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Thanks for subscribing to SatPost. This will be the last e-mail for 2024. Wishing all you readers a happy holiday season. I’ll be back in the first week of January with a “Best of 2024” newsletter.

Today we are talking about the economics of Taylor Swift’s $2B+ Eras tour (and my experience going to one of the final shows).

Also this week:

• Caffeinated Deep Dives (LEGO)
• Google’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough
• …and them fire posts (including Mariah Carey)

Taylor Swift wrapped up her massive Eras tour last weekend in Vancouver.

There was Swift-related paraphernalia all over the city. Sequins. Denim. Sequins on denim. DIY Bracelets. High-heel boots. Cowboy hats. Eras merch. So much Eras merch. I was driving around downtown Vancouver — with probably tens of thousands of out-of-town Swifties walking about — and telling my wife: “they def here for Taylor”, “that person here for TayTay for sure”, “yo, another TayTizzle fan”.

Over the past 21 months, Swift did 149 Eras stadium shows in 51 cities for an impressive pace of one gig every ~4 days. It became the first tour to crack $2B in gross sales with over 10m tickets sold. That figure is 2x the other top-grossing tours including Coldplay (guess they’re feeling “Yellow” about that) and U2 (guess they weren’t the “One”). STFU Trung. Fine, sorry.

Anyway, here are the rough economics for each Eras show:

• Gross per show = $13,943,750
  - Stadium cost (30% of gross) = $4,183,125
  - Staging cost (20% of gross) = $2,788,750
  - Promoter cut (10% of gross) = $1,394,375
• Profit per show (40% margin) = $5,577,500

Then, we add in that fresh fresh merch. There was an average of 67,000 attendees per show. Let’s assume an average spend of $50, which totals $3,350,000. The cost of goods was probably 20% while the stadiums gets 30% of the top-line sales. That leaves a 50% margin on merch for Swift’s touring company, which is equal to $1,675,000 per show.

Add those up and the take-home haul from each show is $7,252,500 ($5,577,500 + $1,675,000). Multiply that across 149 shows and we get ~$1.1B. Swift then handed out $197m in bonuses — in addition to the salaries — for hundreds of crew and performers that were basically operating the equivalent of an aircraft carrier to take Eras around the world (the touring caravan included 90 semi-trucks to transport the dynamic stage, instruments, costumes, microphones, LED screen, speakers, lights…just insane).

After paying out these much-deserved bonuses, my janky napkin math points to a pre-tax profit of $884m for the entire Eras tour. These numbers may be a bit off. But it’s my napkin and my math. If you have better inside baseball insights, please send me a strongly worded e-mail making fun of my spreadsheet formatting.

Speaking of napkin math, The Economist recently ran some numbers on the Eras tour and concluded that Swift probably left $50m on the table for each show. How? This is based on the secondary market sales of Eras tickets which were jacked up hard (often selling for 5x the face value).

The highest median ticket price per city based on secondary market ticket sales:

• Indianpolis (~$1,300)
• Miami (~$1,100)
• Toronto (~$1,100)
• East Rutherford (~$900)
• Seattle (~$900)

The most affordable cities were Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Madrid or Melbourne (all with median ticket prices under $300).

As you can see, the top ticket prices are all North American cities. If Swift weighted even more of the tour to the US and Canada, that could have also boosted her total tally.

However, there’s an obvious rationale as to why Swift didn’t charge even more or overload North American dates. She cares about her reputation. She doesn’t want to squeeze her fans to the max and wanted to attract fans from across the globe. Recall that her entire tour started with a Ticket Master fiasco when bots and scalpers front-run actual fans. The situation was so bad that it catalyzed the US Department of Justice to start an anti-trust investigation into the ticket-selling giant. Swift was very conscious of trying to keep the tour accessible and I’m sure some of you readers probably participated in the various Eras tour ticket lotteries.

Any city that Swift did go to received a huge boost. She did 53 shows in America and it’s estimated that each Swiftie concert-goer spent $1,300 in the local economy (travel, hotel stays, food and merch…so much merch) with an aggregate spend of $100m+ per city. The entire US portion of the tour created $5B-10B in economic impact. This “Taylor Effect” — aka “Swiftonomics” — happened all over the globe. I have no idea how economist calculate “economic impact” but I do know that central bankers were literally citing the Eras tour during their interest rate meetings (one Bloomberg headline: “Swedish Core Inflation Unexpectedly Speeds Up as Taylor Swift Fans Boost Hotel Prices”).

Swift and her parents are probably the savviest business people working in the entertainment game right now. Her dad Scott was a long-time Wall Street wealth manager with Merrill Lynch and her mom was a mutual fund marketing exec. They clearly know what they’re doing. A particularly salient example is Swift taking Eras tour footage and going direct to AMC to have the theatre chain show it. Her film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour — which bypassed the traditional Hollywood studio system — made $250m+ at the box office and is the most successful documentary or concert film ever (she said of the AMC deal that “I did what I tend to do more and more often these days, which is bet on myself”).

When you truly own your audience, you get to do some very baller business moves.

Looking back at the success of the Eras tour, Swift really had a perfect storm of variables come together. I wrote about it last year and found parallels with Beatlemania from the mid-1960s. Some OGs may not want to admit it, but Swift’s latest run was culturally on par with The Beatles breakout (and Michael Jackson in the 1980s). I’m not comparing the music quality but level of popularity for the relevant period.

I found three notable similarities between the Eras tour and Beatlemania (which reached its apotheosis with the British band’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York in February 1964; around 73m Americans — 45% of households with TVs — watched their performance):

• Pent-up demand: The Beatles were big in the UK throughout 1963 but didn’t make it to the US because the American sister company to their English record label didn’t think The Beatles would do well stateside. So, instead of releasing singles from the Beatles one-by-one throughout the year, the band had a number of smash records ready to dump on Americans all at once. When The Beatles were finally green-lit in America in December of 1963, their songs (e.g. "Please Please Me", "Love Me Do", “She Loves You”) completely saturated the record stores and radio waves. Paul, John, George and Ringo were unavoidable. Instead of 5 different arrows throughout the year, it was one arrow with lots of wood behind it around Christmas time.
  • For Swift, she had to cancel her 2020 “Lover” tour because of COVID. That means when she started touring Eras in March 2023, her last live tour was 5 years prior (“Reputation” — which did $400m+ — in 2018). Over that span, she released 4 new studio albums and re-recorded 2 albums. These new tracks were on top of her existing 15-year catalogue of over 200 songs. She kept on collecting new fans by tapping different music genres and broadening her appeal to more males and older audiences.
    
    
• National mood: Why did The Beatles take off in December of 1963 (and really go turbo in February 1964)? Part of the reason was that the country was dealing with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. It was very dark for America and the population was desperate for a diversion and searching for anything to change the national mood. The country’s largest media figures (e.g. Ed Sullivan and Walter Cronkite) wanted to inject joy into their broadcasts and they identified The Beatles as a potential solution.
  • Similarly for Swift, the Eras tour was a massive in-person spectacle just as the world was coming out of COVID lockdowns and years of depressed consumer spending. People were ready to splurge for in-person events and Swift gave them one of the most sought after tickets ever.
    
    
• Technology: The transistor radio exploded in popularity during the holiday season of 1963. These were the equivalent of personalized listening devices at the time and The Beatles were all over the airwaves.
  • For Swift, the launch of the Eras tour in 2023 was a much different media landscape than for the “Reputation” tour 2018. Two huge drivers of popular music — TikTok, Spotify — had gotten much larger in the intervening years. Meanwhile, Swift’s own social media following doubled over that span (as an example: her Instagram followers went from 115m to 265m).

It was truly the perfect storm. Add in the fact that the 35-year old Swift is one of the last monoculture mega-stars to rise up before the internet completely fragmented fame. Based on streaming numbers, Drake is probably the only comparable monoculture artist in the past decade. But Drake’s IP has clearly been impaired because of one Kendrick Lamar Duckworth (and a song that rhymes with “Bot Bike Bus”).

Another way to illustrate Swift’s dominance is comparing her tour to that of a high-powered contemporary: Beyonce. The median secondary market ticket price for the first show of Beyonce’s 2023 Renaissance World Tour was $182; this price dropped to $109 for the tour’s final show. For Swift, the “last stop in America (Indianapolis) cost $1,273, [which was] more than for her first stop (Glendale)” at less than $500, per The Economist.

That’s cultural staying power.

For real, what young-ish artist today could pull this off in 10 or 15 years? Billie Eilish? Sabrina Carpenter? Bad Bunny? The Weeknd? No chance.

Unsurprisingly, Swift — who accounts for ~2% of the American music market — has changed how artists are approaching live events, per the Wall Street Journal’s Neil Shah:

Minting New Stars: Major touring acts always have openers but Swift is on another level. She’s boosted new talent on the Eras tour (Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Adams), who then saw massive jumps in their Spotify streams and have become stars in their own right. Record labels are struggling to break new stars and this version of the superstar co-sign has been a major help.

Long pop shows: At over 3 hours, the Eras concert is a lot of music. Swift plays a set of 40+ songs across the different eras of her career. Fans feels like their getting their money’s worth from pricey tickets. She sings, dances, plays instruments, has dozens of costume changes and interacts with a changing stage and set of performers in a basically non-stop show. Rockers such as Bruce Springsteen have played long concerts, but 3+ hour affairs for pop artists are rare.

Tailoring the concert for social media: The Eras tour became a social sensation because each show had a custom or bespoke song or spectacle. Swifties that couldn’t go to each show (or any show) would follow on socials to see the different easter eggs. Swift basically turned the 149-stop Eras tour into a long-running TV show that could be followed on TikTok, X, YouTube and Instagram (e.g. the Travis Kelce hype leading up to the Super Bowl was wild).

Mini-residencies: Harry Styles previously popularized the touring format in which he’d stop at a major city and play multiple nights in a giant stadium. Swift turned the dial to 11 with the Eras tour. She did 6 nights in LA. No dates in DC, though. Similarly, in Canada, Swift did 6 nights in Toronto but none in Montreal. North Americans that couldn’t make local dates would go as far as Australia, Tokyo and Europe to watch her. These mini-residency shows also happened mostly on weekends to maximise attendance and give Swift breathers.

Other artists can certainly copy elements of the Eras tour but it will probably never be topped. I mean, I don’t even think Taylor will ever be able to top it for the aforementioned “perfect storm” reasons.

This insane Eras hype was why I knew my lemming ways would force me to go to a show. I am a Swift fan but mostly old school stuff (“Love Story”, “Belong With Me”). I don’t know much of her new catalogue and I’ve never made a friendship bracelet. But history is history. My nickname is “Top 40 Phan” because I really like popular music, so yeah, I was definitely going to go to at least one Eras show.

The initial Eras release schedule was only for 53 shows in America. But the demand was so clear that Swift quickly added global dates. I was ecstatic to see the Eras tour scheduled to end in Vancouver because I really didn’t want to deal with out-of-town logistics. Her final three shows — at B.C. Place last Friday, Saturday and Sunday — happily dropped in my lap.

I didn’t get tickets until near the concert date, though. At first, I was ready to go solo but then hesitated because I thought it would a bit weird if she broke out “Styles” and I was going HAM by myself around a bunch of teenage Swifties and their parents.

So, I started incepting my son with Swift songs in our car rides to school. He is more of an Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish person (he also started playing with a kid guitar recently and is getting into The Beatles and Hendrix). Luckily, our Spotify auto-playlist started playing Swift’s “Cruel Summer” after Billie’s “Birds of a Feather”. Then I gave him samplings of “Blank Space” and, obviously, “Shake It Off”. It wasn’t enough, though. He was still hesitant as late as October of this year. Even my “I’ll get you any Lego you want” bribe couldn’t get a firm yes. Up to mid-November, I was prepared to just get my face ripped off for a solo ticket on StubHub the night before the concert. Fortunately, the mother of one of my son’s classmates was able to score four tickets. He now had a friend to go with and was down to try his first ever concert.

The show started at 7pm on Saturday — around his bed time — so we had to do some planning. And by planning, I mean we had my son take a long nap in the afternoon and pulled the go-to move to keep a kid up. It’s 3 words and 5 syllables: blue cotton candy. Someone gave him and his friend a friendship bracelet while they got their sugar-high on.

We were off to a solid start and I started asking some questions.

“I wonder if Travis Kelce is here?” (Nope, he had a game but there were Kelce Brother impersonators)

“What about Michael Buble? He’s a Vancouver guy?” (Dude went HAM)

Finally, we roll up to the seats. The opening performer was Gracie Adams (man, that “Taylor co-sign for a new artist before the biggest tour in human history” is just a massive career boost).

At 7:43pm, the massive stadium LED screen turned into a clock. It started a 2-minute countdown. Then it hit 10 seconds. I lifted my son up. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Pandemonium. Some performers came out from the movable LED screen wearing giant orange parachute-looking capes.

“Yo, where the eff is Taylor?”

The capey things converge on the middle of the stage. BOOM! Taylor rises from the middle of the stage floor. She sings some track I don’t know. Then she drops “Cruel Summer” on us. Now it’s capital-P Pandemonium. Swifties losing their absolute shit.

“This is the very first bridge of the evening,” Taylor says, in full control of 60,000 souls. “Now, I have a question. Do any of you gorgeous people happen to know the lyrics to this bridge? Prove it!!!”

Your boy don’t give AF anymore. He’s directly been asked a question by Taylor and has answered in the affirmative. My son is now just seeing his old man butcher the lyrics: “I'm drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar.”

I’m singing but can’t even hear myself think…and this doesn’t let up for over 3 hours.

Here were my two main takeaways from the Eras experience:

• Truly, the energy was insane: B.C. Place’s capacity — 60,000 — wasn’t the largest of the Eras tour but it was still decent. And when tens of thousands of Swifties are giving Tay Tay a standing ovation or clapping in unison, it’s like an earthquake (one of her Seattle shows actually registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale). I will never forget that feeling.
  
  
• Taylor’s fitness is incredible: She’s just a pros pro. Swift spent a year planning and training for the tour. Just top-tier athlete-level stuff. She explained her cardio routine in her Time Magazine “Person of the Year 2023” profile: “In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.” She worked with choreographer Mandy Moore—recommended by her friend Emma Stone, who worked with Moore on La La Land—since, as Swift says, “Learning choreography is not my strong suit.” With the exception of Grammy night—which was “hilarious,” she says—she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.””

Doing a 3+ hour treadmill workout and changing speeds based on the tempo of the song is fitness goalz.

Absolutely incredible performance. My son’s first concert. Awesome memories.

Swift didn’t get me with the merch, though. No ma’am. I don’t need that $130 beige hoodie. However, I did get absolutely mogged by the stadium on the $15 beers and $40 chicken tenders and fries. Guess you could say deep-fried breaded protein is my “Style” and I wanted to fill the “Blank Space” in my stomach. Sorry.

Update on my podcast Caffeinated Deep Dives

The Caffeinated Deep Dives podcast just dropped the 5th episode on the history of Lego including (Apple, Spotify, YouTube):

• LEGO's founding in Billund, Denmark
• Post-WWII and the Plastics Revolution
• Entering the US market with McDonald's
• LEGO's $1B a year Star Wars collaboration
• 1958: LEGO brick invention (and "clutch power")
• Genius manufacturing and engineering behind LEGO

Really happy that I finally got these podcast episodes out the door and been loving some of the comments. The most common recommendation has been to integrate more scoops of pre-workout to really rev up the energy levels. I will experiment but will have to defer to my gastro-intestinal signals on that one.

If you’re looking for that sweet sweet audio content for the holidays, definitely check out the other Caffeinated Deep Dive episodes:

• iPhone (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Calvin & Hobbes (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Sriracha Sauce (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Trader Joe’s (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)

Always appreciate them fresh subs, reviews and likes 🙏🙏🙏

This issue is brought to you by Bearly AI

Why are you seeing this ad?

Because this is my last newsletter send of 2024 and I need to get one more shill in for the year.

On that note, I co-founded an AI-powered research app called Bearly AI that can save you and your team hours of work with AI-powered tools for reading (instant summaries), writing (GPT-4o, Claude Opus 200K, Grok, Gemini) and speech-to-text transcription tools (Scribe, Whisper).

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Links and Memes

Google Quantum Chips Breakthrough: Google is really the new Bell Labs, AT&T’s research arm that discovered the transistor, information theory, electric microphones, lasers, UNIX operating system, fiber optic cables, radar, C-programming language and so much other wild stuff.

AT&T’s cash-printing phone monopoly was eventually broken up by the US government in 1984. This has clear parallels to Google in 2024 (earlier this year, the US government said Google operates a search monopoly and may force the internet giant to spin-off the Chrome browser, maybe license its search algo and other remedies).

I bring this up because Google has been using that search cash printer to fund a bunch of breakthroughs including:

• Waymo (self-driving car division)
• AlphaFold (AI that predicts the structure for millions of proteins with huge biotech implications)
• Transformer research paper (which laid the foundation for the entire generative AI wave over the past few years)
• The triple unskippable back-to-back-back pre-roll YouTube ads (the most annoying ad unit ever when you’re trying to watch hours of Nikola Jokic NBA highlights)

The latest breakthrough came last week with the Willow Quantum Computing chip. At a high level, the current computing paradigm is known as classical computing, which is the world of digital bits (0s and 1s). Quantum computers use quantum bits (qubit) which encode information as 0, 1 or both simultaneously.

This is about a billion levels above my pay-grade but qubits can do certain math problems at an exponentially faster rate than existing computers. This was the mind-blowing passage from the Google blog:

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

To repeat. The computation benchmark takes a septillion years for classical computers and only 5 minutes for Google’s quantum chip. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word septillion btw. Also, everyone was losing their minds at how Google casually mentioned we probably live in a “multiverse”. Cool cool.

The technology is still a long long long way from commercialization but it’s a milestone and quantum computing would revolutionize materials sciences, drug discovery and other physics breakthroughs. Such a massive jump in computing power is also a threat to the existing paradigm for cryptography and encryption.

One particularly interesting implication is Bitcoin. Can quantum computing up-end the entire crypto industry? Dan Held has a good breakdown on the topic and there are two main takeaways:

Bitcoin mining is safe because of the network’s difficulty adjustment: “SHA-256 is the encryption algorithm used for Bitcoin mining. Most experts agree that quantum computers will unlikely be able to break this even at scale. Even if it could be solved at a faster rate, Bitcoin has a built in defense mechanism: the difficulty adjustment! What is the difficult adjustment? As more miners join the network the network automatically adjusts to the additional hash rate (miners) that have joined the market by making it more difficult to mine a block. This is done so the production of newly minted Bitcoin occurs on a predictable issuance schedule.”

Quantum computing could hack existing wallets…but there is a solution: “The other type of encryption that quantum computing might impact is used to control your Bitcoin wallet: Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). Quantum computers will likely impact this encryption algorithm first. The risk here is that a quantum computer could reconstruct the private key from the public key….In the future, the Bitcoin community could decide to “update” encryption currently used by Bitcoin to quantum resistance algorithms (via soft fork) and have everyone transfer their coins to the new format over a certain time period. All unmoved coins after that time period could then become invalid/deleted to protect against dormant coins/ones that have exposed public keys flooding the market.”

Anyway, I’m hopeful that quantum computing can just figure out this unskippable pre-roll ad situation.

PS. If you actually know a lot about quantum computing, here is a proper assessment of Google’s Willow chip claims by University of Texas at Austin computer scientist Scott Aaronson.

***

Netflix brings One Hundred Years of Solitude to the screen: Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel came out in 1967. It became one of the great books of the 20th century with 50m+ copies sold (I proudly own a copy but haven’t read it but cosplay like I have with it on my book shelf and when a guest says “oh great book”, I nod knowingly and say “one of the best, truly one of the greats, gonna read it again soon, been a while”).

Márquez refused to do a screen adaption but Netflix changed that and dropped a TV series last week.

The backstory is interesting. Márquez’s hesitation for TV or film was around language (he wanted it in Spanish), length (he felt the 7-generation story of a family in the fictitious Colombian town of Macondo required 100 hours of screen time) and visuals (the novel’s magical realism needed good FX).

One Hollywood attempt at adapting Márquez’s books to the big screen was a flop: in 2007, Mike Newell directed Love in the Time of Cholera with Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Javier Bardem and Benjamin Bratt. It has a 45% critic and 26% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The author — who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 — seemed to have the right instincts about his novels.

Márquez died in 2014. Four years later, Netflix the obtained rights to One Hundred Years of Solitude by convincing his family that it could honor Márquez’s wishes and do the project correctly, per the New York Times:

• Language: Netflix has built a massive Latin American audience (70m+ subscribers) and produced high-quality Spanish-first content (Narcos, Roma). The adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is all Spanish (the actors even learnt a special regional Colombian accent for max authenticity).
  
  
• Length: Directors Alex Garcia Lopez and Laura Mora have done 8 hourlong episodes for part 1 of the story (and will do another 8 episodes…at least). It’s not 100 hours but a lot more than a single film.
  
  
• Visuals: Netflix says this is its most expensive Latin American production ever (they didn’t say the budget but Narcos was $25-30m a season). This will be the most expensive Colombian screen production ever, too.

Part of the pitch to Marquez’s family was that Netflix would build the town of Macondo from scratch. They did outside of the Colombian city of Ibagué, “an effort that took hundreds of workers more than a year”.

Now, everyone will get to see the iconic opening words from one of the greatest 20th century books adapted for the screen:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Such a classic line. One of my faves. Great book. Anyway, I’m gonna be locked in AF on the subtitles for this one (no second-screening with the iPhone).

***

Some baller links:

The Nvidia Way…a new book by Tae Kim on the history of Nvidia and Jensen Huang. More than 1/2 through and it’s very good. Love this excerpt on how hard Jensen went even back in the day as a teen during the summers: “It didn’t matter if he was cleaning the same toilet for the hundredth time or interacting with a new customer who had never been to Denny’s before and didn’t know what to order. He recalls pushing himself to do the best he could, even if it meant chasing an absurd goal such as being able to carry more cups of coffee at a time than anyone else on staff.”

Microsoft Excel Championship: Yep, this thing exists. It took place in Las Vegas. In a huge upset, Australian actuary Andrew “The Annihilator” Ngai” was unable to defend his 3x championship. The video is truly absurd and these spreadsheet athletes were annihilating pivot tables and data labelling.

The most demented work e-mail I’ve ever seen… “Indian home beauty startup YesMadam sent a survey to their employees about stress and then fired the employees that said they were stressed” as shown by this post from Sheel Mohnot.

GM exits its robotaxi business: The American automaker spent $10B+ acquiring then funding the self-driving startup Cruise. After a robotaxi accident in San Francisco last year, GM paused the efforts and is now shutting it all down. Instead of building a Cruise robotaxi service, GM will use the self-driving tech to try and soup up its own cars. Robotaxis are a very very expensive game. It looks now like a 3-company race for self-driving taxis in America (the most far along is Google-backed Waymo with Tesla rocking a huge potential fleet and Amazon bankrolling Zoox). Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogyt — who left the company last November — didn’t pull any punches on X: “In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies.” More details from CNBC.

OpenAI launched its video-generating model Sora…it had to shut down sign-ups almost immediately due to high demand. MKBHD has a good review of the tool and it looks like the biggest challenge for AI videos are trying to understand physics and object permanence…which it really really can’t do right now as MKBHD shows in various half-creepy but fully hilarious examples.

Mariah Carey has the greatest passive income stream ever…she makes $3m+ a year from “All I Want For Christmas” royalties. As legend has it, she wrote and recorded the song in only a few hours during the summer of 1994. Lifetime bank from the ubiquitous Christmas song — which is probably making your ears bleed right now — is $100m+. While I’ve graduated to Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe” (remember, my nickname is “Top 40 Phan”), Carey’s track is basically the only real new song in the North American Christmas canon in recent decades. Bing Crosby (“White Christmas”, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”) was from the 1940s. Bobby Helm (“Jingle Bell Rock”) and Brenda Lee (“Rocking Around the Christmas Tree”) are from the 1950s. Wham went hard AF with “Last Christmas” but that was the 1980s. Insider has a great 10-minute YouTube video explaining why “‘All I Want For Christmas’ Is The Only Modern Holiday Classic” (the song smartly borrows a lot of classic elements).

Next-level dating move found on r/WallStreetBets…a user with $1m in trading losses is offering to marry someone with $1m+ in short-term capital gains and split the tax savings.

…and them fire posts (including news that YouTube TV has increased the monthly price of its service from $40 to $83 over the past 5 years):

Time Magazine named…its Person of the Year (Donald Trump), Athlete of the Year (Caitlin Clark) and CEO of the Year (AMD’s Lisa Su). It doesn’t have a “Husband of the Year” category but I nominate this guy who got into a $500m+ memecoin with a very meme-y name:

Written by me, Trung Phan.

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