Business

Ackman, through his Pershing Square hedge fund, had offered in April to take over UMG in a deal valuing the music giant at around €55 billion. But UMG says that the offer “fundamentally and materially undervalues UMG and will not deliver superior value creation.”

That’s what Amazon exec Dave Treadwell told employees after the company shuttered an internal leaderboard tracking which staff members use AI the most, the Financial Times reports:

As the Wall Street Journal reports, SK Hynix and Micron both passed the milestone this week. The spike in value for the world’s three largest DRAM manufacturers follows a months-long global memory shortage, driven by demand from AI data centers, that’s causing prices to skyrocket on everything from phones to game consoles.

Steve Jobs famously told Houston his startup was “a feature, not a product” when trying to acquire it back in 2009. Houston turned down the nine-figure buyout offer and Apple went on to launch iCloud. Houston, now 43 and worth about $2 billion, leaves behind a service used by millions worldwide. He now wants to do something entrepreneurial with — you guessed it — AI.

The deal will pay some workers in Samsung’s highly profitable memory chip unit around $416,000 this year, while employees in other chip units will receive less, and those in its consumer electronics divisions are ‌set ⁠to receive very little by comparison. Payouts are pegged to Samsung hitting profit milestones through 2028.

The new deal, still being voted on, ensures enormous bonuses for memory chip workers but much smaller payouts for everyone else. Two Samsung unions take issue with that: one says its members will vote against the deal, the other says it’s taking legal action after being denied the chance to vote.

The smart ring maker has confidentially filed its Form S-1 ahead of an IPO, and it plans to potentially go public this year, Bloomberg reports. Oura also said Wednesday that it’s “on pace” to pass five million paid subscribers this quarter.

Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary is one of the investors backing the Stratos Project, a colossal data center in Utah. It sounds like he has a few fans in the comments section.

The company reported record overall revenue of $81.6 billion and record data center revenue of $75.2 billion, driven by continued demand for its chips in AI data centers.

Joe Rogan accidentally asked a hard question! He noted that Andreessen has said that the people who are running AI haven’t done a good job explaining AI’s benefits. He asks Andreessen to do it. Andreessen’s pitch appears to be “thinking is too hard.” Well, increasingly, I do believe thinking is too hard… for Andreessen. The rest of us — you know, normal people — are thinking just fine.

The deal is valued at $100 million according to Puck, and would add a US-based brand to Shein’s portfolio after President Trump ended the de minimis exemption on cheap imported goods. If true, that’s a notable pivot for Everlane, which until now has built its brand around sustainability.

The UK’s competition and markets regulator has cleared the deal to go ahead, on the condition that Shutterstock sells its global editorial business, including Backgrid and Splash. This clears a path to finalize the merger, as it was already granted “unconditional antitrust clearance” by the US DOJ in February.

I enjoyed reading this story about Bill Gates’ malevolent influence on the current crop of Silicon Valley megalomaniacs. If you remember his pre-Gates Foundation reputation, you will particularly appreciate it.

Even with the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule vacated (but possibly coming back?), it has reached a settlement over Shutterstock’s subscriptions that allegedly required a phone, chat, or email conversation to get out of.

Just kidding! But some news organizations are offering prediction market affiliate codes — and publishing thousands of stories pushing gambling deals. Popular Information reports that news orgs owned by Advance Local (including The Oregonian and The Cleveland Plain Dealer) are on track to run more than 14,000 pieces of “gambling slop” this year promoting deals for sportsbooks, casinos, and prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi.

Earlier this week I wrote about the social media “clippers” that get paid to semi-covertly promote podcasts, TV shows, and other media through anonymous accounts. One of the clipping campaigns was for Perplexity AI — but nobody can tell me who, exactly, is responsible for the clips:

You know how only one company in the entire world makes the machine that makes the world’s most advanced chips — and only three companies control the world’s supply of RAM? Reuters reports that Big Tech is trying to buy Big RAM’s favor in exchange for some of those machines, among other “unprecedented” offers.

Everything is gambling, but not everything in gambling is going great, as CNBC reports that on Wednesday, FanDuel CEO Amy Howe was “ousted from that post after five years at the company.” FanDuel’s stock is down 60 percent over the last year, and DraftKings shares are down 30 percent.

A report by The Information says that for the US-licensed arm of the prediction market, chief executive Justin Hertzberg “appears to be CEO in name only,” despite his protestations to the contrary.

Fubo TV’s earnings seem to show the impact of the NFL, as the Q2 subscriber count dropped from 6.2 million at the end of 2025 to 5.7 million three months later, which is fewer than the 5.9 million subscribers it had at the same time last year. Still, revenue was up one percent.

Data center sales are now “the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth,” according to CEO Lisa Su. AI agents are increasing demands for CPUs, and AMD and Intel’s x86 industry group recently announced a new instruction set, AI Compute Extensions (ACE), to help close the performance gap with GPUs.

Every three months, we get another round of financial updates from publicly traded companies like Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon, but the Trump Administration is pushing to lower that requirement to every six months. The argument in favor of changing it claims that quarterly reporting is a burden on small or medium-sized companies, despite the risks of weaker monitoring, as Reuters and WSJ report.

Wu is still identifying documents. Two jurors have some real thousand-yard stares going on.

We are now looking at assorted legal documents with him. We have determined the board has approved the agreement of 2018, which is the initial formation of the for-profit OpenAI LP. OpenAI Inc. contributed assets and in result got the limited partner interest and “residual interest.” This seems to be mostly about reading stuff into the record.

Molo asked a very narrow question about texts or emails about removing Musk from the board. Then he accused Brockman of making up the explanation after the fact because of the trial. OpenAI’s lawyer pulled out two sentences from the same entry: “real decision is fire Elon” and “We seem converged on the ‘fire Elon’ route.” Pretty good from OpenAI’s lawyers, and very annoying / misleading from Molo.

For instance, yesterday, Brockman gave a long spiel about the setup of OpenAI that only tangentially involved Musk. Altman and Sutskever were portrayed as being in the middle of things. Molo effectively said that and then pointed out that Musk’s money was key. Brockman objected both to the summary, and to the idea that Musk’s money was key. Come on, dude. We aren’t idiots.