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Every company is racing to modernize. There’s a sense that if you aren’t adopting new technology fast enough, you’re already behind. From AI and automation to digital platforms, the list keeps growing. Leaders make big investments, employees sit through onboarding sessions, and for a few weeks, excitement fills the air. Then the momentum fades. Dashboards sit idle. Pilots stall. The return on investment never arrives. We see it all the time. On the factory floor, operators are juggling a dozen tools that don’t talk to each other. Managers chase data that doesn’t reflect what’s really happening. Teams try to keep up with systems meant to help them but instead end u…

Early in my career, I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed front and center. I was working for a company struggling to meet its marks. We were doing fine, but not knocking it out of the park. I walked into a quarterly business review, confident in our marketing metrics. We were hitting or surpassing every KPI, and I presented our achievements with pride. My CEO made a statement that stopped me in my tracks: “Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning.” That moment was a turning point. In our focus on metrics, it’s easy to overlook what really matters. It’s a lesson I was grateful to learn early and one I believe every leader should e…

The battle for Warner Brothers Discovery got hotter this week as Paramount launched a hostile bid of $108.4 billion for the company, topping Netflix’s agreement last week to pay nearly $83 billion for the company’s streaming and studio assets. It’s the largest M&A deal of 2025 and rightfully will receive tough scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate price for Warner Brothers Discovery will certainly factor heavily into who wins the fight, especially with investors, and there could be additional bidders and proposals. For sure, an acquisition by Netflix of one of the oldest Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, and its HBO Max streaming service would have…

As we enter the 2025 home stretch, Bitcoin is once again down, and dipped below $90,000 on Thursday, following the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated interest rate cut by 25 basis points on December 10. So why are the markets up, but crypto is taking a hit? Why Bitcoin is faltering One reason for Bitcoin’s drop after the rate cut is that traders had already fully priced in the cut ahead of the Fed’s announcement. “Unlike stocks, bitcoin is already in a bear market, where bad news gets accentuated and good news ignored,” Michael Terpin, author of Bitcoin Supercycle, told Fast Company. “Since the 25 basis point cut was already built in, bitcoin traders – p…

Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion company’s value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children. OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica. So what the hell should we make of a just-announced dea…

Mickey Mouse, welcome to the AI era. Fans will soon be able to create short-form generative AI videos featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters thanks to a three-year agreement that The Walt Disney Co. inked Thursday with OpenAI. In addition to a $1 billion equity investment in the tech company, Disney will become the first major content licensing partner on OpenAI’s Sora app. The new collaboration offers an opportunity for Disney to “extend the reach of our storytelling” through AI, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, said in a statement. “Bringing together Disney’s iconic stories and characters with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology puts imagi…

Last week, Netflix announced it was buying Warner Bros. in a massive $82.7 billion deal. The streaming giant’s acquisition will set Netflix, which already leads the streaming wars, even further apart from competitors, as it will also add HBO, a Warner subsidiary. But while the deal will further cement Netflix’s domination, questions are swirling around how it will impact viewers, as well as the talent platforms rely on. Streaming platforms have recently undergone consolidation, creating three mega-platforms. According to a Forbes survey, Netflix is the most popular streaming service in America with 55% of Americans saying they use it, followed by Amazon Prime (51%), and…

If budgeting spreadsheets and lofty financial goals leave you stressed rather than inspired, consider another New Year’s ritual: an end-of-year money audit. The word “audit” might not sound all that fun. But just like an accountant, it’s helpful to approach your money behavior as neutral and impersonal as possible. “At the end of every year, people tend to jump straight into resolutions: cutting spending, tightening budgets, and promising themselves they’ll ‘finally get disciplined’ in the new year,” Jack Howard, Head of Money Wellness at Ally Bank, told Fast Company. “But I think the most meaningful financial reset starts somewhere much quieter: with your em…

Cryptocurrency mogul Do Kwon is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday for misleading investors who lost billions when his company’s crypto ecosystem collapsed in 2022. Kwon, known by some as “the cryptocurrency king,” pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court in August to fraud charges stemming from Terraform Labs’ $40 billion crash. The company had touted its TerraUSD as a reliable “stablecoin”—a kind of currency typically pegged to stable assets to prevent drastic fluctuations in prices. But prosecutors say it was all an illusion that came crumbling down, devastating investors and triggering “a cascade of crises that swept through cryptocurrency markets.” Kwon,…

The heirs of an 83-year-old Connecticut woman are suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for wrongful death, alleging that the artificial intelligence chatbot intensified her son’s “paranoid delusions” and helped direct them at his mother before he killed her. Police said Stein-Erik Soelberg, 56, a former tech industry worker, fatally beat and strangled his mother, Suzanne Adams, and killed himself in early August at the home where they both lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. The lawsuit filed by Adams’ estate on Thursday in California Superior Court in San Francisco alleges OpenAI “designed and distributed a defective product that validated a user’…

AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases? If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a questi…

For many people, the first time they thought about Kalshi—a prediction market where you can place bets on the outcomes of sports, politics, culture, weather, and much more—was after a video clip of its cofounder, Tarek Mansour, went viral last week. Speaking on stage at the Citadel Securities Future of Global Markets Conference, the moderator Molly O’Shea asked, “Tarek, you’ve mentioned multiple times that you think prediction markets will be bigger than the stock market. What is it going to take to become a $1 trillion asset class?” In response, Mansour said, “You know, ‘Kalshi’ is ‘everything’ in Arabic. The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create…

As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead and severely restrict social media access for young people. The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a European Union nation to limit use of social media among teens and children. The Danish government’s plans could become law as soon as mid-2026. The proposed measure would give some parents the right to let their…

Some of the most recognizable artwork depicting the American West is heading to auction at Christie’s, where dozens of pieces from billionaire Bill Koch’s collection are expected to fetch at least $50 million. The in-person “Visions of the West” sale will take place in New York over two sessions beginning Jan. 20, with the final lots offered — appropriately — at high noon the following day. Koch’s holdings include major works by Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell and Albert Bierstadt, artists whose images of cowboys, Native Americans and sweeping landscapes helped define how generations came to picture the American frontier. Tylee Abbott, head of Christie’s Amer…

Coca-Cola said Wednesday that its chief operating officer will become its next CEO in the first quarter of 2026. The Atlanta beverage giant said its board elected Henrique Braun as CEO effective March 31. James Quincey, Coke’s current chairman and CEO, will transition to executive chairman of the company. Braun, 57, has worked at Coca-Cola for three decades. Prior to assuming the COO role earlier this year, he led operations in Brazil, Latin America, Greater China and South Korea. He has held positions overseeing Coke’s supply chain, new business development, marketing, innovation, general management and bottling operations. Braun was born in California and raised in B…

The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point Wednesday for the third time since September, bringing its key rate to about 3.6%, the lowest in nearly three years. Before September, it had gone nine months without a cut. The benchmark rate is the rate at which banks borrow and lend to one another, and the Fed has two goals when it sets the rate: one, to manage prices for goods and services, and two, to encourage full employment. The benchmark rate also affects the interest rates consumers pay to borrow money via credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, and other financial products. Typically, the Fed might increase the rate to try to bring down infla…

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are taking Gemini Space Station Inc. into the prediction market space. The cryptocurrency exchange’s CEO and president, respectively, said on Thursday that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has granted a Designated Contract Market (DCM) license to a company affiliate called Gemini Titan, LLC. Gemini Titan will offer event contracts written as yes-or-no questions about future occurrences, essentially letting U.S. users gamble on the outcomes of everyday events. As examples, Gemini in its announcement provided the questions, “Will 1 bitcoin end this year higher than $200k?” and “Will Elon Musk’s X end up paying the f…

Today, investors are waking up to red on their screens as many tech and AI stocks are dropping in premarket trading. But why are shares in these companies falling? Much of it has to do with the cloud infrastructure company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and its latest quarterly earnings results. Here’s what you need to know. Oracle’s Q2 2026 results send ORCL plunging Yesterday, Oracle reported financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026. To say investors were disappointed in the results is an understatement, given how poorly ORCL shares are performing in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, ORCL shares are down over 12% as inve…

Today, investors are waking up to red on their screens as many tech and AI stocks are dropping in premarket trading. But why are shares in these companies falling? Much of it has to do with the cloud infrastructure company Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and its latest quarterly earnings results. Here’s what you need to know. Oracle’s Q2 2026 results send ORCL plunging Yesterday, Oracle reported financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026. To say investors were disappointed in the results is an understatement, given how poorly ORCL shares are performing in premarket trading this morning. As of the time of this writing, ORCL shares are down over 12% as inve…