97 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Elizabeth Lopatto

Elizabeth Lopatto

Senior Reporter

Senior Reporter

    More From Elizabeth Lopatto

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    How’s that Celsius bankruptcy going?

    Celsius promised to unbank its users, and boy did it ever. The now-bankrupt crypto lender’s court proceedings — as well as those of Voyager — are a circus.

    Alah Shehadeh, who invested $80,000 on the Voyager platform, was thrown out of a key hearing in March after repeatedly interrupting the judge, lawyers and witnesses. At one point he shouted, “You are a terrible judge. You are robbing us. This is a crime.”

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    The rise of social media feeds means a lot more staged “street style” photos.

    Turns out celebrities are just fancy influencers, and those “street style” shots are just unmarked ads:

    “We approached somebody for a campaign recently who is a top, very well known person. And for a campaign, that was a million dollars,” Carmona explains. “They wouldn’t even start talks with us for less than a million.” But for these types of street style images, if you’re going out to a group she calls the “seven heavy hitters,” who guarantee you an almost instant return on your investment — Hailey Bieber, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner, Kaia Gerber, Olivia Wilde and Emily Ratajkowski — expect to pay $500,000, at least.

    The photos spread through TikTok and Instagram, and have upstaged the red carpet and Vogue as valuable marketing.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    AI chatbots are for suckers, crypto edition.

    The fine folks at Protos had a little talk with Binance’s AI bot and... listen, parting chumps from their money is a novel way to monetize AI.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    “I do TikTok to rip people off.”

    Caveat emptor, but especially on TikTok. There’s a moderation problem for their ecommerce business, The Financial Times reports:

    Three TikTok employees said cleaning up fraudulent content on the app and monitoring its ballooning number of merchants seemed to have fallen by the wayside amid a frantic push for growth.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Wait, so how exactly does Waystar Royco work?

    Great question! The Financial Times tried to find out. We know there’s a valuation around $80 billion, that Kendall Roy selling to Stewy “King of Looking Fab in a Turtleneck” Hosseini was an astoundingly bad decision, and... oh it seems like the financial stuff is more vibes-based than math based!

    Still, the Bloomberg terminal shade is fun.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    “Either way, when the Auschwitz Museum is having to issue a public statement saying that they didn’t pay for Twitter Blue, it’s probably time for some deep self-reflection about what you’re doing.”

    Ryan Broderick has some thoughts on the ongoing verification demolition derby, which has somehow gone even worse than I thought it would. Sure, someone could probably give Elon Musk useful advice, but this is way funnier! Webbed site.

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    “Humbled” Silicon Valley VCs are loading up on money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

    If you can’t raise in the US... try, try again?

    “We came to San Francisco looking for them in 2017. Now . . . everyone is coming to [us],” said Ibrahim Ajami, head of ventures at Mubadala Capital, part of Mubadala Investment Company, a $284bn Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. “The tech correction has humbled the industry.”

    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Elizabeth Lopatto
    Sometimes reality is just wilder than fiction.

    Lachlan Murdoch had a panic attack during the deal to sell 20th Century Fox to Disney! (A person close to him denies this but cmon lol.) Lachlan told Rupert that James was leaking stuff to Succession writers! There’s even a cameo by Rupert Murdoch’s former wife, Wendi Deng, who may have pushed him into a piano and fractured some of his vertebrae!

    Oh and in case you were wondering about the real-life inspo for Connor Roy? It’s Prudence, and if you can’t get enough Prudence, I suggest you check out Michael Wolff’s Murdoch biography.