The Verge’s latest insights into the ideas shaping the future of work, finance, and innovation. Here you’ll find scoops, analysis, and reporting across some of the most influential companies in the world. Our coverage also includes interviews with innovators and policy makers at the frontiers of business and technology on Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel’s Decoder; a behind-the-curtain look at Silicon Valley with Alex Heath’s Command Line; and exclusive reporting on Microsoft’s strategy in Tom Warren’s Notepad.
A really excellent essay about how Philip K. Dick predicted our current day, “filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be.”
[Financial Times]
Sky Sports reports that the Amazon founder is part of an investment consortium, along with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, close to buying a roughly 30-percent stake in one of the Premier League’s most successful clubs. Saverin has tried this before — he was part of a failed 2022 attempt to buy rival team Chelsea.
The company has reportedly slashed its revenue forecast for 2026 by a third after relying too heavily on frontier models from other providers to drive AI features on the platform. According to Startup Daily, here’s what CEO Melanie Perkins had to say in an update to shareholders:
“Several of our first-party models were not yet ready for release, and our pricing, consumption model and usage controls had not caught up with the outsized demand we were seeing.”
Srini Gopalan in response to SpaceX saying it plans to “acquire quite a few” of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon’s customers by turning Starlink dishes into tiny cellular base stations using the limited spectrum it acquired from EchoStar:
You’ve got to ask the question of ‘What is the gap in the market that they’re looking to serve? I always prefer starting these conversations back from the customer: Why would a customer buy a new cellular service? Where do they go? What’s their differentiation? It’s clearly not having a broad network.
[Financial Times]
CEO Peter Stern said in the company’s latest earnings report that “Peloton delivered its first full year of net profitability” in 2026, after launching a new hardware lineup that initially had “weaker-than-expected” sales. At the same time, Peloton lost 247,000 subscribers year-over-year.
250 employees have been laid off, The New York Times reports, including members of the social network’s content moderation team. The closure was made “to streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth,” a press officer for TikTok’s US joint venture told The Times.
[The New York Times]
Accell Group is the latest victim of Bikeaggedon: the turmoil created by soaring e-bike demand at the onset of covid, followed by a collapse of the supply chain, and then a period of massive oversupply.
A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness.
[Bloomberg]
The newly privatized company is now saddled with $18 billion of debt, with annual interest payments of about $1.8 billion. Big changes are coming to justify the deal.
The software conglomerate has agreed to acquire Airtable for around $1.29 billion in cash — a fraction of the more than $11 billion it was once valued at in 2021. This is just the latest feather in Bending Spoon’s cap, which has built a reputation for buying software companies that are past their heyday.
It’s the first company to reach the audio streaming milestone, showing 9 precent year-over-year growth in premium subscribers. Monthly active users climbed to 777 million, up 12 percent since the same quarter last year.
The era of AI-powered search has made Reddit mentions highly valuable. Subreddit moderators are catching brands trying to take advantage.
The original satellite internet company “for rural America” has filed for bankruptcy after running out of cash and hemorrhaging subscribers to SpaceX. The service will continue to operate during proceedings, but will pivot away from consumers to focus on businesses and governments. It follows EchoStar’s Dish filing for chapter 11 protection in June.
AMZN surpassed $3 trillion in market value for the first time on the strength of accelerating cloud-computing revenue. It joins only Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple in ever reaching the milestone. It first crossed the $1 trillion mark in 2018.
That’s up from 932 million a year ago, according to Snap’s latest earnings report. The company also says its revenue is up 19 percent year-over-year, as it prepares to launch its $2,195 augmented-reality glasses next month.
In 2021, the bank closed over 300 accounts affiliated with the Trump family business. The reasons why weren’t made public at the time. Last year, the organization filed suit claiming the closures were politically motivated, but in a filing this week, Capital One revealed that they resulted from an anti-money laundering review.
“The closures were the result of months of analysis and a careful review by Capital One’s AML team in accordance with bank policies and regulatory guidance … The transaction patterns identified by Capital One are among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.”
This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.
A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”
[The New York Review of Books]
The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote.
[The Financial Times]
Building the data centers needed to support the AI boom requires lots of skilled human tradespeople working 10-hour days, seven days a week, and earning healthy overtime wages. Bidding wars have broken out in markets with heavy data center construction, allowing workers to jump ship for bonuses and even higher pay in a modern-day gold rush, with companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft paying to help train new recruits.
Samsung Electronic’s memory chip business is killing it, hitting $49.64 billion for the quarter and driving over 99 percent of its operating profit. But the price gouging created by the AI hype caused its smartphone and home-appliance businesses to post modest operating losses due to the higher cost of chips and other components.
In addition to Reuters, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, Meta now has an AI content partnership to “…draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”
If access via Truth Plus just wasn’t enough, I guess.
Elon Musk’s X Corp and the World Federation of Advertisers are ending their long-running legal fight. In 2024, Musk accused the industry group of illegally boycotting X through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, which set standards to prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content. GARM has since been disbanded. A judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit in March.
Poor SK Hynix. Despite the memory-chip maker posting record net profit of about $64.64 billion, the stock fell by as much as 18 percent (down 9 percent at market close) when its revenue haul (also a record) failed to meet the lofty expectations set by the AI hype cycle. The results won’t help investors worried that the AI bubble’s about to pop.
After reports of Nvidia in talks for deals worth more than $750 billion — with OpenAI, among others — insurance on Nvidia’s debt got more expensive. “There’s a fear of financial alchemy driven by opaqueness, off-balance-sheet transactions and intercompany relationships, which could result in credit rating downgrades,” Sal Naro, chief investment officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, told Bloomberg. Nvidia is at the center of many transactions that tie the AI ecosystem together.
Chipmaker Changxin Technology Group is now the most valuable China-listed company after IPO’ing this morning, rising nearly 500 percent on speculation that RAMageddon will drive demand for its memory chips in a market dominated by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Tim Cook’s said to have asked for an exception to use CXMT’s chips in Apple products sold in China to keep costs down.
That 28-day pause could go a lot longer, now that US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a deal saying that Paramount Skydance won’t close its transaction until June 1st, 2027, or at least until after legal claims of two lawsuits (one filed by a group of state AGs, and the other by the WGA) are resolved.
Meanwhile, the “ticking fee” Paramount will owe WBD shareholders for any delay starts counting in October, and could add up to $1.7 billion if the delay lasts until next June.
[CourtListener]
