Business
5 Challenges David Ellison Faces as He Snags His Hollywood Prize. The bigger an acquisition, the riskier it is. We have seen enough big M&A deals fall short of expectations and become expensive write-offs. Warner Bros already changed ownership several times in the last 10 years. Skydance absorbed Paramount a short while ago and just paid an enormous amount of money to buy Warner Bros. The list of challenges, including the promise to the states, the internal battle for scarce resources and a mountain of debt, would be daunting to even very experienced CEOs, let alone a 40-something-year-old that has never managed a public media company before.
‘Black Box’ Revenue From Anthropic and OpenAI Stumps Traders. I find it baffling that people take Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR) figures at face value and derive meaning from those numbers without understanding how each company does its calculation. Annualized by multiplying a quarter’s sale by 4? or a month’s sale by 12? or a day’s sale by 365? While all projections are guestimates with a degree of uncertainty, some methods are more far-fetched than others. If a grocer generated $100 in revenue from your household on Saturday, would it make sense to say its ARR from you would be $36,500? Of course not. To make matters worse, Anthropic includes gross amount of sales through cloud partners as revenue to make its numbers look more impressive. In reality, the fact that OpenAI is expecting to generate $35 billion in revenue in 2026, half of what it projected previously says all about these ridiculous financial fictions in the age of AI.
Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website. Whether a tool benefits or harms our society depends on who wields it. AI is a tool. If we let it function autonomously, we need to make sure it won’t harm or disrupt our society. Even Jensen Huang said that it’s up entirely to us to release safe models. If a model is not safe, well, don’t put it in production.
From BJ’s to Lululemon, retailers are trimming assortments to boost business. Retail is hard. Shoppers want the most bang for their buck. Merchants want to address people with different needs, so they need to have big enough assortments. But having a sizeable line-up comes with a cost, including inventory that is harder and more expensive to manage, less shelf space to test new offerings, and inability to dictate prices. With plans to cut assortments, it’s obvious what is the priority right now for retailers. However, sales is a function of price multiplied with volume. They need to also make sure that the remaining offerings can attract shoppers and generate sales. Otherwise, what’s good of having the power to price if there is no sales?
For Walmart, Replacing Humans With Robots Is a Multibillion-Dollar Struggle. “Walmart and the robotics companies it hired to help searched in vain for a way to choreograph robots to sort merchandise into bins while zipping past warehouse workers, testing technology that either didn’t work or cost too much. Eventually, they designed small robots on wheels with motion and obstacle sensors and are now installing them in more than a dozen warehouses. Problems have multiplied. The cardboard shipping boxes Walmart has used for years are too big for the automated systems. The miniature robots that shuttle goods break down too often. The systems can’t accommodate some oversize products, such as big bags of dog food. Walmart executives said the automation should allow the company to process more inventory, faster, and with more precision, reducing the frequency of out-of-stock goods and reducing costs. They envision a time when a choreographed and predictable cadence of trucks arrive at stores loaded with pallets of goods needed at that moment. The pallets will be organized so store workers can pull them to a single aisle, and the items can be unloaded in the order they are stocked on shelves. That would make store worker schedules more precise and predictable.” This article, paired with a CNBC clip on how Walmart is using digital shelf labels, is showing the investments that the iconic retailer is making in technology and automation. It’s hard and expensive. But it’s precisely what would enable long-lasting high-moat advantage if Walmart could pull it off
Other Stuff I Find Interesting And So May You
The AI telling farmers when to harvest. This story is typical of technology, in general, and AI in particular. AI is only as good as the data it receives. In this case, each farm has a unique dataset. How AI may work for one farm is unlikely to repeat for others. Even with the tremedous potential benefits, farms still rely on humans to decide on when to harvest. AI can help with some tasks, but it won’t replace humans.
Inside Larry Ellison’s Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics. Since Larry Ellison has an unfathomable amount of money and an absurd degree of influence in many areas, it’s fitting that he loves octopus as a species. He does seem to have lived an interesting life with near-deaths both in personal and corporate life, six wives, the latest of which is 47 years younger than him, seven children, a drastic change in political views while still remaining a technology executive at the age of 82. Most recently, he bankrolled his son’s ambitious acquisitions of Paramount and Warner Bros, giving David a ridiculous power in the media and entertainment industry. Given all his accomplishments and wealth, it’s quite revealing to read the last sentence of the piece: ““He’s like a Hollywood star who knows 10,000 people and is completely alone.”
Trump is gutting the Endangered Species Act. These 10 species show what’s at stake. I’d love for the next generations to see these species, but they wouldn’t if we didn’t protect these animals. Money can be made again, but once the last animals are gone, no money would be able to bring them back.
The Nordic Formula for Prospering in a Dangerous, Fragmented World. It makes total sense that the Nordic countries, when facing the increasing hostility from the US, the constant threat from Russia and competition from China, want to band together and reduce dependence on the US. What’s interesting is that they are trying to process payments without involvement from Visa and Mastercard. The US needs to be careful that giving these countries a reason to be independent might spur them to innovate and create threats to its companies.
Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity. “The team recruited healthy adults between 18 and 45 years old. The full study consisted of 57 adults. Of those, 32 completed both the brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and the metabolic sessions. Each participant ate both types of meals in separate sessions, with three or more days between sessions. This allowed researchers to compare how the same person responded to each meal. To examine metabolic effects, participants arrived at the testing site after fasting overnight. They climbed onto a twin-size bed in a metabolic chamber — a sealed, airtight room used to measure human energy expenditure and metabolism. Researchers then took baseline measurements. An hour later, participants were given 10 minutes to eat either a minimally or highly processed meal of 300 nutritionally matched calories. In selecting the meals, the study used the Nova scale, which categorizes food in four groups based on the level of industrial processing. What we noticed with the ultraprocessed food is that insulin response was much higher and blood sugar stays a little bit higher for a little bit longer.“
Stats
“Median family net worth rose 2% from 2022 to 2025 to about $216,000”
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