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.
What the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery says about the future of Hollywood, with Puck’s Julia Alexander.
The closure of its physical Amazon Go and Fresh stores also brings an end to the Amazon One palm ID service by June 3rd for retail locations, including over 500 Whole Foods stores, with all biometric data deleted. Amazon One will continue to function at healthcare facilities “until further notice.”
The previously-rumored cuts follow an accidental calendar invite sent last night. They come after 14,000 corporate jobs were cut in October, attributed partially to advances in AI. This latest round of layoffs is less than 5 percent of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate workforce.
We’ve been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy. While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.
Mr. 420 hopes to raise $50 billion by taking SpaceX public with the largest initial public offering in history. The target date is mid-June, near Elon Musk’s 55th birthday on June 28th, and June 8th and 9th “when Jupiter and Venus will appear very close together, known as a conjunction, for the first time in more than three years.”
SpaceX wants the extra funds to help develop its beefier Starship rocket system, expand its Starlink constellation, and to put data centers into space.
Samsung has been the leading TV maker globally for 20 years. China’s TCL is this close to unseating the South Korean champ after posting a 20 percent surge in year-over-year global TV shipments, according to Counterpoint Research. That Sony x TCL deal all but guarantees a new leader should it go through.
Today’s reports from Hunterbrook Media and Pablo Torre Finds Out claim the company’s hardware is seemingly easily obtained and popularly used in Russia’s war effort through already-sanctioned distributors and other middlemen.
Ubiquiti, which was fined $500k in 2014 over “reckless disregard” for Iran sanctions, did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Politico, a notice will tell state officials to instead use the “secure and sovereign” French-made Visio platform.
David Amiel, Minister Delegate for the Civil Service and State Reform, announces the generalization of “Visio”, a tool developed by the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM), to all State services by 2027. The objective: to put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool.
Alex Lintner, Experian’s CEO of tech and software solutions, came on Decoder this week. When I asked Alex whether he thought the average person likes Experian as a company, he gave me one of the most memorable answers we’ve ever gotten. Check out the clip below, and catch the full interview here on The Verge.
Alex Lintner, head of tech for the global credit reporting company, on AI, privacy, and what data brokerages really do.
The chipmaker’s Q4 2025 earnings report reveals that it earned $13.7 billion in revenue over the past few months, a dip from the $14.3 billion it made at the same time last year.
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “working aggressively to grow supply” of chips built on its 18A process, including its new Panther Lake laptop CPUs.
A survey of 5,000 white collar workers suggests experiences differ greatly between CEOs and non-management employees. Forty percent of workers say it saves them no time each week to use AI and just two percent say it saves them more than 12 hours. Meanwhile, two percent of executives say they don’t save any time, and 19 percent say it saves them more than 12 hours a week.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Sephora is partnering with Korean beauty retailers Olive Young to bring more K-beauty products to international consumers in-store and online. In the last decade, K-beauty has had a meteoric rise outside of Korea; the industry has especially thrived in the TikTok social media era, where new products and releases are used to relentlessly drive beauty trends. Now US retailers are in an “arms race” to cash in on the popularity.
[The Business of Fashion]
Razer’s Min-Liang Tan says the backlash to AI slop is understandable, but that he sees a future where AI can “help game developers make better games.”
From window shopping and browsing to reviews and recommendations, retailers and tech companies envision a future filled with artificial intelligence — whether shoppers want it or not.
The solution is using Bluesky, of course. Naturally, a user with a blue check next to their name told Grok to put a bikini on the butterfly and the AI did — which seems like an even stronger advertisement for Bluesky than the one Bluesky itself posted.
Fourth-quarter profit was up 35 percent for the advanced chipmaker that boasts Nvidia, AMD, and Apple as clients. It has now posted year-over-year growth in every quarter for the last two years, hitting a new record in Q4.
Here’s yet another manufacturing pressure we have the AI chip boom to thank for: glass cloth. It’s a key component in the chip substrates for printed circuit boards, and the industry is mostly reliant on a single manufacturer in Japan, which can no longer keep up with demand.
We’ve got something special for you today. It’s my friend Hank Green, longtime internet creator, science educator, and viral TikTok star, interviewing Dropout CEO Sam Reich, now in full video on our Decoder YouTube channel.
Hank did this episode as a guest host last summer while I was out with our new baby, and it’s a fan favorite, bringing together two internet personalities that’ve known each other for a very long time and who have a lot of inside knowledge about how the internet, Hollywood, and entertainment all intertwine. We think it’s one of the best episodes of Decoder we put out last year, and it’s honestly just a really fun conversation. Here’s the full transcript in case you want to read, rather than watch, the interview.
Powell’s statement says the Fed received grand jury subpoenas “threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June,” about historic building renovations. But, he said, it’s actually retaliation for setting interest rates based on “what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”
The chip shortage created by our desire to watch AI-generated videos of Trump and Maduro dance in matching Nike sweatsuits, has nearly tripled Samsung’s profits for the quarter, as memory prices surged 40-50 percent.
Real people died while Trump treated war like a meme stock.
The WBD board of directors said on Wednesday that Paramount’s amended bid from last month “remains inferior” to Netflix’s offer, adding that Paramount “continues to provide insufficient value.”
Apparently, even a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison wasn’t enough to top Netflix’s bid, which Netflix doubled down on today.
While trying to find vacation info, the chatbot told a WSJ reporter that “Tripadvisor is being a little useless.” They tested several chatbot AI apps, and apparently, Instacart is one of the better ones -- having your former CEO become OpenAI’s “CEO of Applications” must have helped.
Other apps were slow, buggy, and complicated, and, at this stage, still slower than traditional iPhone apps.
Zuckerberg’s 2025 AI spending spree now includes snagging Manus and autonomous bots that turn “advanced AI capabilities into scalable, reliable systems that can carry out end-to-end work in real-world settings.”
As we wait for agent reality to match agent hype, Manus says it plans to expand on its existing subscriptions via Meta’s platforms in the future.
[Facebook Business]
CNBC reports Nvidia isn’t buying all of Groq, which has inference AI tech that IBM’s CEO recently told us “looks like it’ll be 10x cheaper” than GPUs.
Nvidia’s getting a non-exclusive license, and members of the team, like Google TPU creator and Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, and former Autonomic CEO Sunny Madra.
I don’t know what “AX, the financial industry’s first centralized exchange for perpetual futures on traditional asset classes,” is, but I do recognize Harrison.
He was once touting FTX Stocks, and later mentioned by the FDIC for statements about the insurance status of customers’ accounts that it considered “false and misleading,” before everything went boom.
The new offer has a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison. WBD says it will now review it.
