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.
Warner Bros. has a long history of bad buyouts and mergers, but maybe Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has been watching a little too much Arrested Development on his own platform.
Bebopper:
Arrested Development but it might work for us .gif
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Despite Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos’ efforts to woo the president last month, Trump said on Sunday that plans to combine the streamer with Warner Bros. “could be a problem.” Trump said that Netflix already has a “very big market share,” which will “go up by a lot” if the $83 billion buyout goes ahead.
WB has a checkered history of acquisitions, but joining forces with Netflix would elevate it to a new level of prominence.
Alex Karp — the CEO of Palantir, the not-a-surveillance company put forward by Elon Musk’s DOGE to supply the US government with software that allows ICE to track immigrants — is very offended that anyone would suggest he is running a surveillance company.
Also, please “speak up” because “everyone” who thinks he’s a fascist is speaking up, said Karp, who famously wrote a dissertation on the rhetoric of fascism. I wonder why he’s so sensitive!
Multiple sales teams lowered how much salespeople are expected to grow annual sales of Foundry and other AI products, reports The Information, citing sources who called the move “rare.”
Even as its overall cloud business has boomed, the report says that over 80 percent of one US Azure sales team failed to grow Foundry sales by the “ambitious” 50 percent target last year, so in July, the company lowered this year’s goal to 25 percent.
Update: CNBC reports that an unnamed spokesperson denied the report, saying Microsoft has not lowered quotas or targets for its salespeople.
The Italian software company just announced billion-dollar deals to purchase AOL and Vimeo, and now it has reached an agreement to acquire Eventbrite for $500 million. Bending Spoons has added several other digital businesses to its portfolio in recent years, including Evernote, Meetup, Filmic, WeTransfer, and TapeACall.
Along with pro-AI, pro-pollution, and pro-surveillance plans, the spending bill signed in July introduced investment accounts for children with $1,000 contributed for US citizens born from 2025 through 2028. Today, Michael and Susan Dell announced they would also contribute:
Through our charitable funds, we are thrilled to be contributing $6.25 billion to seed 25 million additional accounts with $250 each. These deposits will reach the accounts of most children age 10 and under who were born prior to the qualifying date for the federal newborn contribution. Children older than 10 may benefit, too, if funds remain available after initial sign-ups.
IBM was early, you might argue too early, to AI. Now, CEO Arvind Krishna thinks big bets like Watsonx and quantum computing will start to pay off.
Fresh off a settlement with the DOJ over its software allegedly enabling landlord collusion to raise rents, RealPage is now suing the state of New York over a new law that bans algorithmic rent pricing, claiming it violates the company’s First Amendment rights.
RealPage is seeking a judgment and injunction against a recently adopted statute that seeks to prohibit the use of math and publicly available information to provide advice or recommendations to RealPage’s customers who own and manage rental housing properties. Among other things, the statute seeks to ban software that uses public data about rental or lease terms to advise or recommend market-appropriate rent prices for rental housing properties.
Samsung promoted its head of consumer hardware to co-CEO, joining Young Hyun Jun, head of the memory business. Roh led mobile since 2020, taking on TVs and appliances in an acting role this year, which is now permanent too.
The shuffle follows the death of former co-CEO Jong-Hee Han in March.
[Samsung Newsroom]
Everyone expected drama after Ubisoft delayed its financials at the last minute — a sale, a disruption to the Tencent deal, something else!? — but the reality is less thrilling.
Bloomberg reports Ubisoft “improperly booked sales from a partnership as revenue,” requiring it to correct its accounts and putting it in breach of a loan agreement.
Honestly, that’s insulting.
Last week, Ubisoft delayed releasing its most recent earnings report and asked European markets to stop trading its shares. This week, the company says it’ll release the report before trading opens on November 21st. So whatever’s going on over there, we’ll find out soon enough.
After CEO Sam Altman was fired and then unfired from OpenAI, Larry Summers was added to OpenAI’s board to replace the board members that had nixed Altman. In recently-released email messages, Summers seeks advice from Epstein on pursuing a woman he describes as a “mentee.” Hm!
Ring’s ‘chief inventor’ on AI, lost dogs, and why cameras aren’t dystopian.
American Telephone & Telegraph says it has deployed the $23 billion worth of mid-band spectrum it acquired from EchoStar to nearly 23,000 cell sites in the continental US, which is now boosting 5G download speeds “by up to 80 percent.” Ya’ll seeing a difference?
The Nvidia-backed data center company is part of a growing ecosystem of so-called neoclouds propping up the AI industry and its insatiable hunger for compute.
Despite a $50 price hike to offset Trump’s tariffs, Sony shipped 3.9 million PS5 units globally in the recent quarter (up slightly from 3.8 million last year) with help from Ghost of Yōtei sales that reached 3.3 million after just one month. Lifetime shipments now sit at 84.2 million consoles after five years, putting it roughly in line with the PS4.
[Sony]
Yes. The answer is yes.
Friend of The Verge Casey Newton has some thoughts on the Amazon v. Perplexity web browser battle about AI agents: Perplexity wants to encourage people to use their agents in order to build its own business, but this screws basically every business that runs on web pages, including Amazon. (Humans can look at ads, sign up for newsletters, engage in curiosity-oriented browsing, etc.) Perplexity is a known bad actor. I hope Jeff Bezos eats them alive.
[Platformer]
Whether you should, or would, clone a pet is not the point of People’s article about Tom Brady’s cloned dog Junie.
It’s to tie in with news about a company he invested in, Colossal Biosciences (which claims it has de-extincted dire wolves), buying Viagen, “the leader in animal cloning.”
The outlet will move under Vogue.com, and editor-in-chief Versha Sharma will depart the company. Teen Vogue has carved out a niche in recent years as a youth-focused news outlet with a progressive/leftist perspective. It’s not clear whether the outlet will keep that identity, but leadership says Teen Vogue will focus on “career development, cultural leadership and other issues that matter most to young people.”
Update: Teen Vogue appears to also be doing layoffs, according to former staffers.
Risher sees Lyft as a service company above all, but AI makes everything weird.
The ex-Intel CEO said in a recent speech that he believes Jesus appeared “because of the Roman roads.” Now, his mission is to work on tech that would “...hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” with a startup that filed for its IPO this week.
My question is, does that seem easier or harder than delivering on Lunar Lake and 18A?
Samsung and Nvidia just announced a new “AI megafactory” powered by more than 50,000 Nvidia chips, where AI “analyzes, predicts and optimizes” every step of semiconductor manufacturing, from initial designs to final quality control.
The companies haven’t said where the factory will be built, but its tech will eventually be expanded to Samsung facilities worldwide, including Texas.
The company announced a third quarter profit of KRW 688.9 billion (around $480 million) despite losses of about half that from its TV division, which it hopes to fix through “advancements in advertising.”
It’s the rare company to call out US tariffs directly, though it doesn’t blame them for the TV shortfall.
Reporting its best quarterly financials in over three years, Samsung has its chip business to thank. It’s making bank on memory chips for the AI industry, and will focus next year on mass producing top spec HBM4 chips to keep that success going.
