Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta has been all the rage across social media. Whenever this deal launches every year, people rush to their nearest location to take advantage of it. After all, who doesn’t love unlimited pasta breadsticks, soup, and salad for $13.99? While dining in at an Olive Garden, one group of friends documented an unorthodox method for enjoying the unlimited promotion to-go: by stuffing as much pasta as possible inside Ziploc bags.

Olive Garden hack in action

“How much pasta we can finesse at Olive Garden’s endless pasta deal,” TikTok creator Bridgitte (@halfevil___333) writes in the text overlay.

First, her female friend attempts to cram her full plate of spaghetti into a bag, laughing at her unsuccessful attempt. Then, she pulls out another bag, hovers it over a plate, and slides the pasta into it, creating a small mess. When the content creator pans the camera over to her male friend, he hands a bag full of breadsticks to the female friend, who shoves it into her bag.

Next, the same female friend tries to cram a full plate of rigatoni into another bag. This time, all of the pasta fell in with ease. As Brigitte shifts the camera back to the male friend, he dumps his plateful of penne into a bag on his lap.

Once the trio walks into the parking lot, the content creator proclaims, “Olive Garden haul!” One by one, each member reveals what they snuck off with.

“Fresh mints,” Bridgitte says, dumping a handful of complimentary chocolate mints onto the ground.

“Penne,” the male friend says, unveiling his bag of penne.

“A bag of soup,” the female friend adds, showing off the Zupa Toscana.

“Breadsticks,” Bridgitte chimes in, showing off the breadsticks.

“Pasta,” the female friend states, holding spaghetti and rigatoni in separate bags, followed by meatballs in another one.

What did viewers say?

The original clip amassed over 407,000 views, where Bridgitte turned off her comments. But this didn’t stop her and her friends from confronting them. In the next video, she and her female friend ‘thanked’ an insulting commenter. However, some negative remarks managed to slip into this comments section.

“Thieves in action. if you can’t afford it don’t go,” one viewer remarked.

“Y’all should just take it down anyways before Olive Garden sees it,” another stated.

On the flip side, many defended the trio and applauded their hack.

“All I saw was baddies on a budget and as a fellow budget baddie I salute your service,” one commenter wrote.

“I just wanted to say I thought the Olive Garden idea was genius,” a second praised.

“I’m going to do this the next time I go, thank you,” a third said.

The content creator explained this in response to a viewer.

“Well first off, that’s my friend, [this] isn’t her account. And second, I was more annoyed w all the comments saying [‘just get boxes’ or ‘use bigger bags.]’ Like everyone just [complains] no matter what so I turned it off,” she replied in the comments section.

Can you take home the Never-Ending Pasta while dining at Olive Garden?

No, you cannot. This promotion and the refills are exclusive to dine-in only. On the other hand, you can take whatever leftovers you have on your plate home, depending on your server, according to Yahoo. Because servers have complained about how taxing and with little reward these promotions are, consider tipping them nicely if they allow you to do this.

@halfevil___333

Ayyee Olive Garden hack ?? wait till the end to see all what we got

♬ original sound – halfevil___333

The Mary Sue reached out to Bridgitte via Instagram direct message and TikTok comment as well as Olive Garden via press email.

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

Melody Heald

Melody Heald is a culture writer. Her work can be found in Glitter Magazine, BUST Magazine, The Daily Dot, and more. You can email her at: [email protected]

“Didn’t she leave her husband for this 15 minutes of fame?”

Charlotte Colombo

Posted on August 1 2025 5:00 pm CDT

It’s the end of an era for Bobbi Althoff, as the online personality announces that her podcast, The Really Good Podcast, is coming to an end. She made the announcement during what turned out to be her final episode on July 31.

Featured Video

“Guys, I don’t think there’s any really good way to say this, but this is the last episode of The Really Good Podcast,” she began. After a moving rendition of Hallelujah, Althoff, who was wearing all-black mourning clothes, spilled the beans.

“This podcast started off with just a girl with a dream to make more money,” she quipped.

“I knew when I started that it was gonna go places. I didn’t know that I would fall off as quickly as I did. To be honest, I did think this was gonna last a bit longer. But nevertheless, it lasted a minute, and I’m proud of the accomplishments I had. I’m pretty sad it had to end like this, but it’s OK… It has been a dream, every second of it.”

Divorce and controversy

After establishing herself as a mommy TikToker, Althoff launched her podcast in mid-2023. Her deadpan humor and overall cluelessness helped the podcast — which featured guests like Megan Trainor, Offset, Jimmy Kimmel, Jason Derulo, and Michael Cera — soar in popularity.

But it was Bobbi’s interview with Drake that really put her on the map. The intimate discussion, which featured the pair in bed together, amassed 1 billion views and 300 million likes, according to Deadline.

Following the podcast episode, her husband, Cory, filed for divorce, which led to speculation that she may have cheated on her spouse with Drake.

These rumors intensified when Bobbi wiped the podcast episode from all platforms, with Drake and Bobbi appearing to unfollow each other on social media. Things then hit a fever pitch when Bobbi was allegedly thrown out of a party attended by Drake after showing up uninvited.

Since then, social media’s narrative has been that Bobbi “abandoned her family” for fame, which led to her losing a number of fans who supported her from her mommy vlogger days. To this day, netizens continue to peddle this theory on X.

“Nuclear family unit destroyer Bobbi Althoff’s podcast is officially ending,” one wrote. “Is America finally healing?”

Another asked, “Didn’t she leave her husband for these 15 minutes of fame?” While a third opined that Bobbi “was a bad person who abandoned her family to hang with rappers.”

“People saw through it,” they added.

As of now, Bobbi hasn’t revealed the reason for pulling the plug on her own podcast. Are her fifteen minutes of fame finally up?

The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s newsletter here.

There is a time-honored crisis management strategy, wherein one says nothing and waits for the outrage to pass. For Sequoia Capital, the strategy worked pretty well this week. While partner Shaun Maguire initially weathered criticism over an inflammatory social media post, that initial indignation cooled quickly. Now, some seem to think that Maguire’s defiant stance may even be strengthening his position. Business Insider actually called it “good for deal flow” — controversy as competitive advantage.

Sequoia’s calculated gamble carries real risk, though. Another provocative post from Maguire that hits the wrong nerve, a shift in political winds, or escalating consequences could quickly transform their unflappable partner from an asset into a liability the firm can no longer afford to ignore.

A crisis communications professional who has managed reputation disasters for dozens of major brands tells this editor, “Firms like Sequoia are bulletproof until they aren’t.”

What happened

Sequoia’s hands-off approach was put to the test earlier this week when the storied venture firm found itself in the eye of a storm over Maguire’s comments about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Maguire called him an “Islamist” who “comes from a culture that lies about everything” in a July 4th tweet on X that has since been viewed more than five million times. More than one thousand signatures have poured in since on a petition demanding that Sequoia condemn the remarks, investigate Maguire’s conduct, and apologize.

There’s been a lot of talk about why Sequoia hasn’t done this, with many outlets noting that Maguire isn’t just any partner. This status owes partly to his friendship with Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. According to reports, at a 2015 Founders Fund event, Maguire—then a Founders Fund-backed entrepreneur—defended Collison during an argument with Anduril’s Palmer Luckey about quantum computing, earning Collison’s friendship. The connection proved valuable when Maguire joined Google Ventures in 2016; he helped secure a $20 million Stripe investment during his first week. When Maguire left Google Ventures in 2019, Collison personally recommended him to Sequoia’s partners. (Stripe has been in Sequoia’s portfolio since 2010, with the firm investing more than $500 million over 15 years.)

Maguire also led Sequoia’s investment in Bridge, a stablecoin platform that Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion, and is reportedly Sequoia’s link to Elon Musk, though this is probably somewhat overstated. Musk and Sequoia’s global managing director, Roelof Botha, are both native South Africans and have known each other for more than 25 years, dating back to their time together at the then-nascent PayPal, where Botha was recruited personally by Musk.

Despite that long relationship, the two haven’t always seen eye to eye. Botha was highly critical of Musk’s management style when Musk was CEO of the merged X.com/PayPal company, where Botha was CFO. Botha once told veteran journalist Ebbe Dommisse, “I think it would have killed the company if Elon had stayed on as CEO for six more months. The mistakes Elon was making at the time were amplifying the risk of the business.” But Musk was at odds with pretty much that entire crew at the time, and those tensions have long since been resolved.

The bigger point here: when you’re managing tens of billions of dollars in assets and your firm’s reputation rests on backing winners like Google, Stripe, and Nvidia, you don’t easily cast aside a rainmaker.

Meanwhile, Maguire’s behavior suggests he’s not backing down. After issuing a 30-minute video on X last weekend in which he apologized for offending so many — saying he was making a point about a political ideology and not one about a religion — he has doubled down with increasingly aggressive posts this week. He claimed he has “reverse engineered” his critics’ “command structure” and threatened to “embarrass” anyone who escalates against him. He added that this is him at “1% throttle” and warned people not to “fuck w children of the internet.”

The silent treatment

Sequoia has precedent for its approach to this situation. The firm has historically given its partners space to express themselves publicly, with figures like Doug Leone and Michael Moritz (who left the firm in 2023) representing different political perspectives.

But there’s a crucial difference between political diversity and incendiary rhetoric and clearly to some, Maguire’s comments extend beyond partisan politics into territory that alienates both political opponents and potential business partners.

It’s also worth remembering that even for Sequoia, there is a bright line. Michael Goguen, another, earlier rainmaker with the firm, was promptly shown the door when Sequoia learned of a sexual abuse lawsuit filed against him. The situations are hardly comparable; Goguen’s issues were legal and personal, not ideological. At the same time, Sequoia has shown it isn’t willing to circle the wagons at any cost, not if its reputation is at stake.

Presumably, several factors inform Sequoia’s do-nothing PR strategy, including how quickly people, faced with a constant flurry of news, move on from a scandal. The firm is also operating in a different political landscape right now in the U.S. Along with Donald Trump’s victory and the rollback of DEI initiatives has come new tolerance for controversial speech. What might have been career-ending at an earlier point in time is now weathered more easily.

Beyond the shifting political winds, the firm is likely banking on the fact that while founders want partners who fit the traditional, more genteel VC mold, they want successful ones even more. Startups being courted by multiple top-tier firms might not like or agree with Maguire, but when Sequoia comes calling with its track record and almost bottomless pockets, most founders are going to welcome the firm with open arms.

Of course, there’s the very real possibility, too, that Sequoia is working on a contingency plan. (Sequoia declined to comment on Maguire’s posts when reached by TechCrunch earlier this week.)

Still, Sequoia’s silence carries risks. Not all the signers have been confirmed, but the petition against Maguire includes the names of some prominent Middle Eastern executives and founders who have attested to signing it, and they represent the kind of diverse, global talent pool that drives innovation. By not addressing the controversy, Sequoia risks being seen as tacitly endorsing Maguire’s views.

Put another way, though the venture capital world has historically been remarkably forgiving of controversial figures with exceptional deal flow, the firm is gambling with its reputation in an increasingly connected global market where alienating entire regions and communities carries real business consequences.

Whether that bet pays off will depend on how long the controversy lingers, how much business it actually costs Sequoia, and whether Maguire can resist the urge to push things past Sequoia’s own tolerance threshold. (He has said he doesn’t post anything that hasn’t been “excrutiatingly thought out.”)

History suggests that established financial firms with strong track records tend to outlive their scandals, even serious ones. When Apollo Global Management’s Leon Black resigned in 2021 over his $158 million payments to Jeffrey Epstein, the firm’s stock barely moved and shareholders seemed largely unfazed. Apollo just continued its aggressive deal-making under new leadership.

Similarly, Kleiner Perkins survived Ellen Pao’s high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit in 2015. But it took years and essentially an entirely new team for the storied venture firm to regain its footing in Silicon Valley’s hierarchy. The lesson here may be that while controversial partners can be endured, the recovery timelines can vary significantly depending on how firms handle the crisis.

For now, the crisis communications professional, who asked not to be named, has some advice for Maguire and, by extension, Sequoia. Regarding the video Maguire published in the aftermath of his initial comments, the expert said, “I did think that apology addressed the ambiguities in [Maguire’s] post. But it’s a 30-minute video — you have to be really interested to watch this.”

If there’s a next time, the professional said, Maguire should “do two videos — one for three minutes” and another, longer video, for anyone who wants to keep watching.

Sometimes, the expert added, “less is more.”