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Google quietly discontinues its Earth AI feature a day after its rollout after users made no-no images
Google’s “Nano Banana” AI allowed users to generate any images they wanted from Google Earth—and Google didn’t measure the consequences.
Mamdani wants to form business panel with ex-Lazard, UBS bankers
Mamdani is courting UBS, Lazard and BofA veterans for an advisory council spanning finance, real estate and tech, people familiar with the matter say
Exclusive: Kalshi launches ‘Blanket’ to help small businesses hedge against risk—with help from the guru of ‘hypergamblification’
Lauris Zminsky says "a lot of young people are embracing lottery-ticket economics" — but his new project with Kalshi is totally separate from that.
I built Canada’s largest crypto company. But the business climate here made selling to Robinhood inevitable
The CEO of WonderFi says that he sold because Canada's burdensome regulatory climate makes international expansion out of reach.
The Business Training Fortune 500 Employees to Stay Safe at Work Makes Millions of Dollars for Its Unlikely Creator: ‘Sort of Magic’
COVE is on a mission to help people see — and reduce injuries on the job.
Computer science enrollment is plunging, but AI is taking over the rest of the college campus as it reshapes how students learn and work
Universities like Colby College are increasingly integrating AI into disciplines not related to computer science.
Bernie Sanders hails Michigan result as ‘most extraordinary victory that I can think of in modern American politics’
Abdul El-Sayed has never held elected office and entered the race years after losing the Democratic gubernatorial primary by over 20 percentage points.
Michael Dell’s son built a $13 billion home battery business—and he’s going on 30 years old
Zach Dell is banking on a home electricity and battery rental business that offers backup power without buying an exorbitantly expensive system.
Michael Dell’s son built a $13 billion home battery business—and he’s going on 30 years old
Zach Dell is banking on a home electricity and battery rental business that offers backup power without buying an exorbitantly expensive system.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Is Getting A Manga Series, Here's The Key Art
The game arrives on Switch 2 this September
Don't Worry, PS5 Has Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave at Home
Beaten Path paves a route to release in 2027
Fidji Simo had to leave OpenAI. But she’s still building a business that could find cures to chronic diseases that affect women like her
ChronicleBio is using AI to improve clinical trials and find cures for diseases like POTS.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave Direct Reveals True Protagonist And
There's more to Fortune's Weave than meets the eye
Here's How To Watch The Nintendo Direct For Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
The livestream starts today at 10AM ET/7AM PT.
Exclusive: Former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo discusses her battle with POTS and her startup’s plans to cure it with AI and 3,500 vials of blood (so far)
Simo is a cofounder of ChronicleBio, which aims to cure complex chronic diseases by analyzing biological data with the latest AI models.
Ukraine uses business principles to maximize Russia’s casualties and economic costs, potentially crushing its will to keep fighting, RAND says
Ukraine has KPIs for the military—just like corporations, which use them to track output from employees or subsidiaries.
Nintendo Will Show Off More Of Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave In New Direct Showcase
The direct will take place Tuesday, August 4th and last for 20 minutes
Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Direct set for August 4
Nintendo will host a Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave Direct on August 4 at 7:00 a.m. PT / 10:00 a.m. ET / 23:00 JST, the company announced. You will be able to watch it on YouTube (America, Euro…
Nintendo Direct Announced, Focused on Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
A Nintendo Direct broadcast focused on Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave will broadcast this week, it's been announced.
The computer science major is dying so that the AI literacy minor can be born: ‘we have to democratize it’
Computer science enrollment is falling even as psych, music and biology majors rush into AI minors — colleges are racing to keep up with employer demand.
‘It’s really not for the faint of heart’: This 29-year-old CEO became a business owner, doubled revenue in 3 years, and learned what car not to drive
Lucas Philips became a CEO at 26 and now finds himself getting up at 4:30 am to commute from Manhattan to Newark. He doesn't have a foosball table.
He was homeless at 16. Now, he sits on the board of David Beckham’s wellness company and his business is about to hit $1 billion in revenue
Hudson Leogrande, the founder of popular hoodie brand Comfrt, bounced between car sales and chimney telemarketing before hitting his stride as an entrepreneur.
Bars, bowling alleys and movie theaters cost too much to run and visit. Americans have run out of places to hang out and we’re paying with our health
Chronic isolation has the same health impact as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Anthony Scaramucci: don’t let politics cost America the digital economy
I've been one of Trump's most outspoken critics since my tenure in his White House. But this legislation evolved as lawmakers raised legitimate concerns.
Amazon’s Andy Jassy sees a $1 trillion cloud built on businesses like the PGA Tour—which swapped its server trucks for AI broadcasts
AWS just posted $42.2 billion in revenue with its fastest growth in 18 quarters and the AI platform saw more spending last quarter than in every prior quarter since launch combined.
Wall Street’s hidden recruiting pipeline isn’t an Ivy League diploma—it’s the teammate who triples your odds of getting hired
A new study of more than 120,000 Ivy League graduates finds locker room ties, not diplomas, do the real gatekeeping into finance's top firms
Mark Cuban’s Las Vegas A’s investment is his ‘Sports 2.0’ Dallas Mavericks playbook all over again
“The new model of baseball—or basketball, football—is teams becoming media companies and transcending a local marketplace," Rashaun Williams told Fortune.
Jensen Huang says this is the greatest time in history to start a business—and his advice is to stop overthinking it: ‘How hard can it be?’
The billionaire CEO has spent the last three decades building Nvidia —but says one simple mindset helped turn a diner-booth idea into a $4.7 trillion giant.
Hormel Foods Completes Sale of CERATTI® Business in Brazil
/PRNewswire/ -- Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL), a Fortune 500 global branded food company, today announced the successful completion of the sale of its...
The competition passed on a flying toy. We built it into $100 million dollar business
In his new book, Spin Master's Ronnen Harary explains how three founders in their 20s took a toy everyone rejected and turned it into Air Hogs.
Elevance Health’s CEO started her career as a pro basketball player. Now she’s the highest‑ranking woman on the Global 500, leading a $199B giant
Gail Boudreaux credits collegiate athletics with helping to shape her leadership style.
Microsoft’s stock has biggest one-day gain since 2008, adding $480 billion in market value as cloud business booms
Azure crossed $100 billion in revenue for the first time and a new disclosure about OpenAI offered some respite.
Should AI be formally recognized as a national and global security threat? In London, politicians increasingly think so
More than 125 U.K. lawmakers support ControlAI's campaign led by Luciana Berger to have non-human superintelligence officially recognized as a national and global security threat.
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Meta stock drops 10% as free cash flow gets crushed—and Zuckerberg hints at launching cloud business with few details
Meta's quarterly results showcased the strength of its core social media business, as well as the gap in its business model in the AI arm's race.
Robinhood CFO details surging prediction market business as firm posts record revenue in Q2
Robinhood beat analyst expectations on several fronts though crypto revenue fell significantly.
Dr. Fauci, the Age of Big Players in science and what his diary reveals about the disputed origins of Covid
In the age of Big Players, even science has become politicized. The most recent evidence is contained in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary.
Jeff Bezos says this business is becoming Amazon’s next ‘pillar’
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says the company's custom AI chip business is poised to become its next "pillar," joining Marketplace, Prime, and AWS as one of Amazon's foundational businesses as the tech giant doubles down on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Jeff Zucker is banking on the UAE to help build his new $8 billion entertainment empire
The $8bn Banijay-All3Media merger has created a global media and entertainment powerhouse—and Jeff Zucker believes the Gulf has a starring role to play
Gen Z say selling their secondhand stuff online is teaching them more about business than college—and 85% of hiring managers agree
Exclusive: Hiring managers say running a Depop account impresses them more than an internship or a retail job.
Lenovo Jumps to #153 on ‘Fortune Global 500’ as AI-driven Business Fuels Growth
Lenovo climbed 43 places to #153 on Fortune’s annual Global 500 List, making it the highest ranking in the company’s history and one of the most significant advances in recent years.
A trove of users’ seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot showed up in Google search results
The topics of the seemingly inadvertently exposed chats ranged from erotica, programming chats, work notes, and fake book reviews.
Oprah Winfrey says ‘life starts at 44’—and research proves she’s right: the average founder starts their business after 40
Billionaire Oprah Winfrey says she “locked in” in her 40s—as most CEOs and founders are middle-aged.
Sit back and watch the birds—your health will thank you, data shows
A psychologist says scientific research have cited consistent evidence to show spending time in nature leads to health improvements.
'Good energy' at Chelsea as Alonso kickstarts reign in Sydney
New manager Xabi Alonso said Monday there was "good energy" at Chelsea as he bids to turn around the club's fortunes, but was reluctant to say what a successful first season would look like."But I think that we are starting the new season with good energy, that's going to be important."
Gambling becomes America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined
Americans wagered $166 billion on sports last year, more than Hollywood, the music industry, books, and museums combined.
Trump administration admits it canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy projects ‘based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state’
In this case, that includes 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Ronald Reagan center director: How to talk politics with family, friends and neighbors, without losing them
A new civility handbook offers a simple framework for disagreeing without destroying the relationships that matter most.
Warriors’ Controversial Decision May Have Lost LeBron James
The Golden State Warriors made a critical call this offseason that may have changed the fortunes of the team for years to come. The post Warriors’ Controversial Decision May Have Lost LeBron James appeared first on HEAVY.
Nearly 1,000 people dead from Ebola outbreak in Congo amid health worker strike
Healthcare workers in Congo have faced local resistance, unpaid labor, and physical assault during the declared fastest Ebola outbreak in history.
Panera founder and Cava chairman Ron Shaich bets $100 million on Level99, bringing his restaurant industry playbook to entertainment
Act III Holdings doubles its stake in Level99 after the Disney Springs opening, betting restaurant-industry category discipline can build a dominant player in entertainment.
Exclusive: Twin sisters built GlossGenius into the latest female-founded unicorn. Now they’re debuting AI for small businesses far beyond beauty
GlossGenius just raised $44 million at a $1.15 billion valuation as it rebrands as Genius AI, moving beyond the beauty industry.
Prediction markets Swell to 27% of sports bets during World Cup
Kalshi, the biggest player, has repeatedly broken its own trading records during the World Cup.
Looking back at the World Cup: Fans drank Boston dry, got permanent tattoos, sold out famous BBQ joints, and drove up small business revenue
From permanent tattoos and drinking Boston dry, to a bar doing nearly 300% of weekly business in one night, the World Cup is helping small businesses.
Beyond rockets and satellites, SpaceX is quietly building an AI compute business that may become key to its eye-popping valuation
Deals with Google and Anthropic to rent out computing capacity could generate $26 billion a year.
So you want to buy a sports franchise? Why entering sports ownership gives the rich a ‘very elite and exclusive club’ with great tax benefits
Increasingly, the founders and heads of companies like Home Depot, Walmart and LVMH are entering the sports world. There's a good reason for that.
Off Season began with viral NFL jackets. Now Kristin Juszczyk is building a company designed to outlast any one sports season
Her brand, Off Season, is growing beyond football as she builds a fashion business around sports fandom.
‘We shouldn’t be playing the game’: athletes sound off as smoke chokes U.S. sports
Heavy, pungent wildfire smoke darkened skies in the U.S. from the Great Lakes to parts of the East Coast.
Science-based testing powers better health at Plus10 - Cross Timbers Gazette | Southern Denton County | Flower Mound
Flower Mound resident Yves Lafortune has competed in his fair share of Ironman events, 100-mile runs, and national-level triathlons over the years. And if you ask him if he plans to do more, he wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. Clearly, the challenge isn’t finding the passion or commitment to keep going. As a lifelong athlete, […]
How business ownership is once again becoming a family affair
The growing share of businesses being inherited rather than purchased among wealthy Americans reflects the broader great wealth transfer and signals a shift in how wealth and business ownership are changing across generations, Fortune reports. According to Bank of America’s 2026 Private Bank Study of Wealthy Americans, 23% of businesses owned by wealthy individuals are […]
Can a state be ‘best for business’ while restricting abortion?
Business advocates say reproductive rights are a workforce issue, arguing that state rankings fail to capture how abortion restrictions affect employees.
The $124 trillion Great Wealth Transfer is more than just cash: More U.S. businesses are now being inherited than bought, BofA finds
A greater share of companies passed down to family members could be a sign of greater wealth concentration and the power of private markets.
Americans hate AI so much that politicians are starting to lose their jobs over it
Only 26% of Americans view AI positively, and Utah's ouster of Senate leader Stuart Adams over a data center deal suggests the anger is now costing jobs.
Exclusive: Corner Health raises $25 million to turn nurse practitioners into entrepreneurs
Women dominate NP roles—and can double their salaries in 27 states where they're permitted to practice independently.
Columbia Business School professors: What the Balogun red card can teach us about AI and judgment
VAR, or video assistant referee, has a lot to teach us about what "human in the loop" actually means in practice.
Xbox Seems To Be Making A Fortune On The New Black Ops Ports For PS5
They've been spotted trending higher than GTA 6
Other diet fads championed by MAHA are questionable. But some science and thousands of years of human history are behind fermented foods
“What is it that makes the fermented foods so healthy? The answer is we're still working on it.”
Billionaires warned New York would scare off business. Anthropic and Airbnb just made their biggest bets on the city yet
Not only are they expanding their footprint, they’re also doubling headcount. Anthropic said it plans to have more than 1,000 employees by end of year.
‘Sony essentially destroys its own defense’: How its disc-free PS5 plan triggered a $457M lawsuit and undercut its antitrust defense
Sony’s move enraged thousands of gamers and brought on a lawsuit with the backdrop of rival Xbox’s restructuring amid video game industry challenges.
Billionaire MacKenzie Scott just donated $20 million to support America’s youth mental health, as a fifth of teens struggle with suicidal thoughts
MacKenzie Scott, worth $35.8 billion, just donated a record-breaking gift to the U.S. nonprofit Active Minds to support a “new era of mental health.”
750 million fans and 2.7 million data points: How IBM’s AI powers Wimbledon from hidden ‘Court 19’
The tennis tournament has become a proving ground for IBM’s tech and is helping business executives overcome their AI fears.
World First: Scientists Witnessed a Piece of Earth's Oceanic Crust Being Born
"Fortune favors the bold."
Colts Stick With Their Pick in 2024 Re-Draft
The Indianapolis Colts made a good enough first-round pick in the 2024 NFL Draft that they didn't have to change their fortunes in a recent projected re-draft.
Billionaire John Arnold has already donated nearly half his wealth. Now he’s funding a hunt for the health risks of sports betting.
The foundation John Arnold runs with his wife, Laura, is funding 12 university studies on how online sports betting affects users' finances, mental health, and family life.
Explaining The Comcast and NBCUniversal Divorce
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) I hope everyone had a happy Fourth of July in America, celebrating the country’s 250th birthday. Frankly, I am bummed the 250th wasn’t a bigger celebration, but that’s a different topic for a different Substack. While it was generally a quiet week on the entertainment/streaming/media business fronts, we still had some interesting news stories. Actually, that kinda undersells one of the stories, a huge, huge, huge divestment that could upend the entertainment landscape... So let’s get right to it. In today’s column, I’ll cover Comcast spinning off the rest of NBCUniversal, an entertainment company investing in an LLM company and an LLM-owner investing in a movie studio, the latest round of threats of digital tariffs, and more. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Most: Comcast/NBCU Breakup!!!! If I had to describe my reaction to Comcast spinning out NBCUniversal, it feels like a relationship ending, either breaking up or divorcing. Comcast’s decision to spin off the rest of NBCUniversal, after spinning off some of its cable assets into Versant last year, really does feel like a family breaking up under “irreconcilable differences”. Of my stereotypes of the entertainment moguls, my go-to for Comcast CEO Brian Roberts—heir to the Comcast fortune, but a man who’s been at the helm for 24 years now, and president for twelve years before that—is that he likes building empires. He cut his teeth acquiring cable rivals in the 1990s and tried to buy Disney repeatedly, then settled for NBCUniversal after a long court battle. (Contrast this with Rupert Murdoch, a man who also loved to buy, but would also sell when the price is right. Murdoch made Fox out of nothing, but then sold 20th Century Fox to Disney, arguably at the top of the market. So I understood why he sold.) But I don’t understand Roberts’ motivation to sell now. I have some explanations but no single, super-satisfying explanation. Strategically, it would just make more sense to have kept NBCUniversal in-house, especially for a one-time empire builder like Comcast. Yet one powerful force—arguably the decider in modern capitalism—likely overwhelmed all other considerations. At first, I thought I’d arrange my thoughts as a “Five Why” analysis, digging through each layer of the puzzle. But instead, I found myself asking, “But…why?” (And I only ended up with four sections.) So let’s look at Comcast from that angle. Then, at the end, I’ll give my biggest strategic recommendation for every company in Hollywood. It’s obvious, but sometimes, the obvious strategy is the most ignored. But…Why? The Stock Market, Conglomerations, and Sum of the Parts Analysis We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why Comcast could never get a “tech company” valuation The not-so-secret motivation for Comcast What Versant has to do with all of this The key strategic advice I think every entertainment exec should follow (though it’s really obvious) Some big AI investment news… Whether we’ll see digital tariffs… And more… ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
‘Marie Antoinette would feel very comfortable’: How U.S. airlines built their business around big spenders
Delta, United and American are pouring billions into first-class lounges, caviar service and lie-flat seats as premium cabins become their most profitable real estate—while economy travelers face rising fares and add-on fees.
Game over for 20% of Xbox staff as Microsoft hits reset: We ‘didn’t focus on the core business,’ CEO says. ‘We simply spread ourselves too thin.’
Everything you need to know before you reach the office this morning.
Trump’s request for a review of Folarin Balogun’s red card has become a global test of FIFA’s political neutrality
The U.S. striker’s red-card ban was suspended after President Trump personally asked FIFA president Gianni Infantino for a review.
‘Our business today is not healthy’: 1,600 Xbox employees among the 4,800 laid off by Microsoft as it looks to ‘reset’ gaming division
A third of Microsoft's global layoffs were Xbox employee as the company reduced its workforce by 2.1% globally.
Video games are a fortune. Blame Trump and AI.
Spiking console prices are a clear sign of inflation—especially for one key voting bloc.
As higher airfares and gas prices make vacations ‘crazy expensive,’ small business owners say Americans are staying closer to home this summer
“This summer, we’re still doing a couple overnights and the lake house, but nothing else.”
Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary says if he were 25 today, he’d chase these two booming opportunities in the world of AI
O'Leary says young entrepreneurs shouldn't chase flashy AI, they should instead try to build its backbone.
Mark Zuckerberg takes business calls on a jet ski wearing his $800 Meta glasses—and insists ‘the other person could not tell’
Zuckerberg is convinced smart glasses will replace the smartphone—and he's spending billions to prove it, even as Reality Labs posts a $19.2 billion loss.
The CEO using AI to double revenue with 1,000 fewer hires: ‘Nobody’s going to replace the last mile’
"I was having a conversation this weekend with Claude and it was a pretty in-depth conversation," W.J. Werzyn told Fortune. And then it hallucinated.
Politics is personal for a CT attorney. She’s also a Haitian immigrant now running for Congress
After a years-long journey in search of the American Dream, she eventually received her law degree, bought a home at the age of 30, and is now raising three children with her husband.
America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital
Latino-owned businesses added 180,000 net new firms between 2017 and 2023 while white-owned firms declined — and the talent pipeline behind that growth runs through Minority-Serving Institutions now facing funding uncertainty.
Ukrainian drones target more Russian oil infrastructure as fuel crisis adds political pressure on Putin, who shrugs off attacks as ‘not critical’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack as part of Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” against Russia.
The World Cup is just now discovering Middle America’s big heart. These Irish bingo kingpins built a $24 million business knowing it all along
Craig Reynolds and Will Meara launched Bingo Loco in a Dublin basement in 2017. Nine years later, Locomotive sells a million tickets a year in 300 cities.
The sports economy is unaffordable at the bar, let alone the stadium
New data shows fans are going into debt for tickets — and one in five can't even afford to watch out at a sports bar.
Scott Bessent goes after the top Mexican cartel’s new billion-dollar business: gas stations
Treasury sanctioned two men and nine firms tied to a Jalisco cartel fuel-theft ring that reportedly nets tens of millions a year across 21 Mexican states.
Stripe, Visa and over 140 other businesses to launch stablecoin to rival Tether and Circle
Other big-name participants include BlackRock, American Express, and Google.
The John Rogers Contrarian Playbook: How Envista, MSG Entertainment, and Smucker Stack Up for Retirement Investors
John Rogers built his fortune hunting unloved stocks that the market abandoned too soon, but three of his favorite contrarian bets look very different when filtered through the lens of retirement income and low volatility.
Hormel Foods Announces Agreement to Sell Ceratti Business in Brazil
/PRNewswire/ -- Hormel Foods Corporation (NYSE: HRL), a Fortune 500 global branded food company, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to...
Wendy Schmidt: Three centuries of science is something to celebrate
George Washington Died Not Knowing Dinosaurs Existed. Three Centuries Later, Science Has Never Needed More Defense.
Wendy Schmidt: Three centuries of science is something to celebrate
George Washington Died Not Knowing Dinosaurs Existed. Three Centuries Later, Science Has Never Needed More Defense.
Who slept worst last night: Valtteri Bottas
The Finn had a rough weekend in Austria, battling reliability issues that echoed the fortunes of backmarkers of old
AWS CEO says replacing young employees with AI is ‘one of the dumbest ideas’—and bad for business: ‘At some point the whole thing explodes on itself’
Amazon laid off 14,000 employees this fall, but CEO Andy Jassy denied the reductions were related to AI.
Ex-Google engineer says Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai share the same trait—it’s the lesson he swears by as a $7.2 billion AI CEO
$7.2 billion AI founder Arvind Jain ‘observed’ Sundar Pichai at Google for years before he became CEO—he learned you need to ‘think crazy’ to be successful
Ex-Google engineer says Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai share the same trait—it’s the lesson he swears by as a $7.2 billion AI CEO
$7.2 billion AI founder Arvind Jain ‘observed’ Sundar Pichai at Google for years before he became CEO—and learned you need to ‘think crazy’ to be successful