Business

Analysis of how AI and technology reshape company strategy, organizations, markets, and capital.

2026

Issue #199Business

My Book Sold for $656 in AI Royalties

The next contract might not even offer that royalty at all.

Issue #198Business

The Contract Google Can Exit in 90 Days

SpaceX's earnings were flawless—except for the fine print in its contracts.

Issue #196Business

Why Midjourney Bought an Astrology App

Line up everything Midjourney acquired this year, and a pattern emerges.

Issue #194Business

What OpenAI's Astra Threw Away to Solve 10 Hard Problems

OpenAI's Astra finished a valid proof — then discarded it for a simpler one.

Issue #193Business

The Goal Wasn't Victory. It Was Division.

The same accounts attacked both Moon Jae-in and Yoon Suk Yeol.

Issue #192Business

Railway King's Dividends and AI Capex

The trains were real; the problem was the accounts.

Issue #191Business

Why Claude's Writing Carries a Fingerprint

Media watermarking makes sense, but how do you hide a mark inside plain text?

Issue #190Business

The 19-Year-Old Who Raised $6.2M on Zero Work Experience

Investors are opening GitHub profiles instead of checking résumés now

Issue #189Business

Why Google Chose a Reactor That's Never Been Built

The safe choice takes 15 years—so nobody makes it.

Issue #188Business

Why Tailwind Laid Off Three of Its Four Engineers

Downloads hit an all-time high, yet revenue collapsed by 80 percent.

Issue #187Business

The Two Suppliers Samsung and Nike Wait In Line For

One sold the machine that makes the product; the other hid it.

Issue #186Business

Kevin Warsh's Third Door, Not Crisis or Collapse

There's a third door — and the bond market has already priced it in.

Issue #184Business

Cloudflare Just Gave Bots Names and Wallets

The payment feature isn't live yet — but agent identities just went live.

Issue #183Business

The Four-Year Pledge SanDisk Extracted From Its Customers

Customers guaranteed $16.5 billion before a single chip shipped.

Issue #182Business

No Solo Unicorn Yet, but Solo Millionaires Have Doubled

The prophesied one-person unicorn never arrived, but payment data reveals a new way to grade solo-founder success stories.

Issue #181Business

$800 Billion: The World's Most Famous Wrong Number

It undercounts global AI spending by $200 billion while overcounting America's by exactly the same amount.

Issue #180Business

Why I'd Log 50 Hours for a 30-Minute Job

It's not personal integrity that's broken — it's the billing unit.

Issue #179Business

Why No Manager Ever Says 'Let's Just Fix Bugs'

AI can write code fast, but nobody gets credit for fixing it.

Issue #178Business

You Can Download It. You Just Can't Run It.

Kimi K3's 2.8 trillion parameters force a rethink of what 'open' means.

Issue #177Business

The Rabbit Sites Died, But the Bill Still Came

112 chapters translated for fun — a Korean court just set the price at ₩96,370,000 (~$70,000).

Issue #176Business

Why the New Fed Chair Talks Like a Startup Founder

The pitch-deck line "the numbers aren't in yet, but they're coming" has started moving interest rates.

Issue #175Business

Right on the Trade, Liquidated Anyway

The real cause of last week's Korean market rollercoaster was someone else entirely

Issue #174Business

The '57% Never Dated' Number Was Wrong From the Start

Fix the denominator and it drops to 21%—the real problem lies outside the dating statistics.

Issue #173Business

The Luddites Never Actually Hated the Machine

What 65% of today's workers miss is the same thing Luddites once fought for

Issue #172Business

The Day Tesla Stock Fell 14%, Musk Talked Abundance

Zuckerberg's op-ed dropped the day before Meta's earnings too — that timing wasn't an accident.

Issue #171Business

X's Data Only Opened After a $170M Fine

The EU just issued its first-ever penalty for blocking researcher access to platform data

Issue #170Business

AI Claimed Six Perfect Scores. Only Two Were Verified

Six AI systems claimed a perfect Math Olympiad score—only two went through official grading.

Issue #168Business

The Crash Day China Still Wanted More Nvidia Chips

Two fears—demand collapse and substitution—collided in a single day's plunge.

Issue #167Business

A 30,000-Follower Creator's $140,000 Pay Stub

Brands are trading one big star for a hundred small creators—and the math finally adds up.

Issue #165Business

Meeting Recording Became Default. Nobody Asked.

It wasn't better tech that broke the taboo — it was a new justification.

Issue #164Business

Why a Rooftop Developer Delivers Food Every Night

The engineer who built AI is now watching AI slash his own rates.

Issue #162Business

A World Rich on Paper, a Barter Deal in San Francisco

Only 20% of new global wealth is real investment—today's San Francisco deals are what fills that gap.

Issue #159Business

The 4-Hour Video Call Behind DeepSeek's $7.4B Raise

In DeepSeek's record funding round, the winning strategy was simple: want less than everyone else.

Issue #158Business

Why Jensen Huang Praised Chinese AI Models

A same-day rebuttal to a sanctions warning — the answer lies in Nvidia's P&L

Issue #157Business

China Grew Under Containment. Now It Locks the Door.

U.S. sanctions meant to contain China ended up accelerating its self-sufficiency.

Issue #156Business

The Country Where Salaries Fund Parents' Pensions

Europe's collapse took 30 years to unfold—Korea may face it within a decade.

Issue #155Business

Google Cut the Bill, Not the Price Tag

The unit of AI-model competition is shifting from price per token to cost per task.

Issue #154Business

Ferrari's Designers Still Start With a Pencil

When AI erased the grunt work, it also erased the ladder junior employees used to learn on

Issue #152Business

What Took PCs 15 Years, AI Did in 3

Prices are collapsing, yet AI spending keeps rising — bankers, scientists, and founders are all saying the same thing.

Issue #148Business

The €9 Parcel Fee Redrawing the World's Trade Map

Shirts, toys, sunglasses: how the EU's new per-item customs fee quietly redraws global shipping routes.

Issue #147Business

Palantir Grew Revenue 85%—Then Declared SaaS Dead

As software starts finishing the work itself, the price tag underneath it is quietly changing.

Issue #141Business

Data Centers Aren't Stalling for Money or Chips

A power bottleneck is quietly hastening the exit from the GPU era.

Issue #139Business

Meta's Plan: Build a Refinery for Spare AI Compute

If tokens are the new oil, the real prize isn't selling crude—it's refining it.

Issue #136Business

Selling Fear to Job Seekers

How one careful Stanford paper about a single hiring tool got stripped of context, step by step, and repackaged as AI panic.

Issue #133Business

Amazon's Math: Cut 30,000, Hire 10,000

Employees gaming an internal AI usage leaderboard exposed the cracks in that logic.

Issue #132Business

Silicon Valley Lines Up for Picks and Shovels

Four of the 11 standout YC Spring 2026 startups build testing, security and audit infrastructure—not AI agents. Here is why investors care.

Issue #129Business

Salesforce's $3.6B Fin Deal Wasn't About Technology

The real prize: 30,000 SMB customers and a GTM engine that works the moment you switch it on

Issue #128Business

One Researcher Left With $650M; 138 Stayed in Tokyo

Sakana AI bets kaizen-style efficiency, not massive compute, can win the race to self-improving AI.

Issue #126Business

10,000 Signups a Day, But Revenue Won't Budge

The problem wasn't the email copy — it was who Railway was sending it to, and the fix was surprisingly simple.

Issue #124Business

The Real Reason Apple Pays Google $1 Billion a Year

It skipped the AI arms race and bet on maximum distribution instead of the best model.

Issue #118Business

230,000 Births: The Number the UN Got Wrong

Fertility's turning point in country after country lines up not with economic crises, but with the year smartphones arrived

Issue #115Business

Half Your Salary on AI Tokens? Uber Found Out

What happened after Uber burned through a full year's AI budget in four months.

Issue #114Business

AI Swallowed Our Content, and Clicks Went to Zero

Korean publishers still have no legal shield against AI search's traffic squeeze.

Issue #112Business

Same Company, 100x Bonus Gap: Korea's New Problem

Citizen dividends, a sovereign fund, solidarity wages—three rival fixes emerged in just three weeks.

Issue #111Business

Founders Banned, $2 Billion Meta-Manus Deal Unwound

The chip war's next battlefield: AI agents.

Issue #109Business

Why Anthropic Is Hiring a $320K Copywriter

AI can write, but only humans can figure out what to say.

Issue #108Business

Why Starbucks Pulled AI Out of Its Stores

It promised 99% accuracy, but baristas trusted their own hands more.

Issue #104Business

The Red Crayfish Is Disappearing From Search

Where did all those crayfish go?

Issue #100Business

North Korea Cited GPT-4 in an Official University Journal

A Kim Il Sung University paper cites GPT-4 and Claude-2. What it reveals about North Korea's AI research capacity and the shrinking AI moat.

Issue #97Business

Are the Growth Numbers in Press Releases Even Real?

We rarely know where or how a claimed "500% year-over-year growth" was actually measured.

Issue #94Business

The Day Meta Passed Its Tax Down to Advertisers

Europe taxed Big Tech, but it's advertisers and consumers footing the bill.

Issue #93Business

Musk in Court: 'Everyone Does It'

Musk admitted in court that xAI distilled OpenAI's models — the same practice Big Tech accused DeepSeek of stealing.

Issue #89Business

Is Your 2-Year-Old Startup Plan Still Valid?

AI hasn't just changed the technology — it's rewritten the entire startup formula

Issue #87Business

Middle Managers Aren't Vanishing. Something Else Is

Titles are changing, but the essence of management isn't going anywhere

Issue #86Business

Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky—Everyone Still Uses It

Iran's parliament speaker tweeted a Bloomberg command—by accident?

Issue #84Business

Apple's Caviar Store Forgot How to Sell Cheese

Vision Pro's failure wasn't about the product — it was the cost of gutting retail's soul in the name of 'efficiency.'

Issue #83Business

The Sea's Toll Booths: A History of Maritime Passage Fees

The sea was never free by nature—'freedom of navigation' was forged through centuries of war and negotiation.

Issue #75Business

Harvey's $11B Bet: Can Law Survive Without Billable Hours?

A $1 trillion legal industry's hourly billing model is buckling under AI-driven efficiency gains.

Issue #74Business

The Wuxia Cult That Traces Back to Middle East Oil

A 3rd-century Persian faith became wuxia fiction's Cult of Light — and that same flame ignited the 20th-century oil industry

Issue #66Business

Meta's $6M Verdict Just Gave PMs a New Job

It's not the $6 million verdict that matters — it's the 30-year-old legal shield that just cracked.

Issue #65Business

Your Book Taste Reveals Your Personality

Your book preferences quietly map your personality — the same logic that powers Netflix's recommendation engine.

Issue #64Business

The Compliance Startup That Broke Compliance

YC's expulsion of Delve exposes cracks in open-source ethics and startup trust networks.

Issue #61Business

BYD's 5-Minute Charging Is About Structure, Not Speed

It's not about who can build the same technology — it's about who shares the same industrial structure

Issue #59Business

From a Garage to $3.8 Trillion: Apple at 50

Three growth curves — economic, ecosystem, and creative — explain why the company's flywheel is so hard to break.

Issue #58Business

Economists Got 5x Faster. But What About Quality?

The real contest is between how fast we catch errors and how fast we create them.

Issue #53Business

TikTok's $10 Billion 'Fee' Isn't Really About a Fee

The US government is testing how to turn regulatory power into a revenue-generating asset

Issue #48Business

China's 15th Five-Year Plan: Structure Over Speed

The era of speed is over — what Beijing is really trying to change is the fundamental makeup of its economy.

Issue #47Business

Perplexity Profits on Every Sale — But Not Enough Yet

Perplexity says every revenue dollar has a positive gross margin, yet the company still loses money. Here is what its AI costs reveal.

Issue #46Business

Your Sadness Is Someone Else's Ad Timing

When feelings become merchandise, protecting minors alone isn't enough to solve the problem.

Issue #44Business

Why "Just 1,000 Fans" Is a Dangerous Myth

Growth isn't decided by fan count—it's decided by the structure of reach.

Issue #40Business

Training Can't Fix Your Brain's Multitasking Bottleneck

New research overturns the long-held belief that practice lets us truly handle two tasks at once.

Issue #39Business

Why "Software Eats the World" Has Expired

As AI makes software abundant, economic power is swinging back toward the physical world of hardware.

Issue #36Business

A 17-Year-Old's 3-Day Farm Game Beat Fortnite

The gaming industry's value chain is flipping upside down, with teenagers driving the shift.

Issue #33Business

$250 Billion in AI Spending, So Why Isn't It in the Data?

AI's technical capability and its economic payoff are running on two different clocks.

Issue #32Business

The CIA's 1944 Manual for Wrecking a Company

The playbook that sinks an organization, run in reverse, turns out to be exactly what saves one.

Issue #28Business

AI and Jobs: What the Data Actually Shows

The real risk isn't mass layoffs — it's the quietly narrowing door into a first job.

Issue #27Business

Hollywood's Three-Stage Playbook for AI

From courtroom battles to licensing deals to full acquisitions, the entertainment industry is learning to control AI on its own terms.

Issue #26Business

No 'Strategist' at Your Company? Then Revenue Is Just Luck

GTM is coming: the role that turns one-off sales into recurring revenue

Issue #25Business

Your Customer Is No Longer Human

When a product's real user shifts, the entire way you build it has to change with it

Issue #11Business

Forget Monetization to Actually Make Money

Monetization isn't a starting point — it follows once you've actually built something of value.

Issue #8Business

Adult ADHD Cases Jumped 5x in 5 Years—Blame the Environment

Judge today's attention-economy minds by yesterday's diagnostic standards, and almost anyone becomes a patient.

Issue #7Business

The $1,000-Per-Minute Video Era Is Ending

AI video generation costs collapsed 65% in a year—a sign the industry's structure, not just its tech, is shifting.

Issue #6Business

Does the Kid Next to the Doctor Really Become a Doctor?

A 30-year, 6-million-person study proves neighborhood effects are real, not folklore

Issue #10Business

Your Strategy Document: Have You Tried Inverting It?

Real strategy isn't discarding the bad option—it's giving up one good option for another.

Issue #9Business

How Rice Farming Rewired the Way We Think

A decade of evidence — from a Science cover study to a Starbucks chair experiment — links the crops our ancestors grew to how we behave today

Issue #2Business

The Coal Problem: Why AI Never Actually Saves You Time

The paradox where greater efficiency makes you busier is playing out on your own desk right now.