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.
The former Warner Bros. Discovery CEO will receive the massive windfall after WBD officially merged with Paramount on Tuesday. It consists of more than $224 million in WBD shares sold by Zaslav, as well as $381 million held in stock options, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The company founded in Kansas in 1989 (and now legally based in Switzerland for tax reasons) has seen its annual revenue triple to $7.2 billion under the leadership of employee number six, Cliff Pemble. The short WSJ profile of the CEO who learned to fly in order to write better cockpit software is the antidote to Silicon Valley’s attention-seeking bootlickers.
[Bloomberg]
Another quarter another record profit, fueled by AI demand for the company’s memory chips.
Projected quarterly operating profit is 782% higher from a year earlier. Revenue forecast of about 195 trillion won is up nearly 127% from the same period last year.
Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.
Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It’s the first time Trump has ever given out the awards, which usually don’t go to well-known tech execs, judging by previous recipients.
An IPO prospectus viewed by Reuters included Amodei’s compensation, which the outlet says is higher than last year’s pay for Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Anthropic is expected to file for its IPO this fall, potentially valuing the AI company at over $2 trillion.
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
The chip company said it pulled in a record $39.8 billion in quarterly revenue from DRAM, which has been in short supply. Micron also reported record quarterly revenue for its data center business at $18 billion, up from $1.57 billion in the same quarter last year. Its quarterly NAND revenue also shot up 526 percent to $14.1 billion.
That’s according to a leaked IPO filing seen by Reuters, with $8.06 billion specifically highlighted in operating losses for 2025, more than double the $2.98 billion it reported in 2024. The AI startup spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, and plans to spend a further $518 billion over the coming years, so profitability seems a long, long way off for Anthropic.
The July Digital Markets Act ruling required Google to share search data with rival search engines by January 2027, and give third-party AI assistants equal access to Android by that July. Google’s Oliver Bethell told Bloomberg that sharing user search data “would cause irreversible harm to user privacy.”
In the works since earlier this year, plans to go public were only announced a week ago, but are already on the rocks. The smart ring company blames the postponement on “uncertainty in the IPO market,” and CEO Tom Hale suggests it will still go ahead eventually:
“We aim to deliver an extraordinary IPO for our employees and investors and we have the luxury of choosing our moment.”
The WSJ chronicles WS Game trying to build a bespoke version of the Monopoly board game using only American manufacturers. It mostly succeeded, but the result was far more expensive, of worse quality, took too long, and the dice still had to be sourced from China.
In China, WS Game tells factories what it wants, and asks them to make the idea a reality. The U.S. process was reversed. “We figured out what the factories’ capabilities were, then backed into the design.”
Now imagine trying to make an iPhone in the US.
Mike Cannon-Brookes on AI in the enterprise, Atlassian’s new org chart, and why chatbots aren’t the future of work.
Former MongoDB CEO CJ Desai will lead the platform as Meta’s new chief enterprise platform officer. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the Meta Enterprise Platform will initially focus on bringing its new Muse agent to businesses and developers, as well as Meta Business Agent, the Muse API, and Muse Code.
[Meta Newsroom]
Sony’s keynotes were once a highlight of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But the company’s presence has shrunk in proportion to its slow exit from consumer electronics. And with Bravia now a TCL brand, and the Afeela EV joint venture with Honda scrubbed, there’s little reason to attend.
Cloudflare’s mission to remake the business of the web for the AI age.
A24, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and The New York Times Company are all reportedly interested.
Other rumored potential buyers include Versant and The Ankler, as well as Netflix, Paramount, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
[New York Times]
The Theranos founder convicted of fraud in 2022 and sentenced to 11 years behind bars will be transferred from a minimum-security federal prison next year, according to a letter sent to victims of her crime. After several reductions to her sentence, her scheduled release remains February 22nd, 2030, but prisoners typically only spend a short time in halfway houses. Last year, she requested to have her sentence commuted by the Department of Justice.
[The New York Times]
Bloomberg chief Apple correspondent Mark Gurman on Siri, Tim Cook’s legacy, and what to expect from Ternus.
They’ll be joining Nvidia’s Jensen Huang next week at a White House state dinner for Xi Jinping. It’s the first chance for Tim Cook to earn that $47 million pay package in his new role as Apple’s dedicated Trump whisperer: You is smart, you is strong, you is important.
According to The Information, former DreamWorks co-founder (and co-founder of the quick bites video app) Jeffrey Katzenberg’s latest move is joining up with Bill Peebles, who left OpenAI after it pivoted away from the Sora team he was leading.
Huawei says it didn’t send it, but an agency claiming to represent the company has been contacting tech influencers, offering to pay them to promote Huawei’s new Mate XT 2 foldable around the iPhone Duo launch, and disguise the posts to look like an organic, grassroots groundswell of enthusiasm.
The new flick about the disgraced Theranos founder, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, got a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of its October release. Here’s how A24 describes it:
“Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss.”
The smart ring company filed for an initial public offering on Thursday, revealing over $1.4 billion in revenue between July 2025 and June 2026, along with 5 million paid members.
Kalshi says that in February, the former Republican congressman “placed a series of large trades in a market where the underlying contracts depended upon his own attendance” at the State of the Union. He’s now permanently banned and penalized $71,356.
In other news about everything being gambling now:
Google is pitching its AI tools as a way to streamline production and visual effects, but the effort faces pushback from union workers and creators concerned about copyright, job displacement, and artistic control.
The Verge’s Hayden Field on how OpenAI president Greg Brockman has consolidated power as Sam Altman’s second-in-command.
