

“C-Suite is my stab at helping other CEOs and leaders learn what I am learning in real-time … Not to be cheesy, but America needs better, smarter leadership in everything – and CEOs and their teams are ideally positioned to fill the void. What’s cool for me is that Axios has such deep readership among leaders and CEOs – and they are generous in reading and sharing feedback.”