Business

The next step in the “finance is just another meme” movement will apparently include GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen making an attempt to acquire eBay.

There are compelling reasons to believe that slop is no longer just limited to the internet. From AI design tools to trend scraping and fast fashion… This video makes a compelling argument that AI plays a role in why so few fashion brands have unique identities anymore.

The day after opening up its relationship with Microsoft and Azure, OpenAI announced an expanded deal with Amazon that brings its latest AI models, Codex, and other tools to AWS.

While the Trump administration’s attempt to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air was ultimately unsuccessful last year, the president is once again demanding his removal.

It’s the numbers, too, according to a new Wall Street Journal report, which echoes The Information’s claim earlier this month that CFO Sarah Friar has expressed concern about its IPO plans and CEO Sam Altman’s datacenter spending.

Tiny — the movie-tracking social media platform’s controlling investor — has reportedly pitched its stake to potential buyers , including CNBC parent company Versant and Hollywood startup The Ankler. Tiny hasn’t modified much since it bought Letterboxd in 2023, but that could change under a new steward.

He threatened to “put a big tariff on the UK” if it doesn’t drop its tax on the revenue of tech giants, despite the Supreme Court ruling that he can’t actually do that. The president still thinks the tax, which brought in £944m ($1.3bn) last year, unfairly targets US companies.

The prediction market took action against a handful of congressional candidates: Ezekiel Enriquez (a Republican running in Texas); Mark Moran (an Independent in Virginia, who says he meant to get caught); and Matt Klein (a Democrat in Minnesota) for betting in markets related to their political races. Each was banned from the platform for five years and fined modest amounts ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Jason Bonfig, Best Buy’s chief customer, product, and fulfillment officer, will take over for Corie Barry as CEO on October 31st, the company announced on Wednesday. Barry has served as CEO since 2019, and has contended with layoffs, stagnant sales growth, and tariff-related price hikes.

Governor JB Pritzker signed an executive order today dealing specifically with prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. State employees were already barred from using insider information for personal gain, but this executive order specifically bans them from using it to make bets on prediction markets.

Reporting from Bloomberg on how many Cybertrucks Elon’s other companies have been buying:

Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.

Since launching in 2024 with 48 Hyundai dealerships, we’ve seen Amazon Autos add used cars from Hertz and Ford, but now the Wall Street Journal says it’s active in over 130 cities with Kia, Mazda, Subaru, Chevrolet, and Jeep vehicles listed. According to the article, one benefit to Amazon, beyond the listing fee, is attracting carmakers and dealers as advertisers.

Elon Musk has apparently made the jump from X to infect both TikTok and Instagram with new verified accounts. According to the New York Times:

TikTok star Khaby Lame sold his personal brand to a small, relatively unknown company called “Rich Sparkle Holdings.” Instead of handing him $975 million in cash, they paid him in stock. Fans piled in, causing the price to skyrocket, briefly making Lame a paper billionaire (several times over) before the price plummeted. It’s now looking suspiciously like a “pump-and-dump” scheme, causing trading apps to freeze the stock. 🤷‍♂️

The New York Times thinks it found the elusive person behind the pseudonym credited with creating Bitcoin. It relied on a combination of textual analysis and in-person tells to narrow a pool of suspects “from 34,000 down to one”.

Kalshi will have paid product placement on the biggest news channel in the US, according to The Hollywood Reporter (though Fox reportedly won’t use Kalshi for elections coverage). The network is the latest news organization to jump on the prediction market bandwagon: The Associated Press and CNN have deals, not to mention Kalshi and Polymarket’s vast influencer and advertising operations.

Preliminary earnings suggest an eightfold increase in profit (57.2 trillion won estimated, or about $37.8 billion) from the same quarter in 2025, exceeding its entire profit for all of last year. The spike is likely due to strong demand for its memory chips, which have only increased in price as Big AI gobbles up all available inventory.

The billionaire investor is offering to take over the world’s biggest music company (and home to artists like Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar) through his hedge fund. The deal for UMG is valued at more than $50 billion and would install Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz as chair.

A long, and at times funny, report in The New Yorker on Altman’s will to power, people-pleasing, and alleged pattern of deceit, compiled from notes, memos, and more than 100 interviews. Altman’s reputation has given rise to grimmer rumors – hiring sex workers, the sexual pursuit of minors, even involvement in murder – that The New Yorker found no evidence for. Increasingly, the question is not whether computers are intelligent but whether OpenAI’s leadership is.