Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Electronic Arts has announced plans to go private in what will be the largest leveraged buyout in history. The $55 billion purchase of the entertainment giant behind franchises that include Madden NFL and Battlefield is set to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) will be, by far, the majority investor in EA, one of the largest third-party publishers of video games. Silver Lake and Affinity Partners (whose CEO is Donald The President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner) will own minority interests. CEO Andrew Wilson will continue to head EA. The all-cash deal calls for a buyout of EA stock at a price of $210 per share. …

Perusing the grocery aisle in the Westside Market on 23rd Street in Manhattan, you might not even notice the screens. They look just like paper price labels and, alongside a bar code, use a handwriting-style font we’ve come to associate with a certain merchant folksiness. They’re not particularly bright or showy. The only clues that they’re not ordinary sticky shelf labels are a barely distinguishable light bulb and, on some, a small QR code. These are electronic shelf labels, chip-enabled screens that some stores are now using to display product prices. Unlike their paper predecessors, the prices aren’t printed in ink but rendered in pixels, and they can change instanta…

Silicon Valley’s giants crowd the list of the world’s most valuable companies, but drugmaker Eli Lilly is hot on their heels. The company topped a market capitalization of one trillion dollars on Friday, becoming the first business in the health industry to hit that milestone. Lilly’s achievement comes during a tense week for stock watchers. AI chipmaker Nvidia, which itself became the first $5 trillion company less than a month ago, beat expectations with its latest quarterly earnings. But with AI overrepresented among the world’s top businesses and massive AI investments making headlines every day, investors remain skittish that excitement over the tech might be ove…

The market for obesity and diabetes treatments remains scorching hot, funneling billions in sales to Eli Lilly and fueling a bidding war over another drugmaker. Lilly said Thursday that its top-selling drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, brought in more than $10 billion combined during the recently completed third quarter. That made up over half of the drugmaker’s $17.6 billion in total sales. Separately, Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk announced plans to buy Metsera Inc. in a deal that could be worth up to $9 billion. That came more than a month after U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc. made a nearly $5 billion bid for Metsera, which has no drugs on the market but is developi…

Technology tycoons Elon Musk and Sam Altman are poised to face off in a high-stakes trial revolving around the alleged betrayal, deceit and unbridled ambition that blurred the bickering billionaires’ once-shared vision for the development of artificial intelligence. The trial, which is scheduled to begin Monday with jury selection, centers on the 2015 birth of ChatGPT maker OpenAI as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk before evolving into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion. The trial’s outcome could sway the balance of power in AI — breakthrough technology that is increasingly being feared as a potential job killer and an existential threat to h…

Elon Musk on Thursday sparred with an attorney for OpenAI during his third day of testimony in the contentious trial over the company’s pivot from nonprofit status to a for-profit venture valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. The trial centers on the 2015 birth of the ChatGPT maker as a nonprofit startup primarily funded by Musk. It pits the world’s richest person against Sam Altman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder he accuses of betraying promises to keep the company as a nonprofit dedicated to humanity’s benefit. Tempers have flared on both sides of the high-stakes trial, as the morning began with an existential discussion about the future of humanity — complete with r…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk just admitted what we have been saying since he first made his grand promises about the company’s Cybercab robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot: His target to mass-produce these products was unrealistic, and now they’re crumbling faster than a Cybertruck’s accelerator pedal. On January 20, Musk said on X that early production of both products will be “agonizingly slow”—a remarkable admission for a man who has spent the past year telling investors these moonshot projects would save his flailing car company. “For Cybercab and Optimus, almost everything is new, so the early production rate will be agonizingly slow, but eventually end up being insanely…

Elon Musk has been summoned to Paris on Monday, where investigators are looking into allegations of misconduct related to the social media platform X, including the spread of child sexual abuse material and deepfake content. The world’s richest man and Linda Yaccarino — the former CEO of X — have been summoned for “voluntary interviews,” while other employees of the platform are scheduled to be heard as witnesses throughout this week, the Paris prosecutor’s office said. It remains unclear whether Musk and Yaccarino will travel to Paris. A spokesperson for X did not respond to questions from The Associated Press and Yaccarino’s current company, eMed, did not answer a req…

Today, one of the biggest tech showdowns of the year begins. It’s the day on which the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the world’s most influential AI leader, Sam Altman, are expected to appear in court to issue their opening statements in the OpenAI trial. Here’s what you need to know about the high-stakes case. What is the OpenAI trial about? The trial centers around the very public dispute between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Musk is suing Altman and OpenAI for allegedly deviating from their commitment to keep the company a nonprofit institution, as it was when Musk first invested millions of dollars in the then-upstart between 2015 and 2017. In 2018, Musk…

Tesla has reached a potentially lethal moment in its history, and it isn’t solely due to CEO Elon Musk’s political radicalization. Years of design and technology stagnation have led to a languishing model line and outdated technology. Back in 2023, I wrote that the beleaguered carmaker should aspire to survive and become yet another car manufacturer. Now that objective feels more pressing—and distant—than ever. The company just announced a new quarter of abysmal vehicle sales. Tesla’s first quarter of 2025 was a disaster—a 71% decline in net income compared to the same quarter last year—except for a better-than-expected gross margin thanks to its energy business. Its EV …

X owner Elon Musk was privately messaging with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman while also putting public pressure on the social media company’s content moderation efforts, The Verge reported Thursday. Two months ago, several Reddit subreddits started to block links to X in protest of Musk appearing to give the Nazi salute. Musk called the efforts “insane,” while a Reddit spokesperson at the time clarified that Reddit itself wasn’t imposing a ban on the links. A few days later, Musk claimed that Reddit users who were calling for violence against members of his Department of Government Efficiency were breaking the law. Musk has been a vocal critic of content moderation on…

Not driving your car directly into a body of water may sound like common sense—but hey, if Elon Musk says it’s safe, who are we to disagree? A Tesla Cybertruck driver learned the hard way that Musk’s words aren’t gospel when he intentionally drove his car into Grapevine Lake in North Texas on Monday evening, employing the vehicle’s “Wade Mode,” which is intended for use in water up to 32 inches deep. Videos shared on social media show the vehicle moving through the shallow section of the lake, only for his Cybertruck to shut down when he got to deeper waters, leaving the vehicle stranded. In the aftermath, social media users are pointing to posts by Elon Musk that…