Business

Narayen told investors today that AI-first products “should be our next billion-dollar business,” and that he will leave the role he’s held since 2007 once the board names a successor. He’s overseen its Creative Cloud rollout, big bets on the future of AI, and its abandoned $20 billion attempt to acquire Figma.

Fortune has a report on how Epstein got into Gates’ inner circle, and then leveraged a bridge player rumored to be Gates’ ex-girlfriend against him: “The richest man in the world is so cheap, his former bridge girl and toy, lives on a friends sofa,” Epstein wrote. Epstein wanted Gates to manage a “donor-advised fund” to reduce his taxes.

We just published our new Decoder interview with Chris Cocks, the head of Hasbro. I asked him directly about how he thinks about author J.K. Rowling’s politics and what it’s done to the Harry Potter fandom, following Hasbro’s major Harry Potter merchandising agreement announced just last month. Here’s what Chris had to say.

The Financial Times reports Palmer Luckey’s ModRetro is in talks to raise funds at a $1 billion valuation, which sounds like a lot for a retro gaming company.

Fresh off another round of controversial bets, accusations of insider trading, and general profiting off human suffering, the two biggest prediction markets are seeking fresh funds. According to the Wall Street Journal, both companies are trying to lure investors at a valuation of $20 billion, nearly twice last year’s.

In 2017, while Reid Hoffman was publicly expressing outrage at pervasive sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, he was privately emailing the sex criminal. In 2018, they discussed Coinbase investments. There sure are a lot of these guys, huh? Wonder why.

The outlet will provide Kalshi with elections-related data — namely, vote counts and race calls — that will be available on the predictions market platform. The AP licenses its elections data to many sources (including other news outlets). What’s notable is that Kalshi and other predictions markets are increasingly blurring the line between actual news and a thing a guy online decided to put money on.

The $34.5 billion deal to combine two of the biggest US cable providers can now go ahead after appeasing Brendan Carr by pledging to drop DEI policies.

In an interview with Bloomberg, he explained why he backed out of the deal and said Netflix pursued Warner because it was a unique opportunity. “We definitely wanted this asset. We didn’t need it,” he said, praising its “incredible IP” and long history. But he was clear the plan was to just move on:

A four-day clock for Netflix to respond just started, but here are the details of the offer that include a starting price of $31 per share and other assurances, like:

Warner Bros. Discovery is telling shareholders it’s “continuing to engage” with Paramount after receiving its latest offer yesterday.

On Monday afternoon, Uber announced it’s buying the parking spot reservation app for an undisclosed amount, saying it plans to add parking benefits to Uber One and build in-app reservation into its main app, bringing car owners into Uber’s ecosystem.

The Netflix boss is apparently not too worried about Trump’s meddling in his company’s attempt to purchase Warner Bros. He told BBC Today that Netflix’s offer left Hollywood with five major studios instead of four, and Trump, “likes to do a lot of things on social media.”

“If your best idea for what AI can do in the workspace is ‘replace a hundred human beings with a server rack doing the same thing’, you’ve got no business calling yourself a techno-optimist.” Let’s gooooo!

On Friday morning, the court ruled against the Trump administration (pdf) in the case of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, about whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) gave the president the power to impose sweeping tariffs on imports from more than 100 countries.

Amazon reported $717 billion in sales for 2025, edging ahead of Walmart’s $713.2 billion. Walmart was previously the world’s largest company by sales for over 10 years. However, as Bloomberg notes, Amazon’s cloud computing business made up a large portion of its sales — without AWS revenue, Walmart still outpaces Amazon.

Snap announced today that its subscriber count grew 71 percent year-over-year in Q4 2025. Its subscription offerings, including Snapchat Plus, Lens Plus, Snapchat Premium, and Memories storage plans, are projected to earn $1 billion in annual revenue. Snapchat creators will also soon be able to offer creator subscriptions to other users.

In its Q4 earnings report, the audio streaming service said it’s gained 38 million monthly active users (MAU) and nine million paying subscribers since its last quarter. Spotify now has 751 million MAUs and 290 million subscribers globally.

We interviewed Docusign CEO Allan Thygesen on Decoder this week, and one standout moment was when I asked Allan about his headcount. Docusign now employs around 7,000 people, which is a staggering number of employees for a company with a core product many think of as straightforward and simple.

Even after his 2008 conviction as a sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein still had friends in Silicon Valley. The New York Times details the companies that took his money — including Coinbase, wearable manufacturer Jawbone, and Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — along with more he considered investing in, including Palantir, SpaceX, and Spotify.

Maybe combining Musk’s companies is really about space AI data centers. But reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal indicate that SpaceX’s IPO pursuit includes a push to have major index providers find a way around the usual waiting periods before they’ll add newly listed companies.